Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Three hundred francs was a fortune for an agricultural student. Böhni didn’t even have to think about asking his parents, in Flaach they’d never seen as much money as that all at once, and even if they’d had it, it certainly wasn’t going to a son who brought shame on their heads, for a lad with previous convictions at whom everyone in the village was already pointing a finger. Böhni’s parents hadn’t been in the courtroom, at harvest time they had, God knew, better things to be getting on with, when they were in any case missing a few hands they had firmly expected to be working for them, now that the Strickhof was on holiday.

Hillel’s father had sat there throughout, with such a wounded expression on his face that one might have thought the whole punch-up had taken place solely to defy him. He had always been opposed to Hillel’s Zionism, and now one could see where it led when an adolescent burrowed his way into an ideology and didn’t listen to his father or, which in Adolf Rosenthal’s opinion amounted to the same thing, to reason. Bad company and fighting. A Jewish boy thumping people in public — it only caused rish’es. Hillel knew that his father, if he had asked him subserviently enough, would have would have been able to drum up the three hundred francs one way or another, with interest in the form of contrition and obedience. But he didn’t even think of paying such a price. He would rather be locked up. And Adolf Rosenthal remained stubborn as well, however much Lea might complain. No help without an admission of guilt. If you won’t listen, you go to jail.

‘Not a bad daily wage,’ Hillel said to Böhni while they were still in the courtroom. ‘Ten francs a day, seven times a week. Some workers don’t earn half that.’

What he hadn’t reckoned with, and neither had Böhni, was that the governor of the local prison was a person with a sense of humour, and had thus come up with the idea of locking the two of them up together in a cell. ‘Then you will have plenty of time for your philosophical discussions,’ he said. ‘And If you want to beat the living daylights out of each other, that’s up to you. But no bloodstains on the blankets.’

Twenty-three hours a day. Twenty-four with yard exercise. In a cell, for which a room in the Strickhof was a luxury hotel in comparison.

There was one stool. One of them always had to lie on his mattress or sit on the edge of the bunk, either on top, where your feet dangled into the void, or on the bottom, where you had to bend your back. Right at the start, when he still refused to grasp that they were real prisoners, Hillel had asked for a second stool. The guard said only that his Majesty should be so kind as to go and sit on the throne, meaning the toilet bowl. And he laughed at his own joke as if he had made it for the first time.

They weren’t assigned to work. It wasn’t worth training them for four weeks. But they were given prison clothes, a brown suit not much different from the ones they wore to work in the Strickhof stables.

The worst thing was the boredom. They were woken at half past five, to which they were accustomed from school, there was breakfast at six, the daily ration of bread, a glob of jam and coffee so thin that even when the metal cup was full one could still make out the Zurich crest stamped on the bottom. The cleanliness of the cell was checked at eight, and having been drilled by Kudi Lampertz they never had any problems with that.

And then: nothing else.

Apart from yard exercise, nothing at all, for the whole day.

Books were only allowed from the second month. At first only one newspaper each, which meant that their only intellectual stimulation was the Front and the Volksrecht . At first each refused to read the other’s newspaper, and they just made jokes about it: it was nice of Böhni to have fresh toilet paper sent in every day, or: Rosenthal wasn’t to forget to wash his hands after reading, the Volksrecht was so red that the colour was bound to come off.

But soon the boredom was stronger than their convictions. Böhni in particular was bad at being locked in, he was a person who had to be on the move, and he could drive Hillel round the bend by marching back and forth, the few paces from one wall to the other, or doing sit-ups on the floor out of a surplus of energy. You had to distract yourself somehow, and so it was that Hillel studied the Front from cover to cover for the first time in his life, from the leading article entitled ‘Oy veh!’ to the advertisements, in which the Kreuel restaurant at 33 Kanonengasse recommended itself to its kind customers with Hürlimann beer.

Böhni read the Volksrecht , where in the reports from Spain he failed to recognise the civil war as he understood it, and in all seriousness believed at first that there was two wars going on down there, the just struggle of a nation under the yoke of Communism against its oppressors, and the terror bombing of squadrons of foreign planes against Basque towns. Even where the politics of the city was concerned, the Volksrecht seemed to inhabit a different world from his own; here they supported the red majority on the council, even though everyone knew that the comrades were hand in glove with international Jewry and…

‘You’re a dickhead,’ said Hillel.

‘No one can dispute that the Jews…’

‘Give me an example.’

‘There are hundreds!’

‘Give me one!’

‘Erm…’ said Böhni.

‘Aha!’ said Hillel.

But then Böhni did come up with an irrefutable argument. ‘The department stores,’ he said. ‘They’re finishing off the small businesses. Epa, for example. Or Jelmoli.’

‘They’re Italians.’

‘If you fall for their names! Meier, for example, with his department store, his name isn’t even Meier. He writes his name up on all the shop windows and it isn’t even his name. But we’ve… they’ve carried out a few improvements on that. Did you know he’s a Jew?’

Hillel thought of his baptised Uncle François and nodded. ‘Yes, I knew that.’

‘There you have it!’ said Böhni.

And so it went on all day. Neither of them convinced the other, no one could have expected that, but the hours passed.

Not that they talked about politics all the time. Their most frequent subject was the Strickhof, and how headmaster Gerster would react to their sentence. There was something in the school regulations about ‘blameless students’. It could be interpreted in various different ways, but that they were now blameful — was there even such a word — there could be no doubt, and if Gerstli went stubborn on them, they would be flying out of the school in a high arc.

A disaster.

Böhni, normally a fellow of few words, couldn’t stop telling Hillel about the grave consequences that such an expulsion would have for him personally. He would have to creep home like someone who had wanted to make something better of himself and had failed in his task; the rich farmers’ sons would laugh at him and the girls in the village wouldn’t so much as look at him. And his parents… Böhni knew very well what his time at school meant for them: two years with one pair of hands too few on the farm, and no money to take on a labourer.

Hillel also thought out loud about how his parents would react. His father would point out that he had been right — ‘What business did you have at an agricultural college? That’s goyim naches,’ he had always said — and Adolf Rosenthal wasn’t the kind of person who would ever forget such a defeat. He would rub Hillel’s nose in the story at every opportunity, and Hillel wouldn’t have a single argument to silence him. But worst of all — except he didn’t tell Böhni this — Hillel was worried about what Malka Sofer would say. And he had only ever talked to her properly on one occasion. Then she had described him as childish over his adventure with the box-cart, but had still acknowledged that he was going to an agricultural college so that he could later be a useful member of society in a Jewish state. If he was expelled now…