72
The next morning they were at the station before sunrise. If there had been an earlier train, they would have taken it. Arthur was in a hurry to get back to Switzerland, and Rosa couldn’t wait not to be in Germany any more.
They were sitting opposite one another and they were married.
They had set off while it was still dark. Now it was gradually brightening outside, but neither of them felt like looking out of the window.
In this compartment too there was a picture frame above each seat, but the frames were empty. The photographs had probably shown something undesirable, and they’d had no time to replace them.
There was much to talk about, but they sat mutely facing one another, only every now and again saying inconsequential things as one might to a stranger. ‘No, I don’t mind not facing the front,’ or ‘It looks like it might rain.’
He asked none of the questions that really interested him, because they didn’t know where to start. ‘It’s like that first term,’ thought Arthur, ‘when I took the big anatomy atlas home and didn’t dare to open it for two days. I was too scared of having to memorise it all.’
Reality ran after the train and couldn’t catch up with it.
They sat opposite one another.
Her face, he could find no other terms to describe it, was precise, with clear, distinct lines, as if drawn by a draftsman who doesn’t hesitate when he sets down his strokes. A confident nose and a resolute chin. Hair shorter than was fashionable in Switzerland, almost a boyish cut. Her earlobes had once been pierced and were growing closed again. Perhaps she had had to sell her earrings.
‘You’re looking at me as if you want to learn me off by heart,’ said Rosa.
But he hadn’t even got that far. He was only just starting to spell her out.
She wasn’t beautiful, no one would have said that of her at first glance, but then not every woman is a woman for the first glance. It was easy to imagine looking at her anew, over and over again, across a table.
Or from bed to bed.
No, he couldn’t imagine that.
‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, having read his thoughts. ‘We managed that thing yesterday.’
And she suddenly burst out laughing.
‘Like my sister,’ he thought. ‘When Hinda was still a girl, she would suddenly explode with laughter for no good reason.’
Rosa had a very young laugh. And she was the mother of two children, with a fate and with memories that must have hurt.
A young laugh.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But the fact that you actually mistook my friend Trude for the bride… Admit it, you like her more than me! Admit it: you’re sorry that you had to take me instead of her.’
It had been a strange wedding. Even standing outside that town hall, in a suit like a homeless man standing in worn-out shoes at the door of strange houses, begging for a bowl of soup. That was probably what he had looked like. Or when they had been supposed to swap the rings and he couldn’t get them off his key-ring. Tugged away at them and apologised at the same time. Until she took the keys and liberated the rings.
Deft hands.
How the register had tried to give them a copy of Mein Kampf, as was the regulation for all newlyweds, had automatically started saying the words and then broken off mid-sentence because it wasn’t an Aryan wedding and the regulation didn’t apply. Many other regulations, but not that one. How he had then very hastily had them sign the wedding certificate, first the groom, Dr Arthur Meijer, then the bride, Rosa Recha Meijer, née Bernstein, widowed name Pollack, and then the witnesses, Trude Speyer and Dr Saul Merzbach. Rosa had been at teacher training college with Trude; Dr Merzbach had brought her children into the world and, now that he was no longer allowed to work at the hospital, he was her family doctor. Arthur remembered the name; he had read it at the bottom of the health certificate that Irma and Moses had needed to travel to Heiden.
Then, at Merzbach’s house, they had celebrated. Four people eating sandwiches and drinking Sekt. Could you call it celebrating? One bottle of Sekt, and yet Arthur had managed to get slightly light-headed, well, all the excitement, and he hadn’t eaten a thing all day.
After his dismissal from the hospital Dr Merzbach had had to set up a surgery at home; no one would rent him anything. The familiar smell of carbolic soap and cleanliness made Arthur careless, and of course the alcohol and the excitement. When Trude discovered a gramophone in the next room and insisted that the bride and groom dance together, right now, a little mitzvah tantz, he didn’t even try to get out of it. Then of course he had tripped and nearly tumbled over with Rosa. Whereupon Dr Merzbach wanted to give him a pair of his shoes, with heels. No, no, he could happily take them, sooner or later most things would have to be given away in any case. He had made some inquiries: doctors were needed in South America.
But then the shoes hadn’t fit.
Trude, who was good at such things, repaired the seam of his jacket.
Their suitcases had stood side by side the whole time, the picture had lodged in Arthur’s mind, his own, broken and tied together, and her two with the light patches where she had scratched off the stickers, the last remains of beautiful experiences that she didn’t want to be reminded of any more. Two suitcases, she took no more than that from her old life. She had taken her luggage to Dr Merzbach’s that afternoon. She didn’t want to go back to the little room in the house of her uncle with the heart condition.
They spent the night at Dr Merzbach’s too, the few hours until they had to leave again. Rosa slept on the sofa and Arthur in an armchair. They kept their clothes on, and he preferred it that way.
He couldn’t imagine it.
Rosa had asked that no one accompany them to the station, but Trude had come along anyway, and cried a little. Outside it was already starting to rain. Just individual droplets at first, so that you could follow the trace of each single drip on the glass, and then more and more until the landscape blurred as if behind frosted glass.
‘In one of your letters,’ she said quietly, ‘you wrote to say that I should enjoy the good days. Do you think they’re starting now?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
She shook her head. ‘These Goliaths! They even want to be responsible for the weather.’
When she laughed, she squinted very slightly, not like Irma, but still noticeably. He was pleased by the observation. Precious things belong to one much more when one knows their hidden little flaws.
He had been mistaken: she was a beautiful woman after all.
While he…
Would she expect caresses from him? Or even put up with them? Arthur felt guilty again.
At the wedding he had kissed her, of course, but it had had nothing to do with the two of them, it had just been a formality. ‘Sit down, give me your papers, kiss the bride!’ A ritual. When his patients got undressed in front of him, they weren’t really naked either, but had just brought their bodies to him as one takes a watch that has stopped working to the watchmaker.
But she wasn’t a patient. She was…
A slender waist under the flower-patterned dress.
She was now his wife.
Rosa Meijer.
‘Rosa Recha Meijer.’
He must have said the name out loud, because she nodded and repeated it a few times, like someone who wants to commit to memory a word in a new language.