Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

The hail stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Arthur raised his head. The black clouds were fleeing the sky as if they had a guilty conscience. It was not night, but still bright daylight.

He drew up his legs and straightened his torso. The hailstones under his knees were hard as gravel. Where the wind had driven them against the canvas of the Panopticon, they were piling up into white cushions.

He stood up and noticed that he had lost his cap. It was somewhere in the booth, and he would never have the courage to look for it.

The two horses stood with their legs spread and their heads in between them. They were probably not trying to shelter from the storm any more, however, just rummaging for the remaining oats at the bottom of their feed bags.

Arthur was hungry.

In one of the two trucks a lamp burned behind a window, exactly as if it were in a house. He remembered that it was late, that everyone had been waiting for him for ages, and that, drenched and dirty as he was, no one would believe that he was coming from bar mitzvah instruction with Cantor Würzburger.

But that wasn’t what frightened him most.

By the time Arthur finally came home, he had come up with an excuse. He had been on his way home from bar mitzvah instruction, exactly, that’s how he would put it, when suddenly a whole gang of boys he’d never seen before jumped out at him from a doorway and beat him up and threw him in the dirt. Of course they would ask him if he recognised the faces, and he would reply: They certainly hadn’t been from his school. They would believe his story, he hoped, because something of the kind had actually happened once before, except that it hadn’t come to blows. They’d just shouted ‘Schiissjud, Schiissjud!’ — ‘Fucking Jew! Fucking Jew!’ and ‘ — ‘Jewboy, Jewboy, fetch your cap, or else pay us seven rapp’!’ They’d taken his cap from him and thrown it from hand to hand while he dashed helplessly and breathlessly after it. He had only told Mama the story; Janki got so cross so quickly, and he himself had felt strangely guilty, as if he had somehow deserved this torment because of some special quality he had. This time, this was the story he had come up with, they had run off with his cap, had put it on the end of a stick and waved it around like a flag. They had also shouted something else while they laid into him, not ‘Judebübli’, but ‘Tisza-Eszlar!’, ‘or something like that’, he would say, he hadn’t really understood. It had all happened so quickly. He had defended himself as best he could… No, he had been too scared to put up any resistance; that would make the whole thing properly convincing, he reflected.

But when he crept into the flat, there was no one there to ask him questions. Only fat Christine heard him coming and pulled him out of the corridor into the kitchen, where the oven was always hot even in summer. There he had to sit down on the bench, and she sat down beside him and rubbed him with a cloth until he had stopped shivering. The cloth smelled of fresh bread.

The cook, who was otherwise very curious, didn’t want to know why he was only coming back now, dirty and drenched. She didn’t ask where he had left his cap. She just let her hands do the work, as they would have rolled out pastry or tenderised a tough piece of meat, and was meanwhile elsewhere. Suddenly she let go of him, went to the door and opened it a crack. She stood there for a few moments, then she furiously slammed the door close again, and Arthur couldn’t see who she was so furious with. She pulled a handkerchief out of her apron, with the same red and white pattern as the meaty kitchen towels, and loudly blew her nose in it. Arthur couldn’t help thinking of the two horses near the booth, and the way they had buried their heads in their feed bags.

Then Christine turned to him, looking as if she had just discovered him in her kitchen and wasn’t happy about the discovery. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Arthur said quickly, although it wasn’t true. Little boys who have been beaten up, he had imagined, lose their appetite for ages afterwards.

Then they sat together in silence. Christine seemed to be listening out for something, she kept lifting her head and lowering it again straight away, as if she’d caught herself doing something forbidden. The kitchen smelled of soup, burnt wood and secrets.

Then, very slowly, as if time had gone rusty, and was only reluctantly getting going again, the door handle lowered itself. Christine too, it seemed to Arthur, had to struggle from her chair, bend her torso a long way forwards and rest her broad hands on her thighs to get to her feet.

In the doorway stood Louisli, the young maid, strangely holding a small framed oil painting, Rabbi in the Sukkah , it was called, and it actually belonged on the wall in the corridor.

Louisli was really still a girl and not a woman. When she brought the breakfast coffee to the table her eyes were sometimes quite red from crying, because she had been homesick for her village during the night again. Now her eyes were wide open. ‘As if she had seen a ghost,’ Arthur thought.

As if she too had seen a ghost.

‘So, what is it now?’ Christine asked.

‘I hate him,’ said Louisli.

‘They’re really arguing over you?’

‘No,’ said Louisli.

And then something happened that Arthur had only ever seen in very small children: her face folded in on itself, it actually crumpled, she closed her eyes and twisted her mouth as if she had eaten something revoltingly sour, and then she started to wail, quite noisily without warning, just as the hail had begun today, still in the doorway she stood and howled, sobbed with her whole body, the lion from the Panopticon sat inside her and tore her to shreds.

Christine went over to her, laid a heavy arm around her and drew her into the kitchen. Arthur closed the door. He had the feeling that had to be done right now.

‘There, there,’ Christine said consolingly, and again and again, ‘There, there.’ ‘A Jew would say, “Nu, nu,”’ Arthur found himself thinking, and the very difference in the words of consolation represented an unconquerable obstruction between him and the rest of the world.

The two women were now sitting side by side on the bench by the stove, where Arthur had previously been sitting, and Louisli still clutched the painting as if rocking a new born baby.

‘There, there.’ Christine repeated the words regularly and without the slightest impatience, just as she could stir a sauce at an unchanging pace for half an hour until it had exactly the right consistency. Louisli’s face smoothed itself out very gradually; she sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Arthur could clearly see the revolting glistening trail on the black material.

‘It’s my own fault,’ said Louisli. ‘I should have known.’ Her body heaved again, but not violently this time, as if the lion were already full and had only bitten her one last time out of habit.

‘What should you have known?’ Christine asked. Her voice was quite soft.

‘That he was lying to me.’ And then, placing each word as carefully as one places the good porcelain on the table, ‘He said I was the only one for him.’

Christine laughed, a short, snorting, boxer’s laugh, as if after far too obvious a feint, from which one cannot be lured into dropping one’s guard.

‘And he said he loved me.’

‘They always say that. I know that one. Men can hurt you very badly.’ Arthur, pressed invisibly into the corner by the door, stared at the cook. He had never heard her say anything like that before, not Christine, who could break a carp’s neck just with her thumb and then, with bloody hands, calmly scoop its guts out of its belly, not fat Christine, who in Mama’s opinion was a pearl precisely because no suitor was ever going to distract her from her duties. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said now, and made a face like Aunt Mimi when she had a migraine, ‘I know men.’