Irma’s face was full of admiration at such cunning.
‘Every time you’re in the bathroom, hold your hands under ice-cold water for one minute.’
Never in his whole life had Arthur had such an attentive listener.
‘And then make sure someone holds your hand, and shake a little.’
Even Fräulein Württemberger, in a one-to-one class with Martin Heidegger, could not have listened with greater devotion.
‘And soap. If you rub some in your eyes, they will turn red and produce tears.’
‘But that will sting!’’
‘Only if you can stand it, of course.’
‘I can stand anything,’ Irma said proudly.
‘Can you also swallow soap?’
‘Then I’d feel sick.’
‘Good.’
Irma looked at him admiringly for a moment. Then she blinked at him, shook as if she already had soap in her mouth and asked anxiously, ‘Does it make you very sick?’
‘Quite sick,’ said Arthur. ‘Soldiers used to do it so that they didn’t have to go into battle. It can even give you a fever.’
‘Fever?’ she smiled dreamily as if he had promised her a particularly lovely present. ‘Then I’ll do that.’
When they came down from the hill, Irma was holding his hand.
‘No dragons or hostile armies,’ Moses reported.
‘Very good, squire Moses,’ said Arthur, and saluted, although in all likelihood that wasn’t the custom among knights in armour.
After his consultation with the Women’s Association children — a scald from kitchen duty, a sprained ankle from sport — when he was back in his topolino and driving down into the valley, he sang quietly to himself.
Zurich, 10 June 1937
Dear Frau Pollack,
Yesterday I was in Heiden again, and spent a most enjoyable hour with Irma. Interesting, by the way: every time she laughs, her squint gets worse. Have you ever noticed that? (Stupid question. Of course you have. You’re her mother.)
Together we practised making yourself convincingly ill without exaggerating too much. At first Irma was very disappointed, I think. She likes drama. What did you call her? A diva. If it was up to her, she would be miming the closing scene from La Bohème once a day. At least. Do you like the opera? (Forgive me, that was another stupid question, I’m sure you have other things on your mind.)
Moses has grave concerns about his sister, and I couldn’t really take them away from him, even though I did my best to reassure him. Irma and I have never dared to let him in on our conspiracy. We fear he might blab sooner or later. (The scribble on the last word is because I used a Swiss phrase that you mightn’t have understood. Sometimes I think that if all the words in all the countries meant the same thing there would be no more wars.)
Moses did a drawing for me. It’s on the wall in front of me as I write this letter. The picture shows your family, with a very big father who has put his arms around the others and is protecting them. It must be very hard when such protection suddenly is no longer there. But somehow in these times it is almost reassuring that it was a traffic accident, and hence something impersonal.
Please write and tell me how your plans are progressing.
Kindest regards
Dr Arthur Meijer
PS: (I don’t think I’ve ever written a letter without a PS.) I hope you won’t misunderstand me if I refer to the chance nature of a traffic accident as something reassuring. I have here a patient whose back is covered with scars, and imagine that he will never be able to forget the faces of the people (people?) who did that to him.
64
At the Strickhof the pupils slept in rooms of six, and they were expected to make their beds with military precision, the sheets smoothed flat and the woollen blankets given an edge as if with a ruler. The shoes had to stand as if on parade, laces tied in a bow, under the bed — only the smart shoes, of course, there was a wire shelf near the front door for the dirty work boots in which one had tramped around in the fields or the stables. Kudi Lampertz, who was also in charge of the rooms, had been a corporal in military service, and held the view that it was only order in one’s belongings that led to order in one’s head.
The only untidy thing that he was unable to do anything about was the locker doors. It was an old tradition in the Strickhof that everyone was allowed to pin up whatever he liked on his own locker door, however odd or tasteless it might be. Even caricatures of the teachers had to be tolerated there, and even much worse things than that. Once Lampertz complained to the headmaster about the photograph of a blonde with a shamelessly revealing cleavage — he never went to the cinema, so he didn’t recognise Mae West — and Gerster replied with one of his strange jokes: ‘Let him have the picture. It’s probably his mother.’
The iconoclastic controversy in which Hillel and Böhni now became embroiled, and which finally led to the fateful bet, was not about film stars, but about idols of a quite different kind. Böhni started it, by hanging on his locker door — just to annoy Rosenthal, in fact — a picture of the far-right leader Dr Rolf Henne, standing at the microphone at a National Front meeting, his left thumb hooked in his belt and his right hand sticking into the air; it could have been seen as a rhetorical pose, or as a Hitler salute. Hillel countered with a photograph of Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist organisation, he too photographed delivering an address, but without any big gestures, his hands resting on the lectern, an academic delivering a lecture. Böhni looked at the face, the bald head and the little beard and asked, ‘Who’s that meant to be? Lenin?’
Next he brought in a poster that he’d kept at home in Flaach for almost four years, because he had thought it was funny even as a boy. Under the promise ‘We’re clearing up!’ an iron broom was sweeping away three kinds of undesirables: fat cats with top hats on their heads and fat cigars in their mouths, Communists with the hammer and sickle on their hats and Jews with hooked noses.
Hillel said nothing about it, but just put up a new photograph: a shomer on the plain of Chule, peering alertly out across the landscape, blond and tanned. The gun over his shoulder and the resolute, manly features, the eyes narrowed into the sun clearly signalled, ‘We Zionists won’t put up with anything, and are prepared to defend ourselves.’ The photograph was generally appreciated in the six-man room, and Kudi Lampertz said he hadn’t thought Hillel was interested in cowboys.
To escalate matters, Böhni actually wanted to get hold of a photograph of Hitler, but then he started feeling uneasy, so instead he merely jibed at the shomer. Far away in Palestine, perhaps the Jews had balls and knew how to use a gun, he said, but here in Switzerland he’d never seen one at the shooting club. He wasn’t casting aspersions at anybody, people weren’t all the same, some had timidity in the blood, and were startled by the slightest bang.
Whereupon Hillel — he was eighteen by now, and you can’t let such accusations go unpunished — naturally had to declare that he was willing to take up Böhni’s bravery challenge any day, whether on a trip in the box-cart or wherever he liked. And thus the bet was sealed after lights-out in front of witnesses, which went as follows: Böhni was to determine a test of courage, but lest he come up with something impossible, he himself must be willing to submit to it. The loser, it was solemnly decreed, must make himself available to the victor as his personal servant for a whole week, and obey all his orders, make his bed, clean his shoes, indeed, if he called for it, even butter his breakfast bread. Böhni, already sure of his victory, described how he was going to go stomping specially through slurry every time his shoes were due to be polished.