‘I understand it very well,’ said Désirée.
At two in the morning, when the audience had gone, they met up with their colleagues. They sat in the cold smoke of an empty auditorium and asked the same questions over and over. They called themselves ‘the temporary ones’. No one knew who had invented the expression, but everyone used it. And had thus already given himself his answer.
They were only there temporarily, all of the ones who had been released from the camps because the Olympic guests needed entertainment. The gigolos who had once again swapped their clogs for patent leather shoes: temporary. The masculine women with their monocles and starched shirt-fronts: temporary. The cabaret artistes with the funny lyrics and sad eyes: temporary.
The dead on leave.
It was all just for a few weeks. After the Games they would be rounded up again.
Should one try to escape before then? That was the question.
And how best to do it? That was the problem.
There were a few optimists among them, and Schlesinger was one of those. ‘We have an agreement with them,’ he said. ‘We’ve fulfilled our part. We appear again, and in return they leave us in peace afterwards. Of course they will close our venues again. I’m not naïve. In future we’ll have to do something else. Anything. Cart bricks about on a building site. If need be. But they won’t lock us up again. What good would it do them? We aren’t dangerous to them any more.’
Grün couldn’t persuade him otherwise. There’s always someone who thinks you can strike a deal with the devil.
For three weeks they appeared on stage. For three weeks people laughed.
Guten Tag, Herr Grün.
Guten Tag, Herr Blau.
And then, on the very last day, when Siegfried Schlesinger still refused to abandon his blind hope, clinging to it like a child to a favourite cat that had been run over by a car — no, it isn’t true, it isn’t dead, I’m just not going to believe it! — on the very last day Herr Grün didn’t come on stage.
‘I’m a skilled practitioner,’ he said into the silence of the night. ‘I knew what was on the cards. I went to Vienna, where I had friends, I just took the night train. It wasn’t even difficult. I had fake papers, and the border guards were dozy. Once I was there, I found out that they’d all ended up back in the camp. All rounded up again.’
‘They ordered Schlesinger to tell them where I was. He didn’t know, but they tried to beat it out of him anyway. This time they didn’t just break his nose.’
A beetle flew over their heads, rumbling like a plane.
‘Yes,’ said Herr Grün, ‘they let us go. That was the worst thing they did to us.’
All of a sudden he stood up and walked to the edge of the hill, which after a low wall falls down to the Limmat. He spread his arms, it looked in the moonlight as if he was about to pray or argue or fly away, and then Herr Grün whispered something. ‘Du bist beslozzen in minem herzen,’ whispered Herr Grün. ‘Verlorn ist daz slüzzelin, du muost immer drinne sin.’ The key is lost, you are there for ever. It sounded almost like Swiss German.
Then he came back to the two women, stopped in front of them, impatient again, and quickly finished the story, the way you sometimes rush to the end of a bedtime story when you can’t wait to clap the book shut at last and turn out the light. ‘Then I crossed the Swiss border on foot. Wladimir Rosenbaum got hold of a work permit for me. He knows an official who likes to meet up with ballerinas. Shall we go?’
Their footsteps rang out in the sleeping city. And there was no conversation for them to drown out.
First they brought Rachel home, and then Herr Grün insisted on walking Désirée to Morgartenstrasse as well. Outside the door — she had already opened it — he stopped and took off his hat.
‘I’ve been doing some thinking,’ said Herr Grün. ‘Even though one can’t actually say that. You don’t do thoughts. They do themselves. They eat their way through your head like worms through wood.’
‘And where have your woodworms crept to?’ Perhaps Désirée was smiling, but it was impossible to tell in the darkness.
‘You have lost someone you were very fond of,’ said Herr Grün. ‘That is obvious. You’ve been alone since then. That is obvious too. And I…’
‘No,’ she said.
‘We go well together.’
‘No, Herr Grün.’ She had expected his question and formulated the answer long ago. ‘We are too similar. Two left shoes, bent in the same direction. But two left shoes don’t make a pair.’
‘I’m not that much older than you.’
Now Désirée really was smiling, you could tell even without any light. ‘And you aren’t that much older than Rachel either,’ she said.
‘Fräulein Kamionker?’
‘Yes,’ said Désirée. ‘You need someone you can argue with.’
Her lips ran softly over his without really touching them, and then the door had closed behind her and the key turned in the lock.
Herr Grün didn’t bring Rachel flowers, and she didn’t put a picture of him on her desk. Stilclass="underline" the relationship between them was noticed, and there was much talk in the kosher clothes factory. Not just because Rachel was the boss’s daughter, although of course that made the story even more interesting, but because Joni Leibowitz opened a book on the subject. You put a franc on a particular date, and the one closest to the day the engagement was officially announced won the whole pot. So, for example, early dates were much sought-after because it was said that Rachel and Herr Grün had been seen together at the cinema, You Are My Happiness with Beniamino Gigli and Isa Miranda, and even during the big aria they hadn’t looked at the screen once, so preoccupied were they with each other. Then again it was said that the couple had been seen arguing loudly over a coffee in the Old India on Bahnhofplatz, which meant the whole thing was over. Joni revealed this with hand-rubbing satisfaction, because as banker he had reserved nil for himself, which meant: if no shidduch had happened within six months, the whole pot went to him. So sure was he of his win that he had already spent, as an advance, some of the stakes he was supposed to be administrating. ‘Rachel will never marry,’ that was his firm conviction, because she had after all, nearly twenty years before, fended off his advances, and that could mean only that the woman was frigid.
Both the rumours were incidentally true, and false. Herr Grün really hadn’t heard anything of Beniamino Gigli, not, however, because he had been using the darkness of the cinema to canoodle, but because he had fallen asleep during the first act. And that in turn had to do with politics. The Frontists had decided that the scantily clad dancers in Wladimir Rosenbaum’s revues were undermining public morals in a typically Jewish way, and to prevent graffiti and broken windows a round-the-clock guard had been mounted around the Corso. After a sleepless night even the most musical of love stories can’t keep you awake.
The argument in the Old India had actually happened as well, but anyone who had bet for that reason on a failure of the relationship was backing the wrong horse by miles. Rachel and Herr Grün enjoyed arguing with one another, as two jazz musicians enjoy improvising variations on a given tune together. And Rachel had to admit that Herr Grün was by far her superior in verbal combat, or rather: she would have had to admit it if the admission of any kind of weakness had not been so alien to her nature.
Her Grün complimented her, and she insulted him for it. Or else she insulted him and he complimented her about it. Désirée had been right: they needed one another.
At first they didn’t see each other very often. By day Rachel sat in the office, and in the evening Herr Grün was in the Corso. Then they gradually stole more and more time for each other. He still had his room with the Posmanik family, but he no longer slept there every night. ‘He has so much to do that he spends the night in the theatre,’ Frau Posmanik explained to little Aaron.