They ignored the rings. He had, so as not to lose them, fastened them to his key-ring, and they probably thought they were worthless pendants.
He hadn’t packed much, he planned, they planned, to travel back the next day, so the officials found nothing that might have been described as contraband. But then, when he was starting to think he had passed the test, they moved on to the anti-epidemic examination. In Germany they were in the process of freeing themselves from vermin, and one had to be alert to ensure that no new ones were smuggled in. They cut open the seams of his jacket with a razor blade, but found neither lice nor fleas inside, and the new tie that he had packed for the ceremony they dipped in the inkwell, for disinfection, they said.
Then, very suddenly, their examination was over, there was probably a break in their timetable, or else the game had gone stale. He was allowed to get dressed, slip into his heel-less shoes and pack his belongings again. They even gave him a piece of twine to tie up his suitcase; they had only been doing their duty when they pulled out the bottom, to ensure that it wasn’t double.
The next train left in three hours, they informed him considerately, thirty-four minutes past two exactly, and no, they couldn’t let him get in here, this was purely an official stop, and use by private individuals was not permitted. But he was welcome to walk back to the border station, it was only a few kilometres, just keep following the rails, he was bound to get there in time, although walking without heels was a bit of an effort. They waved as he left, and one of the border guards who had proved particularly humorous during the procedure, called after him, ‘Goodbye, Charlie!’ — ‘He shuffles like Charlie Chaplin,’ he explained to the others, but they weren’t cinema-goers and didn’t join in.
Breathless and drenched in sweat Arthur caught the next train. The rage that he wasn’t allowed to vent on anybody stuck in his throat, a lump that couldn’t be swallowed or spat out. On any other day and on any other journey he would have turned around, immediately, he would have gone back to Zurich and hidden himself away in his flat.
But it wasn’t just any day or any journey.
The second-class carriages were all full; in the end he found a seat in a compartment full of travelling salesmen, who bunched up reluctantly for him. With his broken shoes and the twine around his suitcase he probably looked like a tramp. As he sat down, he pushed his jacket together behind him so that they didn’t see the ragged seam.
The same three guards checked him this time again, but they left him in peace and wished him a pleasant journey. They had probably decided they had had enough fun with him for one day.
He had set off from Zurich early in the morning, because he had wanted to have enough time in Kassel to freshen up in a hotel room. Now he would get there at the very last minute. If indeed he had enough time.
No, they weren’t late, the conductor reassured him. He didn’t know what it was like in Switzerland, but here in Germany the trains were punctual.
You had to admit, said an artificial honey salesman, that many things had improved. In his field at any rate, agreed a representative in leather goods, boots in particular were selling like mad. Of course one couldn’t agree with everything, a third began, there were things that actually shouldn’t have been happening. But the others didn’t want to talk politics, they preferred to get on with their card game.
Photographs hung over the seats in the compartment: festively decorated buildings with half-timbered facades and mountain-tops reflected in romantic lakes. ‘Germans, go on holiday in Germany!’ it said underneath. In one picture a girl in peasant costume carried a bunch of flowers in her arm and smiled shyly from under her beribboned bonnet.
‘I don’t even know what she looks like,’ thought Arthur.
He should have asked her, of course, he should have asked for some photographs, but at first he hadn’t even thought about it, and now there was censorship, and you didn’t know who read the letters. Everything had to look perfectly natural, as if it had all been discussed and agreed. There should be nothing to suggest that the marriage was about anything other than a Swiss passport.
So he hadn’t even formally proposed, in his letter he had acted as if everything was long since resolved between them. Without advance notice he had written to her to say that he, for his part, had the necessary papers for the marriage contract, and very much hoped that she would soon have them as well. He had also received confirmation: for the wife of a Swiss citizen, immigration was not a problem.
Irma and Moses sent their greetings and were already looking forward to showing her Switzerland. ‘Particularly the city of Zurich,’ he had added in brackets.
She had replied just as matter-of-factly, in a curt letter without surprises or objections. She just reminded him — she actually wrote ‘remind’ — please under no circumstances to forget to bring his certificate of non-Aryan descent, otherwise they would assume at the register office that he, being Swiss, was of German or congeneric blood, and then marriage to a Jewess would not be permitted.
So he had asked the Israeli Religion Society to confirm his membership, and stupidly kept the officially accredited paper in his passport, in which his religious affiliation was not recorded. If only he had simply put it in his pocket… ‘Meijer’ had a good Swiss ring about it, and they would probably have left him in peace.
François or even Hinda would have warned him against such recklessness, but he hadn’t told his siblings anything about his journey, his wedding trip. They would just have advised him against it. François would have listed, point by point, all the reasons why the business should not go ahead, never under any circumstances, and Hinda would have shaken her head and said, ‘Really, Arthur, one can overdo the idealism.’
For the second time in his life he had asked for a woman’s hand, and again it was a woman he didn’t know at all.
Any more than he had, that time before, known Chaje Sore Wasserstein. At least he had seen her, that evening in the tabernacle. And had immediately felt obliged…
He didn’t even know what she looked like.
Perhaps she was ugly. Not that it would have mattered, of course not, but if you were going to be sitting opposite one another at the table every day, if you even had to sleep in the same…
He had asked Dr Strauss, the lawyer, it didn’t concern him personally, he had said, it was one of his patients, but he would be interested, purely out of curiosity, what the conventions were in such a situation. The authorities examined everything, said Dr Strauss, dropped in after a year or two and checked whether the marriage actually existed. They rang your doorbell without warning, and had them show you the bathroom, whether there were really two toothbrushes in the tooth-mugs. They looked at the bedroom.
The bedroom.
Arthur couldn’t imagine that side of things.
He didn’t even know what colour her hair was.
Perhaps he would stand outside the register office and not recognise her.
Nor she him.
He had once heard about a woman, in a very Orthodox community, who had been brought together with her husband by a shadchen, and when her veil was lifted under the chuppah for the first time, she found him so ugly that she’d thrown up.
But people said it had been a happy marriage anyway.
Would she expect him to kiss her?
He was fifty-seven, and was worried that he would look awkward.
Ridiculous.
Fifty-seven.