Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘How is Irma?’

She looked at him irritably.

‘Better,’ she said at last.

‘So the medication I sent her is working?’

Glucose. In a jar with an impressively complicated Latin name on the label.

‘We ensure that she takes it punctually.’ Fräulein Württemberger took the credit even for this success. And added, with the quiet joy that comes from rubbing the nose of someone one doesn’t like in a mistake they’ve made, ‘But she’s still having these attacks, which would make you think she was about to die at any moment.’

‘Really?’

‘Proper spasms. Then she rolls around on the bed and screams.’

Arthur took off his glasses and rubbed his nose. The gesture also allowed him to conceal a smile.

‘Is she still coughing blood?’ he asked with his serious medical face.

‘Sometimes. I’ve made an observation.’ A nervous hand went in search of escaping strands of hair. ‘I don’t know if it’s important.’ The modest doubt was only an empty phrase. Of course Fräulein Württemberger’s observations were always important.

‘Yes?’

‘Once I was standing next to her when she spat blood. It smelled quite sweet. Like sherbet powder. Tell me, Doctor, is that normal?’

‘Yes,’ said Dr Arthur Meijer. ‘In this special case it is entirely normal.’

He found the pair in the adjacent building normally reserved for children’s camps during the summer months, but was now constantly occupied because of the extraordinary circumstances. Irma was making the beds in the big dormitory: the Women’s Association children who were no longer being paid for were used as labour wherever possible. His patient was wearing a grey work smock that was far too big for her, in which she looked like a little nurse. Moses assisted her, or at least tried to make himself useful. To make sure he stayed eager, Irma had come up with a special task for him: whenever a bed was made, he was to hit the pillow with the edge of his hand and ensure the perfect dimple.

And each time she praised him.

Arthur could have stood in the doorway and watched them for ever. He liked going to the cinema, and whenever a plot ended happily after a lot of setbacks, he shed a few pleasant tears in the dark from time to time. That was exactly what happened to him now: he was watching a strange harmony, and would have liked to be a part of it.

At last he cleared his throat. Irma — she seemed used to it — reached into the pocket of her apron, took out a handkerchief and held it to her mouth. Only then did she turn round. When she recognised him, she dropped the handkerchief and came running over to him. ‘Dr Goliath!’ she cried excitedly. ‘That means I can stop coughing.’

Moses came over as well, more timid than his sister, shook hands very formally with Arthur, bowed and asked, ‘Will Irma be well now?’

‘Not quite today. But we’ll get there, won’t we, Irma?’

‘Yes,’ said Irma and looked at him trustingly with her squinting eyes. ‘We’ll get there.’

In the grounds there was a small hill which could be all kinds of things in the games of the children at the home, the crow’s nest of a pirate ship, the tip of a jungle tree, the cockpit of a zeppelin, in which one could fly round the world and even all the way home. Today the hill was the parapet of a knightly castle, and Moses, a broken branch over his shoulder as a pike, was guarding the only entrance with a serious expression on his face.

Arthur checked that the little boy couldn’t hear them, and then said, ‘You’re exaggerating your illness.’

‘The witch has fallen for it.’ Impolite, but not a bad description.

‘You mixed sherbet powder with the blood.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Irma. One of her eyes looked at him innocently, while the other seemed to be looking for something in the distance beside his face.

‘So?’

‘It wasn’t blood!’ Irma giggled, as only a little girl who has managed to trick the adult world can giggle. ‘I promised you I would stop cutting myself. It was just red sherbet powder. If you put a spoonful in your mouth and then let the bubbles pour out…’

She was so triumphant that she couldn’t go on talking, and started to laugh. Arthur was infected by it too. The idea of the hygienic Fräulein Württemberger disgustedly sniffing a handkerchief and making the medical discovery that Irma’s bloody sputum smelled of sherbet powder was just too absurd.

‘Strawberry flavour!’ Irma managed to gasp between two fits of laughter. Arthur had never heard a funnier phrase. It was a while before he could speak again.

‘She asked me if that sweet smell was normal with this illness.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘Yes, Fräulein Württemberger, with this very rare illness it is entirely normal.’

This time they laughed so loudly that Irma’s eyes actually crossed. Moses came running excitedly up the hill because he thought his sister was having a coughing fit.

‘The doctor tickled me when he was examining me,’ Irma lied, and then asked with her severest knightly expression. ‘What do you have to report, squire Moses? No hostile dragons on the way?’

‘All dragons repelled,’ reported the squire and marched, proud of his own importance, back to his sentry post.

‘You’re very fond of your brother, aren’t you?’

‘That’s normal.’

‘Of course,’ said Arthur, and was almost a bit envious of being this age when such normalities were not called into doubt.

And then, on this imaginary parapet, there took place what must have been the strangest lesson ever given in the Wartheim. Dr Arthur Meijer, experienced general practitioner by profession, showed a twelve-year-old girl how to pretend to be ill.

‘In future we’ll leave out the spasms and all that play-acting,’ he began his lecture.

‘Oh,’ said Irma, disappointed.

‘We don’t want Fräulein Württemberger flying into a panic and calling a doctor from the village.’

It was hard for Irma to forego her dramatic scenes, but she was prepared to do so for her Dr Goliath.

‘If anyone asks you how you are, you always say, “I’m fine.”’

‘Why?’

‘But you say it in a very weak voice. And when you go out, you hold onto the doorpost as if you were dizzy.’

Irma’s face was full of admiration at such cunning.

‘Every time you’re in the bathroom, hold your hands under ice-cold water for one minute.’

Never in his whole life had Arthur had such an attentive listener.

‘And then make sure someone holds your hand, and shake a little.’

Even Fräulein Württemberger, in a one-to-one class with Martin Heidegger, could not have listened with greater devotion.

‘And soap. If you rub some in your eyes, they will turn red and produce tears.’

‘But that will sting!’’

‘Only if you can stand it, of course.’

‘I can stand anything,’ Irma said proudly.

‘Can you also swallow soap?’

‘Then I’d feel sick.’

‘Good.’

Irma looked at him admiringly for a moment. Then she blinked at him, shook as if she already had soap in her mouth and asked anxiously, ‘Does it make you very sick?’

‘Quite sick,’ said Arthur. ‘Soldiers used to do it so that they didn’t have to go into battle. It can even give you a fever.’

‘Fever?’ she smiled dreamily as if he had promised her a particularly lovely present. ‘Then I’ll do that.’

When they came down from the hill, Irma was holding his hand.

‘No dragons or hostile armies,’ Moses reported.

‘Very good, squire Moses,’ said Arthur, and saluted, although in all likelihood that wasn’t the custom among knights in armour.

After his consultation with the Women’s Association children — a scald from kitchen duty, a sprained ankle from sport — when he was back in his topolino and driving down into the valley, he sang quietly to himself.