Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

The carts and coaches were parked so densely around the Guggenheim that there was no room for the broad box-wagon to get through. ‘As if there was anything for free,’ the coachman grumbled sullenly. He couldn’t force his way through to the entrance to the inn, but had to let Pinchas climb down first, and was quite disappointed when Chanele too decided to walk the few streets to the old double house. He would rather have driven his boss up like a princely postilion, with snorting steeds and a bright rosette on his top hat.

In the pub room there was hardly an empty chair to be found, even though the meeting was due to start at three o’clock. The wave of conversation, laughter and shouting swept over Pinchas so loudly that he took an involuntary step backwards and had to take a second run even to enter the room.

He didn’t often visit inns, he wasn’t really familiar with these places, and yet he immediately had the feeling that there was something different here, something that you didn’t usually see in such places. Only at first he couldn’t quite put his finger on what that different thing was. Until all of a sudden he understood: usually one sits in an inn at night, it’s dark, and in the lamplight all you see is faces, hands and glasses. Here the sun shone through the windows and gave the clouds of smoke from the many pipes and cigars an almost festive glow. The guests, all men, also seemed to be in a holiday mood. While normally in the country people carefully nurse their beers or wines to derive the greatest possible amount of comfort from their invested money, here they were boisterously clinking glasses, no sooner had they been given their schnapps than they ordered another one. The mood was more like a victory party at a gun-club party than the meeting of a Popular Education Association.

The door to the hall where the actual event was to take place was wide open, but two sturdy young men, dark blue ribbons around their muscular upper arms, flanked the entrance and made sure that no one entered the holy of holies prematurely. They stood there motionless as sentries, with severe expressions, visibly impressed by their own importance.

‘Seek and ye shall find,’ said a voice directly beside Pinchas. ‘Herr Pomeranz! I recognised you immediately. Yes, yes, true beauty stands the test of time.’

The schoolmaster himself had changed a lot. Above all he seemed to be much smaller than Pinchas remembered, the miniature copy of a vanished original. In Pinchas’s day Jewish children had only gone to the cheder and not, as they did quite naturally these days, to the community school too, but that had not diminished the authority of the schoolmaster. On the contrary: precisely because one had not experienced them personally, one believed all the horror stories that the village children told about his teaching methods.

Now an elderly little man was standing there, with thin legs and a pot belly that looked as if he had stuffed a pillow up his waistcoat. His beard was just as bushy as before, but now it looked as if it had been stuck on. His voice had got shriller and thinner as well, just as a bottle, when being filled, reaches its highest note just before overflowing.

‘The good endures,’ said the little man. ‘Slow and steady wins the race. It took me a long time to found my Popular Education Association, but then my son’s stepfather said to me: Let’s just do it. And look at this onslaught, this enthusiasm. This delight in the competition of opinions and arguments! Arma virumque cano! Do you understand Latin?’

‘Enough for that,’ Pinchas said.

‘Who would have thought that in such unusual circumstances we would…? You remember the last time we met? It was in my garden, in my modest Tusculum, and you… But I see you don’t like to be reminded of it. Don’t worry, I am as quiet as the grave.’ He put a finger to his pursed lips and blinked at Pinchas with unpleasant familiarity. ‘Come, come, they’ll keep a chair for us, but not for long. So many people have come to hear the song and see the chariot-fight.’

He took Pinchas by the arm and pulled him along in his wake. When they made their way through the inn, conversations fell silent as they passed. People nudged one another and whispered.

Pinchas didn’t recognise any of the faces, however hard he tried to think back twenty years. They all seemed so young to him, but of course that was ridiculous. He himself had got older.

The first familiar face was that of master butcher Gubser, whom he had often met in the abattoir when his father had taken him there. Gubser had hardly changed, had if anything become more dignified and vicar-like. He leapt to his feet when Pinchas and the schoolmaster approached, and although it was very noisy in the inn, the many little pendants on his watch chain could be heard jangling.

‘Young Herr Pomeranz,’ he exclaimed, putting his hand on his heart. ‘How lovely that you could come. I’m so glad, so glad, so glad.’ He took Pinchas’s hand and shook it as if he had just met up with a long-lost friend. ‘Sit down, please, sit down! I had to fight like a lion for a chair. Will you drink a glass of wine with us?’ And when Pinchas politely refused, ‘Of course not, how silly of me. Our wine isn’t clean enough for you, or however you put it in your books. But we don’t have such sensitive stomachs, what do you think, people?’

The two men at the table laughed loudly. You could tell: they would have laughed at anything Gubser said.

Pinchas would have preferred to find a seat elsewhere, but the schoolmaster wouldn’t let him. ‘Herr Gubser helped me so much with the preparations,’ he said, and was childishly delighted by the success of his Popular Education Association. ‘I myself would have expected the setting — what blessing it is to be modest! — to be much smaller, in the schoolroom, perhaps, but Alois…’

‘One does what one can.’ The master butcher bowed slightly to the schoolmaster. ‘Did you know, dear Herr Pomeranz, that Anne-Kathrin and my eldest…? Oh, you did? Of course. You people are always well informed. Then you will also now that I have passed on the business to my son and now devote myself only to important matters. The truly important matters.’

The men around the table nodded. Yes, there could be nothing more important.

‘Alois,’ the schoolmaster said in his piping voice, ‘Herr Gubser is in fact the chair of our local league—’

‘Cantonal!’ one of the men corrected him with an important expression, and again they all nodded.

‘You?’

‘Who knows more about the suffering of animals than a man of my trade?’ said Gubser piously.

‘—and he will also be representing the viewpoint of the organisation on the podium today,’ piped the schoolmaster. ‘I am already looking forward to an informative and peaceful debate, relying only on the power of the superior argument. How does our beloved Goethe poet put it? “With words we can our foes assail.”’

Pinchas was not at all happy about the prospect of having to stand up against master butcher Gubser, who was so popular in Endingen, and his facial expression revealed as much with great clarity.

‘I cannot imagine a better pairing than the two of us,’ said Gubser, and put his hand on his heart again. ‘When we are professional colleagues. A Schlächter and a Schächter . Two types of work with only an L between them. And do you know what that L stands for, my esteemed Herr Pomeranz? For what the Schächter sadly lacks. For Love.’

The men at the table applauded.

Pinchas felt himself turning very cold inside. ‘If the L does not stand for what the Schlächter has too much of,’ he said. ‘Lies, I mean.’

‘But that’s—!’ one of the men began, but a gesture of Gubser’s was enough to silence him.