A colleague, well, fair enough, you could call it that. Although… You couldn’t really say that they were detached from one another, that they just happened to sit side by side at their desks. They had experienced that adventure together, down the steps with the box-cart and a team of horses. Which had, incidentally, not fulfilled its most important aim, because Malka Sofer had not been impressed in the slightest. On the contrary: she had called Hillel childish, and wanted nothing to do with him.
But it had been an adventure.
At first Böhni had distanced himself from the affair, Rosenthal had been driving, not he, but when he realised that the wild ride was admired as a heroic feat at the Strickhof, when he told the story he soon moved from ‘he’ and ‘that lunatic’ to ‘we’: ‘We gripped the reins, drove the horses on, took the bend.’ Except of course he didn’t mention that they had scattered a crowd of Fröntlers, either saying ‘we’ or ‘that other fellow’.
Because one can’t support such things, the teachers all pretended they hadn’t heard a thing about the forbidden excursion, but they became accustomed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to bringing the two of them together on practical tasks, and putting them side by side in theoretical lessons. Which was more use to Böhni than it was to Hillel, because he was better able to copy from him.
The impulse behind this partnership — yes, that was perhaps a word that one could use, even it still wasn’t quite the right one — to some extent the initial spark had come from Headmaster Gerster. That Sunday evening, over the pitiful remains of his plum flan, he had reached the conclusion that in spite of the hefty bollocking he had given them the two sinners had got off far too lightly, and he had come up with an additional punishment for them, which he announced to them the following day. They were to write an essay — ‘Yes, both of you together, so that you learn that you can work through cooperation, and not opposition!’ — which was to be delivered the following Monday, eight pages in their best handwriting. As a pedagogically instructive subject he had chosen, ‘The meaning of a healthy farming class for our nation’.
Of course that was a red rag to a bull. Böhni wasn’t much good at writing, but on the other hand he couldn’t just let Rosenthal do it. Even if it would have been easy for him, given that Jews, as everyone knew, preferred to work with their heads rather than their hands. At any rate, he tried it on his own, and fiddled around with it until Wednesday, but only managed to get two pages together, and they didn’t make sense at all. Then, when he asked Rosenthal, quite casually and in passing, how far he had got, Hillel just grinned and said he wasn’t planning on making his life difficult if there was an easy way of doing things. He had found a brochure on this very subject, and they could just copy out its introduction, Gerstli would never notice. But he liked to leave such hard work to Böhni — after all, he was supposed to do something as well, because how had Gerster put it so well? They were to work through cooperation, not through opposition.
Böhni furiously refused, these were Jewish tricks, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with them. But by Friday he hadn’t got any further, and on Sunday he wanted he wanted to go to the international in the Hardturm, Germany versus Switzerland. So in the end — ‘But you take responsibility!’ — he had to accept the suggestion and set about copying. But the brochure, and this was one of Rosenthal’s typical tricks, wasn’t a nice Swiss pamphlet from the school library, as Böhni had expected, but a Zionist treatise with one of those Jewish candelabras on the title page. But the text, one had to admit, wasn’t at all bad. The author wrote that a state can only remain healthy if its citizens farm the soil with their own hands, that the sciences still have their significance, but that only agriculture can strengthen a people’s soul. In principle these were all thoughts to which Böhni could not have objected, but he wasn’t happy with where they came from. Besides, when copying it out he had to be as careful as a hawk to see that he always wrote ‘the Swiss’ rather than ‘the Jews’, and ‘the Confederacy’ rather than the ‘Yishuv’. Once he made a mistake and had to start a whole page over from the beginning.
Gerster didn’t notice a thing. He was even very impressed by their observations, and praised them both for their genuinely patriotic way of thinking. Afterwards Böhni could never tell anyone how Rosenthal had bamboozled him. It was another secret between them, which bound them together somewhere between enmity and friendship.
There must be a special word for it.
It was also a part of their special relationship that they squabbled at every opportunity. When, for example. Germany had won the international one nil, the next day Rosenthal asked pointedly who Böhni had really been cheering for, the Swiss or his beloved Germans with the swastikas on their shirts. Böhni replied that he should stay out of it, football was a thing that his people knew absolutely nothing about. Whereupon Rosenthal actually claimed that a totally Jewish team, Hakoah Vienna, had won the Austrian championship a few years before. You could never tell whether he was taking the piss out of you or not.
In turn, Böhni felt superior in practical subjects, and where that superiority was not obvious, one could help it along a little with some little tricks. For example there was a method of making a cow so crazy (by sticking pepper up its arse) that it could barely be milked, and then when it knocked the pail over for the third time, you could say, ‘Oh, yes, these city people, who think milk comes from the milkman.’ At the next opportunity, Rosenthal swung the pitchfork so vigorously that Böhni got a load right in the face, whereupon Hillel apologised very politely, because as an inexperienced city boy he had mistaken a pitchfork for a flail.
As we have said: a very special relationship.
At home Hillel didn’t say much about the Strickhof, but his parents worked out that he had more to do with one of his fellow pupils than the others, and Lea insisted that he invite him to dinner, quite informally, it didn’t have to be a Friday evening with candle-lighting and Kiddush. Hillel wasn’t keen on the suggestion, and kept putting off the invitation; such things weren’t customary at his school, he said, and Böhni certainly wouldn’t feel at ease at their house. But if Lea wanted something, she had a very calm way of insisting on it, and Hillel had no answer to the rhetorical question of whether he was ashamed of his family.
So in the end he invited Böhni. To his relief Böhni wasn’t quite sure at first, and had a thousand excuses. But as is so often the case: precisely because Böhni responded like this, the matter suddenly became important for Hillel, he was even quite offended that Böhni should have baulked, he started over again every day, and in the end even ironically reassured him that he didn’t need to be scared, the feast of Pesach was over, and it would be next year before they needed to slaughter a Christian boy to bake matzos out of his blood. Böhni refused to be accused of cowardice, and finally: a dinner isn’t such a big deal, and it’s soon over.
And so it happened.
Normally they cycled into town, but for some reason Böhni insisted that they take the twenty-two, even though a tram journey like that was just a waste of money, thirty rappen in each direction. When they met — ‘Please be on time, Böhni! My father insists on it!’ — at the Milchbuck tunnel, Hillel had to suppress a smile, because Böhni turned up in his dark blue Sunday suit, and had tied his tie so tightly that he had to stretch his neck even to be able to breathe. He had even brought flowers for Lea, a bunch of pink tulips. They were bred at the Strickhof for the weekly market on Bürkliplatz, and anything that came back unsold ended up on the compost heap. Böhni had wrapped the bouquet in an old edition of the Front, although at the last moment that struck him as unsuitable, so he quickly unwrapped it again outside the front door. He crumpled up the newspaper and stuffed it in his jacket pocket, where it went on rustling all evening.