Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Later it turned out that this worry at least had been superfluous. Malka had received her permit for Palestine and had left without saying goodbye.

‘Maybe we should write Gerstli a letter,’ Hillel said thoughtfully.

Böhni shook his head, with his mouth full. They were sitting over lunch, Böhni, whose turn it was today, on the stool, and Hillel cross-legged on the lower bunk. It was beef roulade, tough as saddle straps, with overcooked Brussels sprouts swimming in a sweetish sauce. Hillel had let Böhni have his roulade — he couldn’t get used to treyfene food, was his excuse — and ate only the bread, of which they were given half a loaf per day.

Böhni choked down a mouthful so big that his Adam’s apple practically burst out of his throat, and said. ‘You’re crazy, Rosenthal. What would you say to him?’

‘That school is important to us, blah blah, that we love it, that the trial has been a salutary lesson, that in future we will be model students. All the things my father likes to hear.’

‘What does your father have to do with it?’

‘Teachers are all the same.’

Böhni wasn’t happy about the idea. Like many people who aren’t good with words, he had far too high an opinion of all things written. ‘That’s why you believe in the Front ,’ mocked Hillel. Böhni was in favour of doing nothing at all, just drawing in his head and hoping the whole business would come to nothing, at least as far as the school was concerned. After all, there had only been a small item in the papers, with no names. And besides, by the time they had sat out the three hundred francs, the summer holidays would be coming to an end; so they wouldn’t miss a single day of lessons. And Gerstli might have gone away or been otherwise engaged and wouldn’t hear a thing about the whole affair. No, the letter was a very bad idea.

They didn’t agree, but the argument about Hillel’s suggestion still filled the whole afternoon, and in fine weather, when you had to look out through the barred windows to where the sun was shining, the afternoons were always particularly long.

The next day Böhni was called to the visiting room. There was a man waiting for him there.

‘My father?’ he asked, quite startled, and involuntarily reached for his throat as if there were a noose there that someone was about to pull tight.

‘I don’t think so,’ said the warder. Today this was a cosy, elderly officer who had seen everything in his long years of service, and who set a great deal of store by his knowledge of human beings. ‘An accountant or a teacher, I would say. He’s wearing a funny polka dot bow tie.’ He looked at the docket that had to be filled out at every prison visit. ‘Gerster’s his name.’

Headmaster Gerster.

Böhni trotted behind the warder as if going to his own execution.

For the first time in more than two weeks Hillel was alone in the cell. He had the stool and the beds and the toilet all to himself, and yet it still seemed to him that the room had grown smaller, that it had shrunk like the skin over a wound when it slowly scars over.

What did Gerster want from Böhni? Why was he visiting only him?

He tried to convince himself that he wasn’t interested, he flicked through the Front and didn’t understand a word of what he read there. ‘A Jew as theatre director makes it impossible for Swiss artists to be discovered; a Jew as university teacher influences young academics against the necessary renewal of our nation.’

What sort of renewal?

Gerstli was basically not a grumpy person, but he had said clearly and distinctly that if even the smallest thing should occur… Expulsion, no ifs or buts. Finished, once and for all.

Why was he only visiting Böhni?

There was only a corner left of the daily ration of bread. Hillel pulled a piece out of the sticky middle and shaped it into a grey ball between the palms of his hands. He drew a mouth and two eyes in it with his fingernails. Then he flattened the head with his fist.

How long had Böhni been gone? You couldn’t take a watch with you into the cell, you had to hand it in with your other belongings.

Why had Gerster even come?

And why was he only visiting Böhni?

If he was thrown out of school…

‘Away with the bad apples,’ it said in the Front . ‘We don’t want the plague to spread.’

When the keys rattled outside again, Hillel was lying on the top bunk, reading. ‘A Jew in the editing room suppresses any view with which he is unhappy. A Jew as film distributor seeks only immoral films for his cinemas.’ He didn’t lower the paper when Böhni came in.

‘Come on, Rosenthal,’ said the warder’s voice. ‘Get up, come with me. A visitor for you.’

‘He wants to talk to you too,’ said Böhni.

‘What about?’

‘He asked me who it was who started all this nonsense. The instigator will be thrown out, in the case of the other he will put mercy before justice.’

‘So? What did you tell him?’

‘The truth,’ said Böhni, without looking at him.

The old warden unlocked the cell door from outside and kept the keys in his hand. They rattled with each step that he took, like bells on a harness.

The corridor smelled of cheap scouring powder.

The visiting room wasn’t much bigger than their cell. A table, a chair for the visitor, a stool for the prisoner.

Headmaster Gerster stood by the window and looked through the bars at the courtyard.

‘Ten minutes,’ said the warder.

Ten minutes? Böhni had been away for much longer than that.

Or had it only seemed that way?

‘Grüezi, Herr Gerster.’

The headmaster turned towards him very slowly, looked at him as a doctor might look at a seriously ill patient who is beyond help, and then said, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘Why do you do such things?’

‘I’m sorry, Herr Gerster.’

‘Everyone’s sorry in retrospect. It’s not enough. You have a head on your shoulders, Rosenthal! What on earth were you doing at a Front meeting?’

‘I know, it was idiotic.’

‘“Idiotic,” he says.’ Herr Gerster didn’t even raise his voice, and that scared Hillel. After the box-cart journey, when Gerstli had given them a proper earful, he had felt better. ‘Behaves like the most unreasonable ragamuffin in the whole world and then says: “idiotic”. Is it true that it was about a bet?’

Hillel nodded.

‘Give a decent answer when I ask you a question! Was it about a bet?’

‘Yes, Herr Gerster.’

‘And who started this bet?’

‘He’ll be expelled, won’t he?’

Gerster didn’t reply. He just stood there, his arms behind his back, and clapped the back of his hand impatiently into his palm.

‘Who?’

‘Böhni will be finished if you throw him out,’ said Hillel.

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘They’ll finish him off in his village.’

Back of hand against palm.

‘His whole life will fall apart.’

‘I want to know who is to blame.’

On the wall there was a sign: ‘The passing over of objects is strictly forbidden.’

‘Who?’

A wooden hatch, like the one between kitchen and dining room at home, but higher up. Probably you could keep an eye on the visits from there.

‘I’m waiting.’

The sweetish taste of lunch rose up in Hillel’s throat. He swallowed.

Back of hand against palm.

‘Me,’ said Hillel. ‘I’m to blame for this.’

Gerster turned away as if he hadn’t heard him, and walked back over to the barred window as if he were about to deliver a speech to the courtyard.

‘Did you agree that in advance?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Herr Gerster.’

‘That each of you was to shoulder the blame?’