‘Rosenthal, Hillel.’
‘Hillel? How do you spell that?’
‘His name’s actually Heinrich,’ said Böhni.
‘My name is Hillel. It’s a good Jewish first name.’
‘A Jew? Great,’ said the constable.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It means we’ve got one of each. Our commander’s been saying for ages, “That’s the only way we can make an example, so that there’s peace in this city at long last.”’
‘But we weren’t fighting with each other.’ It isn’t easy to argue when you have to press a bloody handkerchief to your sore nose at the same time.
‘Then you can tell that to the judge,’ said the policeman. ‘Except it won’t interest him. Who against whom — it’s completely irrelevant. Paragraph 133. Disturbance of the peace. You’re liable for prosecution just by being there.’
‘But that’s not fair!’
‘You should have thought of that before,’ said the policeman. ‘Take them away!’
He was in a hurry. Once you’ve finished the day’s work, no one can stop you having a beer.
65
Herr Grün’s illness dragged on. The fever had subsided, certainly, and his lungs sounded quite normal again, but he just couldn’t get back on his feet. Arthur said he had noticed such things in other patients, but most of them had been much older people. Rachel would have to imagine it as something like a flood, where someone would cling on to something with the last of their strength and keep themselves above water. If he lost his strength and let go, it would be hard for him to grab hold of anything else.
That might certainly be the case, Rachel said, although she would have preferred the doctor to have given her an effective remedy rather than fine words. But be that as it may, she was a busy woman and didn’t have time to play the Samaritan all the time. She was responsible for fifteen members of staff, and you hadn’t time to hold hands with each individual.
On the other hand…
When Herr Grün lay in bed under his bedcover like that — a new bedcover, of course, with real down, she’d made sure of that — when he just lay there like that, above all when he had just woken up and hadn’t yet had time to put the old grumpy mask back on, he had a quite different face. His smile, if he had such a thing, he still kept in the basement, but to remain with the image, the door was already open a crack.
And besides…
No, that wasn’t it. The fact that Frau Posmanik always greeted her as submissively as if the next person after a daughter of Herr Kamionker the factory director would be the Prophet Elijah, followed by the moshiach in person, had nothing whatever to do with it. She didn’t care for flattery. Not she. A professional woman has no time for such shmontses. And Frau Posmanik had only been after leftover swatches of brocade. No, that was certainly not why she went all the way to Molkenstrasse.
But…
She was interested in Herr Grün, she didn’t dispute that. She really knew her way around people, Oh yes, she had had her experiences, and they hadn’t always been the most pleasant, but she didn’t understand this man. There were a number of things about him that just didn’t fit together, a suit that he’d begged from various different places, trousers here, jacket there.
If she wanted to make conversation with him, as one should when visiting a patient, he wouldn’t open his mouth, you had to drag the words out of him one by one. But then when little Aaron came into the room — he visited the lodgers several times a day, in spite of Rachel’s strict reminder that Herr Grün had to get better and needed peace and quiet — when he knocked at the door, twice slowly and three times quickly, nobody knew what that was supposed to mean, the patient sat up on his pillows, even though that had taken a lot out of him at first, and started entertaining the boy. Yes, entertaining him. You might have thought the bed was a stage and Aaron had bought a ticket. Herr Grün had all kinds of silly poems and song lyrics that no sane person would ever have learned by heart. Aaron couldn’t understand most of it, he was far too young, but he listened to it all with a beaming face and sometimes actually squealed with pleasure. Then his younger siblings poked their heads into the room and wanted to join in the fun. But Aaron sent them out with a severe expression. ‘Uncle Grün has to get better, and needs peace and quiet.’
Even the oranges that Rachel brought, Herr Grün shared with the boy. And they cost a fortune, now that it was summer, and Rachel had had to pay for them out of her own purse when there wasn’t enough in petty cash at the shop. Not that she would have said as much to Herr Grün, heaven knows what he would have thought.
But he could have said thank you.
‘Do you actually have to be a child to be treated decently by you?’ she once asked, whereupon Herr Grün nodded very seriously and replied, ‘It would be an advantage.’
No, Rachel really didn’t have time to make patient visits every day, certainly not if it wasn’t appreciated. Luckily there were other people for this kind of thing, people who weren’t as tired as she was in the evening, who could shut their grocery shop at seven on the dot, and who had never heard of last minute commissions and overtime. Generally speaking, when a person is always alone and has no real family, it’s practically a mitzvah to do find something sensible for him to do.
Désirée took on the task without asking too many questions. She didn’t just attend to the patient, but looked after the Posmanik family as well. On her visits she always brought a box of groceries and wouldn’t even let anyone thank her for it. She was happy if anyone would take it off her hands, she claimed, in her field it was hard to judge precisely how much she needed, and if you’d bought too much then it was better for it to be eaten than to go off. She found a job for Herr Posmanik in the warehouse of a pasta factory, and even made sure that his wife dropped by every week and collected his pay packet in person.
‘She’s an angel,’ said Frau Posmanik to Rachel, who replied, ‘Well, if she has time on her hands.’
When she paid her visits Désirée didn’t just sit by Herr Grün’s bed and wait for him to chat to her; she preferred to make herself useful. One day, when she was cleaning the window so that the bit of sunlight that wandered into the courtyard at the back could also find its way into the room, he suddenly said, ‘You were very fond of him.’
‘Of whom?’
‘The person you lost.’
‘How do…?’
‘It’s obvious,’ said Herr Grün.
Désirée rubbed away at a piece of putty that was stuck to the glass and just wouldn’t go away. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was very fond of him.’
It was so quiet in the room that the drill sergeant could be heard issuing orders in the parade ground.
‘I once had someone like that,’ Herr Grün said after a pause. ‘My best friend. His name was Blau. Not really, of course. That would have been too much of a coincidence. But it looked good on the posters.’
Désirée didn’t turn around and went on cleaning. In the years of her solitude she had become just as good a listener as Mina had once been.
‘His real name was Schlesinger,’ the voice behind her said. ‘Siegfried Schlesinger. But because everyone called me Grün, we had the idea that he should be Blau. Grün and Blau. That was our act.’
Herr Grün — whose name wasn’t Grünberg, Grünfeld or Grünbaum, but really Grün — had appeared in cabaret, never in the really big Berlin venues like the Chat Noir or the Kadeko, but always in Friday theatres, so-called because the artistes received their wages once a week and not every morning after the performance as they were in the small clubs. His speciality had been the double act, with his partner Schlesinger, who called himself Blau because it looked better on the posters.