Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t really understand it either.’

Irma nodded, she hadn’t expected anything else, and went on telling her story. ‘Then we moved in with Uncle Paul, but he’s only got one room for the three of us, and we always have to be quiet and aren’t allowed to disturb him. He has a nervous heart, and noise is very bad for that. So Mama said it would be good for me to go to Switzerland for three months. So that she can get on with looking for work and a new place to stay. I said a trip like that would be far too expensive, but Mama said we’d been invited and it wouldn’t cost anything at all.’

Probably, Arthur thought, someone from the forbidden B’nai B’rith had written to the Augustin Keller Lodge, the sister lodge in Zurich, and asked for help. That lodge actually owned the Wartheim, it had been bought with donated money and placed at the disposal of the Women’s Associations for free.

‘And now we’re to move back to Kassel, but…’

But…

She sat beside him, quite still. Only her feet played with each other as if they had nothing to do with the rest of her body.

But…

She made a decision and slipped down from the table. She went and stood in front of Arthur, her hands clasped behind her back. She had to throw back her head to look up at him.

‘I want to ask you something,’ she said. She looked him in the eyes and past him at the same time.

‘Yes?’

‘Dr Merzbach, who used to bring the children into the world at the hospital, and isn’t allowed to do that any more, he told me that all doctors have to take a great oath not to give away people’s secrets.’

‘That’s true,’ said Arthur, eager to know what secret he was about to be told. ‘It’s called medical confidentiality.’

‘Does it apply in Switzerland as well?’

‘It applies all over the world. If a patient tells me something, I’m never, ever allowed to tell anyone else. Unless the patient lets me.’

‘I won’t let you, though,’ said Irma and hopped triumphantly onto her tiptoes. ‘I’m your patient and I won’t let you.’ She performed a proper war dance, so proud was she over her cunning. ‘So you mustn’t tell Fräulein Württemberger that I’m not sick.’

‘I’ll have to think about that,’ said Arthur. ‘But it’s still your turn. Why are you so keen to suffer from something so serious?’

She had, it turned out, a very good reason.

‘Mama wrote to say that she still hasn’t found work, and that she’s now looking for a job abroad.’

Irma, the twelve-year-old adult, had translated that correctly: her mother saw no future in Germany, and had decided to emigrate.

‘And that it would make much more sense if Moses and I didn’t have to travel back and then leave again straight away.’

You can’t write to your children, ‘Don’t come home, you’re not safe here.’ You don’t explain to them, ‘My chances of a visa are better if you’re already out of the country.’ You write, ‘It would make more sense for you not to make the journey twice,’ and if a twelve-year-old is clever and listens when the grownups are talking about politics, she will understand what’s meant. Particularly when she’s promised her mother to take care of her little brother.

In the Wartheim, Mama had said, they were looked after well, and it would be best if they could stay there longer than the three months allowed by the rules. To get to Switzerland, Irma had needed a medical certificate. Why shouldn’t there be another one that prevented her from travelling home? For example, if she was coughing blood and incapable of travelling?

So, now she had told him, but he wasn’t allowed to say a word to Fräulein Württemberger. Because he was a doctor and Irma was his patient, and because he had sworn that oath that all doctors have to swear, and you’re not allowed to break an oath.

Arthur let his glasses dangle back and forth by one leg, as he often did when he was trying to think. His eyes had grown moist. Probably from the smell of soap.

‘What made you think of tuberculosis?’ he asked at last.

‘I read it in a book.’

‘A book about medicine?’

‘No,’ said Irma, ‘a novel.’

There was a library in the Wartheim, or at least a cupboard full of books, from which each child was allowed to borrow a book once a week. There were only a few children’s books, Nesthäkchen Flees the Nest , and The Turnach Children in Winter , and they were hard to get hold of. When you were choosing them, as with all things in the Wartheim, there was a strict order: first came the private children, whose parents were, after all, paying a lot of money, then the official children, and last of all the Women’s Association children who could pick through what was left. They were mostly adult books, battered volumes that had ended up in the Wartheim because charitable ladies had used a collection appeal to weed out their bookshelves. Irma had chosen the book because of its title: Alone Among Strangers . Perhaps, she had thought, it might be about a girl who can’t go home because bad things are happening there. But as it turned out it was a romantic tear-jerker, a maid’s novel, at the tragic end of which a spurned Juliet, estranged from her Romeo by a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, is coughing her way to the grave in a pulmonary sanatorium in Davos, until at the last moment her beloved turns up at her sick bed and inspires her to go on living. The endless protestations of love and outbreaks of emotion, all those adult complications, had only bored Irma, but the many descriptions of dark red stains on snow white handkerchiefs had given her an idea. In the novel everything had turned out well as soon as the heroine had started spitting blood.

Except that the author had neglected to specify that the blood had to be bright red. And mixed with sherbet powder.

The confession was over, and there was silence in the ironing room. There was only the sound of children squealing as they played outside, with no one telling them off.

‘And now?’ asked Arthur.

‘Can’t you just say that I really have tuberculosis?’

‘You mean I should lie?’

When Irma thought, her forehead wrinkled. ‘It wouldn’t really be a lie, she said. ‘They just wouldn’t have noticed.’

‘But then I would be a very bad doctor.’

Irma shrugged. It was a very grown-up gesture.

He hadn’t locked the door, so Fräulein Württemberger could simply come storming in dragging little Moses behind her. She thrust the boy at Irma and stood in front of Arthur with her arms propped on her hips. For the last half hour she had been in her office, outside in the courtyard and again in the office, and all that time she had been collecting arguments, as she might have collected quotations and evidence for a seminar dissertation, she had assembled all the things she wanted to say to this stuck-up Dr Meijer, and now it all came bubbling out of her, like water from a saucepan when steam lifts the lid.

She wanted to know exactly what was going on her here, right now, on the spot. She had no intention, not the slightest intention did she have, of simply being sent away and fobbed off, after all, she was the director of the home, and bore the responsibility, almost twenty children more than usual and most of them from Germany, and they couldn’t even pay for their expenses. And if an epidemic broke out now, who was going to take the blame? So what was going on?

Arthur was a man who was rather impressed by authorities and superiors, and if she had asked a little more politely, he would probably have told her the truth.

No, not even then. Even though he couldn’t have said when exactly he made his decision, he had switched entirely to Irma’s side.