He would have to get her back to the home soon.
‘It’s too cold for you here, Mama,’ he said. She didn’t hear him.
‘You can tell your children,’ said Chanele and patted his hand. ‘You need to know where you come from. One of them always marched up and down with a rifle. But it wasn’t a real rifle. Dr Hellstiedl says none of them are dangerous.’
Arthur took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his knows. He knew the doctors who looked after the inmates of the old people’s home, and none of them was called Hellstiedl.
‘There were poplars on either side,’ said Chanele, ‘and it was hot. It’s easier if you count your footsteps. Forty-five. Forty-six. A million.’
‘I’m sure lunch will be ready at the home.’
‘One of them raked the leaves.’ Chanele had started giggling again. ‘But there were no leaves.’
He tried to lead his mother to the way out, but she resisted, as violently as before, when the waitress tried to take her table cloth away. ‘We haven’t been to his grave yet,’ she said. ‘He’s celebrating Bris there. Dr Hellstiedl is invited too. They’re going to have a party, and everyone will sing. Menachem and Sarah. Menachem and Sarah. Menachem and Sarah.’
At last, because there was no other way of calming her down, he led her to a strange grave, it must have been one of the first in the cemetery, because the stone was weathered and half sunk into the ground. Perhaps it was one of the ones rescued from the old Judenäule in the Rhine. The inscription had long been overgrown with moss, and could no longer be deciphered.
‘Here, Mama. This is the grave of Menachem and Sarah.’
‘You see.’ Chanele had the triumphant expression of someone who has been proved right. ‘You wanted to lie to me. They all want to lie to me, but I know.’ She bent down to the ground, she did it all by herself, even though it was hard for her, picked up a pebble and set it down on the strange grave. ‘If you touch him,’ she said, ‘his skin is like paper.’
Then she accepted his help, let him lead her back to the car and would probably have liked to be picked up and carried. Arthur wouldn’t even have found that very difficult. There was not much left of his mother.
On the way back she sang both songs at the same time, ‘Ruben, Lea, Rachel’ and ‘Menachem and Sarah’. Arthur could not have said what made him sadder, that she didn’t recognise her grandchildren, or that she remembered a father she had never had.
Back at the old people’s home he took off her coat and Chanele sat down, rubbing her hands against each other, at one of the empty tables. ‘It will soon be breakfast,’ she said. ‘My treat. Why didn’t you bring the children?’
56
It was an act of stupidity, of course it was, a loutish prank which one could not tolerate as headmaster, but it was also the kind of loutish prank that would be transformed within ten or twenty years into a heroic deed, something that you could tell and tell again at the old-boys’ table, before clapping the boys who hadn’t had the chance to see such things sympathetically on the shoulder and saying, ‘Ah yes, that’s the kind of thing we used to get up to in the good old Strickhof.’
So Headmaster Gerster struggled to maintain a severe expression and gave the pair a stern talking-to. They would be ruthlessly expelled from the school, both of them, if ever, just once, he heard the slightest thing. He would drive them both firmly into the ground. And besides: they should be ashamed of themselves, because the things that could have come of such a piece of coltish nonsense — what was he saying, coltish, a colt had far more intelligence than the two of them put together! — the things that could have happened hadn’t even occurred to them. They probably both thought the Lord God had given them their heads to smoke cigars with rather than to think.
Böhni, standing to attention, a great lump of a young man, let the storm pass over him. He was wearing short trousers, as he did in almost all weathers, and had even rolled up the sleeves of his grey shirt. And the schoolroom wasn’t heated, it was Sunday, and at agricultural college you don’t have money to burn. Gerster had been sitting comfortably at home in the warm parlour, chatting to a visitor, when the phone had rung, just as his wife was serving up the plum tart.
The young hooligans!
Böhni’s face had reddened slightly, Gerster noticed, but certainly not because he was ashamed, and not because of the cold either. He always looked like that. It made Headmaster Gerster, who liked to theorise about physiognomy and body language, think he was short-tempered.
That Rosenthal, on the other hand… He couldn’t work that boy out at all. The fact that he wanted to study agriculture, of all things, when no one else in his family had anything to do with it. There was only supposed to have been one cattle trader in the family, or at least that was what Rosenthal had told him. But his father was a scholar, and they usually sent their sons to the Gymnasium, and farming wasn’t really in the blood of the Jews. He was a hard worker, you had to give him that, even though he had to learn a few things that the others had known from childhood. The way he’d picked up the scythe the first time, as if it was going to bite him! They had also laughed long and hard at him for that. He took their jibes in good part, and never even complained about the blisters on his fine city-boy hands. Headmaster Gerster liked students who gritted their teeth. Agriculture wasn’t crocheting.
His stance was quite different from the other boy’s as well. Arms folded and legs far apart, they way you stand when you want to say, ‘No one knocks me over, just him try.’ Not exactly challenging, he couldn’t be accused of that, but he certainly was hard-headed. He was the kind of person who didn’t put up with any nonsense, and that was how the unfortunate matter had come about.
‘Idiots!’ yelled Herr Gerster. ‘Snot-nosed brats!’ But his heart wasn’t really in his lecture. What that Rosenthal had done was one hell of a thing.
It was this: even though they had their own mechanised testing station, they didn’t set much store by modern technology at the Strickhof. Kudi Lampertz, the deputy head who also taught arable farming, even raged against the modern fad for tractors — ‘As if a small farmer in Säuliamt could afford such an expensive thing!’ — and insisted on his students continuing to learn to plough with a four-in-hand, even if it looked a little old-fashioned, particularly on the Strickhof farm where the city had grown so much that the agricultural college was now in the middle of residential buildings. They hadn’t been able to resist buying a truck for ever, but one old tradition had survived: on Sunday, when there wasn’t much traffic in town, they hitched up two horses and transported the milk-cans on the box-cart to the association dairy. The task was in great demand. A coachman like that, with a coloured ribbon on his whip, cut a fine figure, and if you whistled at girls from the high box, hardly any of them turned away insulted.
Today the job had fallen to Walter Böhni and Hillel Rosenthal, Böhni because he had learned to drive a coach on his parents’ farm, and Rosenthal because he wanted to practise. They put the more and less experienced students together for the sake of camaraderie, and also because the Canton never provided enough teaching posts.