‘We really have no time for business right now,’ said Staudinger.
‘Which one of you is Meijer?’ asked the man, and when everyone looked at Janki, he shook his hand like that of an old friend and said, ‘Be moichel me, I should have explained straight away. I’m sure your friend mentioned it to you.’
‘May I ask what it’s concerning?’
‘Chaje Sore, of course. A pearl of a daughter. Exactly the right one for your Arthur. A shidduch — made in heaven, God willing.’
Von Stetten rose to his feet, a judge getting up to deliver his verdict. His voice suddenly had the same booming commanding tone that Staudinger had used on the train to Hoyerschleuse. ‘Comrade Meijer,’ he said, ‘Do you know this Jew?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘No idea he says he has, this Herr Meijer,’ said the persistent stranger, ‘when our children are to marry.’
The echoing laughter that these words provoked around the table faded quickly away. They saw Janki’s embarrassed face and knew that there was nothing to laugh about here.
‘Meijer,’ said von Stetten — the ‘comrade’ had been lost along the way — ‘Meijer, I have just one question for you: are you a Jew?’
‘What does that have to do with anything? I’m also a Frenchman, and you said…’
‘I would prefer it, Herr Meijer,’ said Lieutenant von Stetten, ‘if you would address me formally from now on.’
44
Afterwards, Arthur couldn’t and wouldn’t forget, afterwards, which was always a before as well, when they were able to breathe again, and their hearts no longer hammered as if they had climbed a summit, and it was a summit, every time, an impassable summit which one fears, while it draws one irresistibly, different each time and each time more familiar, with paths that one would yearn to walk again, and again and again, were one not afraid that one might exhaust oneself before exploring others, afterwards, when one did not yet wish to open one’s eyes, as one tries to prolong a dream even though one already knows that one will not be able to bring it back, not until the next time, when it will be different again, yet more beautiful, yet more mysterious, yet more dangerous, afterwards, when the fine hairs on the skin still bore that charge, and drew sparks beneath the wandering fingertips — wait! not now! not yet! — afterwards, when the everyday seeped once more through the closed shutters with its weary smell, that stench of reality that one can drown out for a few minutes but not really expel, when self-evidence fell from them like a badly stitched coat, when their nakedness was nakedness again and liberation no longer, afterwards, when they got up and lingered for a few seconds, afterwards, when they sat side by side and dangled their feet in the air, as if it were not the couch in Arthur’s consulting room, but a shore, a lake, a sea, and really cold water into which they were now to jump — not yet! please not yet! — as they both stared at the glass cabinet of medical books because they did not yet have the courage to let their eyes meet, afterwards, when it was over and slight disappointment rose up in them, the kind that belongs to happiness as age does to life, afterwards, when time stood still and yet must start again, they covered over the seconds of their sweet embarrassment with the unchanging sentimental ritual.
‘Oh please, Doctor,’ Joni had to say, ‘when can I have another appointment with you?’
And Arthur had to take the black diary from the desk, had to flick through it as if he didn’t know the answer, as if he were not the only answer in his life that he did not doubt, and had to say, ‘Whenever you like.’
They had met here, here in this room with the smell of disinfectant and the freshly printed diploma on the wall. Arthur had just furnished the room, but it felt too old for him, he felt like a little boy putting on his father’s trousers, far too long for him, and a jacket his arms couldn’t find a way out from, who paraded like that through the flat and imagined he’s grown up. Back then Janki had shouted at him for dragging the carefully ironed trouser legs over the freshly waxed floor, and he had only wanted to try out what it was like if you…
He had just wanted to try it out.
No, that wasn’t true. It had been more than curiosity.
Much more.
Joni had come to him with a pulled muscle, nothing serious, not even particularly painful, but the next weekend there was to be a competition, and he wanted to know if there wasn’t a remedy for it, something to rub in or something, because this particular competition was particularly important. ‘Are you interested in wrestling, Doctor?’
And Arthur had said, ‘Please slip out of your things.’
Sometimes quite ordinary sentences, sentences that one has said a thousand times, suddenly acquire a new meaning, the words come freshly coined from the mint, gleaming and new.
Please slip out of your things.
Open, Sesame.
He had used, ‘du’, the informal form of address, of course he had. The boy was seventeen, no longer a child, but not yet a man either. Why shouldn’t he have called him ‘du’?
There was no ulterior motive.
And then Joni had been standing naked before him. For the first time.
His muscles weren’t particularly powerful. Not for a wrestler. A brutal fighter could have grabbed him and broken him. Could have hurt him. Quite slim hips. And his belly… Tense, as if a clenched fist were hidden in there, just waiting to be…
Stop. Jonathan Leibowitz. A patient. Rectus abdominis well developed. Legs perhaps slightly too sturdy for real symmetry. Flat feet? No, it was just the way he was standing. Combative was the wrong word. He wasn’t just ready to fight, he was ready for anything.
‘Did you say something, Doctor?’
His voice. Like running a hand over your arm without quite touching it, just brushing the fine hairs so that they stand up and yearn for more — that was the sort of voice that Joni Leibowitz had.
‘Did you say something?’
A strain in the levator scapulae, hence the slight pain when he had to move his shoulder. Arthur showed Joni the muscle on one of the coloured posters that he’d been given for the opening of his own practice. The flayed man, one arm resting, the other held aloft, always reminded him of the bloody martyr in the poster for the panopticon all those years ago. That had been another such day, a day that had changed everything, when nothing afterwards was where it had been, when one suddenly understood…
‘What can we do about it, Doctor?’
He had prescribed him an ointment that would help or not, and said, ‘Can you come back a week today? I would like to take another look at you.’
All of a sudden the most natural sentences were no longer so natural.
I would like to take another look at you.
Then he had gone to the fight. Just like that. In the Israelitisches Wochenblatt there had been a small advertisement requesting support for the Jewish Gymnastics Club, so why shouldn’t he go, when he had nothing better to do on that Sunday afternoon? He would just say he’d dropped by at the schoolhouse on the Hirschengraben, he would just mingle among the spectators, but there were hardly spectators there, there was no real competition, and the wrestlers — this made it much easier for him later on — didn’t have many fans anyway. The people looked around when he came into the gym, and Sally Steigrad, the chairman of the club, hurried towards him, garrulous as befits an insurance salesman, and greeted the young doctor as a welcome guest of honour.
Joni was sitting on a bench next to three other wrestlers, all four of them in long white gymnastic trousers and tight vests. A curl had fallen into his forehead, he threw his head to one side and his eye caught, by chance — but nothing that Joni did involved chance, it wasn’t possible that this could all be chance — his eye, as if by chance, caught Arthur’s. Then he smiled, and seemed to lose interest in the new spectator.