Von Stetten, the oldest of the group, was the only one of them to have been an officer at Sedan, a dashing lieutenant, as he put it who, if he hadn’t been so discreet, could have told them stories about his conquests with the ladies, ‘it would make your hair curl, gentlemen!’ He had preserved the custom from those days of twirling his moustache at the conclusion of each sentence, so that the ends stood up like confirmatory exclamation marks.
Every night they drank Tacke Blecken’s mysterious grog, smoked the cigars that Janki was allowed to bring and, behind a curtain of smoke and male laughter — ‘Ha!’ — they created their own world, into which only warriors were allowed, no civilians and certainly no women.
Chanele, for her part was not unhappy to see her husband occupied, although the stench of smoke and grog that he brought into the room in the early morning was thoroughly repellent. But that was a small price to pay for the fact that she was free of the need not just to be in a summer resort, but also of having to play the role of the summer resort guest. By the time Janki rolled out of bed with a hangover, she had long since put on one of her simple Liberty dresses in which she felt most comfortable, had had breakfast and left the hotel.
She even discovered a new passion for which she had never in her life found time: the Atlantic had a reading room, and there she picked a book from the shelf at random, a different one every day, took it with her to the water, sat down in her wicker beach chair and enjoyed the luxury of problems and entanglements that one could snap shut and set aside whenever one wished. So even though she wasn’t aware of it, she spent her holiday much as Janki did: in a world that didn’t really exist.
But her peace was repeatedly disturbed by the Wassersteins, who had set up their rented beach chairs — not one, not two, but three! — in her immediate vicinity, and were firmly resolved not only to nurture Chanele’s acquaintance, but to appropriate it entirely to themselves.
Hersch Wasserstein was smaller than his wife, a squat, curly-haired bundle of energy. On this beach spending time in the water was not considered truly healthy, but still he wore a black bathing costume all the time, from whose neck curly chest hair sprouted, and a straw hat with a coloured ribbon of the kind sold in all the souvenir shops of Westerland. His arms and legs were burnt bright red, but in spite of his wife’s warnings he never spent long in the shadow of his beach chair, and was instead constantly doing something, either fetching glasses of lemonade — ‘You have one too, Frau Meijer, do me the honour!’ — or helping Motti set up a water wheel in the moat of his sandcastle, exactly the same system, incidentally — ‘This is bound to interest you, Frau Meijer!’ — on which the sawmill in Marjampol operated.
His wife, who had talked away at Chanele the first time they met as if words were going to double in price the following day, said little in her husband’s presence. Apart from, ‘What do you mean, Hersch?’ and ‘Quite right, Hersch!’ she was hardly ever heard. But that was still more than her daughter said.
Chaje Sore Wasserstein was insulted, not for any concrete reason, but in principle. The lemonade wasn’t cold enough, the sand too hot, the young men one met here no better than the ones in Marjampol — and she said all that without words, she just let the corners of her mouth droop, studied her fingernails and groaned every now and again as if the whole world had conspired to turn her twenty-one-year-old life into a living hell. From childhood onwards her parents had assured her that things would get better, and Chaje Sore Wasserstein was of the view that they certainly had not kept their promise.
Hersch was a very talkative man and insisted on telling Chanele in great detail about all the dreadful things they had experienced in their first resort of Borkum. Little Motti’s sandcastle had been trampled to pieces, there had been a map on the wall of their hotel showing the route from Borkum to Jerusalem, a brazen message to them that they should go there and not come back, and at the spa concert everyone had sung a song, the Borkum song, whose last lines he would never forget if he lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, God willing. ‘But those who approach you with flat feet,’ they had sung, ‘with noses crooked and curly hair, they should not enjoy your beach, away with them, away with them!’ They had left very quickly, they had fled, in fact, to be honest, and here on Sylt it was really much better, ‘don’t you think, Frau Meijer?’
Chanele would have preferred to withdraw behind her book, but the insistent attention of her new acquaintances repeatedly kept her from doing so. Sometimes when she dozed off for a few minutes in the midday heat, characters from the two worlds merged, a Bedouin prince from an adventure story assumed the features of Hersch Wasserstein, and the beautiful countess that he was holding prisoner had the same pinched little mouth as Chaje Sore.
Janki dreamed too, or rather: the six musketeers, as they called themselves, pursued a common dream. They couldn’t remember which of them had had the idea first, most likely it had been Staudinger, who was something like the chairman of their association. For days now they had all been weaving away at it and, inspired by beer and grog, drawing ever brighter colours through the beautiful picture. In Westerland, they knew from before, 2 September was decked with bunting in honour of Sedan Day, and the mayor laid a wreath for the fallen on the victory monument, but was that really enough for such an important day? The fact that the hotels decorated their dining rooms in black, white and red, and the chefs invented new patriotic names for their old recipes — Hofmeister, who knew about such things, remembered very ordinary Büsum shrimps which had appeared on the table bearing the name ‘Field Marshal Moltke prawns’ — that the spa band had played patriotic tunes and that the battle flag had flown on many a sandcastle, that was all well and good, but not enough for true veterans, who had risked life and limb in that battle.
‘Someone’, Staudinger said, ‘should organise a central event, with speeches and honours…’
‘… and’, Kessler went on toying with the idea, ‘hire a hall in a hotel…’ and of course Janki cried, ‘In the Atlantic, where else?’ There was in fact a big ballroom there, where meetings and dances were held, and the manager — ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to it!’ — was sure to make it available to them, the spa newspaper would publish big advertisements, the house band would play something dignified rather than the inevitable tangos — ‘The Hohenfriedberg March’, suggested the musical Neuberth, ‘composed by Old Fritz in person’ — the war veterans would march into those sounds and then… Yes, they weren’t quite clear about what would happen then, so they ordered the next round of Tacke Blecken’s mysterious grog, rested their heads on their hands and gave it some thought.
‘I have given it some thought,’ said Hersch Wasserstein, ‘and in fact it could all be done very quickly and without any fuss.’ He had sent his family on a walk and was now kneeling in the sand beside Chanele’s beach chair, as Sir Walter Raleigh knelt before the throne of Queen Elizabeth in the book she was just reading. ‘How do you like my Chaje Sore?’
‘Charming, quite charming,’ said Chanele, for where does it say in the Shulchan Aruch that you are supposed to rob a proud father of his illusions?