‘Do you know who’s written to me?’ he said, imitating Mimi’s voice. ‘You’ll never guess.’
‘Who?’
‘The letter is from Endingen.’
‘Who?’
‘The father of your friend Anne-Kathrin!’
‘The schoolmaster?’
‘He signs his letter as chair of the Popular Education Association. Which he always talked about. So he actually did set it up.’
‘What does he want from you?’
‘He’s planning a public event: “Arguments pro and contra shechita slaughtering.” In the hall at the Guggenheim. He wants to invite me as a speaker.’
‘Are you going?’
Pinchas carefully folded the letter and put it in his pocket.
‘Do I have a choice?’
27
He hadn’t played truant, Arthur said to himself, not really. You had to go to school, it was even a law. Even if you were two minutes late, there was one on the hand with the ruler, and sometimes even if you just made a face that a teacher didn’t like. He’d never dared just to stay away from school. Even after the chickenpox, when he had a letter excusing him, signed by Janki Meijer in person, even then he had gone back trembling, and even dabbed spots on his face with white zinc ointment so that people really believed he was ill.
But the bar mitzvah instruction, he persuaded himself, that was something else completely. It was voluntary, as you could tell from the fact that it took place not in a classroom but at Cantor Würzburger’s house, in a room that always smelled of sal ammoniac pastilles that the cantor sucked for his voice. Otherwise, for ramming the Torah passages and the droosh down people’s throats, Würzburger was paid a fixed sum; Arthur always had to bring him the envelope at the start of the month. Surely he would be pleased to have to give one lesson less for the same amount of money.
Arthur hadn’t just stayed away, either, he had hatched a plan which, if everything went as it should, would make him invisible in a way for an hour or two. Immediately after lunch, at a time when the cantor, to relax his vocal cords, always took a little nap, he had called in with Frau Würzburger and, coughing violently, told her he was unfortunately a bit feverish, and hoarse as well. His voice had been quite quiet and weak, half out of dissemblance and half out of fear. Did she think, he had asked, that he should still come to the lesson after school? She had most strictly forbidden him to do so, because Frau Würzburger knew, exactly as Arthur did, her husband’s terror of everything to do with hoarseness. So everything had gone as he had expected.
Arthur had worked everything out very precisely. Even if Frau Würzburger were to inquire of Mama, on Shabbos in shul, perhaps, whether her youngest was feeling better, it wouldn’t prompt any suspicion. Arthur was often sickly, and Chanele would only think he’d had his headaches during the lesson again.
He was not practised in these matters. Shmul wouldn’t have had so many scruples; in his school days he had played truant as a matter of course, and always found a fellow pupil to lie for him. And Hinda wasn’t afraid of anything anyway. She had even, when she was as old as Arthur was now, come up with tests of courage, had once gone into a shop where Jews were treated in an unfriendly way, and asked for a hundred grammes of ‘Klaff Tea’, before running away, laughing loudly. Of course the shop-owner couldn’t have known that ‘klafte’ is more or less the worst word in Yiddish that one can use about a woman, but Arthur would never have dared to do anything like that. He suffered from the fearfulness that goes hand in hand with an overactive imagination: it was too easy for him to imagine all the things that could go wrong.
But today he simply had to play truant. On the Gstühl — it had been the main topic of conversation at break-time that morning — the Panopticon had arrived, a first herald of the spring fair at the weekend, and he knew: if he didn’t go there straight away, today, he would have lost his chance. At the autumn fair the same company had once been in Baden, two of his classmates had visited it and reported the most marvellous things, but then the rumour had spread in town that there were objects on display in there that endangered public morals, and all the pupils at the pro-gymnasium had been forbidden to go there. Some had crept in anyway, but Arthur had been unable to summon the courage to defy such an emphatic prohibition, had stood for a long time in helpless longing outside the colourful booth, repeatedly listening to the barker’s patter: ‘Thirty rappen entrance! Children pay half!’ His imagination had had six months to dream of the marvels he had missed, in ever more glowing colours, and meanwhile the pictures in his head had become entirely irresistible. Early in the morning he had pinched three five-rappen coins from his savings box; Shmul had once shown him how to do that with a knife and a knitting needle. All day he had been restless and impatient, for fear that there might be another prohibition this year too, but there had been none as yet, and the old one, or at least one might convince oneself that this was the case, must no longer be valid. So there was something like a gap in the law through which he had to slip today, because tomorrow was Friday, when he went home straight after school to prepare himself for the service, nothing was possible on Shabbos anyway, and at this time of year it got dark so late that he wouldn’t be allowed out after Havdole either. And by Sunday… Not only did the time till then seem unbearably long, the fear of missing the great event for a second time was for once stronger than any prudence.
The Gstühl Square, where the donkeys waited in the summer so that the spa guests could ride on the Baldegg and drink milk still warm from the cow, was almost empty. Only a few particularly early market traders had already secured the best spots for themselves and, with their carts, marked out the future thoroughfares of a town of booths and stands, as adventurous and transient as the gold-digging settlements in California that Arthur had read about.
Two staked bony horses snuffled morosely around in the feedbags around their necks before the Panopticon, which stood there still almost in its under-garments, like Mama before someone’s deft hands fingered all the little hooks into the eyes. The front of the booth was still bare, a forbidding surface of stained canvas, quite without the brightly painted panels that Arthur had gazed at so longingly in the autumn. They had shown a Roman gladiator blocking the path of a charging lion, while a woman in white knelt in the sand with her hands folded in prayer; a man in a turban had whipped along a column of dark-haired slaves with heavy shackles around their necks; a martyr, bleeding from countless wounds, had smiled mildly and forgivingly from below his halo; a knight had fought a dragon and a stag carried a flaming cross in its antlers. All these wondrous pictures were still stored in one of the two huge carts in which, it seemed to Arthur, a whole world could have been transported. They were not, like ordinary removal carts, simply painted with water-resistant dark green paint, but with an oversized portrait of the barker that Arthur remembered so clearly, an imposing man in an admiral’s uniform decorated with all kinds of ribbons and medals, with a majestically twirled moustache, beside which Shmul’s looked as childishly insignificant as a rocking horse beside a dashing steed. The painted promoter pointed with a stick at a panel bearing the inscription: Staudinger’s Panoptikon, Johann Staudinger Wdw. Under that someone had added, in a different colour and in letters that jostled one another in the tight remaining space, Owner: Marian Zehntenhaus.