‘No,’ said Arthur.
Never again.
‘Not as an active member,’ Sally reassured him. Arthur had never, and he wasn’t to be offended by his frankness, been a Karl Schuhmann, he would recognise the name, only five foot six and four gold medals. Arthur’s mind, Sally had often observed, had never been entirely on the subject, ‘as if you were thinking about something other than victory’, but that was what intellectuals were like. He, Sally, imagined the medical profession as a big adventure, something that demanded the whole person, not like insurance, in which everything was already planned out and prescribed by central office. Arthur should, just by the by, think of taking out household insurance, he didn’t own much now, but the leather armchairs they were sitting in were very pretty, and if he ever got married they could ramp up the premiums.
But back to the topic at hand. He didn’t want to bring Arthur back into the club as a wrestler, but as a doctor. It had recently become customary, and he thought it made perfect sense, to have a representative of the medical profession on the spot, mostly they were only nurses, and once, which he had found completely ridiculous, a dentist had even turned up at a wrestling competition, could Arthur imagine? if someone had dislocated a joint he would probably have reached for his drill, ha ha ha.
Little jokes like that had helped Sally conclude many a deal.
So, to get to the point: what did Arthur think of the idea of making himself available as the club doctor? It wouldn’t take as much time as active sport, he trained to a certain extent in his daily practice, ha ha ha, and perhaps — it didn’t have to be so, but it was a timely thought — perhaps he could occasionally give the young people a kind of course, medically correct relaxation before training, the anatomical foundations of competitive sport. Just things like that.
To his own surprise Arthur heard himself saying ‘yes’, not ‘yes, he would think about the suggestion,’ but quite rashly and directly ‘yes’. Sally Steigrad attributed this spontaneous agreement to his own powers of persuasion and saw, once again, confirmation of his credo that arguments in the insurance trade are more important than forms.
Arthur assumed his new duties for two reasons. On the one hand he felt a debt towards the gymnastics club, and it was part of his character always to feel most himself when he thought he was atoning for something, and on the other hand he hoped — an essay in the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Stages had led him to this thought — that regular harmless contact with young men would have an inoculating effect on him, just as a dilute pathogen protects the body against the outbreak of illness.
And he knew that there would be no second Joni among the gymnasts, because there could never again be a second Joni.
If it was a penance that he had taken upon himself, it was one of a not unpleasant kind. Arthur had only just celebrated his thirty-third birthday, but since Joni had ended their relationship he had aged, not exactly like Rabbi ben Ezra, who was said to have turned overnight into a dignified old man, but like someone for whom memory has become more important than the future. The young gymnasts treated him, out of respect for his profession, and indeed for or his age, with a certain distance, and he appreciated that. It was part of his character always to re-examine himself, just as there are people who turn around three times just to check that the front door is locked, and each time he did so he established, reassured and a little disappointed, that there was nothing there.
There would never be anything there again.
When Sally Steigrad, in the pub where they drank beer after training, started talking about the need for a club flag, whose acquisition was indispensable because one would otherwise simply make oneself ridiculous at gymnastics festivals — ‘we can’t just tie a tallis to a stick and carry it around in front of us, after all’ — Arthur voluntarily assumed the task of drumming up the money. He would, he reasoned, dedicate the flag to Joni, only in his own thoughts, of course, but they were what mattered in the end.
He was so pleased with the idea that he didn’t even contradict Sally when he wanted to fix a date for the consecration of the flag. They agreed on 28 June of the following year, ‘which gives you nine months’, Sally said, ‘and nine months, I don’t need to explain to a doctor, is enough to create something with functioning limbs, hahaha.’ That was a joke that he liked to trot out for young married couples.
However the self-appointed task proved almost impossible. Arthur did the rounds of Jewish businessmen, but hardly won a concrete agreement from anyone, even though he was always given a very polite welcome. People are always polite to doctors, perhaps for fear of not being treated properly should they fall ill.
Typical of the increasingly long list of his disappointments was his visit to Siegfried Weill, the father of Désirée’s friend Esther.
‘Bureau’, it said on the door; the French spelling was probably supposed to upgrade the desk squeezed between the shelves to something more elevated, but it was just a store-room directly behind the shop, and the chair that Herr Weill had offered him was actually meant for salesmen, who tend to stay too long if they’re sitting comfortably.
With his deep voice and black beard, Herr Weill looked like a licensed German rabbi. He radiated imposing dignity, which he was well aware of, and which he liked to deploy as a sales technique. He would confirm hesitant lady customers in their decisions with such a sermon-like ‘A very good choice, Madame!’ that afterwards they rarely dared to go and look elsewhere. He used a pair of ladies’ buttoned ankle-boots, chevreaux leather with patent toecaps, to explain to Arthur why — ‘to my great regret, and even though I see great value in supporting the gymnastics club as such’ — sadly, sadly he could not take part in the collection of money. ‘Look at this shoe,’ he said, and with a solemn gesture held out the open cardboard box to Arthur, ‘one of our most popular models, American in origin. On sale for eighteen francs. And now tell me, Doctor: what does this shoe cost me? If I include everything, transport, rent, wages, taxes? What does the shoe cost me?’
Arthur had no idea. ‘Fifteen francs?’ he said hesitantly.
‘Fifteen francs! Halevei! If I were to buy a pair of shoes for fifteen francs and sell them for eighteen, twenty per cent rewech, it would be a hanoe to me to pay for your flag, and the flagpole too!’ He shook his head, like a sage over the sins of this world, repeatedly lamenting, ‘Fifteen francs, he says! Why not make if fourteen?’
And in any case, said Herr Weill, one had been so overrun of late by shnorrers — ‘Do not take the word amiss, Doctor!’ — like wasps in a hot summer they were, and then of course there were the regular obligations too: if you was called up to the Torah in synagogue, you had to shnoder something, and apart from those charitable donations he also paid his shekels for the construction work in Palestine — he wasn’t one of those diehard Zionists, but one didn’t want to stand aside completely — and otherwise there was always this and that, in short: sorry thought he was, in this case he would have to say no. But if the Jewish Gymnastics Club undertook to buy all its sports shoes from him in future, then he would offer a ten per cent discount, what was he saying, fifteen per cent! Just so that the doctor could see that he was very positive on the subject.
That was the response that Arthur got wherever he went; the money simply wouldn’t come together. When he had gone all the way through the list of businessmen, the firm commitments came to less than a hundred francs. And a flag, even a modest one, cost at least four times as much as that.
Next June, which had seemed an infinite distance away only a short time before, was now suddenly, it seemed to Arthur, practically on his doorstep. Sally Steigrad called meetings in which the design was discussed, he had also already drawn up a list of the halls where the big ball might be held — ‘Of course there must be a ball, if you’re going to do something, do it properly!’ — and at the flag-makers’ they had told Arthur that three months was the least, the very least, he could expect; now that everyone was thinking about the national exposition in Bern, they were drowning in commissions.