So no one else had been there, but Gerster’s knowledge of human nature allowed him to imagine how it might have happened. Of course Böhni had acted the expert, and set himself up as the man in charge, had given the new boy the lowly job of curry-combing the horses and chewed his head off when the stencil slipped and the checker-board pattern on its crop wasn’t clearly visible. He would also have kindly assigned him the task of harnessing up, but then of course he would have taken the reins himself and played the big master-coachman, all the way across Schaffhauserplatz and the Kornhaus Bridge. On Langstrasse, Gerster didn’t even need to ask, and Böhni wouldn’t have admitted it either, he had doubtless crossed the Railway Bridge at a thundering gallop. That was expressly forbidden, but they all did it, and you can’t be that strict with grown adults.
But then again…
‘Riff-raff!’ shouted Gerster. ‘Damned day labourers!’ ‘Day labourers’ was more or less the worst curse you could hurl at a farmer’s son, and Böhni actually flinched. Rosenthal, the city-dweller, didn’t bat an eyelid.
Then the following had happened outside the dairy: when the full milk churns had been offloaded and the empty ones loaded on — Böhni would generously have allowed his companion to perform that task too — and Rosenthal was to take the reins for the return journey, Böhni had probably needled him a bit too much, or rather prodded him with a pitchfork, because delicate weapons were not his style. What had been said, and whether it had concerned a lack of horse sense or something entirely different, neither Böhni nor Rosenthal wished to confess, and Herr Gerster was basically satisfied with that. Some things are better sorted out in private, with fists. It certainly had something to do with the fact that Rosenthal was a Jew, and that Böhni was wearing a grey shirt, not exactly like the ones worn by members of the fascist Fröntler movement, but the same colour, so at any rate Rosenthal felt obliged to demonstrate his skill as a driver, so he took the team back to the Strickhof not by the prescribed, direct route, but…
‘Stupid oafs!’ yelled Gerster, and even he realised that this last insult had sounded a bit feeble.
He had driven right into the centre of the city, that lunatic, which of course wasn’t allowed at all. And Böhni had let him do it, had just let him run headlong into disaster, rather than assuming responsibility as the more experienced of the pair. Responsibility! But then that was a word that had probably been scrapped from their dictionary. That they had had more luck than intelligence and nothing really serious had happened was a matter beyond their control, which meant that they were both equally culpable, regardless of who was holding the reins in the end. Cling together, swing together.
Herr Gerster couldn’t even think, he raged, about how it would have reflected on the school and on himself if things had gone badly, all the reports that people would have had to write, and the explanations. And, almost worst of all, the people who had been trying to move the Strickhof away from the city for such a long time, who wanted to win building land where there were now only fields and orchards, they would have had their arguments served up to them on a plate, there it was again, they had said, plain as your face, an agricultural business and a big city, the two things just don’t go together.
He looked for a sufficiently violent insult, couldn’t find one and instead brought the flat of his hand down on his desk, so that it echoed around the empty room like a cannon-shot. A headmaster’s life was far from easy.
And at home they would be eating up all that delicious plum tart.
The lout had ridden around the back to the station and then crossed to the other side and into Bahnhofstrasse, which was wide enough for him to have negotiated if necessary, but then he had suddenly turned off to the left into Rennweg, and then into Fortunagasse, which was so narrow that even the King of England’s personal coachman would have thought twice.
‘Why did you go there, of all places?’ roared Gerster, and Rosenthal spread his arms and said, ‘No reason.’
That was, of course, a lie. Hillel hadn’t taken that path by chance at all, but he wasn’t going to let Gerstli — as the headmaster was secretly known — in on that one. In Fortunagasse was the ‘Beth Hechalutz’, a house in which two dozen young pioneers, the Chaluzim, were waiting for the opportunity to be able to travel on to Palestine. They were all refugees, Germans and Poles expelled from Germany; they lived there as a collective, exactly as it would be later in the kibbutz, they paid the bit of money that they had earned somewhere into a kitty, cooked in a communal kitchen and went on talking until far into the night about how they would build a Jewish state, and a socialist one at that. On Sunday, Hillel knew, they would all be at home, it was too cold to go for a walk and no one could afford to go to the café.
All of them — that is: even a certain Malka Sofer from Warsaw, who was already twenty-two and thus unattainable for a seventeen-year-old, but who had beautiful black curls and a very serious face on which Hillel would have loved to put a smile. But for that to happen, she would have had to notice him, and what better means could there be to that end than to drive past her in a coach, so to speak, with a team of horses and a coloured ribbon on his whip?
He had planned to stop on the Rennweg, where, a bit further on, even an unpractised driver could have turned his team without much difficulty. There was a big brass bell fixed to the box, the kind they have on ships; the police demanded a warning signal in traffic, and a horn really wouldn’t have been right on a horse-drawn vehicle. He would ring the bell, he had worked out, and then everyone in the Beth Hechalutz would look out of the window, even Malka, he would wave nonchalantly with his whip and then later, when they met on their own — he was already working out plans about how he would organise this — they would have an ice-breaker, and once something has begun there is always the possibility that it might continue.
But when he looked into Fortunagasse, there was a group of men, ten or twenty, in such haste it was impossible to count them. From up there on the box you could look out on everything as if from a balcony, they were wearing their grey Fröntler shirts, and stood there in rank and file, looking almost military. They also had their flag with them, the white bars of the Swiss cross extended to the edge against the red background. They were standing outside the house of the Chaluzim and shouting something that Hillel couldn’t, or wouldn’t, at first understand. It was a very simple line, which they were shouting over and over again: ‘Get back to Poland, damn your eyes!’ One of them had a landsknecht field drum, and was striking out the beat on it. They were demonstrating against his people, and Böhni sat next to him and had a great grin on his face that seemed to say, ‘You’re in the shit not just because you took a forbidden detour, but just generally!’
Hillel hadn’t thought, he hadn’t thought at all, in that respect Gerstli was completely right, he had just tugged on the reins and shouted ‘Giddy-up!’ and somehow done everything right, better than he had ever managed in the practice yard. The horses had turned into the Fortunagasse, had started galloping on the thoroughfare that was far too narrow for them, he had struck at them with his whip and rung the bell like the fire service in an emergency. The Fröntlers had scattered, into people’s doorways and against the wall where it goes up to the Lindenhof. The flag-bearer dropped his bit of cloth, and how the drummer and his drum managed to get to safety Hillel couldn’t quite say. But no one had been hurt, otherwise they wouldn’t have been standing in front of the headmaster right now getting a telling off, they would have been told to pack their things together long ago.