But then Böhni did come up with an irrefutable argument. ‘The department stores,’ he said. ‘They’re finishing off the small businesses. Epa, for example. Or Jelmoli.’
‘They’re Italians.’
‘If you fall for their names! Meier, for example, with his department store, his name isn’t even Meier. He writes his name up on all the shop windows and it isn’t even his name. But we’ve… they’ve carried out a few improvements on that. Did you know he’s a Jew?’
Hillel thought of his baptised Uncle François and nodded. ‘Yes, I knew that.’
‘There you have it!’ said Böhni.
And so it went on all day. Neither of them convinced the other, no one could have expected that, but the hours passed.
Not that they talked about politics all the time. Their most frequent subject was the Strickhof, and how headmaster Gerster would react to their sentence. There was something in the school regulations about ‘blameless students’. It could be interpreted in various different ways, but that they were now blameful — was there even such a word — there could be no doubt, and if Gerstli went stubborn on them, they would be flying out of the school in a high arc.
A disaster.
Böhni, normally a fellow of few words, couldn’t stop telling Hillel about the grave consequences that such an expulsion would have for him personally. He would have to creep home like someone who had wanted to make something better of himself and had failed in his task; the rich farmers’ sons would laugh at him and the girls in the village wouldn’t so much as look at him. And his parents… Böhni knew very well what his time at school meant for them: two years with one pair of hands too few on the farm, and no money to take on a labourer.
Hillel also thought out loud about how his parents would react. His father would point out that he had been right — ‘What business did you have at an agricultural college? That’s goyim naches,’ he had always said — and Adolf Rosenthal wasn’t the kind of person who would ever forget such a defeat. He would rub Hillel’s nose in the story at every opportunity, and Hillel wouldn’t have a single argument to silence him. But worst of all — except he didn’t tell Böhni this — Hillel was worried about what Malka Sofer would say. And he had only ever talked to her properly on one occasion. Then she had described him as childish over his adventure with the box-cart, but had still acknowledged that he was going to an agricultural college so that he could later be a useful member of society in a Jewish state. If he was expelled now…
Later it turned out that this worry at least had been superfluous. Malka had received her permit for Palestine and had left without saying goodbye.
‘Maybe we should write Gerstli a letter,’ Hillel said thoughtfully.
Böhni shook his head, with his mouth full. They were sitting over lunch, Böhni, whose turn it was today, on the stool, and Hillel cross-legged on the lower bunk. It was beef roulade, tough as saddle straps, with overcooked Brussels sprouts swimming in a sweetish sauce. Hillel had let Böhni have his roulade — he couldn’t get used to treyfene food, was his excuse — and ate only the bread, of which they were given half a loaf per day.
Böhni choked down a mouthful so big that his Adam’s apple practically burst out of his throat, and said. ‘You’re crazy, Rosenthal. What would you say to him?’
‘That school is important to us, blah blah, that we love it, that the trial has been a salutary lesson, that in future we will be model students. All the things my father likes to hear.’
‘What does your father have to do with it?’
‘Teachers are all the same.’
Böhni wasn’t happy about the idea. Like many people who aren’t good with words, he had far too high an opinion of all things written. ‘That’s why you believe in the Front,’ mocked Hillel. Böhni was in favour of doing nothing at all, just drawing in his head and hoping the whole business would come to nothing, at least as far as the school was concerned. After all, there had only been a small item in the papers, with no names. And besides, by the time they had sat out the three hundred francs, the summer holidays would be coming to an end; so they wouldn’t miss a single day of lessons. And Gerstli might have gone away or been otherwise engaged and wouldn’t hear a thing about the whole affair. No, the letter was a very bad idea.
They didn’t agree, but the argument about Hillel’s suggestion still filled the whole afternoon, and in fine weather, when you had to look out through the barred windows to where the sun was shining, the afternoons were always particularly long.
The next day Böhni was called to the visiting room. There was a man waiting for him there.
‘My father?’ he asked, quite startled, and involuntarily reached for his throat as if there were a noose there that someone was about to pull tight.
‘I don’t think so,’ said the warder. Today this was a cosy, elderly officer who had seen everything in his long years of service, and who set a great deal of store by his knowledge of human beings. ‘An accountant or a teacher, I would say. He’s wearing a funny polka dot bow tie.’ He looked at the docket that had to be filled out at every prison visit. ‘Gerster’s his name.’
Headmaster Gerster.
Böhni trotted behind the warder as if going to his own execution.
For the first time in more than two weeks Hillel was alone in the cell. He had the stool and the beds and the toilet all to himself, and yet it still seemed to him that the room had grown smaller, that it had shrunk like the skin over a wound when it slowly scars over.
What did Gerster want from Böhni? Why was he visiting only him?
He tried to convince himself that he wasn’t interested, he flicked through the Front and didn’t understand a word of what he read there. ‘A Jew as theatre director makes it impossible for Swiss artists to be discovered; a Jew as university teacher influences young academics against the necessary renewal of our nation.’
What sort of renewal?
Gerstli was basically not a grumpy person, but he had said clearly and distinctly that if even the smallest thing should occur… Expulsion, no ifs or buts. Finished, once and for all.
Why was he only visiting Böhni?
There was only a corner left of the daily ration of bread. Hillel pulled a piece out of the sticky middle and shaped it into a grey ball between the palms of his hands. He drew a mouth and two eyes in it with his fingernails. Then he flattened the head with his fist.
How long had Böhni been gone? You couldn’t take a watch with you into the cell, you had to hand it in with your other belongings.
Why had Gerster even come?
And why was he only visiting Böhni?
If he was thrown out of school…
‘Away with the bad apples,’ it said in the Front. ‘We don’t want the plague to spread.’
When the keys rattled outside again, Hillel was lying on the top bunk, reading. ‘A Jew in the editing room suppresses any view with which he is unhappy. A Jew as film distributor seeks only immoral films for his cinemas.’ He didn’t lower the paper when Böhni came in.
‘Come on, Rosenthal,’ said the warder’s voice. ‘Get up, come with me. A visitor for you.’
‘He wants to talk to you too,’ said Böhni.
‘What about?’
‘He asked me who it was who started all this nonsense. The instigator will be thrown out, in the case of the other he will put mercy before justice.’
‘So? What did you tell him?’
‘The truth,’ said Böhni, without looking at him.
The old warden unlocked the cell door from outside and kept the keys in his hand. They rattled with each step that he took, like bells on a harness.