Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

When Pinchas came home at last from his conversation with Dr Stern, Chanele had left again, taking Hinda with her.

‘She came with me to the clothes collection,’ Mimi said, concealing behind voluble lists of trivia the things that she wanted to keep to herself, ‘although she really hasn’t been brought up for such occasion. And afterwards she was suddenly in a great hurry, you know how she is. Hinda wasn’t happy to go with her. They even had an argument about it. Even though there’s a fair in Baden at the weekend, the little one absolutely wanted to stay in Zurich for Shabbos, one might have imagined there was nothing more important to her in the world. It’s always so cosy at our house, she says. But do you know what I think? You’ll never guess! Do you know what I think?’

‘My dear,’ said Pinchas, ‘if I could translate every page of Gemara as easily as I can your face, I would be the greatest Talmid Chochem in the world.’

‘So, what am I thinking?’

‘You’re thinking: Zalman Kamionker.’ He put his arm around his wife and drew her to him. ‘Don’t look so disappointed. It wasn’t a very hard task. The young man inquired so insistently after Hinda today…’

‘But you don’t know about the other story,’ Mimi consoled herself, feeling her new-found friendship with Chanele as a precious warmth within her.

Pinchas too had something to report, the crazy tale of a rabbi who had become an atheist, and now tried to prove the worthlessness of the Talmud using Talmudic quotations. On the way home he had firmly undertaken, when telling it, to stress only the comical aspects of the story, and to give no sign of how troubled he had been by the discussion. But he didn’t get round to it for the time being, because at that moment Regula brought in a letter that had arrived that afternoon. She didn’t bring it in on a tray, as Mimi had been trying to teach her for weeks, but had set it down on a perfectly ordinary plate like a slice of bread.

‘Ah, les servants !’ Mimi sighed, and Regula marched out, insulted. You don’t have to know foreign languages to notice when someone’s talking disparagingly about you.

The letter was addressed in old-fashioned writing and green ink. In a skilfully embellished hand it said, ‘Pinchas Pomeranz, Esquire.’ Pinchas tore open the envelope — with his fingernail, even though Mimi had given him a letter opener with an ivory handle! — cast his eyes over the contents and frowned in puzzlement.

‘Do you know who’s written to me?’ he said, imitating Mimi’s voice. ‘You’ll never guess.’

‘Who?’

‘The letter is from Endingen.’

‘Who?’

‘The father of your friend Anne-Kathrin!’

‘The schoolmaster?’

‘He signs his letter as chair of the Popular Education Association. Which he always talked about. So he actually did set it up.’

‘What does he want from you?’

‘He’s planning a public event: “Arguments pro and contra shechita slaughtering.” In the hall at the Guggenheim. He wants to invite me as a speaker.’

‘Are you going?’

Pinchas carefully folded the letter and put it in his pocket.

‘Do I have a choice?’

He hadn’t played truant, Arthur said to himself, not really. You had to go to school, it was even a law. Even if you were two minutes late, there was one on the hand with the ruler, and sometimes even if you just made a face that a teacher didn’t like. He’d never dared just to stay away from school. Even after the chickenpox, when he had a letter excusing him, signed by Janki Meijer in person, even then he had gone back trembling, and even dabbed spots on his face with white zinc ointment so that people really believed he was ill.

But the bar mitzvah instruction, he persuaded himself, that was something else completely. It was voluntary, as you could tell from the fact that it took place not in a classroom but at Cantor Würzburger’s house, in a room that always smelled of sal ammoniac pastilles that the cantor sucked for his voice. Otherwise, for ramming the Torah passages and the droosh down people’s throats, Würzburger was paid a fixed sum; Arthur always had to bring him the envelope at the start of the month. Surely he would be pleased to have to give one lesson less for the same amount of money.

Arthur hadn’t just stayed away, either, he had hatched a plan which, if everything went as it should, would make him invisible in a way for an hour or two. Immediately after lunch, at a time when the cantor, to relax his vocal cords, always took a little nap, he had called in with Frau Würzburger and, coughing violently, told her he was unfortunately a bit feverish, and hoarse as well. His voice had been quite quiet and weak, half out of dissemblance and half out of fear. Did she think, he had asked, that he should still come to the lesson after school? She had most strictly forbidden him to do so, because Frau Würzburger knew, exactly as Arthur did, her husband’s terror of everything to do with hoarseness. So everything had gone as he had expected.

Arthur had worked everything out very precisely. Even if Frau Würzburger were to inquire of Mama, on Shabbos in shul, perhaps, whether her youngest was feeling better, it wouldn’t prompt any suspicion. Arthur was often sickly, and Chanele would only think he’d had his headaches during the lesson again.

He was not practised in these matters. Shmul wouldn’t have had so many scruples; in his school days he had played truant as a matter of course, and always found a fellow pupil to lie for him. And Hinda wasn’t afraid of anything anyway. She had even, when she was as old as Arthur was now, come up with tests of courage, had once gone into a shop where Jews were treated in an unfriendly way, and asked for a hundred grammes of ‘Klaff Tea’, before running away, laughing loudly. Of course the shop-owner couldn’t have known that ‘klafte’ is more or less the worst word in Yiddish that one can use about a woman, but Arthur would never have dared to do anything like that. He suffered from the fearfulness that goes hand in hand with an overactive imagination: it was too easy for him to imagine all the things that could go wrong.

But today he simply had to play truant. On the Gstühl — it had been the main topic of conversation at break-time that morning — the Panopticon had arrived, a first herald of the spring fair at the weekend, and he knew: if he didn’t go there straight away, today, he would have lost his chance. At the autumn fair the same company had once been in Baden, two of his classmates had visited it and reported the most marvellous things, but then the rumour had spread in town that there were objects on display in there that endangered public morals, and all the pupils at the pro-gymnasium had been forbidden to go there. Some had crept in anyway, but Arthur had been unable to summon the courage to defy such an emphatic prohibition, had stood for a long time in helpless longing outside the colourful booth, repeatedly listening to the barker’s patter: ‘Thirty rappen entrance! Children pay half!’ His imagination had had six months to dream of the marvels he had missed, in ever more glowing colours, and meanwhile the pictures in his head had become entirely irresistible. Early in the morning he had pinched three five-rappen coins from his savings box; Shmul had once shown him how to do that with a knife and a knitting needle. All day he had been restless and impatient, for fear that there might be another prohibition this year too, but there had been none as yet, and the old one, or at least one might convince oneself that this was the case, must no longer be valid. So there was something like a gap in the law through which he had to slip today, because tomorrow was Friday, when he went home straight after school to prepare himself for the service, nothing was possible on Shabbos anyway, and at this time of year it got dark so late that he wouldn’t be allowed out after Havdole either. And by Sunday… Not only did the time till then seem unbearably long, the fear of missing the great event for a second time was for once stronger than any prudence.