Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Herr Grün, even Rachel had to admit, had learned how to sew very quickly. Admittedly he couldn’t yet be used for complicated work, but he could make a straight seam without any difficulties, and with the necessary speed.

But he was still a meshuganeh.

He had been sitting at a sewing machine — ‘He always sits apart from the rest!’ — and was the only one, or almost the only one, in the sewing room when Joni Leibowitz and the model came in, perhaps because they hoped they wouldn’t be disturbed there. Rachel left no doubt about what purpose that lack of disturbance might have been supposed to serve.

She herself had just happened to be standing in the doorway.

‘Just happened?’ asked Zalman, and Rachel replied with unexpected vehemence that she had not the slightest interest either in Herr Leibowitz or in Fräulein Flückiger, and if anyone thought she had been spying on the two of them, then he would also need to explain why she should have been doing such a thing.

No matter. At any rate, she had been standing in the doorway and could confirm that Joni and Blandine had been chatting quite peacefully, about politics, of course, what else were people talking about these days, until Herr Grün had suddenly risen to his feet. Not leapt to his feet, as if he had been furious or agitated, no, he had risen quite calmly, he had taken the heavy iron that always stood ready in the sewing room because certain pieces always need to be pre-ironed before they can be sewn, so he had picked up the iron and hit Joni so hard on the head with it that he collapsed straight away. And then? Then he had put the iron carefully back in its holder, had gone back to his seat as if nothing had happened, had sat down again and gone on eating his bread.

Joni had lain there, one might have thought he was dead, everything was covered in blood, and Blandine had screamed her head off until everyone was suddenly standing in here, the whole workforce, it was Bedlam, or the Burghölzli. Only Rachel had kept her seichel and phoned Arthur straight away.

During this account Herr Grün stood there in the three-piece suit that was far too big for him and inappropriate for a factory stitcher, and when everyone looked at him quizzically, he just nodded and said, ‘You observed that very well, Fräulein Kamionker. That’s exactly how it was.’

‘So why?’ asked Zalman.

‘The iron was the only thing to hand.’

‘What did Leibowitz do to you?’

Herr Grün shrugged and held his hands in front of him, fingers spread, a very Jewish gesture that means more or less, ‘What is a person to do? A man plans his way, but God guides his steps.’ Then he turned to Zalman and said, ‘Of course you’re going to fire me now.’

‘First of all I want to know what on earth got into you.’

‘That is a point in your favour,’ said Herr Grün quite matter-of-factly. ‘But how am I to explain it to you? Let’s put it this way: I didn’t like what Herr Leibowitz said to the young lady.’

‘What?’ Zalman was a peaceful man, but now he was raising his voice.

‘He was prancing around in front of the girl. He wants to get her into bed, and he hasn’t managed it yet.’

‘How do you know that?’ Rachel cut in.

‘You can see,’ said Herr Grün. ‘And you can hardly blame him either, she’s a pretty girl. And it’s none of my business.’

‘And still you…?’

Herr Grün talked calmly on, as if they weren’t all standing impatiently around him

‘He was trying to impress her with his chochme, he wanted to show her what a clever person he is, and how much he knows about the world of politics. They talked about what was happening in Germany, and he declared that nothing like that would ever happen to him personally. He always got on famously with all non-Jews, even if they sympathised with the Front or thought Hitler was a great statesman. Because he was adaptable, unlike lots of other people, because he didn’t attract attention and he wasn’t stand-offish.

‘Lots of Jews, he told her, still didn’t understand that, and if someone was bullied or put in the camps, it was always partly his own fault. “His own fault,” he said. So I picked up the iron and hit him over the head with it.’

Zalman walked over to him and rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘I would be grateful, Herr Grün,’ he said, ‘if next time you settled for an object that wasn’t quite so hard.’

‘Next time?’ asked Rachel, furiously.

‘I can’t sack him for that,’ said Zalman.

‘Just ask him!’

Always the same answer, however much Rachel might have urged her father. ‘Ask him! If he wants to tell you, he’ll tell you.’ And Hinda, who must have been let in on the secret, was no help either.

Of course there was an official version. There was always an official version.

It had been an accident, they had told everyone in the shop, an unfortunate slip, a stumble, whatever. Admittedly no one was really convinced by that, but what Blandine Flückiger was going around saying was even less credible. Herr Grün had quite deliberately picked up the iron, she claimed in all seriousness, and simply lashed out with it. ‘Impossible,’ people said. She was known to play the tormented victim, and to over-dramatise her not particularly interesting life.

If someone doesn’t know the truth, he creates one for himself, so in the kosher clothes factory they agreed that it must have been a story of jealousy. Two men, no longer in the first flush of youth, fighting tooth and nail over a peroxide Jean Harlow — it was a good story, so it was the one that people chose to believe.

Neither of them wanted to say anything about what happened, and their persistent silence was generally seen as a confirmation of the legend. That night Zalman had gone with Joni Leibowitz to Arthur’s surgery, and used the opportunity to press him to be silent — Rachel didn’t know what arguments he had used. Just two days later Joni had turned up for work again, with a fat bandage around his head, on which his hat sat two sizes too small. He batted away the jokes of the buyers with the same, unchanging joke: ‘Ok, I fell on my head — but that doesn’t mean you can push my prices down!’

Herr Grün got on with his work for a few more days as if nothing had happened; he had just become even more taciturn, he said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Goodbye’ and otherwise didn’t talk to anybody. Every time Blandine Flückiger saw him, she took cover behind someone with a shrill cry, to which Herr Grün responded with a smile, or with a facial expression that must once have been a smile.

‘Ask him!’ was all that Rachel heard each time she tried to find out, but of course she wouldn’t have dreamt of asking Herr Grün. How could she have?

But then, a few days later, he was no longer sitting at his sewing machine, and his landlady, Frau Posmanik, informed them that he had a high fever, and there was no way of telling when he might recover. So it fell to Rachel to look after him. If you’re responsible for the staff in a company and you fill the pay packets, you have a certain duty of care.

‘And you can use the opportunity to ask a few questions,’ mocked Zalman.

Rachel had not, as she replied in a dignified voice, even thought of such a thing. She was just doing her duty. So in the evening she dutifully took the money for a fortifying bottle of tonic wine from petty cash and set off.

The Posmaniks lived on Molkenstrasse, right behind the barracks’ parade ground, in one of those cheaply built rental blocks that look derelict while they’re still new. Five people crammed themselves into three small rooms, and they’d had to rent out one of those. Herr Posmanik spent his days looking for work, which in practice meant that he boosted himself for the task with his first beer in the morning, and consoled himself for his lack of success with the last schnapps in the evening. His wife kept the family afloat by taking little scraps of brocade, which she begged from Zalman, among others, embroidering them with gold thread and then selling these coasters from door to door among the Jewish houses. Her products were neither useful nor really decorative, but people felt sorry for this sickly woman — ‘Her skin is like blue milk,’ Hinda had once said — and always bought something from her. In Zurich you almost had the impression that a Jewish flat without a brocade coaster was just as incomplete as one without a mezuzah on the door post.