Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Every time he died, he came back.

He belonged to the family.

He belonged to all families.

When they talked about Ruben — and when didn’t they speak about him? — he repeated the name like a spell, ‘Ruben, Ruben, Ruben’. Hinda and Zalman had grown old, older than their years, and still lived entirely on what once had been. They sat under the Shabbos lamp that no one lit now, because it couldn’t make their worries vanish, they sat there looking at the same photographs over and over again until he took them out of their hands and fanned them out on the games table like playing cards. He listed the tricks as they had been played, for twelve whole years. One game after another, and they hadn’t won a single one. He could tell them where Ruben had been collected and where he had been taken to, on what day and at which hour, where he had been first and where he had ended up after that, which way they had gone and on which transport. He told them where he had been seen and where he had eventually not been seen, told them what had happened to him before his trail had disappeared amid millions of other trails that Uncle Melnitz all knew as well, and whose stories he could all tell on long dark days and on long wakeful nights. He spoke calmly and without haste, like one who knows: I will never run out of stories.

So many stories.

He knew how to talk about Ruben’s wife, who had been a Sternberg from Berlin, and who everyone had only ever called Lieschen. Those two names were all that was left of her, Lieschen and Sternberg, everything else had been carried away by a cold wind, grey dust and flakes of ash. ‘Where it blows, the flowers grow better,’ he said. They couldn’t really remember their daughter-in-law, they had only ever visited her or been visited by her, and you don’t get to know people that way. Not the way you would like to know somebody. They couldn’t even have named her hair colour, the photographs were black and white, black and ivory, black and brown. Each time they took the album out, her face was less familiar to them. There was only one detail that they never forgot, the one small, unusual thing that everyone has left over if he’s lucky, the detail which is like a nail that you can hang things on, a picture or a memory. They’d called her Lieschen, a child’s name, even when she was long grown up, only ever Lieschen. Even her own children had got used to it; you remembered that even if you remembered nothing else about her. It had been four children, three boys and a girl; there was one photograph in which they would never grow older. Uncle Melnitz was the only one who could tell them apart, who still knew their names. The only one who had played with them, and now he wanted to teach the game to everyone else, you count down and clap your hands and sing, ‘Ei! Ei! Ei!’

Every time he died, he came back.

He was a stranger here in Zurich, and yet he was at home, just as he was at home in every place to which he had been exiled. At Sechsläuten he marched with the parade, in a costume that was older than everyone else’s, and stamped out the beat of the brass band music with dusty shoes. The bouquets thrown to the others dried in his hands, and he greeted and laughed and waved and was the guest of honour. In the Knabenschiessen shooting competition he stood in front of the targets and unbuttoned his red frock coat, waved to the riflemen not to keep him waiting. And he also liked to pick up the black wand and point it at the hits, on the chest, on the belly, on the forehead. At Schulsilvester, the tumultuous last day of school before the Christmas holidays, he went from house to house at dawn and roused the people from their beds with lots of noise. ‘They often came at this time of day,’ he said.

When Adolf Rosenthal walked past the Cantonal school — he was retired now, and had had to give up his authority along with the key to the staff room — when he just happened to walk past it, as he just happened to do every day, when he then looked up to his old classroom, where no one had been allowed to interrupt him, Uncle Melnitz was standing at the window, waving at him and calling, ‘You’re late! My class has already started.’

They had a lot to learn from him, and this time they had to listen to him.

He had been right.

As he was right every time.

Came back and reported.

Telling stories made him vivid. He had brought new stories with him, lots of new stories, each one so fatally vivid that the others paled in comparison. In the modern age everything gets bigger and better and more efficient. Six million new stories, a fat book from which you could read for a generation without repeating yourself a single time. Stories that could not be believed, certainly not here in Switzerland, where they had lived all those years on an island, on dry land in the middle of a deluge. Stories that wouldn’t go into people’s heads, not here, where supplies had never run out. Here you had lit your fire to cook and not noticed that you were doing it on the back of a huge fish that only had to roll over once in the water or beat its fins and you would be crushed and suffocated and drowned straight away. They hadn’t known it, here in Switzerland. They were finding it out now, and would have been happier if they never had.

He told and told and told his tales and had been buried so often that it almost bored him to think of it.

These were no heroic tales that he had brought. Not the kind that one knew in this country.

Hillel, for example, had stood at the border, for five whole years. He had defended his fatherland with his rifle in his hand and would one day defend another fatherland. No one had yet found the knife to cut it from the map. Hillel had been a hero in active service, or had at least been granted permission by the state to remember heroism, to hang it on the wall in a frame: a dark green soldier staring into the distance, as unbowed and alert as a shomer in a different picture. Uncle Melnitz liked to stand before it, twist his head to study the signature of General Guisan, and say to Hillel, ‘Don’t forget to keep your rifle clean.’

Melnitz loved Switzerland. Even those who fear war like to play with tin soldiers. He loved this country, in which you could complain of hunger when chocolate was in short supply. It was interesting to visit Noah’s Ark after its thousand-year voyage.

In the watch shops on Bahnhofstrasse he made the hands stop. ‘Nothing changes here,’ he said. ‘Why would time need to change?’ On Bürkliplatz he walked from market stall to market stall and asked the farmers for rotten fruit and potato peelings. ‘I’ve got used to it,’ he said. ‘Why should I lose the habit?’ In François’s department store he stood in all the window displays, always behind the company emblem that decorated every pane, stood in such a way that the sun cast the shadow of the company insignia on his chest, where the circle in which the letters MEIER intersected sat over his heart like the bull’seye of a target. ‘Doesn’t it suit me?’ he asked.

Meijer with or without a yud.

He kept François company in his office, pushed the photographs of Mina and Alfred aside and sat down on the desk. With a small, modest gesture that was supposed to mean, ‘Don’t be distracted!’ Watched François as he checked accounts and added up columns of numbers, only nodded appreciatively from time to time and said, ‘A fine result. You’ve really achieved something.’

He loved the ringing of the tills and the cold solemnity of the strong rooms. He scratched secret signs into the gold bars, knew their origins and made them recognisable. When the shutters rattled down over the riches at night, he let himself be locked in, studied the neat columns of figures in the books and couldn’t stop laughing.