Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘I’d translated that for myself.’ Désirée was now sitting on the chair beside the bed, but was still holding the cleaning rag, as if to say, ‘Just for a moment.’

‘Hello, Herr Blau.’

When Herr Grün imitated himself, he spoke ‘jargon’, the linguistic bastard that the Germans mistake for Yiddish. That had been their role: two cliché Jews who make the simplest things unnecessarily complicated and thus come to surprising conclusions.

‘We weren’t the only ones in Berlin with that shtick. Other people had noticed that all you had to do was get up on stage and say “mishpocha” and people would start laughing. But we were the best.’

Herr Grün closed his eyes as if talking for such an unusually long time had exhausted him, but he was only trying to block out a painful image. ‘They’re still laughing,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t funny any more.’

The dialogue about the apples, that had been their biggest hit, in the years before 1933. They talked about the red ones, which always thought they were ripe at last, and hadn’t noticed that they were already starting to turn brown. About the brown ones, which you had to get rid of quickly because otherwise they infected all the other ones. And then, when Hitler was Reich Chancellor, they’d invented the punchline about the Reich apple that everyone had to bite into, but you couldn’t eat it, it was so disgusting.

‘When people stopped laughing at it, we should have got out straight away,’ said Herr Grün. ‘But we were actors. So we thought it was our fault.’

And then…

They were interrupted. Little Aaron knocked at the door, twice slowly, three times quickly, as Herr Grün had taught him. They were secret agents, Herr Grün and he, and they need signals like that.

‘Not now,’ said Désirée, but Herr Grün smiled — he actually smiled, suddenly he remembered how it was done — and said, ‘Let him.’

‘Do you know a new poem, Uncle Grün?’

‘I know a million billion poems,’ said Herr Grün.

‘But today I’ve got something much better for you. A magic spell, it goes like this: “Owa, Tanah, Siam.”’

The little boy waited and then, when nothing came next, looked at his idol as disappointedly as if Herr Grün had promised him a wonderful sweet and then held out nothing but empty silver paper. ‘And?’

‘It’s a magic spell. You have to say it five times in a row, as quickly as you can, and then you’ll see.’

Aaron looked slightly dubious, but Herr Grün had never disappointed him, so he started practising talking really quickly. ‘Owa Tanah Siam, Owa Tanah Siam…’ When he worked out what a wonderfully rude sentence lay hidden behind it, he beamed as radiantly as if it were his birthday.

‘But whatever you do, don’t try the trick out on your brother and sister!’

‘Of course not,’ said Aaron, and ran out to try it on his brother and sister straight away. And all the other children in the house.

‘Now we’ve got some peace,’ said Herr Grün, and sat up straight in his bed for the first time in ages.

‘You’re very different from what one might expect.’

Herr Grün shook his head. ‘No, Fräulein Pomeranz,’ he said. ‘I’ve just learned not to let everyone see past my face.’

He didn’t want to chat, that much was clear, he wanted to tell a story. About how it had been, and how it had stopped.

At first everything seemed to be going on as before. They mightn’t have belonged to the Reich Culture Chamber, but they were allowed to go on performing. In cabaret people didn’t seem to take it all too seriously. They were used to Nazis disrupting the performance with catcalls. It was part of their job, and was no worse than the drunks who thought, after the second bottle of wine, that they were funnier than the people on stage. After Hitler came to power it wasn’t very different. Perhaps you were less direct in your phrasing, perhaps you were a bit more discreet with your barbs, but people listened much more precisely and reacted to nuances. ‘A dictatorship does wonders for your sense of hearing,’ said Herr Grün.

And then, in 1934, two men were waiting for them after the show. They were standing quite patiently by the stage door. As if they wanted an autograph. ‘In those days they didn’t yet have the leather coats they wear now, each of them just had an armband, and they still looked slightly uncertain, two comedians who aren’t sure about the lines in their new sketch. They hadn’t rehearsed it yet. One of them hit me in the face, but his heart wasn’t in it. I’ve learned to tell the difference in the meantime. Amateurs.’

And then…

But Herr Grün had overtaxed himself, a convalescent who wants to cross the whole city the first time he goes for a walk, and doesn’t yet have the strength for it. ‘I need to sleep a bit now,’ he said.

Perhaps Désirée was just imagining it, but when she looked quickly in on him before she left she thought his face had a bit more colour than usual.

She told Rachel about it, and Rachel was strangely insulted. ‘Sorry if people don’t trust me. I don’t force myself on anyone. I’m a busy woman.’

But she was firmly resolved never to visit Herr Grün again.

And then there was this delivery of autumn models of the Ober department store, and old Frau Ober was always so fussy, and carped about every individual thread, so it was better for Rachel to go and clear the air. In the end no one in the company was as good at dealing with people as she was. The Ober wasn’t far from the barracks, and from the barracks it was only a few steps to Molkenstrasse, so could Rachel please be so kind and drop the bag of leftover brocade off with Frau Posmanik, because she’d set it aside for her anyway. If she called in to see Herr Grün at the same time, it was the most natural thing in the world, after all, you have to know when you can expect your workers to be back on their feet.

Herr Grün wasn’t in his bed, as he should have been if he’d been signed off sick. ‘He isn’t here,’ said Aaron through the crack in the door. It was really infuriating how often Frau Posmanik left her children alone. It was only after a number of questions that the little boy condescended to reveal to Rachel that Herr Grün hadn’t gone out or anything, but that he was on the roof.

The impertinence of it.

You had to fish for a hook with a pole and lower a ladder. You had to find the way through a dusty attic, and afterwards you had cobwebs in your hair, the lengths you have to go to sometimes. And then after you’d bent through far too low a door, you were standing on a metal roof where you were constantly tripping over a seam, really not the right place for a businesswoman who’s put on almost her very best shoes for a conversation with an important customer.

At first she didn’t see Herr Grün at all. Someone had put washing out to dry on the roof, the unsightly intimacies of a big family. She had to duck under clothes lines hung with underpants and vests, and then at last discovered, in a niche between two chimneys, a wicker chair with someone sitting in it, someone of whom only a pair of slippers and an adventurously colourful dressing gown could be seen. The rest of the man was hidden by an open newspaper.

‘Herr Grün?’

He didn’t lower the newspaper straight away. As if he wanted to finish an article before he was prepared to notice her. But then he was exquisitely polite, which Rachel found merely aggravating.

‘Fräulein Kamionker! What a pleasant surprise! Unfortunately I can’t offer you a chair. There’s only one, and it’s not worthy of you.’ He briefly raised his backside to show her that the wicker chair was completely worn out, and should long since have been sent to the blind people’s workshop on Stauffacher for repair.