Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘And what does that have to do with the socialists?’ Hinda asked.

‘A little game that we used to pass the time in Bad Kissingen. You’re not really artistically stretched in a spa orchestra of that kind. Before we played the pot-pourri, we always bet on the individual countries. We looked at the people in the audience and tried to guess where they came from.’

‘And then…?’

‘The fact is that people applaud when their national anthem is played. I don’t know why; they just do. At least on this point the socialist comrades seem to be exactly as patriotic as everyone else.’

Because they all turned their heads at that moment — pointlessly, because if people don’t actually happen to be swinging flags, you can’t see their patriotism — so because at that moment they were looking over at the tables of the congress participants, they were able to see quite precisely what was happening there, and what would even appear in the newspaper the following day under the title ‘Riot in the Palm Garden’.

They didn’t catch the words of the discussion, they had no idea what it was about, but one of the men involved must have said something that so enraged his listeners that they no longer knew how to reply with arguments, resorting instead to brandished beer glasses. The result was that in the middle of the archipelago of crammed-together tables a volcano seemed to be erupting. A surge of chairs, cutlery, fluttering pamphlets and flying hats poured in all directions, and in its midst, fish washed on to the shore by the storm, fighting men thrashed around, fists flailing, even as they fell.

It all happened so quickly that Mimi and Hinda didn’t even have time to be really frightened. They hadn’t had time to explain the sudden flurry of excitement, when a young man, pushed by another, crashed backwards into their table and knocked it over. The cups of hot chocolate and the plates of cream slices went flying through the air as if slung from a catapult. The man himself, as he stumbled, landed half in Hinda’s lap, and nearly dragged her from her chair.

Hinda heard Mimi screaming beside her, a long, high note like the one blown by a tekiyoh on a shofar, except that it wasn’t in fact Mimi, it was Monsieur Fleur-Vallée.

The strange man slipped very slowly from her knees to the floor, tried to cling on to something, reaching blindly into the air, grabbed the sleeve of Hinda’s dress, pulled himself up by it and, as he did so, tore the sleeve from its stitches, with a noise which to Mimi, who had by now recovered from her shock, sounded like a shot from a cannon.

The man struggled to his feet, smiled at Hinda with big, white teeth, as if the whole thing had been only a harmlessly amusing diversion, said something incomprehensible in a foreign language and hurled himself back into the fray. Hinda tried to watch after him, but the churning floods of humanity had immediately swallowed him again.

The whole thing lasted only a few minutes. Tempers cooled as quickly as they had flared. The men brushed the dust from each other’s suits, lost hats were sorted, undented and put back on, toppled plant tubs were set back up again. The injured were carried out on table-tops, the legs having probably served as clubs. When at last two policemen, as quickly as their official dignity allowed, came into the Palm Garden, the previously so disputatious conference participants were already calmly helping the waiters clean up.

Monsieur Fleur-Vallée took considerably longer to calm down. He was a sensitive artist, after all, as Frau Pomeranz would surely confirm, and not made for excitements of this kind. But more than his own wellbeing, it had been concern for Hinda that had led him to pass the remark, and it was his most fervent hope that the young lady had not been hurt in any way, and that she had soon recovered from her unpleasant experience.

He had to ask his worried question twice before Hinda heard him. Lost in thought, she was observing two delegates as they picked up scattered pamphlets. Neither was the man who had collided with her so roughly. Perhaps he had been one of the injured men.

‘At least put your cape on!’ said Aunt Mimi. What will people think if they see you in your torn dress like a gypsy?’

She actually wanted to go home straight away, but the landlord of the Palm Garden, who was rushing from table to table to apologise in person to his regular guests for all the unpleasantness, insisted that they first be served another hot chocolate, with cream slices, on the house, of course.

‘Well, all right,’ said Mimi, ‘the refreshment might do us good after all that excitement.’

‘As you wish,’ said Hinda, who hadn’t been listening.

Monsieur Fleur-Vallée was still quite pale, and Mimi insisted that he join them and also have a hot chocolate, on the house.

The socialists, as if nothing had happened, were already sitting back at their tables talking. Mimi looked on, with respectable disapproval.

‘Such people shouldn’t even be allowed in the country,’ she said. ‘He could have broken all your bones, Hinda.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘He could have crippled you.’

‘He didn’t do it on purpose. And nothing really happened.’

‘He tore your dress. Is that nothing? Well, if you ask me, it doesn’t matter very much anyway, it’s hardly the latest fashion, but still… What is the world coming to?’

‘Still, he did apologise,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée.

‘Did you understand what he said?’

‘Did you not, Frau Pomeranz?’

‘Can I speak Russian or Polish or whatever it was?’

‘It wasn’t Russian,’ said the conductor, and rubbed his hands together in a know-it-all manner, spraying powder all over the place. ‘And it wasn’t Polish.’

‘So what was it?’

‘Yiddish,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée.

‘Seid mir moichel,’ the man had said, ‘Forgive me.’ He had spoken not the Yiddish that was customary hereabouts, but the Eastern European variant that served the Jews as a lingua franca from the Baltic down to Bessarabia. There were many Jews from different countries among the delegates at the socialist congress, said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée, which was hardly a surprise, after all, Karl Marx, who had invented the whole thing, if you liked, had himself not been a goy.

‘Herr Blumental’, Mimi displayed her newly acquired knowledge later over dinner, ‘has even met Karl Marx’s daughter in person. She is an interpreter at the congress. And August Bebel, the top socialist, has a son-in-law in Zurich. A doctor. And you, Pinchas? Did you even know that there was such a congress here?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Pinchas, ‘I kind of suspected as much. Because of all the articles that have been appearing in all the newspapers for weeks.’

‘As a housewife one has no time to sit around for half the day reading newspapers.’

‘Of course not, my dear,’ said Pinchas, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of irony in his voice. He loved his wife as she was, and happily allowed her all her superficiality and little vanities, although without ignoring them. He didn’t disapprove of her spending too much money on clothes. After more than two decades Pinchas still felt it was his greatest good fortune that Mimi had married him and not Janki; sometimes when he thought of her, he had to interrupt his work for a few seconds and just stand still and rejoice.

Pinchas had changed a lot since the Endingen days, not just because he had got that pivot tooth. He had grown into himself, physically, too, his gangling frame had become rounder, and his movements less agitated. Only his beard was still thin, but that was no longer so striking since it was cut and trimmed into shape once a month. At dinner he wore a soft brown housecoat in whose pockets — how many times Mimi had complained, but the man wouldn’t listen! — he carried far too much paraphernalia. He had covered his head with a small black silk cap.