Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘They’d always known a lot about show business,’ said Herr Grün with the reluctant acknowledgement that one grants to the professionalism of an unloved branch of something. Yes, their actual speciality might have been mass marches and rallies, but a good director can stage anything that the management puts on the bill. Olympic tolerance is an easy exercise in that respect. Particularly when you have enough extras at your disposal. A whole country full of extras. You just have to be careful that no embarrassing details disturb the beautiful picture as a whole.

So on the Ku’damm the ‘Jews unwelcome’ stickers on the shop doors were suddenly no longer desirable. The glass Stürmer cases around the Olympic stadium stopped showing hate-filled caricatures, and instead displayed pictures of defiant-looking athletes. And at the Wannsee beach baths they took down the signs saying that ‘bathing is forbidden for Jews and those with skin conditions.’ Berlin smartened itself up. Put a white waistcoat over its brown shirt.

It was just for a few weeks, after all.

They took away the seals and padlocks from the doors of the long-closed cabarets and gay bars. The international guests wanted to enjoy themselves, they expected the wicked pleasures of the big city, and their expectations were to be fulfilled. The performers were at hand, in fact. They were all sitting in the camps. You just had to take their striped suits off them and put their old costumes back on. It was still all there. The feather boas for the transvestites and the tailcoats for the masters of ceremonies.

It was only for a few weeks.

‘We were to tread the boards again,’ said Herr Grün. ‘“If you’re not willing to join in, you stay in the camp,” they said. Which amounted to, “Would you rather live, or would you rather be beaten to death?” We had a free choice.

‘We even got our names back. On loan. Suddenly I was Felix Grün again, rather than prisoner 4892. That was my number in the camp.’

‘I know,’ said Rachel quietly.

‘We were to play the old sketches. Including the dialogue about the apples. Particularly that one.’

The text was placed on the table in front of them. Someone had sat at one of the shows and written it down. Word for word. They were to play it again exactly like that. With the punchline about the browns that had to be got rid of and the joke about the Reich that’s not for eating, it’s for throwing up. ‘And if you can think of anything especially pointed about us,’ said the man in the brown uniform, ‘don’t hold back. We’re not like that. We’ve got a sense of humour.’

‘And after the Games?’ one of them dared to ask.

‘We’ll see.’

If you cast a person’s feet in a concrete block and throw him in the water — does he drown?

We’ll see.

It was just for a few weeks.

‘We had got the same dressing-room.’ Herr Grün said it as if nothing had ever given him such grounds for amazement. The same dressing-room. The same stage. The same sketches. ‘Only my suit didn’t fit any more. You don’t stay fat in a concentration camp.’

In the stalls the sport tourists from all over the world ordered expensive wines, had the punchlines translated for them and were amazed to find such freedom of thought in a Germany that had been decried as a dictatorship. Evidence once again that you couldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.

Guten Tag, Herr Grün.

Guten Tag, Herr Blau.

All as it had been.

Not quite everything. For the first time in the career, Grün and Blau were on after the interval. The big names weren’t there any more. One had emigrated to Holland. One to America. One had been run over by a tipper in a quarry.

There was no applause to greet them when they came on stage, either. They had been forgotten. ‘A year in the camps does nothing for your popularity,’ said Herr Grün, and there was not a trace of irony in his voice.

Much had changed behind the scenes as well. Between their performances Schlesinger no longer read clever books, and Grün no longer romped with the twirlies. They sat in their dressing-room, looked at their own strange faces in the mirror, and every now and again one of them asked, ‘What do you think?’

‘It isn’t true,’ said Herr Grün, ‘that you think more quickly when it’s a matter of life and death. On the contrary. Thoughts get bogged down like car wheels in the sand. Wheels in the sand.’

He fell silent and looked out into the peaceful Zurich night, without seeing it.

On the Limmat Quay a light came on in a bathroom. A shadow moved behind the frosted glass. Only when the window was dark again did Herr Grün go on talking.

‘We put on our performances, two every evening. But it was as if we weren’t really standing on the stage. As if we were just pushing ourselves back and forth, like big puppets. I don’t know if you can understand that.’

‘I understand it very well,’ said Désirée.

At two in the morning, when the audience had gone, they met up with their colleagues. They sat in the cold smoke of an empty auditorium and asked the same questions over and over. They called themselves ‘the temporary ones’. No one knew who had invented the expression, but everyone used it. And had thus already given himself his answer.

They were only there temporarily, all of the ones who had been released from the camps because the Olympic guests needed entertainment. The gigolos who had once again swapped their clogs for patent leather shoes: temporary. The masculine women with their monocles and starched shirt-fronts: temporary. The cabaret artistes with the funny lyrics and sad eyes: temporary.

The dead on leave.

It was all just for a few weeks. After the Games they would be rounded up again.

Should one try to escape before then? That was the question.

And how best to do it? That was the problem.

There were a few optimists among them, and Schlesinger was one of those. ‘We have an agreement with them,’ he said. ‘We’ve fulfilled our part. We appear again, and in return they leave us in peace afterwards. Of course they will close our venues again. I’m not naïve. In future we’ll have to do something else. Anything. Cart bricks about on a building site. If need be. But they won’t lock us up again. What good would it do them? We aren’t dangerous to them any more.’

Grün couldn’t persuade him otherwise. There’s always someone who thinks you can strike a deal with the devil.

For three weeks they appeared on stage. For three weeks people laughed.

Guten Tag, Herr Grün.

Guten Tag, Herr Blau.

And then, on the very last day, when Siegfried Schlesinger still refused to abandon his blind hope, clinging to it like a child to a favourite cat that had been run over by a car — no, it isn’t true, it isn’t dead, I’m just not going to believe it! — on the very last day Herr Grün didn’t come on stage.

‘I’m a skilled practitioner,’ he said into the silence of the night. ‘I knew what was on the cards. I went to Vienna, where I had friends, I just took the night train. It wasn’t even difficult. I had fake papers, and the border guards were dozy. Once I was there, I found out that they’d all ended up back in the camp. All rounded up again.’

‘They ordered Schlesinger to tell them where I was. He didn’t know, but they tried to beat it out of him anyway. This time they didn’t just break his nose.’

A beetle flew over their heads, rumbling like a plane.

‘Yes,’ said Herr Grün, ‘they let us go. That was the worst thing they did to us.’

All of a sudden he stood up and walked to the edge of the hill, which after a low wall falls down to the Limmat. He spread his arms, it looked in the moonlight as if he was about to pray or argue or fly away, and then Herr Grün whispered something. ‘Du bist beslozzen in minem herzen,’ whispered Herr Grün. ‘Verlorn ist daz slüzzelin, du muost immer drinne sin.’ The key is lost, you are there for ever. It sounded almost like Swiss German.