Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

The Gstühl Square, where the donkeys waited in the summer so that the spa guests could ride on the Baldegg and drink milk still warm from the cow, was almost empty. Only a few particularly early market traders had already secured the best spots for themselves and, with their carts, marked out the future thoroughfares of a town of booths and stands, as adventurous and transient as the gold-digging settlements in California that Arthur had read about.

Two staked bony horses snuffled morosely around in the feedbags around their necks before the Panopticon, which stood there still almost in its under-garments, like Mama before someone’s deft hands fingered all the little hooks into the eyes. The front of the booth was still bare, a forbidding surface of stained canvas, quite without the brightly painted panels that Arthur had gazed at so longingly in the autumn. They had shown a Roman gladiator blocking the path of a charging lion, while a woman in white knelt in the sand with her hands folded in prayer; a man in a turban had whipped along a column of dark-haired slaves with heavy shackles around their necks; a martyr, bleeding from countless wounds, had smiled mildly and forgivingly from below his halo; a knight had fought a dragon and a stag carried a flaming cross in its antlers. All these wondrous pictures were still stored in one of the two huge carts in which, it seemed to Arthur, a whole world could have been transported. They were not, like ordinary removal carts, simply painted with water-resistant dark green paint, but with an oversized portrait of the barker that Arthur remembered so clearly, an imposing man in an admiral’s uniform decorated with all kinds of ribbons and medals, with a majestically twirled moustache, beside which Shmul’s looked as childishly insignificant as a rocking horse beside a dashing steed. The painted promoter pointed with a stick at a panel bearing the inscription: Staudinger’s Panoptikon, Johann Staudinger Wdw . Under that someone had added, in a different colour and in letters that jostled one another in the tight remaining space, Owner: Marian Zehntenhaus .

The till had already been set up on the low podium next to the entrance. In the autumn it had been draped with an embroidered green velvet blanket with gold sequins; the woman who took the money from the visitors and put it in a heavy iron box was wrapped in a veil of the same colour, and a row of golden coins hung over her forehead. Now the table was stripped of its magic, as ordinary and everyday as the wrapping table in the Emporium, and that made Arthur strangely sad.

He had walked quite close up to the table the till sat on, but there was no one there to take his fifteen rappen. He even knocked on the scratched wood with one of his precious five-rappen pieces, as Papa did on Sunday outings to call the waiter over, but nothing moved. The only sound was the rustle and snap of the lengths of canvas. After all the calm, sunny days, over the last hour a strong wind had risen up, chasing dark clouds across the sky.

‘What are you doing there, you little beggar?’ called a voice.

A man came climbing down from one of the wagons, big and strong, with loose trousers stuck into the top of his boots, with braces that stretched across his shirt with the rolled-up sleeves, as wide as an arba kanfes, and above all with a device strapped over his face which, at first glance, looked as if it was made of metal, as if the man in the iron mask had managed to escape from the Bastille and in some inexplicable manner found the way to Baden. But on closer inspection it was only a leather moustache strap. It was fastened so tightly that the man could not really move his mouth; when he spoke he sounded as if he had no teeth.

‘What do you want?’ the man asked again and came menacingly closer.

Arthur held out the three coins on the open palm of his hand. ‘I want to go to the Panopticon,’ he said, and because he felt he needed to explain the fifteen rappen, he added unnecessarily, ‘I’m a child.’

Two suspicious eyes looked at him so keenly that Arthur’s muscles were already tensing to run away. Then the man scratched himself carefully under his open shirt for a long time, spat, turned away and returned to the cart. ‘Come again tomorrow. We’re not open yet.’

‘Tomorrow I can’t.’ There is a kind of despair that feels almost like courage, and it was that despair that sent Arthur running after the man. ‘Please,’ he said, and realised that tears were welling up in him as inexorably as storm clouds in the sky. ‘Isn’t there a possibility even so that I might…? I’ll even pay the adult price. I can bring you another fifteen rappen, but not until Sunday.’

The man thought for a moment and then stretched his hand out. He didn’t take the money, however, but rested his fingers on Arthur’s upper arm and pressed it as if performing an examination. ‘Are you strong?’ he asked. ‘My old woman has drunk too much and is no use for anything. If you help me shift the last few things, you can look at everything for free afterwards.’

It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Arthur in his whole life.

The whole cart had been almost cleared. If you climbed in — the loading space was high up, and Arthur had to lie on his stomach before pulling in his legs and then his feet — it was as if you were in a cave; footsteps echoed on the board floors, and it smelt musty, as Arthur imagined bats did. The cart was empty, there only a few figures wrapped in coarse sackcloth at the very back, some of them secured with straps that looked like dirty white belts. The protective packaging hid their shapes; it was impossible to tell whether they represented men or women, whether they were queens, murderers or Indians. Arthur recalled the poem about the veiled picture in Sais that he had had to learn by heart for school: ‘A youth there was who, burning with a thirst for knowledge, to Egyptian Sais came…’

His task was to loosen the straps and push the figures to the edge of the cart where Herr Zehntenhaus — for it was the owner of all these precious objects in person who had taken him on to do the job — tipped them over his shoulder and carried them inside the booth. Arthur was worried at first that he might break something, snap off a finger or even a head, but the figures were much more stable and also much heavier than he had expected; with the bigger ones he had to make a huge effort even to move them. ‘Only the outer layer is made of wax, there’s always a plaster core inside,’ explained Herr Zehntenhaus who, every other time he came back with the empty sacks, liked to break for a chat to get his breath back. When he did he took the moustache strap off his face, wiped off the sweat underneath and then let it spring back into place with a damp smack. ‘Basically I hate moustaches,’ he said, ‘but it’s just expected of a fairground barker.’

At last the cart was cleared. Only one single figure, smaller and wider than the others, was left. ‘The Holy Virgin got broken on me,’ said Herr Zehntenhaus. ‘I haven’t yet found anyone who can fix her.’

He helped Arthur down from the cart and led him to the rear of the booth, where a corner of the canvas was held up and fasted on a nail. ‘Then I’ll just look in quickly on my old lady,’ he said, pushed Arthur through the opening and let the makeshift door fall shut behind him.

Arthur felt he was in paradise. He wasn’t just in the forbidden Panopticon, he was there as the only visitor, before everyone else, and today all these unimagined treasures belonged to him alone. At that moment he wouldn’t even have swapped places with Janki, who had been at the World’s Fair in Paris and seen all of Edison’s inventions. The sky outside had turned gloomy. Not so much light was filtering in through the gaps where the canvas had been folded away into triangular windows. Arthur enjoyed the mysterious gloom in which one could be fearful without being really frightened.