Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Most of the windows were barred.

There were unhealthily bare, apparently dried-up patches in the expansive, deserted, stubbly lawn, although there had not been many really hot days that year. The borders of the long-untended flowerbeds, mossy and overgrown, marked vanished forms on the ground, sunken graves in a long-abandoned graveyard.

There was no one to be seen for far and wide. Only one old man raking leaves, with unchanging, concentrated movements. When Chanele approached, she saw that there were no leaves there.

‘Excuse me…’

The man ignored her.

‘Can you tell me?’

He went on scratching away at the ground.

‘I’m looking for…’

The same spot, over and over again.

Perhaps the old gardener was hard of hearing. Chanele touched his shoulder, and he started screaming, the breathless, terrified screams of a little child. Arthur too had often screamed like that when he had woken from a bad dream.

Chanele tried to calm the old man in the way that had worked with her youngest. She put her arm around him and repeated several times, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. I’m here.’

The man only screamed all the louder. Apart from two brownish stumps his wide-open mouth was completely toothless.

‘Our Néné doesn’t like being touched.’

The woman in the starched, pale grey linen uniform must have been watching from a window. With two pointed fingers she removed Chanele’s hand from the screaming man’s shoulder. Then she bent for the rake that he had dropped and held it out to him. ‘There are lots of leaves left, Néné, you keep on working.’

And sure enough: the man calmed down. He gasped for air a few times, gathered his breath for one last scream and then suddenly seemed to forget his panic. He started raking again. Carefully and regularly and always on the same spot.

‘I’m staff sister Viktoria,’ said the uniformed woman. She rolled her Rs the way people from the Baltic do. Her face was friendly, but it was a professional friendliness that she had put on with her uniform.

‘My name is Meijer. I have come from Baden…’

‘I know,’ said the staff sister, and her tone left no doubt that she knew everything that went on here. ‘We expected you sooner.’

‘I walked from the hotel.’

But that wasn’t what the staff nurse meant. ‘We wrote the letter weeks ago.’

‘I’ve only just received it.’

‘There was a lot of work involved in finding out your details. A lot of work.’

‘I’m grateful to you.’

‘With good reason, Frau Meijer. With very good reason. The files from the French days are extremely chaotic. You go on working, Néné!’ She turned away, walked a few steps towards the brick building and then stopped again. ‘Come,’ she said, and her friendliness was no longer such a perfect fit. ‘I have other things to be getting on with.’

After her long march, the corridor in which Chanele waited was pleasantly cool. The light came from a series of narrow openings very high in the wall. The brightness penetrated the room in well-defined beams, like in the women’s gallery in Endingen synagogue when the colourful glass windows were opened.

Except that there were no bars over the windows in the synagogue.

And the walls weren’t freshly whitewashed and bare, as if in a prison.

The bench to which staff sister Viktoria had shown her was right against the wall. To keep from dirtying her dress, she had to sit with her back ramrod straight. She tried to shift forward, but the legs of the bench were fastened solidly to the floor. So she stood up again and walked back and forth on aching feet.

Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.

A display case was fixed to one wall, like the trophy cupboard full of laurel wreaths that Chanele knew from the Guggenheim inn back in Endingen. The hooks behind the glass door were empty. She tried to open the box, but it was locked. The inscription had been scratched from an enamel sign, and all that remained was an arrow pointing into the void. On each of the many doors, at eye level, there was a lighter, faded patch where there had once been a sign. Chanele thought of a story from Janki’s days as a soldier. He and his company had once had to pull road signs out of the ground and burn them to confuse the advancing German troops.

Fifty-two. Fifty-three. Fifty-four.

Somewhere far away someone began to speak. Chanele couldn’t even have said whether what she heard was German or French, or a language that didn’t exist, but she understood very clearly that the voice was trying to persuade someone, was talking away at someone who didn’t want to listen, constantly presenting new arguments, listing reasons, delivering proof and then, when the other person stayed mute, beginning to plead, to beg, to wail and at last to weep, to whine. And fall silent.

Everything was still once more, so still that she could hear a beetle that had got lost beating against a window time and again in search of an exit.

She had no watch, but it was already the afternoon.

She had had the impression that the corridor simply stopped at its furthest end, but there must have been another one off to the side. From it a man now emerged, looked searchingly around and bore down on her with clumsy haste, a bear walking on its back legs. Even before he had reached her, he started to speak.

‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. It isn’t usually my way to keep guests so long… Not that we have the opportunity to welcome many guests here. Far too few. Most of our patients are… Out of sight, out of mind. Regrettable, but one cannot hold it against people either. Sometimes it’s hard to bear when somebody… I am Dr Hellstiedl. Hello, pleased to meet you. And you are…? Stupid of me. Staff nurse Viktoria told me… Frau Meijer, of course. Interesting spelling. I know e-i, a-i, e-y, but I’ve never seen the name spelt like… From Baden, is that right? Baden in Switzerland? Very nice. Then please come to by office, so that I can…’

He had opened one of the many doors and disappeared into his room, before Chanele had had a chance to say a word. Then he stuck his head out of the door again, like the jack-in-the-box that Hinda had always liked to play with, and which had frightened Arthur every time, and finished his sentence, ‘… make the necessary preparations.’

Dr Hellstiedl’s unease, Chanele soon noticed, had nothing to do with impatience. Rather, he was constantly distracted by his own thoughts, found each new idea worthy of note and kept interrupting himself as a consequence. Conversing with him was a little like following the conversation at an animated dinner party, a dinner party where the conversation was more intelligent than it had been at Janki’s goyish evening.

When she entered the office, he was standing by an open filing cabinet, flicking through the cards in an index box. Papers and books lay around on every available surface, and in among them were objects whose function in this room could be explained only if one used a great deal of imagination: a pine cone, a soup tureen, knitting needles with the beginnings of a sock.

‘Meijer,’ Dr Hellstiedl murmured. ‘Meijer, Meijer, Meijer. I will shortly… Just one moment. The classification system of my French colleagues… Although I don’t believe that each people has typical qualities… It is more the external circumstances that create the appearance that… Meijer, Meijer, Meijer. Please sit down!’

Chanele stood where she was, because even the chair by the desk, the one meant for visitors, was covered with papers.

‘And my predecessor — a most capable specialist, I never had any doubts on that score — cleared out everything French so painstakingly when he took over the clinic that now… Even the signs on the doors. An excess of thoroughness, which in a patient one would see as… One might really wonder whether patriotism should not be considered an illness… Although presumably it would be incurable. Meijer. Meijer. Meijer. Where on earth is the…?’