‘What’s your opinion, Herr Böhni? Should one accept such a plan?’
Böhni would have liked to give him the right answer, just to stop having all these questions fired at him. But he didn’t know what Herr Rosenthal wanted to hear. So he said very carefully that at first glance that all sounded very reasonable.
That was an unfortunate move. It was extremely unreasonable, Herr Rosenthal thundered, as could be proven with reference to a thousand historical examples. Founding a state in such a small territory was pure suicide, above all when that small territory was itself divided by a foreign corridor, and one could only hope that the World Congress in the Stadttheater…
Where the Stadttheater suddenly came into it Böhni had no idea, and his confusion was visible.
‘The World Zionist Congress,’ Lea explained helpfully, ‘is meeting in Zurich this year, and at the Stadttheater.’
Böhni nodded, even though he didn’t really know what Zionist meant. The word had cropped up in the brochure that he had copied out for his punishment essay, and in the Front the pro-Jewish Basler Nationalzeitung was always mocked as a ‘Zional Zeitung’. But that probably wasn’t the same thing.
‘… that the World Congress will reject this suggestion once and for all.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Hillel, and was suddenly no longer indifferent, but to Böhni’s surprise absolutely furious. ‘What you’re saying is complete nonsense.’
‘Hillel!’ his mother said, trying to calm him down, but father and son had argued too often about this subject, and so they could start up again right in the middle of an old quarrel, with a flying start, as they called it in the six-day race.
What his father was coming out with was total nonsense, Hillel said. Of course they had to found the state, even if was only a few square metres.
And excuse me, what good would that do, Herr Rosenthal inquired quite tartly.
It was only if one finally took a first step that other steps could eventually follow, said Hillel, and brought his fist down on the table, making the tea glasses dance. If you wanted to wait for the British or the League of Nations or a good fairy to agree to a Greater Israel one day, then one could equally well decide to spend another two thousand years in exile. What good had it done, spending all those centuries praying every day for the chance to return? None at all! Now that a practical chance seemed to present itself, they had to grasp it, and not make unrealisable demands and be left empty-handed in the end.
That was a short-sighted view, his father contradicted, that was practically fanatical. A state of one’s own was by no means the most important thing, and exaggerated nationalism had never led to anything good.
So, said Hillel, that was exaggerated nationalism, and could his father perhaps explain where all the refugees from Germany were supposed to go, if not to their own state?
It was regrettable that so many people were being driven out of Germany, said Herr Rosenthal, but in both the literal and the figurative sense no state could be made with them, because they did not come from conviction, but only from Germany. Besides, the refugees were a passing phenomenon, Hitler wouldn’t stay in power for ever, and by the time such a state was founded in Palestine, National Socialism would have faded from the scene. It wouldn’t keep going for long.
Actually Böhni would have liked to contradict him on that point, but he didn’t get the chance to speak, and it was better that way.
Luckily, said Hillel, the reasonable Zionists would definitely be in the majority at the World Congress, and not reject the Peel Plan without further ado.
It was very questionable, said Herr Rosenthal, whether there could even be such a thing as a reasonable Zionist.
Whereupon Hillel pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. ‘Come on, Böhni, we’re going!’
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Lea tried to mediate. ‘What sort of things are you interested in, Herr Böhni?’
‘He wants to get back to his room on time,’ said Hillel. ‘That’s the only thing he’s interested in.’ According to the rules of the Strickhof, farmers in training had to spend the night in the school, which was only sensible when you had to be back up at five o’clock in the morning for milking. No exceptions were made even for rare city pupils like Hillel.
‘There’s a bit of cheesecake left over,’ said Lea. ‘Shall I wrap it up for you?’
‘Sure,’ said Hillel sarcastically. ‘Böhni still has a page of his favourite paper in his pocket. That would be the ideal wrapping for a piece of kosher cake.’
The hasty departure was a bit like a flight, and on the tram back to the Irchel — the twenty-two to the Milchbuck had stopped running by this time of night — Hillel was in a bad mood, and not saying a word.
‘I would never dare contradict my father like that,’ Böhni said, trying to start up another conversation after they got out.
‘I hope your father doesn’t talk as much rubbish as mine.’
‘To be honest: I didn’t quite understand what it was actually about.’
‘You can’t understand, either, with all that Fröntler crap you fill your head up with.’
If he hadn’t been so annoyed with his father, Hillel wouldn’t have yelled at Böhni like that. And if Böhni hadn’t felt so ill at ease all evening he wouldn’t have reacted so sensitively and given Rosenthal a shove. Either way, regardless of who started it, on the way from the tram stop to Strickhof they fought for the first time. It felt really good venting their tempers like that, they rolled on the ground almost with pleasure, in spite of Böhni’s good blue suit, and it actually felt good as they beat each other’s noses bloody.
Their pleasure wasn’t visible to the naked eye, however. If someone had walked past he would have thought the two young men were trying to kill each other.
When it was over, and neither of them had won, they had come strangely closer to one another. It didn’t make them friends, certainly not, but neither did it make them enemies. They were not mates, and not chaverim, but something different, for which there must be a special word.
61
Arthur wasn’t one of those bachelors who knew how to operate a stove. When he came back to his little flat after work he heedlessly stuffed something into his mouth, a bit of chocolate or a few slices of salami, whatever came to hand. So when Désirée paid him a visit she always brought along something she had cooked herself. As she heated it up in his kitchen, Arthur cleared up or arranged his papers and magazines into manageable piles. He laid the little table with the fine Sarreguemines crockery from the Baden flat. He had inherited a whole cupboard of it, enough for the big family he would never had.
With melancholy self-irony they called these evenings they spent together the ‘lonely hearts’ ball’, because they had both come to terms with the idea of spending their lives alone. Since Alfred’s death Désirée had seen herself as a widow, and even though her grief for him had settled into a scar, any interest in another man would have felt like infidelity. Arthur had slipped into being alone as a drinker slips into alcohoclass="underline" with no conscious decision, but also with no prospect for change. When they sat there together, both alone, their conversation was almost like that of an old married couple, they repeated the same phrases over and over again and felt quite at home in them. When Arthur had emptied his plate, for example, he always said, ‘A family of one’s own would be nice.’ And Désirée replied, ‘When it comes to that, let’s swap flats.’