Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Herr Grün pushed a few bits of cigarette ash together into a little pile with a beer mat. ‘Depends what you compare it to,’ he said.

The landlady brought the carafe of wine. She set a big glass of clear liquid don in front of Herr Grün.

‘Schnapps?’ said Désirée, without reproach.

‘Water,’ said Herr Grün. ‘I like to allow myself something good.’

Rachel studied her own glass suspiciously and wiped the rim with her handkerchief. Herr Grün smiled.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked.

‘You know something, Fräulein Kamionker? You shouldn’t mix coffee with your henna. Once you’ve got used to it, the colour really suits you.’

She didn’t understand this man.

A few tables away a drunk stood up, reached unsteadily for the back of his chair and dragged it — as a support or as a weapon — over to the three. A tall, thickset man with a puffy face, an athlete who had let himself go, or a worker who drank too much. He placed the chair next to their table, sat down and leaned over to Rachel.

‘Princess,’ said the man. ‘You’re a princess.’

You could hear the alcohol in his voice.

‘I’m the king,’ said the drunk man. ‘Princess and king. Do you notice anything?’

‘Please leave us alone.’ Later Rachel would claim she had remained quite calm.

‘Come home with me,’ said the man. ‘I’ll show you my sceptre.’ He laughed, and when no one at the table joined in, he repeated more loudly, ‘My sceptre. You understand? Sceptre!’

‘That’ll do.’ Herr Grün said it quite calmly, but the man’s head spun around as if someone had cracked a whip.

‘You can’t say that to me.’

‘You want to check?’ asked Herr Grün. His voice hadn’t got any louder, but all conversations fell silent in the White Cross, and someone shook the sleeping man at the next table awake to say to him, ‘You can’t miss this!’

The drunk man looked at Herr Grün.

Herr Grün tilted his head slightly to one side, not menacingly, just asking amicably.

How would you like it?

The drunk man started laughing, not very convincingly, and said, ‘We’re jolly people here. Jolly people. You can take a joke, can’t you?’ And then, to Herr Grün and not at all to Rachel, ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry. It wasn’t meant in a nasty way.’ He got off, dragged his chair back to his table, sat down with his back to them and didn’t turn round again.

All around them the conversations struck up again, but no longer quite as loudly as before.

‘Thank you,’ said Rachel.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Herr Grün.

Désirée ran her fingernail along the rim of her wine glass. ‘He’s stronger than you,’ she said without looking at Herr Grün. ‘He could have beaten you up.’

‘Beatings aren’t a matter of strength. It depends how far you’re prepared to go.’

‘How far would you go for me?’ The alarm was over, and Rachel’s voice was flirty again.

‘No one hits me any more,’ said Herr Grün. ‘Not any more.’ He took a deep draught from his water glass. ‘I’m skilled.’

‘What does that actually mean?’

‘You live here in Switzerland,’ he said ‘you can’t understand. On an island you don’t know what it means to drown. I had to learn to swim. If you didn’t do that…’

He raised both hands above his head and let them fall back down on the table.

‘You’re talking about your friend Blau,’ said Désirée quietly. It wasn’t a question.

‘His name was Schlesinger. Siegfried Schlesinger. Studied German. Knew the Merseburg Charms off by heart, and when he was in a good mood he liked to recite poems in Middle High German. “Du bist beslozzen in minem herzen. Verlorn ist daz slüzzelin, du muost immer drinne sin.” Beslozzen in minem herzen. Locked in my heart,’ Herr Grün repeated and drank his water as if it was schnapps.

‘He would have liked to be a teacher, but for some reason they wouldn’t have him. They wanted to have him as Herr Blau.’

Guten Tag, Herr Blau.

Guten Tag, Herr Grün.

‘Brought a different book to the dressing room every day. If reading books made you fat we’d have had to swap roles.’ Herr Grün laughed, and again it was that pickled laugh from the basement.

‘He had a funny face. Sticking-out ears. That was his good fortune on stage and his misfortune in the camp. He stood out, and if you stand out you haven’t a chance.’

He waved to the landlady, as impatient as a drinker whose alcohol has run out. She brought him his next glass of water and he drank greedily.

‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘If you hit someone with a stick, it sounds different from when you use a whip. Did you know that? With a glove it’s different from when you use your bare hand. Some people didn’t even punch. They preferred to kick. They made you stand bolt upright and then rammed their knee into your privates. Everyone has his own style. Like comics on the stage. There were also double-acts. Just as Grün and Blau were double-acts. One punched, the other kicked. If you have the right partner you understand each other implicitly.

‘You can’t understand that, here in Switzerland. In the auditorium you don’t really understand what’s happening on stage.

‘Beslozzen in minem herzen,’ said Herr Grün. ‘Verlorn ist daz slüzzelin. Lost is the key.’

‘Herr Blau…’ Désirée began to frame a question.

‘His name was Schlesinger.’

‘Herr Schlesinger — did he die in the camp?’

‘No,’ said Herr Grün. ‘It was much worse. They let us go.’

He stood up so suddenly and violently that his chair fell over, just left it lying there and said into the sudden silence in the pub, ‘We’re going.’ He threw a handful of coins on the table — he carried his money loose in his pocket, something that people usually do only when the small change doesn’t matter — spoke into the gap between Rachel and Désirée as if someone invisible were sitting there, or as if he couldn’t look them in the face, and repeated impatiently, ‘Let’s go.’ Didn’t help them into their coats, did hold the door out for them, but not like a gentleman, more like a bouncer, and outside in the alleyway he made so quickly for the Limmat Quai and Münster Bridge that they practically had to run after him.

Then, in the middle of the bridge, he suddenly stopped, had a very old, sad face and said, ‘I’m sorry. You think you’ll get used to it, but… You don’t. You just don’t…’

‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’

‘No,’ said Herr Grün. ‘I do. Otherwise it will never get better.’

All three together, yet apart, they walked from the Münsterhof to the St Peterhofstatt, and then up a narrow, dark path to the Lindenhof, sat down on one of the benches where lovers usually sit, or drunks, looked out over the Limmat and down at the meat market, the dark façades of the guild-houses, the empty windows of the museum society, and waited for Herr Grün to find the words he needed for his healing.

The night was warm. The moon lit the square as the cold neon light lit the sewing room in Zalman’s factory. On a fountain a woman stood in full armour and guarded the unthreatened city. Everything was still. Only sometimes did a heavy beetle buzz over their heads as if on its way to deliver an important message or drop a bomb somewhere.

‘They set us free in the summer of 1936,’ Herr Grün said at last. ‘Because of the Olympic Games.’

The weeks of the Summer Olympics, he said, were an exceptional time in Germany. The dictatorship took a holiday, outwardly at least. The tourists wanted to see a Berlin that was open to the world, so the order was issued by the Propaganda Ministry to present them with a Berlin that was open to the world. The way one might take the backdrop of a long-forgotten play out of the props room. Iron the mothballed costumes. Have the music played one last time.