Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

The sound of children shouting could be heard from the top-floor flat. At first Rachel knocked politely, but in the end she had to hammer on the door with her fist to be heard at all. The shouting died down, she heard whispering and then at last the door opened, at least as far as the security chain on the door permitted. A little boy, stark naked, eyed her suspiciously through the chink. ‘We’re not buying anything,’ he said, a phrase that he had probably often heard his mother say on similar occasions, and thought was a correct form of greeting.

‘I’m Frau Kamionker,’ said Rachel in her best aunty voice. ‘I’ve come to visit.’

‘There’s no one at home,’ said the little boy, and was about to shut the door again. Rachel was just able to wedge her foot in it.

‘Your lodger is at home. Herr Grün.’

When he heard the name, the little boy beamed. ‘He’s such a funny man,’ he said. And then, suddenly serious, ‘But now he’s sick.’

A funny man? ‘Funny’ wasn’t really a word that seemed to apply to Herr Grün.

‘Shall I tell you a poem?’ asked the little boy.

‘What?’

‘A poem. Uncle Grün taught me it.’

‘Won’t you let me in first?’

‘No, first the poem,’ he said, as seriously as if in polite circles such a recitation was one of the most natural preliminaries to visit.

‘Off you go, then.’

The naked boy in the crack of the door took a deep breath and recited in one breath: ‘My parrot won’t eat carrots, he thinks they’re rather grim, he’s the loveliest of parrots, but carrots aren’t for him.’

‘That’s a song,’ said Rachel.

‘Only if you sing it,’ the little boy replied and went on, ‘He’s wild about cough sweets and biscuits, and celery keeps him trim, he’s been known to try an oyster, but carrots aren’t for him. Do you know what cough sweets are?’

‘They’re sweet things that you eat when you have a cold.’

‘Have you got any for him?’ asked the little boy. ‘I think Uncle Grün has a cold.’

‘Does he teach you lots of poems like that?’

‘He knows at least a million,’ said the little boy. ‘Or even more.’

‘How lovely.’ Rachel was feeling more and more ridiculous standing outside the half-closed door to the flat. ‘But will you please open up for me now?’

The boy thought for a minute, even raised his hand as if to say, ‘Don’t bother me when I’m thinking,’ and then nodded. ‘All right, then.’

To open up, he first had to close the door again and then, to judge by the rattle and clatter on the other side, he had trouble unhooking the chain. But then it was done; Rachel was finally able to make her visit. When she stepped inside the flat, two even smaller children looked at her curiously.

‘I’d like to have a parrot as well,’ said the boy, and walked straight ahead of her, stark naked as he was. ‘If he doesn’t want the carrots, I’ll eat them myself.’

Herr Grün’s room was tiny. A bed, a wardrobe, a chair. There was no room for a table; the window sill had to serve as a substitute.

‘Herr Grün?’

No reply. Just a strange sound, like someone drumming nervously on a glass with their fingernails.

The room smelled of illness. You didn’t need to be a doctor to recognise that.

It wasn’t fingernails. It was teeth. Clattering teeth.

He was in bed. The day was warm, almost summery, but Herr Grün’s teeth were chattering. He had laid a coat over the thin blue bedcover and crept under both, had drawn up his legs like a baby, his arms wrapped protectively around his body, and still he was shivering.

‘Herr Grün!’

When he heard his name he tried to sit up, tried to say something, but didn’t have the strength. The breath whistled out of his throat. Deep inside him a door was open, a window was broken. He moved his lips and couldn’t put the syllables together. He tried again and again and again.

Rachel bent down to him. He smelled unpleasant, as sick people do.

A number. He was trying to force out a number.

‘Four thousand eight hundred and ninety-two,’ whispered Herr Grün.

A thread of saliva ran from his mouth. Even though Rachel was repelled by it, she wiped it away with a corner of the sheet.

A shabby, worn, pauper’s sheet. Far too thin for a sick man.

When she asked the naked little boy about a telephone, he looked at her as if she’d asked him for something unheard-of, something from a fairy-tale, a lump of gold or a parrot.

‘No one in the building has a telephone,’ he said.

‘And where does your mother go when she needs to call somebody?’

‘Who would I want to call?’ Frau Posmanik had come home, from a journey, one might have thought, because she was holding a big suitcase in her hand, covered with faded souvenir stickers from expensive hotels, St Moritz, Carlsbad, Nice. Someone had given her the old thing out of pity, and since then she had been carting her collection of useless brocade coasters around the city in it.

‘What an honour, Frau Kamionker,’ she said. Anyone who depends on the sympathy of others to earn a living develops fine antennae, so she knew that Rachel didn’t like being addressed as Fräulein. ‘I had no idea — Aaron, put your trousers on immediately! — no idea that you were going to come and visit…’

‘My trousers are wet,’ wailed the little boy.

‘You’ll have to forgive me, Frau Kamionker. I had to wash them, and they’re the only ones he’s got.’

‘That doesn’t matter. I’m here for Herr Grün.’

‘He really can’t come to work,’ said Frau Posmanik, and forgot to set down her suitcase, she was so eager to stand up for her lodger. ‘He tried to get up, but he just couldn’t.’ Because of her life’s experience, she could only imagine that Rachel had come on a punitive mission.

‘The man is seriously ill!’

‘Why didn’t you bring cough sweets?’ the little boy asked and immediately started reciting again, ‘He’s wild about cough sweets and biscuits…’

‘Sha!’

‘Herr Grün needs a doctor.’

‘I’ve done what I could,’ Frau Posmanik defended herself. ‘I made him some tea but he wouldn’t drink it, and I can’t spend all day…’

‘Is there a telephone anywhere around here?’

‘Only at the Kreuel in Kanonengasse. It’s a pub. But you’re better off not going there. It’s not a place for…’

‘For our people,’ she had wanted to say, but then she choked the words back. It would have struck her as presumptuous to put herself on the same level as the daughter of Herr Kamionker the factory owner. Although the people in the Kreuel wouldn’t have distinguished between them, and would have treated them both with equal rudeness. ‘It’s the Frontists’ pub.’

‘Kreuel,’ Rachel repeated. ‘Good. Perhaps in the meantime you can find something to wrap him up in.’ And was already out the door, with a competent efficiency unfamiliar in this household.

Frau Posmanik was already holding her suitcase, with all the stuck-on memories that weren’t hers.

When Rachel came home at last that night, back to the safety of her own flat, she stood in front of the mirror for a long time.

She just couldn’t get it. There was nothing unusual about her. She looked like a thousand other Zurich women. All right, not all of them had such flaming red hair, but it couldn’t be that.

And yet they had known straight away. Had smelled it. Hunting dogs, picking up a scent.

She turned to one side and tried to appraise her profile from the corner of her eye. There was nothing remarkable about it. Nothing that would make you think straight away, of course, a Jew. There was nothing.

She didn’t wear a sheitel, even as a married woman she wouldn’t have worn one, and she would never have put on one of those old-fashioned high-necked dresses by which you could recognise the Orthodox women, above all the ones from the East, at first glance. She dressed fashionably, always from the latest collection, she owed the company that, and her lipstick was the colour of the season.