As Arthur was to discover, Joni had two kinds of smile, a public and a private one.
In the middle of the vast gym the mats had been laid out, a raft in the sea, and the spectators arranged themselves around it in almost indecent proximity. They were competing in only four weight categories, the young Jewish gymnastics club did not yet have any more wrestlers to offer. It was a very unequal competition: inexperienced rookies against confident veterans, who knew all the holds and counterholds and gained their points routinely, as a matter of course. Joni’s turn was last; the score was already three-nil, and his fight was no longer significant. But he was to be brought out anyway, Sally Steigrad had agreed with the chairman of the opposing team, ‘My boys need experience.’
Joni’s opponent had very hairy arms, far too coarse to be grappling with this slender boy’s body.
Far too coarse.
When the two of them stood facing one another and entered the first clinch, when they pressed their torsos against one another, golem and angel, when their heads touched as if in a caress, Arthur had to take off his glasses and rub his nose. He had been seized by a strange emotion, a not unpleasant sadness that brought tears to his eyes.
Then the fight was over. Joni had been knocked off his feet, his opponent left the raft of mats, had finished his job, which had been strenuous but not particularly difficult, and Joni was still lying on the mat with his face contorted, pointing at his shoulder, which his opponent had tugged at like a farm hand straightening a sack of corn before getting a proper hold of it and throwing it on the pile with the others.
‘Would you be so kind, Doctor?’ asked Sally Steigrad.
It was as if Joni had no smell of his own. The sweat of his hairy opponent rose into Arthur’s nose, the dust of the mat he knelt on, and the sour aroma of effort and exhaustion common to all gyms in the world. But Joni? Even when he bent over him to examine the injury, there was no scent for him to catch. Or was it so close to his own that he wasn’t even aware of it, as one isn’t aware of one’s own smell?
‘The same spot again?’ Arthur asked.
Joni turned his head towards him and smiled at him from below, with his very private smile.
‘Oh, please, Doctor,’ said Joni, ‘when can I have another appointment with you?’
It was the first time he had said it.
That was how it started.
Arthur would have done anything to be close to Joni, and Sally Steigrad was proud of this new, academic member whose suddenly awakened interest in wrestling he attributed to himself, or at least to the appeal that he had placed in the Wochenblatt. Arthur was not a really gifted athlete, but he tried, and as a medic he had the advantage that he knew about bones and sinews, and didn’t need to have the holds and their effects explained to him in great detail. He just had to overcome the inhibition of applying that knowledge practically in a fight.
In training, his partner was usually Joni Leibowitz, who was in the same weight category. They were a good pairing, Sally Steigrad thought, as he looked at them. They often worked together on their technique, when the others were already getting dressed again.
Arthur couldn’t have explained what happened between himself and Joni during this time, although in sleepless nights he analysed every look caught by chance — by chance? — and every offhand remark for hidden meanings. He had never been in love before, and could not interpret the condition that assailed him, could not begin to interpret that illness. No one had ever told him that love is confusion above all.
Joni was only seventeen, an apprentice in his uncle’s stationery shop, and reacted with much greater calm than the doctor with all his book-learning. He interpreted Arthur’s vague feelings before he really understood them himself, and seemed to fee neither hurt nor threatened by them. He played quite unselfconsciously with the power they gave him over the older man, and he did that without any malice, just as a cat feels no hatred for the mouse that it allows to escape and catches again and allows to escape and catches again. Whether Joni returned his love — yes, it was love, Arthur had had to admit it, and since then felt strangely relieved — whether he felt the same or at least something similar, that was a question to which Arthur never found a certain answer, right until the end.
Arthur won his first bout, quite to his own surprise. It was in the return round of the championship — the more modest the sporting achievements, the more seriously one takes rules and plans — and the Jewish Gymnastics Club was already abjectly at the bottom of the table. The opposing team was the same one as the one at Arthur’s very first visit to the gym, the Workers’ Gymnastics Club from Wiedikon, all people who did hard physical work in the factory day after day, and who had chosen wrestling as a sport because they needed an outlet for their surplus strength at the weekend as well. Arthur faced the same man who had defeated and injured Joni, who had dared to hurt Joni, and when he felt the man’s hairy arm against his body, he was suddenly assailed, for the first time in his life, which had hitherto always been mild and theoretical, with such boundless fury that they had had finally to drag him off his opponent, because he refused to relax his neck wrench long after his opponent had knocked on the mat as a sign of giving in.
‘Now we’ve taught you how to give it an edge,’ Sally Steigrad said, and attributed this success to himself as well.
Afterwards they stood side by side at the wash basin. Joni threw his curl out of his forehead and said, ‘I know what you want from me.’ They called each other ‘du’, of course, fellow sportsmen call each other ‘du’, there’s nothing special about it. ‘I know what you want,’ said Joni, ‘but you’ll only get it if you defeat me.’
Arthur lay awake all night and tried to grasp what he thought he had understood.
They faced one another at the Club Championship. It wasn’t an important title, a single bout would decide it, there were no other competitors in their weight category, and it would actually have made more sense to award Joni the victory wreath without a fight. Arthur hadn’t beaten him in a single training session so far. There were, in fact, real bronzed oak-leaf wreaths with blue and white bows; Sally Steigrad placed a lot of value on such outward appearances, which was also why he complained about the fact that the Club still didn’t have a flag.
Luckily no one from the family had come, even though Hinda and Zalman had offered to support him. Arthur felt as if he had been caught every time someone asked him about his new-found passion for the sport, and sometimes became really bad-tempered, as if someone were touching the open wound of his bad conscience.
They stood facing one another on the mat, they established their holds, and Arthur’s hands trembled as they did every time he touched that body. It was a battle of wait-and-see, a clumsy dance, and soon, after hold and counterhold, their heads were quite close together, cheek to cheek, and Joni suddenly smiled his smile, a very private smile, and Arthur whispered, ‘A promise is a promise.’ Then he let himself fall in such a way that everyone would think Arthur had pulled him off his feet. The fight was over, and Arthur had defeated Joni.
When the put the wreath on his head — ‘Completely ridiculous, such decorations!’ he had always said, and never let it go for as long as he lived — when Joni stood in front of him and shook his head, surprising victor and fair loser, he heard the words for the second time. ‘When can I have an appointment with you, Doctor?’