It was a very ordinary consulting room, with the smell of illness and cleanliness and fear of death. The couch was narrow, so high that your legs dangled in the air if you sat on the edge, and a thick roll of paper was fastened at one end, the same rustling hygienic paper that hairdressers used for their head-rests. There was a desk in the room, an armchair behind it, a chair in front of it, a screen that concealed a clothes-stand, and a white-painted glass bookshelf in which textbooks jostled with specialist journals, and at the back in the second row, where it couldn’t be seen, Professor Hirschfeld’s Yearbook of Sexual Intermediary Stages, which Arthur scoured in vain for explanations for his own confusion. He had found only questionnaires, with which one was supposed to measure the female proportion of one’s own physicality: ‘Are your fingers pointed or blunt?’ ‘So you give off a noticeable smell in hot weather?’ ‘Do you think logically?’
No, he wasn’t thinking logically, and it worried him, and it gave him courage, and he couldn’t wait for the day he had agreed to see Joni.
It was a quite ordinary consulting room, but it was the most beautiful room in the world.
Joni had been just as uncertain as he, just as curious, and afterwards just as happy and exhausted.
Every time.
Afterwards, which was always also a before.
Arthur had immediately given up wrestling. He knew he couldn’t have gone on touching Joni without everyone noticing the way he was touching him. Once he had started awake from a dream in which they had met for a training session, the mat in the middle of his consulting room, onlookers had jostled all around, Sally Steigrad and Cantor Würzburger and also Uncle Salomon, even though he had died long ago, they had walked towards one another, Arthur and Joni, and Joni had thrown the curl out of his forehead, and Arthur had kissed him, he had kissed him in front of everyone, and Joni had smiled and said, ‘Oh, please, Doctor, when can I have another appointment with you?’
‘There’s something I have to discuss with you,’ said Joni.
The wrong words.
‘It has nothing to do with you,’ said Joni, and didn’t look at him, just stared at the glass book-case, which couldn’t provide any answers either, ‘just with me, and the fact that I’m nineteen now and have to think about what happens next.’
They had been the best years of Arthur’s life, and even before Joni went on talking he knew they were over.
‘I’m going into army training,’ said Joni, ‘so we won’t see each other for a long time anyway, and afterwards I may be going abroad. My uncle knows someone who has a paper factory in Linz, and there I can… But that’s not the reason. None of that is the reason. The reason is…’
The reason is that there are no miracles.
The reason is that one cannot be happy without being punished for it.
‘I’ve done a lot of thinking,’ said Joni. ‘The way you always think about things before you do them. I’ve learned a lot from you, you know. I’m grateful to you for that. Honestly: I’m grateful to you. But I’ve done a lot of thinking and reached the conclusion… It really has nothing to do with you.’
Your heart is torn from your body, but it has nothing to do with you.
‘I have reached the conclusion…’ said Joni, still sitting beside Arthur, he would only have needed to reach out his hand to touch him, to hold him, never to let him go.
But he didn’t have the right to do that.
‘I have reached the conclusion,’ said Joni, ‘that I’m a perfectly ordinary person. One like all the others. Nothing special. Not like you. Just a man who wants to have a family and children and… yes, and a wife. The way you do.’
The way you do.
‘It would also be the best thing for you. A family, I mean. You’d be a good father. A wonderful father, I’m sure of it. It’s always been lovely with you, really, it was lovely, and I’m not levelling any reproaches at you.’
Reproaches.
‘But it isn’t going anywhere. You understand what I mean? It isn’t going anywhere.’
And Arthur did the bravest thing he had ever done in his life, he did the most cowardly thing, the most contemptible, and said, ‘Yes, Joni, I understand you.’
Joni slipped from the couch and stood in the room as much of a stranger as if he had only come here by accident on his way to a quite different destination. Arthur saw him naked, one very last time. The physique was no longer that of a boy, now it was a man, just a man, a man like many others. He walked as if he was flat-footed, his legs were slightly too short and his bottom…
Gluteus maximus. Just a muscle. Which started here and here and stopped there and there and moved that and that.
The screen was a three-part metal frame stretched with pleated beige material, and Joni disappeared behind it, as all patients did after their examination, they disappeared, you heard a rustle, and eventually they reappeared and were dressed and armoured and belonged only to themselves.
Arthur sat on the edge of the couch for a long time. He touched the leather covering where Joni had been sitting and thought he felt a last trace of his warmth.
45
Joni didn’t return to the gymnastics club after military training. Neither did he go to Linz, which had just been an excuse; he now had other interests, he had broadened both inwardly and outwardly, had lost his narrow-hipped youthfulness and grown into a shape of which there were many copies in the world. Of course they met repeatedly, Zurich was small and Jewish Zurich still smaller, but Joni only had his public smile left for Arthur, he had decided not to remember the other smile. When he greeted him, he was polite and detached, a pupil meeting a teacher long after the end of his school days.
Eventually Sally Steigrad contacted Arthur, visited him at home and brought with him two bottles of beer which they — ‘No ceremony among fellow sportsmen!’ — drank without glasses. Sally was a long, thin man, for whom the club was more important than his family. not because he didn’t have one, on the contrary, the Steigrad family comprised countless siblings and cousins, and their policies brought him, an insurance salesman, a decent income as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But policies don’t make life interesting. It was in the competitions he made his gymnasts take part in as often as possible that Sally sought excitement; in terms of his character, he said, he was a global traveller or conqueror, and he liked to complain that everything in his life was so orderly and regulated, he sometimes felt as if all he had to do before he died was tick off due dates, and no surprises of any kind were factored into his life’s plan. Although of course one always had to reckon with surprises, even unpleasant ones. And while they were on the subject: had Arthur ever thought of taking out life insurance?
But that wasn’t what he had come about, it really wasn’t, although they should have a quiet talk about the topic another time, ‘better safe than sorry’ as the English said, and they were hardly stupid people. When Sally turned to the topic of insurance, there was something automatic about his words, a gramophone that starts singing away from wherever the needle happens to fall in the groove. As he talked, he bobbed up and down as if an over-abundant temperament wouldn’t leave him in peace for a moment, and appraised Arthur’s modest furniture like an auctioneer evaluating an inheritance. But insurance wasn’t the reason for his visit today, it really wasn’t, Sally said and sat down at last, today he didn’t want a signature from Arthur, but something quite different — to get straight to the point — he wanted to win him back to the gymnastics club.