Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

That might certainly be the case, Rachel said, although she would have preferred the doctor to have given her an effective remedy rather than fine words. But be that as it may, she was a busy woman and didn’t have time to play the Samaritan all the time. She was responsible for fifteen members of staff, and you hadn’t time to hold hands with each individual.

On the other hand…

When Herr Grün lay in bed under his bedcover like that — a new bedcover, of course, with real down, she’d made sure of that — when he just lay there like that, above all when he had just woken up and hadn’t yet had time to put the old grumpy mask back on, he had a quite different face. His smile, if he had such a thing, he still kept in the basement, but to remain with the image, the door was already open a crack.

And besides…

No, that wasn’t it. The fact that Frau Posmanik always greeted her as submissively as if the next person after a daughter of Herr Kamionker the factory director would be the Prophet Elijah, followed by the moshiach in person, had nothing whatever to do with it. She didn’t care for flattery. Not she. A professional woman has no time for such shmontses. And Frau Posmanik had only been after leftover swatches of brocade. No, that was certainly not why she went all the way to Molkenstrasse.

But…

She was interested in Herr Grün, she didn’t dispute that. She really knew her way around people, Oh yes, she had had her experiences, and they hadn’t always been the most pleasant, but she didn’t understand this man. There were a number of things about him that just didn’t fit together, a suit that he’d begged from various different places, trousers here, jacket there.

If she wanted to make conversation with him, as one should when visiting a patient, he wouldn’t open his mouth, you had to drag the words out of him one by one. But then when little Aaron came into the room — he visited the lodgers several times a day, in spite of Rachel’s strict reminder that Herr Grün had to get better and needed peace and quiet — when he knocked at the door, twice slowly and three times quickly, nobody knew what that was supposed to mean, the patient sat up on his pillows, even though that had taken a lot out of him at first, and started entertaining the boy. Yes, entertaining him. You might have thought the bed was a stage and Aaron had bought a ticket. Herr Grün had all kinds of silly poems and song lyrics that no sane person would ever have learned by heart. Aaron couldn’t understand most of it, he was far too young, but he listened to it all with a beaming face and sometimes actually squealed with pleasure. Then his younger siblings poked their heads into the room and wanted to join in the fun. But Aaron sent them out with a severe expression. ‘Uncle Grün has to get better, and needs peace and quiet.’

Even the oranges that Rachel brought, Herr Grün shared with the boy. And they cost a fortune, now that it was summer, and Rachel had had to pay for them out of her own purse when there wasn’t enough in petty cash at the shop. Not that she would have said as much to Herr Grün, heaven knows what he would have thought.

But he could have said thank you.

‘Do you actually have to be a child to be treated decently by you?’ she once asked, whereupon Herr Grün nodded very seriously and replied, ‘It would be an advantage.’

No, Rachel really didn’t have time to make patient visits every day, certainly not if it wasn’t appreciated. Luckily there were other people for this kind of thing, people who weren’t as tired as she was in the evening, who could shut their grocery shop at seven on the dot, and who had never heard of last minute commissions and overtime. Generally speaking, when a person is always alone and has no real family, it’s practically a mitzvah to do find something sensible for him to do.

Désirée took on the task without asking too many questions. She didn’t just attend to the patient, but looked after the Posmanik family as well. On her visits she always brought a box of groceries and wouldn’t even let anyone thank her for it. She was happy if anyone would take it off her hands, she claimed, in her field it was hard to judge precisely how much she needed, and if you’d bought too much then it was better for it to be eaten than to go off. She found a job for Herr Posmanik in the warehouse of a pasta factory, and even made sure that his wife dropped by every week and collected his pay packet in person.

‘She’s an angel,’ said Frau Posmanik to Rachel, who replied, ‘Well, if she has time on her hands.’

When she paid her visits Désirée didn’t just sit by Herr Grün’s bed and wait for him to chat to her; she preferred to make herself useful. One day, when she was cleaning the window so that the bit of sunlight that wandered into the courtyard at the back could also find its way into the room, he suddenly said, ‘You were very fond of him.’

‘Of whom?’

‘The person you lost.’

‘How do…?’

‘It’s obvious,’ said Herr Grün.

Désirée rubbed away at a piece of putty that was stuck to the glass and just wouldn’t go away. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was very fond of him.’

It was so quiet in the room that the drill sergeant could be heard issuing orders in the parade ground.

‘I once had someone like that,’ Herr Grün said after a pause. ‘My best friend. His name was Blau. Not really, of course. That would have been too much of a coincidence. But it looked good on the posters.’

Désirée didn’t turn around and went on cleaning. In the years of her solitude she had become just as good a listener as Mina had once been.

‘His real name was Schlesinger,’ the voice behind her said. ‘Siegfried Schlesinger. But because everyone called me Grün, we had the idea that he should be Blau. Grün and Blau. That was our act.’

Herr Grün — whose name wasn’t Grünberg, Grünfeld or Grünbaum, but really Grün — had appeared in cabaret, never in the really big Berlin venues like the Chat Noir or the Kadeko, but always in Friday theatres, so-called because the artistes received their wages once a week and not every morning after the performance as they were in the small clubs. His speciality had been the double act, with his partner Schlesinger, who called himself Blau because it looked better on the posters.

Grün and Blau.

‘We even made a record,’ said Herr Grün, ‘and sold it at the interval. We were always on before the interval, never in the second part like the famous acts. No one would have stayed there and ordered another round of sekt. Although we were good. You’ll laugh,’ said Herr Grün, ‘but people once laughed at me.’

‘Guten Tag, Herr Grün.’

‘Guten Tag, Herr Blau.’

That was how their act always began, it had been a real trademark. Sometimes they came on in coats and hats and were passersby in the street, sometimes they were holding cups and were customers in a café, but the first sentences were always the same, and eventually the time came when the audience laughed even after their greeting, sometimes even applauded, even though no one had said anything funny. That was popularity.

‘Guten Tag, Herr Grün.’

‘Guten Tag, Herr Blau.’

He imitated both voices, exaggerated the rumbling bass of his own and the shrill descant of his partner’s.

‘You shouldn’t strain yourself,’ said Désirée.

‘No, I should. It does me good.’

Blue was small and thin, a straight line in the landscape, and Herr Grün had been fat in those days. Yes, really. ‘I filled my suit well, and never skimped on the butter sauce. It was a professional belly, my most important prop.’

Grün had been the authority figure, the man who knew everything and could explain everything. Blau was the nebbish who didn’t understand a thing and only ever asked stupid questions. ‘When in fact it was exactly the other way round. Schlesinger sat in the wardrobe reading books, while I romped with the twirlies. The chorus girls,’ he added by way of explanation.