Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

And so on. Frau Olchev, and perhaps this had something to do with her profession, was chatty even at this early hour.

François called his brother and sister — they had agreed that he would do this some months previously — and got the car out of the garage. For a few years he had been driving a French product again, a Citroen 11 CV that his business partner in Paris had bought for him under particularly favourable conditions. On other days he could wax as lyrical about the model’s advantages — front wheel drive! Steel monocoque chassis! — as his father once had about an exotic wood dining table, but today no one in the car uttered a word as they drove to Lengnau in the summer dawn. François spoke only once, to say, ‘How empty the roads are at this time of day.’

Hinda and Arthur sat side by side in the back and held hands.

They arrived at the old people’s home just before six, and all three ran up the steps, as if every second counted. When they charged into their mother’s room — the best room in the house, François had seen to that — the doctor had already come from the village and gone again. He had given Chanele an injection; she was sleeping now, and would not wake up for the next few hours. She lay there with a thumb in her mouth, a little girl who had dressed up as an old woman and gone to sleep after her game. Her breathing was quite calm and peaceful.

It had been a false alarm.

Frau Olchev, feeling guilty about all the excitement that she had caused, and at the same time proud of the importance granted her by the event, was even chattier than usual, and construed the meaningless phrases uttered by the doctor she had summoned as statements of profound significance. He hadn’t been able to find anything really alarming, she said, reporting his diagnosis, but given the patient’s great age and her weakened general condition, one must always expect dramatic changes, so it had only been correct — Frau Olchev repeated the words with red underlining — it had been absolutely correct to call him straight away, because once they started fantasising it was always an alarm signal. She, Frau Olchev, hoped very much that she had acted as Herr Meijer would have wished, she knew how concerned he was about his mother — as indeed were the other ladies and gentlemen — and he would certainly have taken it amiss of her if she had neglected to make the phone-call out of concern for his sleep, and then, God forbid, the worst might have come to the worst.

She used the phrase ‘if the worst comes to the worst’ and its variants as a universally applicable specialist term. Arthur could easily imagine her recording deaths at the home in the incident book in the same terms: ‘Frau So-and-so at such-and-such a time: the worst came to the worst.’

Basically, he thought, it was the most honest opinion that one could express.

After the excitement of the nocturnal alarm, the sudden relief also had an aftertaste of disappointment, as if someone had at the very last moment removed an obstacle at which they were already running. In fact they could have driven back to Zurich straight away, but they agreed, quickly and silently, that they would, since they were here, visit Chanele again later, once she had woken up. There was nowhere in the old people’s home where they could have waited in any great comfort; the cleaning women had just arrived, and were putting the dining room and the common rooms under water. So they got back into the Citroen and drove into Lengnau, since they were all ready for a small breakfast or at least a cup of coffee.

But that wish turned out not to be easily fulfilled. The pubs — here in the country there were no cafés — were all still closed, so at last they found themselves in the deserted garden of Die Sonne, where a table with two benches stood beneath a massive chestnut tree. All around the foundations for other seating opportunities were fastened to the ground, smaller stones for the benches, larger ones for the tables, but because the requisite boards were missing it looked as if the siblings had sat down in the middle of a neatly arranged graveyard.

The three of them didn’t find themselves sitting together like that very often any more. The days when they had really been close were now long gone; they weren’t children any more, and with every new grey hair one grows further apart from one’s brothers and sisters. They turn into strangers, or perhaps it only seems that way because strangers become more familiar. Either way, a special kind of awkwardness had arisen between them, as often happens when private feelings have been made public, when one is ill at ease with mutually agreed silence, and prefers to create a safe feeling of detachment by batting a few commonplaces back and forth.

‘We should actually be grateful to Frau Olchev,’ said Hinda. ‘She’s brought about another family reunion.’

The first at which we’ve sat around an empty table.

‘That’s true,’ said Arthur. ‘We’ll probably have to wait a long time for a coffee, at such an unchristian hour — Oh, forgive me, François.’ His brother and sister looked at him in surprise. He was the only one to have noticed any allusions in his words.

The benches had no backs, so they weren’t sitting very comfortably.

Arthur started talking about the vote in the religious community, at which they had just decided by 236 six votes to 178 to remove the harmonium from the synagogue, again, but he couldn’t even pretend to himself that he was interested.

The silence between them grew louder.

As a distraction, Hinda opened her handbag, took out an envelope and rubbed away at the digestive traces that a bird had left on the table.

François saw the Hitler stamp and asked, ‘News from Ruben?’

Hinda nodded. Grateful for a topic of conversation, she reported that a letter had arrived at Rotwandstrasse only yesterday, and it had been so strange that neither she nor Zalman had really been able to make head or tail of it. The letter itself was at home, but she could recite it almost by heart. Previously, Ruben had kept reporting new irritations and instances of bullying, his letters, Hinda said, could have been bound into a Black Book, and now all of a sudden here he was writing that they shouldn’t worry about him, and please to lend no credence to the horrific propaganda that was sadly being disseminated even in the Swiss newspapers. Germany was a country in which law and order prevailed, he wrote, where nothing was ever done to anyone unless he had broken the law. A new Reich was coming into being, so exemplary that it almost corresponded to that ideal state described by the scholar Rabbah bar bar Chana in the Talmud, and he, Ruben, was grateful that he had been allowed to make a modest contribution to that construction in his own town of Halberstadt.

‘Do you understand that?’ asked Hinda. ‘He can’t really mean it.’

François ran both index fingers from his upper lip and across his cheeks, his old gesture when he felt superior to others. ‘Do I really have to explain that to you as a goy? Have you forgotten the stories Uncle Pinchas always told us? About the campfire on the back of a fish, or about the crocodile as big as a town with sixty houses? Those were all stories told by Rabbah bar bar Chana.’

‘So?’

‘They’re all lies. Tall stories.’

‘You mean…?’

‘They’ve probably started censoring letters going abroad. So he’s writing the opposite of what he means, and mentions Rabbah bar bar Chana so that we know how to read it. They may even have threatened him. From what one hears, in Germany you can end up in a re-education camp for less than a letter.’

Hinda, entirely accustomed to the orderly conditions in Switzerland, had never even thought of such a thing, but now that François said it, she was sure he was right. The most terrible rumours were going around about those education camps and the things that happened in them. No one knew exactly, but it was assumed to be terrible. And now her son Ruben…? She took a shocked, deep breath, as someone falling from a bridge gasps for water just before the water closes over him.