‘You can’t see from outside,’ she said, as she folded her apron and laid it in a laundry basket. ‘But when I cough it hurts quite badly.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘Everywhere,’ came the voice from under the pullover that she was just pulling over her head.
‘And how frequent are these attacks?’
‘Sometimes every day and sometimes… It always comes as a surprise.’
She put her vest carefully in the basket as well, and stood in front of him wearing only a pair of white panties and grey hand-knitted socks.
This was not a sick child. Perhaps a little undernourished, with excessively prominent collar-bones, but otherwise… Her skin was rosy and by no means cyanotic.
But when she coughed she spat blood.
From the courtyard came the sound of children playing and the voice of Fräulein Württemberger demanding that they be quiet.
The girl was not tubercular, he would have bet his medical certificate on it. He examined her thoroughly, according to all the rules of the discipline, and found not the slightest symptom of any illness. In percussion the sound was sonorous, and in auscultation there was neither a rattle nor a buzz. He had her whisper ‘sixty-six’ strictly according to the textbook, something he had not done since training at the university hospital, and then say ‘ninety-nine’ in a deep voice. It all sounded exactly as it was supposed to sound. In the notes that he filled in for every Women’s Association child, he used the abbreviation n.n.s.
No noticeable symptom.
But her handkerchief was full of blood.
He made her turn away from him and applied the stethoscope again, this time to her back.
‘Please cough.’
She coughed violently and put her hand to her chest.
‘Is there blood again?’
She held her hand in front of her mouth, spat into the palm and held it out to him. ‘Not this time.’ Then she rubbed her hand on her pants, pulled a face and added, ‘But it hurts.’
‘When you cough?’
‘It hurts a lot.’
Where she had rubbed her hand dry there was something red on the seam of her pants. Not blood, as Arthur thought for a moment, but the red stitching of a laundry mark: ‘I.P.’ for Irma Pollack. They were keen on order here in the Wartheim.
Outside the children squealed with delight as they played. The ironing room smelled of soap flakes and damp.
‘Can I get dressed again?’ asked Irma.
‘One moment. When blood comes when you cough — what colour is the blood?’
The two diverging eyes looked at him in surprise. ‘Like blood. Red.’
‘How exactly?’
‘Just normal dark red. I don’t know what you want to know.’
‘I only want to know one thing from you, Irma,’ said Arthur. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Just one little thing. Why are you lying to me?’
59
‘But it is real blood,’ she said.
She had tried everything, she had coughed for him and bowed her back as if the pain was unbearable, she had described how sometimes in the night she couldn’t breathe at all, and had to open the window wide, and the other girls in the dormitory had complained about the draught, he could ask them, she had, as he went on merely shaking his head, resorted to childish defiance, stamped her foot and declared that she had a very special form of tuberculosis, a kind that you couldn’t spot just with a bit of knocking and listening, she had, when none of that did any good, shaken out her encrusted handkerchief and held it up in front of his eyes, ‘Blood, real blood, can’t you see?’ She had tried everything.
But she hadn’t cried.
‘You should get dressed again,’ said Arthur. ‘We don’t want you catching a cold.’
At the end of an examination there is always that embarrassing moment when patients are no longer impersonal actors of their illness, but are once again themselves, and hence no longer just undressed, but naked. Irma too suddenly folded her thin arms over her little-girl chest and turned away. It was a sign of submission. She had done her best, but now she was admitting defeat.
Only when she had put on her vest again did she ask, ‘How did you know?’
‘It was the wrong sort of blood.’
‘It was real blood,’ she protested.
‘Let me explain,’ said Arthur, and at that moment, as so often, he wished he had experienced children of his own. ‘If someone coughs blood, you see, and if that blood comes out of the lungs, as it does in tuberculosis, for example, it’s always bright red. And slightly foamy. You have to imagine, as if someone had stirred in a little pinch of sherbet powder. But on your handkerchief…’
‘It’s real blood!’ As if she just had to repeat it often enough to convince him.
‘I realise that. Where did you get it?’
She looked cautiously around, even though they were alone in the ironing room and no one could see in through the window, and lifted the leg of her pants a little. On the inside of her thin thigh was a whole series of scars, one beside the other.
‘Fräulein Württemberger always checks to see if we’re clean,’ Irma explained. ‘But we have to keep our pants on, even under our night-shirts. That was why I cut myself there and then held the handkerchief to it.’ A quick smile spread across her face. She was also a little girl whose attempt to trick the adult world had nearly worked.
‘Where did you get the knife?’ Arthur asked.
‘I stole a razor blade from Köbeli’s room.’
‘I understand.’
‘No,’ said Irma. ‘You don’t understand at all.’
Then they were sitting side by side on the ironing board. For confessions, Arthur had learned in the past, it’s good to sit side by side; you’re close to the other person and don’t have to look him in the eye.
It was a long story that she told him, and when he remembered it later he could still smell soap flakes and damp sheets and the smell of cleanly washed children’s hair.
Irma’s story began with all Jewish organisations in Germany being dissolved, which was why from one day to the next Irma’s mother had no work and nowhere to live. No, in fact, it had actually started earlier than that.
With the accident.
‘He slipped,’ said Irma, ‘he just slipped like that, he didn’t even fall over, Mama says. She was there. He just stumbled, from the pavement into the street, and then there was this lorry coming along.’
She told of the death of her father without shedding a tear, she had probably decided once and for all not to cry, at least not here in Heiden, where she was responsible for her little brother and had to be strong.
It was five years since that accident now, she had been seven at the time and Moses only four. ‘He doesn’t remember anything about it, not really, but we tell him about his father, Mama and I, over and over again, and then it’s as if he can remember it all himself.’
She always talked about ‘his father’ and ‘my father’, she never said ‘Papa’. She had built a lot of walls for herself, to shelter behind and find her way along.
‘Then Mama found a job, in the B’nai B’rith old people’s home. Do you know what B’nai B’rith is?’
Yes, Arthur knew what B’nai B’rith was. He was even a member of that charitable organisation himself.
‘We lived there too. Up in the attic. Before, it had been a room for the maids. With very crooked walls. Mama said, “The old flat’s far too big for us, now that there’s only the three of us.” But I think she just couldn’t pay the rent any more.’