Chanele bent down to him and picked him up with the sure grip of a woman who has consoled many children and grandchildren in the past. The boy’s hair smelt of sun and sand, and Chanele couldn’t help hugging him. ‘Hush now,’ she whispered to him, ‘hush now. We’ll find your Mamme.’
It had all happened so quickly that Janki didn’t know whether he should go running after his wife or wait for her exactly where he was. A voice with a Southern German inflection relieved him of the decision. It addressed him with such noisy cordiality that some of the spa guests looked around disapprovingly for the source of this new disturbance.
‘There you are, Meijer,’ roared Staudinger. ‘Where have you been hiding yourself all this time? I would like to introduce you to a few comrades.’ If you’re holding a walking stick in one hand and a parasol in the other, it’s hard to lift your hat as form decrees. The four men who accompanied Staudinger didn’t seem to be bothered by this. They had just emerged from an early drinking session that had carried on over lunch, and cared nothing for formalities. They clapped Janki on the shoulder and shook him, regardless of walking stick and parasol, by the hand. One of the men, as awkwardly as if he had copied his movements from the drilling children, presented his hiking stick, covered with little metal crests, with great military precision, and they all talked over each other so excitedly that Janki couldn’t even hear the names by which they introduced themselves. The man with the hiking stick, that much he understood, had even mentioned an aristocratic title.
They insisted that Janki accompany them to the Strandcafé, where the beer was particularly good, straight away and with no dawdling, because drinking, they thought, was like artillery fire — it was only when you stopped that things got dangerous, ha! They put him in the middle, and no one who met the group on the way to the café really knew whether someone was being flanked by a guard of honour or led away as a criminal.
They drank beer. Janki’s suggestion that he celebrate their encounter by buying a good bottle of wine or even champagne was laughed at like a good joke, absolutely mind-boggling, but then he was a Frenchman, they said, so allowances had to be made. But they recommended that he abandon such dandified cravings forthwith, lest they find themselves forced to resume hostilities.
‘Ha!’ said Staudinger.
Janki laughed with them. He would have laughed at anything, so happy was he to be included in this company, of which one member even had an aristocratic title.
Staudinger, whose scar had been turned bright red by the sun or by the beer, must have described the encounter in the train to Hoyerschleuse in all its details to his four colleagues, and he exaggerated proficiently. He had clearly turned Janki into a Gallic hero fighting with courage born of desperation, who might have turned around the fortunes of the Battle of Sedan single-handedly, had a bullet not struck him in the leg and injured him with potentially fatal results. He did not necessarily wish to assert that this bullet actually came from the ranks of Staudinger’s Second Battalion, but it was still a possibility, which was why the two men — a soldier is a soldier, regardless of which side he is fighting on — were linked by a kind of mystic blood-brotherhood, which had to be celebrated at all costs, and to which glasses must be raised.
They celebrated, and they raised the glasses.
Janki, who wasn’t used to beer, couldn’t hear everything that the comrades told him, only that all five of them, albeit in different units, had been at the Battle of Sedan, that they had met much later at a Sedan Day celebration on Sylt, and had decided henceforth to meet in the same place every year and commemorate the day together, as a kind of veterans’ reunion or even just as a men’s group outing, ‘any excuse to leave the old woman at home, I bet you feel exactly the same, don’t you, chum?’
They were by now on first-name terms, they had solemnly included Janki in their circle in a drunken ceremony in which Chanele’s parasol had to stand in for the sword in the dubbing ritual, and when they walked him back to the Atlantic they all had their arms around each other’s shoulders, out of comradeliness as much as a lack of balance, and together they sang the song about an old comrade, and how you’ll never find a better one.
Janki had left the parasol in the Strandcafé.
Even though it would soon be evening, hence time to change for the table d’hôte, Chanele wasn’t yet back at the hotel. While Janki was learning to drain a glass of beer without setting it down, she had found the little boy’s mother.
‘Your dress,’ was the first thing the woman had said, ‘for heaven’s sake, your beautiful dress! Motti, what have you been up to this time?’ And then she had been very relieved that Chanele hadn’t been looking for her because of the stain on her dress, but because it was high time the little boy was finally, finally able to wail out his woes.
They hadn’t let him play.
He had wanted to join in with the company of drilling children, with spades over their shoulders and sailors’ caps at an angle, as they all did, he had paid close attention and followed the orders, ‘Right turn!’ and ‘At ease!’ and ‘Pre-sent… arms!’, he had done everything right, he’d definitely done everything right, and still the twelve-year-old, who was the officer and who was able to issue whatever orders he liked, had pushed him away and said, ‘Not you.’ Just: ‘Not you.’ And when he had tried to join the ranks again anyway, the elbows had spread and the spade-handles had been used as bayonets, and the officer had grabbed him by the ear and pulled him out of the formation and said, Jews can’t be soldiers.
And now his mother was to come, right now, and tell the others they had to let him join in with the game.
‘I’m sure it’s been over for ages,’ the woman said comfortingly, even though they could still here the jangle of the Turkish crescent. She blew her son’s nose, straightened his sailor’s cap and promised him that Tata would buy him a new spade for the beach, a much, much nicer one.
Then she sighed deeply and said to Chanele with a sad smile, ‘You don’t know how people sometimes treat us Jews.’
‘Me neshuma, I know,’ replied Chanele.
‘You too?’ the woman said with relief. ‘I should have known, with those eyebrows.’
Of course they fell into conversation, and of course they had lots to tell each other. Or rather: the little boy’s mother told Chanele’s lots of things. She was one of those people who are usually quiet out of shyness, but who then, when the person they are talking to proves not to be a threat, let the flow of words surge over the banks like a flood.
Malka Wasserstein came from Marjampol in Galicia, no need to have heard of the town — town? It was a backwater, a fly-speck on the map, nothing at all. Her husband had made a certain amount of money there with a sawmill — ‘We’re no Rothschilds, but God willing we found ourselves very well off’ — and that had caused a problem — ‘A problem? May all Jewish children have such a problem!’ — that would never have occurred to them before: there was no husband for their daughter to be found for far and wide. Little Motti had an elder sister, and he himself had been a latecomer, an afterthought — ‘born when I already thought my time was over. But Riboyne shel Oylem must know what he’s doing.’
Chanele could hardly interject that she too had had a latecomer, and that she sometimes even found herself thinking that Arthur was the nicest of all her children. Malka’s words had spread their elbows too, leaving as little room for other words as the drilling children had for little Motti.
So there was Chaje Sore, almost fifteen years older than her brother — ‘Motti, leave that, we don’t play with things like that!’ — a girl of already twenty-one, God willing, and still unmarried. Of course there had been proposals — ‘The shadchonim overran the house, she could have had anyone in the district, a golden key opens every lock’ — but why should Chaje Sore marry a chandler or a herring trader or — ‘God preserve us!’ — an innkeeper who has to drink l’chayim with every customer and stinks of bronfen by the time he eventually crawls into bed? Not that we thought we were finer than other people — ‘May my tongue fall from my mouth if I ever said such a thing!’ — but one wants the best for one’s children, otherwise why would one break one’s back a whole life long?