Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

You had to admit, said an artificial honey salesman, that many things had improved. In his field at any rate, agreed a representative in leather goods, boots in particular were selling like mad. Of course one couldn’t agree with everything, a third began, there were things that actually shouldn’t have been happening. But the others didn’t want to talk politics, they preferred to get on with their card game.

Photographs hung over the seats in the compartment: festively decorated buildings with half-timbered facades and mountain-tops reflected in romantic lakes. ‘Germans, go on holiday in Germany!’ it said underneath. In one picture a girl in peasant costume carried a bunch of flowers in her arm and smiled shyly from under her beribboned bonnet.

‘I don’t even know what she looks like,’ thought Arthur.

He should have asked her, of course, he should have asked for some photographs, but at first he hadn’t even thought about it, and now there was censorship, and you didn’t know who read the letters. Everything had to look perfectly natural, as if it had all been discussed and agreed. There should be nothing to suggest that the marriage was about anything other than a Swiss passport.

So he hadn’t even formally proposed, in his letter he had acted as if everything was long since resolved between them. Without advance notice he had written to her to say that he, for his part, had the necessary papers for the marriage contract, and very much hoped that she would soon have them as well. He had also received confirmation: for the wife of a Swiss citizen, immigration was not a problem.

Irma and Moses sent their greetings and were already looking forward to showing her Switzerland. ‘Particularly the city of Zurich,’ he had added in brackets.

She had replied just as matter-of-factly, in a curt letter without surprises or objections. She just reminded him — she actually wrote ‘remind’ — please under no circumstances to forget to bring his certificate of non-Aryan descent, otherwise they would assume at the register office that he, being Swiss, was of German or congeneric blood, and then marriage to a Jewess would not be permitted.

So he had asked the Israeli Religion Society to confirm his membership, and stupidly kept the officially accredited paper in his passport, in which his religious affiliation was not recorded. If only he had simply put it in his pocket… ‘Meijer’ had a good Swiss ring about it, and they would probably have left him in peace.

François or even Hinda would have warned him against such recklessness, but he hadn’t told his siblings anything about his journey, his wedding trip. They would just have advised him against it. François would have listed, point by point, all the reasons why the business should not go ahead, never under any circumstances, and Hinda would have shaken her head and said, ‘Really, Arthur, one can overdo the idealism.’

For the second time in his life he had asked for a woman’s hand, and again it was a woman he didn’t know at all.

Any more than he had, that time before, known Chaje Sore Wasserstein. At least he had seen her, that evening in the tabernacle. And had immediately felt obliged…

He didn’t even know what she looked like.

Perhaps she was ugly. Not that it would have mattered, of course not, but if you were going to be sitting opposite one another at the table every day, if you even had to sleep in the same…

He had asked Dr Strauss, the lawyer, it didn’t concern him personally, he had said, it was one of his patients, but he would be interested, purely out of curiosity, what the conventions were in such a situation. The authorities examined everything, said Dr Strauss, dropped in after a year or two and checked whether the marriage actually existed. They rang your doorbell without warning, and had them show you the bathroom, whether there were really two toothbrushes in the tooth-mugs. They looked at the bedroom.

The bedroom.

Arthur couldn’t imagine that side of things.

He didn’t even know what colour her hair was.

Perhaps he would stand outside the register office and not recognise her.

Nor she him.

He had once heard about a woman, in a very Orthodox community, who had been brought together with her husband by a shadchen, and when her veil was lifted under the chuppah for the first time, she found him so ugly that she’d thrown up.

But people said it had been a happy marriage anyway.

Would she expect him to kiss her?

He was fifty-seven, and was worried that he would look awkward.

Ridiculous.

Fifty-seven.

Twenty years’ difference.

You can overdo idealism.

But Irma would smile at him with her squinting eyes. And Moses would give all the cushions in the flat a perfect dimple with the edge of his hand.

He would have to buy a few cushions. Throw out the old leather armchairs and get a sofa. So that they could sit together in the evening like a real family.

At the weekend they would go to the zoo. Once a year to the Sechseläuten parade. They’d go on holiday.

Germans, go on holiday in Germany! Germans, go on holiday in Germany!

Why was that slogan rattling through his head, to the rhythm of the wheels?

Why was he suddenly alone in the compartment?

He must have gone to sleep, he didn’t know for how short or how long a time.

Outside the windows a happy landscape passed by as if in a propaganda film.

Germans, go on holiday in Germany!

In the fields, farmers were bringing in the last harvest under a cloudless sky. In the towns contented citizens went about their business. People waited with patient expressions at railway crossings.

Everything was so normal.

Normal?

Arthur was on his way to marry a complete stranger.

Perhaps he wouldn’t get there in time. Perhaps it would be impossible to get another appointment. Perhaps everything would already have been cancelled by the time he got there. What time was it anyway?

Eventually he would have to get a wrist-watch. Having to flip up a lid every time you wanted to tell the time was far too laborious. Nobody nowadays carried a watch on a heavy chain in their waistcoat pocket. He would have to change, become more mobile. Now that he had all these new obligations.

But perhaps he had missed everything anyway. Without being able to do anything about it. He had boarded the right train, the earliest one there was, but they’d taken him off that one, and the next one wasn’t until three hours later. What if the town hall wasn’t right next to the station?

No, said the conductor, long-distance trains stopped in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe. To get into town he would have to change for the local train to the station or take a taxi if he was in a great hurry.

Was he in a great hurry?

When he was a little boy looking at the panopticon, he couldn’t wait to have all the mysteries revealed to him. ‘A youth there was, who, burning with a thirst for knowledge, to Egyptian Sais came.’ And the first time he had seen Joni…

What was it he had said by way of farewell? ‘A family would be the best thing even for you. You’d be a wonderful father.’

Meanwhile, whenever they approached a larger town, the train slowed down, almost to a standstill, and Arthur didn’t know if he should be pleased. But in the next station they set off precisely on time. As was only proper in a country that set such store by order.

The railway track now ran through a forest, and on either side the trees were lined up in order, presenting themselves in rank and file for the woodcutters.

Through villages that looked as if they’d been built from construction kits. The same village over and over again.

Past a barracks that looked like a factory, and lots of factories that looked like barracks.