In the next week Franz spent most of his time with Luke and Rachel. He visited his father every day, and found that the distance between them grew. When he mentioned this to Rachel, she said, “Maybe that’s kindness on his part. Maybe he thinks it best for you to disengage.”
He made more than a couple of attempts to see Saul Birnbaum, for a consultation which would help fix his own mind on his father’s defence; but each time he was put off with a plea of urgent business. So he was thrown back on Luke and Rachel, and was grateful to them, though it puzzled him that they were so friendly. He even suspected Luke of using him for future copy.
Yet it was Rachel with whom he was mostly alone, for Luke went to his newspaper every day, and also spent two hours shut in their bedroom writing at the desk there. Franz was surprised that Rachel didn’t work – wasn’t that expected of every young Israeli woman, even mothers? And why wasn’t she a mother?
“I’m fighting hard against being a good Israeli wife,” she said. “I keep trying to maintain my American identity.”
“Do you still have an American passport?”
“Sure, and aim to keep it.”
She had the frankness he associated with Americans. She explained that, though her parents had come to Israel in ’49, she had remained in Brooklyn with her aunt (her mother’s sister) and her husband. She had just entered High School – Franz was surprised to learn that she was half-a-dozen years older than himself – and not knowing how the emigration to Israel – “the return home, I mean” – would work out, they had persuaded themselves, that was how she put it, that it wasn’t a good idea to interrupt her education. Maybe they were sincere, she didn’t know. So she hadn’t come to Israel except for holidays until she was grown-up, not indeed until she had met Luke, who was then on a scholarship at Columbia.
“I don’t speak Hebrew, maybe you’ve noticed?”
“Between you and me, Franz, I think the whole concept stinks.”
They were on the beach, eating kebabs and falafels bought from a stall. Sunlight sparkled on her salty legs. Her thighs were short and thick; they didn’t seem to belong to the same girl as her sharp-featured, distinguished face. He thought of Alexis striding into the waves, rising out of them with the water falling away from her legs, and of Becky walking naked with the proud self-conscious step of a girl happy in love, from the bed in Alexis’s apartment to the bathroom. There was something to be said for Rachel’s stumpy legs; life was already sufficiently complicated.
“The first evening we met, you said that you thought my father’s trial was necessary. I’m puzzled you should think so. It doesn’t seem to fit with your general view of things. I mean, you seem less than enchanted about Israel.”
“Sure. I didn’t mean it was necessary for me. Quite the reverse, if it pleases you. Only that they couldn’t do without it.”
“Who are they?”
“They’re all around us.” She waved her hand along the beach which was filling up as people, on their way back from their offices, stopped off for a swim. “Don’t you understand? The same way Hitler needed the Jews, so the Israelis need the Nazis. They’re our justification. They’re the justification of all this. So, any time the national spirit seems to be flagging, it’s useful to turn up someone like your father.”
“I see what you mean. But the Nazis’ crimes were real. That’s what’s so horrible.”
She stretched out a towel, crawled on top of it, and lay face down, letting the sun get at her back. She turned her head towards him, keeping one cheek on the towel.
“Sure,” she said, “and if the Nazis had won, he’d be a hero, like the Jews who blew up the King David Hotel.”
“But that was different,” he said.
“Yeah, that was different.”
Luke was always edgy at the start of the evening. This took the form of sniping at Rachel. Most of the time she paid no attention. She told Franz that Luke was stuck on his novel, or rather that it wasn’t going well. His first book, published four years ago, when he was only twenty-two, had been hugely admired, caused him to be recognised as the voice of Young Israel. That made him uncomfortable. It had been a patriotic story; its hero was a young French Jew, whose father had been a Communist zealot murdered by Stalin in the Great Purge. The hero had spent his boyhood hidden in an attic in Paris throughout the Occupation. The combination of these experiences had destroyed the two faiths in which he had been reared. The State of Israel promised to restore him. Then he was wounded, and his wife killed, by an Arab bomb. The explosion cost him his sight. The story was contained in his mind as he struggled behind the bandages to come to terms with these catastrophes.
“Don’t read it. It stinks,” Luke said now. “I blush to think of it, and as for the praise it received…,” he made a vulgar gesture of contempt.
He was proud of the second book, a young woman’s account of her unhappy marriage to a soldier. It had been attacked by the religious press. But the new novel wasn’t moving. So, in the evening, he criticised Rachel’s appearance, cooking, household arrangements, and accused her of frittering her life away.
“I didn’t marry a squaw,” he said. “You won’t believe it, but she has real talent as a painter. Only she won’t work at it. And she was a promising actress, she used to be in the theatre. But now, oh no…”
Rachel laughed, “I was a lousy actress. You’ve said often enough, Schatz, that when you want to damn anyone you call them promising.”
Franz was surprised and moved to hear the German endearment, which, when he was a child, his mother used to employ in addressing him. But the realisation that Luke was having these difficulties made him all the more suspicious of his motives in befriending him, especially when, pouring brandy after supper, he said, “But you must have been curious about your father when you were growing up. Didn’t you ever ask him what he did in the war…?”
“No,” Franz said. “My mother told me not to.”
“And you didn’t ask her?”
“You don’t know my mother.”
“And what did you think when she told you to steer clear of the subject?”
“I believed her. She said it was a painful subject, which would only distress him.”
“I guess it would and all,” Rachel said. “Honey, Franz isn’t in the dock.”
“You have a lovely choice of phrase, my darling,” Luke smiled, and reached for the brandy bottle.
“Well, we didn’t make the world,” he said, “but we sure did inherit it.”
* * * *
The next morning Saul telephoned Franz while he was still in bed.
“I’m coming over right away,” he said. “Wait for me. Don’t go out. Don’t answer the telephone.”
Franz washed, shaved and dressed in a hurry. Then he called Room Service and asked them to send up a pot of coffee with two cups. Saul’s urgency made him anxious, but maybe it was not as important as it seemed. Maybe Saul was the sort of man who postponed things and then insisted they were done in a rush. After all, he had been trying to get hold of him for days and had been stalled time and again. But what could have happened? Could his father have killed himself? How would he feel if he had done so? Or – he remembered the ageing and stupid Nazis in Argentina – there might even have been an attempt at a rescue. After all, everyone knew that the Nazis had friends in Arab countries; and not only friends.
“No,” Saul said, as, without thinking, he met him with a barrage of such questions, “no, it’s not as bad as that. Or as good. I tell you, this case has me in such a spin that I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad.”
This made no sense. Franz wondered if the lawyer was drunk.
“No, it’s you I’m worried about. I feel responsible for you. There’s no reason why I should, you’re a Gentile and the son of a man whom for my sins I am obliged to defend, which I shall do, I assure you, with all the professional competence at my command, but whom in other circumstances I would have been happy to slay with one blow of my fist, as Samson slew the Philistines. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” Franz said, “and thank you for being honest. I’m quite happy to know that that’s the basis on which you are ready to defend my father. It makes it less of a farce.”
He pushed a cup of coffee towards the lawyer.
“So what is it?”
“I’ve let you down, that’s what it is. I promised to try to keep you incognito, and I betrayed that to Luke – you can’t keep any secrets in Israel.”
“But Luke’s, well, I’ve come to think of him as a friend.”
“Sure, and it’s been noticed.”
He slapped a newspaper on the table.
“You won’t be able to read this. It’s in Hebrew. This,” he tapped the paper with the corner of his folded spectacles, “is a popular paper, owned by one of the smaller extremist parties. When we say extremist in Israel, we mean right-wing. Maybe you know that.”
He opened the paper, and pushed it towards Franz. “Look at this.”
The photograph showed him with Luke and Rachel sitting at a café table.
“The caption reads, ‘A Friendship of Equals: Luke Abramowitz with Kestner’s Son.’ The piece is really an attack on Luke, but it also blows your anonymity.”
“Well,” Franz said, “that had to happen some time. But what does it say about Luke?”
His first thought was the fear that this would cost him their friendship, and that the caption was accurate: he had felt it to be a friendship of equals.
“Oh, it’s salacious and scurrilous, but it’s just politics. Luke’s accustomed to this sort of thing. The implication is that he doesn’t give a damn for what the Jewish people have suffered, because he is a rootless cosmopolitan with an American wife and now with Nazi friends. It stinks.”
“It makes no difference to your defence though?”
“No, I suppose not. But I’ve thought it a good idea to fix a press conference, and produce you at it.”
“What good will that do?”
“It will save you from being besieged by journalists seeking exclusives.”
“But I’ve nothing to say.”
“I’ve arranged for it to take place in my office. That way we can control numbers and keep a grip on things.”
There were some thirty journalists and a dozen photographers. Saul had provided a large room which, he explained to Franz, they kept for use by their company clients for annual general meetings and suchlike occasions. Franz wore a dark suit and a subdued tie. Most of the journalists were in shirt sleeves. So was Saul. They sat at a table at the end of the room with a carafe of water and two glasses in front of them. The girl, Anna, who would act as interpreter if necessary, settled herself at the corner of the table, at an angle to Franz, who tried to catch her eye, and extract a smile. The room, despite the air-conditioning, was hot. Some of the journalists were sweating, and Franz rubbed his brow with a handkerchief. But when he touched his cheek with the back of his hand, the sensation was icy. He sat with his hands below the level of the table, holding them together, the nails of one digging into the fingers of the other, behind the knuckles. Saul explained that Mr Schmidt would answer any questions in English or German directly, but that others would have to be translated. There was an immediate request that his answers should be translated also.
“If he answers, as he promises, in English, I don’t think that will be necessary,” Saul said.
“Why do you call yourself Schmidt? Your name’s Kestner, isn’t it?”
“I have been Schmidt since I remember. It’s the name on my passport.”
“Are you denying that your father is Rudi Kestner?” Franz glanced at Saul, who nodded.
“That’s something that, I understand, has to be established.”
“Do you mean that part of his defence is going to be denial that he is Kestner?”
“That’s a question for Mr Birnbaum, not me.”
“But you’re not denying that the man held under the name of Kestner is your father?”
“Oh no.”
“You’ve nothing clever to say about that?”
“I’ve nothing clever to say.”
“Are you a Nazi?”
“No.”
“A Nazi sympathiser?”
“No, I’m not that either.” He hesitated, took a sip of water. “I don’t see how anybody could be that, now.”
“So you don’t deny that the Nazis murdered six million Jews?”
The questioner was one of the two women among the journalists – a thin, black-haired girl with a red, full-lipped mouth, who spoke with an American accent. Saul Birnbaum slipped a sheet of paper towards him: he looked down. “Careful. Minty Hubchik, Yank, v clever.”
“You’re not sure,” she said.
“That’s the generally accepted figure, isn’t it?” Franz said. “I don’t know any reason to argue with it.”
An Israeli journalist: “But it doesn’t horrify you?”
“I haven’t said that.”
“You’re getting a little wide of any mark, friends,” Saul Birnbaum said. “Mr Schmidt isn’t on trial, you know.”
That wasn’t how it struck Franz. Without having done anything wrong, his validity was in question. He was like Isaac, his eyes seeking the alternative ram in a thicket, meanwhile in danger of being sacrificed to the original jealous God. But which God was that?
“What do you think of Israel, Mr Schmidt?”
He stopped before the apparent innocence of the question, gazed at the little old man with round spectacles who had asked it, in a voice so low that it had been necessary to have him repeat his words.
“I’m impressed … by the energy and commitment to a cause …”
The little man scribbled his reply. What could it matter to anyone? Franz looked over their heads at the clock on the wall. The thing had lasted less than five minutes.
“I believe that your stepfather is a General and a minister in the Argentinian government? Won’t your association with this case damage him?”
“He’s a General, yes. I don’t think he’s a minister. Not currently. And I can’t speculate, I don’t know enough about…”
His voice died away. About anything, was what he had really wanted to protest.
“What is your connection with Luke Abramowitz? Is it true that he has signed a contract to write your father’s biography?”
“I haven’t heard so.”
“So what’s your connection?”
“He came to see me. We got talking. That’s all. You’ll have to ask him.”
“Good boy,” Saul muttered. Had the microphone picked that up?
It was the full-lipped girl, Minty Hubchik again, with her hand up.
“Two questions. They’re connected. Am I right in asseverating that it was Professor Eli Czinner gave the tip-off that led to your father’s arrest? And are you still engaged to his daughter?”
Again Saul cut in, “Come, come, lady, you can’t expect the boy to answer that.”
But the intervention was too late to stifle a buzz of excitement, then a babble of conversation, which drowned his words. He leaned over to Franz and whispered that he didn’t need to respond. “Dumb chick, I don’t know why she is letting go of that information.”
There was a silence. Franz looked back at her. She held the tip of her pencil poised against her lips. She knew she was right, and she knew he was uncertain about the second part.
“No,” he said, “I’ll answer. As to the first part of your question, yes, I believe you are right. I understand Professor Czinner’s motives.” He paused, wanting to add, “So does my father”, but he didn’t know whether Saul would approve, or would feel hampered by the admission. “As to the second part, the answer is yes. Simply yes.”
“How will you feel” – the questioner was a large, red-faced man, in a white linen suit, and he spoke English in a rich and superior voice which Franz recognised from the movies as belonging to a certain type of English actor – “how will you feel about this marriage if your father is sentenced to death, as I assume he may very well be?”
“Come, come, Mr Murison,” Saul said. “You’re infringing forbidden territory in that assumption.”
“No assumption, dear boy, merely a hypothetical question…”
“Then I would guess that Mr Schmidt can’t tell you how he would feel in a hypothetical situation.”
But of course he could. It was not after all merely a hypothesis; it was a question he had been living with for months now. And the answer was blunt: “I’m responsible for my own life, I’m not going to be constrained by what an older generation did or chooses to do. And that goes, must go, for Becky also.” So he said it, and blushed. He had given them a headline, a ridiculously Hollywood story.
“It was good, your press conference.” Saul clapped him on the shoulder. “You carried it off, boy.”
But what was the point of it? He couldn’t see that anything had been gained or averted. He couldn’t escape the feeling that, in talking with all the honesty he could muster, he had made a fool of himself. And he still wasn’t sure that Luke and Rachel would want to go on seeing him, and that prospect dismayed him.
“Luke is furious. He says we have to go south to recover. We’ll pick you up at the hotel. OK. What time are you back from seeing your father? Eleven? Fine. He’s so furious he’s going to take the day off work. See you – We’ll go to Ashkelon. You ought to see Ashkelon. Down the coast. OK.”
“Coming to terms, that’s the thing,” Rudi stretched himself. Sunlight glanced through the narrow grille, and lay on the table like melted butter. “I detached myself from those who had been my colleagues, the clowns or zealots, who in a fit of barely comprehensible folly, abducted your girl, Franz. They wanted to go back, to pretend, you know, that certain things had not happened. Madness. Refusal to contemplate reality. Inexcusable. Now,” he laughed, “I’ve been brought back, but in a different fashion and one which I would have avoided. Yet now that it’s happened, well, it’s happened. That’s all. Do you think this world is a training-ground for spirits?”
The question was inconceivable. That is, it was the sort of question that only students pose to each other. Franz was amazed to hear it coming from the lips of this father, whom he had accustomed himself to think a dull man, mechanical and punctilious in duty, even while he admired and feared him.
“We’ve never talked about the war, Father,” he said.
Rudi lit another cigarette, pushed the pack towards him. The two soldiers, sitting on chairs at either end of the table – so that to a casual observer the four of them might have been engaged in a game of bridge, played at a table awkwardly shaped for the purpose – fixed their eyes on the transaction. Then one of them produced a lighter and lit Franz’s cigarette. Rudi urged the pack in the soldier’s direction, and the offer was accepted.
“The war? We’re going to go over my war in too exhaustive detail. I’m not ashamed of my war. Whatever people say, war is beyond good and evil. Katyn and Dresden and Hiroshima prove it. It’s proved every day in war, only less dramatically.”
“So what do you accuse yourself of?”
“Credulity. When I was working on these remote sites, with so little in the way of congenial company, I used to read every evening. Have you read Jung, Franz? No? Do so. He wrote an essay called ‘Hitler and the Germans’. I think that was the title. It was certainly the substance. I wish I’d read it in 1933 – but it wasn’t written then.”
He laughed again, and smiled.
“It makes everything so clear. I learned one passage by heart. ‘He’ – that is, Hitler, Franz – ‘represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him. But what could they have done? In Hitler, every German should have seen his own shadow, his own worst danger. It is everybody’s allotted fate to become conscious of and learn to deal with this shadow. But how could the Germans understand this, when no one else in the world can understand such a simple truth?’”
He looked at Franz as if to say: there, everything is now understood, and therefore to be forgiven; what a clever boy I am to have seen this.
Rachel sang as they drove down the coast to Ashkelon. She sat in the back seat of the Citroen 2CV and sang the blues. They crossed over a stone bridge, and Luke told Franz that the Egyptians had been defeated there in the War of Liberation.
“This was the limit of their advance, and so the bridge is called ‘Ad Halom: Till Here’. It was, we said, as Isaiah says, ‘in that day shall Egypt be like unto women; and it shall tremble and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of Hosts, and the land of Judah shall become a terror unto Egypt…’”
“Typical misogynist brute,” Rachel said, “‘Egypt shall be like unto women.’” She switched registers: “‘Go see what the boys in the back room will ’ave,/ and tell them I’m ’aving the same.’”
The road dipped towards the sea and was fringed with flowering shrub roses. Sycamores and cypresses grew abundantly. To their right sprawled the ruins of Ashdod, the Philistine city of Dagon, the fish-headed god. Then they turned off the coast road.
“There is something I want you to see,” Luke said, and the car climbed, past a reservoir, to a high point from where they had a view of the coastal plain and the sea on one side and the mountains of Judah rolling and heaving to the east. The road wound between hills and then emerged on a plateau covered with fields of maize and wheat and orange groves. He stopped by a water-tower.
“A land flowing with milk and honey,” Franz said.
“This is Negba,” Luke said. “It means ‘To the South’. The kibbutz here was established in 1939. It was wiped out in the War of Liberation. Then it was rebuilt. Only this water-tower, which was used as a lookout point, survives from the original settlement.”
They got out of the car. Luke led them to the military cemetery and stopped before the War Memorial. It showed three huge figures, two men and a girl. They were holding hands and their chins were tilted upwards in heroic style. Its simplicity was impressive, but it also reminded Franz of posters he had seen celebrating the heroes of the Soviet Union. He was about to remark on this, then saw there were tears in Luke’s eyes as he gazed at it. Luke turned away, entered the cemetery. It was very neat and very still, and the stones were white. Only the sound of a tractor disturbed the silence. He stood before a grave, his head bowed. He had a rose in his hand. Franz hadn’t seen him take it from the car. He bent down and laid it on the grave.
“Thank you, Michael,” he said.
Then he turned away, and took Franz by the arm.
“You don’t mind that I brought you here,” he said. “I wanted to, to help you understand. Michael was my brother. He was half grown up when I was born. He was killed in the first hour of the war, defending this kibbutz where he had been accepted only six months before. His faith in Israel’s destiny was complete. This kibbutz looks to the south and God promised Jacob, ‘Thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east, and to the north and to the south, and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ Michael never doubted that: all the families of the earth, it’s significant, isn’t it?”
They lunched at a little restaurant in the old town of Ashkelon. It was cavernous, with an arched roof that dated back to the Middle Ages at least.
“Perhaps your Crusaders, perhaps the Moslems, who knows? It was a great trading city. Twenty years before your First Crusade Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela reported that there were two hundred Jews here, and that merchants came from all quarters of the world.”
“Though possibly not Germany,” Franz said.
They ordered red mullet, which tasted fresh, of the sea, and pigeon, because, Luke said, they used to worship the dove in Ashkelon, and Roman coins from the city depicted the bird.
“Herod the Great was born here. According to Josephus, he built baths and fountains, costly fountains, that were admirable for size and workmanship.”
“A jerk,” Rachel said. “You could say as much of Albert Speer. As for the Massacre of the Innocents, doesn’t that make him a prototype Hitler?”
“There’s some dispute as to whether it actually took place.”
Franz took a piece of Arab bread and mopped up the gravy on his plate. He remembered his father and Dr Czinner both doing that at the Engineers’ Club, on an afternoon when life stretched before him, green and level as a polo field. But the pang of memory was momentary. He was caught up for the first time in the romance of Israel, in the sense that what was happening here now represented a new stage in a journey that had extended from the beginning of time, that the Jews had been offered what was denied to others, a second entry to their Promised Land. Wasn’t it in fact a third chance? There had been the return from the Babylonian captivity, though he was hazy about that.
“I wish I knew the Bible better,” he said. “I feel I’m missing so much.”
He was envious of Luke. Rachel shared something of this envy; that was why she was showing herself so crabby. And this, he realised, had been conceived by Luke as a day of reparation. He had been wounded by that newspaper caption, even though as a novelist he should have been accustomed to criticism, and as a journalist have known its worthlessness. But it had flicked an open wound. He was permitted to criticise Israel, but resented criticism of his criticism, for that suggested that he was some sort of enemy, whereas he knew he criticised as a lover, in the same way as he got at Rachel for making less of herself than she could.
Luke ordered a second bottle of wine. It was pale yellow in colour, with a taste of almonds and came from vineyards near the border with Lebanon.
“Was Goliath from Ashkelon?” Franz asked.
“No, Gath, a few miles away. Kiryat-Gat, it’s called now. Gath means a winepress cut in the rock. They are excavating the mound of old Gath now. Some people think it is not Gath itself since the findings so far offer evidence of a Jewish settlement, rather than a Philistine one. But they’ll come to that, I’m sure.”
“Does it matter?” Rachel said. “I don’t see that it matters.”
“Of course it matters.”
“Why? You don’t wear a skullcap, you’re not religious. You’re a modern man, what does it matter to you?”
“The Bible matters because it is the history of our people. It is important that it be justified.”
“Can’t you be honest, Luke? What you really want is evidence of the Covenant, anything that will let you believe that the Jews have a God-given right to this land, even though you don’t believe in God, as far as I can see. It makes me sick.”
She threw down her napkin and ran out of the restaurant. She stumbled on the top step and her sunglasses fell to the ground, but she kept on running. Franz rose, picked them up, and looked out: she had disappeared round the corner. He returned to the table to find Luke pouring more wine.
“Rachel’s afraid of Israel,” Luke said. “She hopes I may become such an international success that I am offered a Chair at an American university. A visiting professorship anyway.”
“And would you take it?”
“It would be desertion.”
Becky’s father could have got out of Germany long before the war. He was already sufficiently distinguished, sufficiently competent and experienced in any case, to have got a good job in England or the United States. What had made him stay on? Obstinacy? The feeling that that too would be desertion? And if he had not remained, perhaps none of this would have happened – but that none would have included his own meeting with Becky.
“Do you believe in Fate?”
“In what sense?”
“The obvious one, I suppose. That things are bound to happen.”
“Oh no. We are each masters of our fate, responsible for our actions.”
“And yet you believe, deep down, that God gave this land to Israel?”
Luke smiled. He shook his head, took a sip of wine, and, not looking at Franz, said, “Nothing makes sense, does it? Nothing coheres. And yet we are obliged to behave as if that wasn’t so.”
“My father has been reading Jung. Does that surprise you?”
“No. It’s natural, if he is a man of any worth, that he should be seeking explanations.”
“Is Rachel all right? Should we go after her?”
“No. Leave her alone. She’ll come back when she’s ready.” He twiddled his wine glass. “Have you ever read The Bacchae?”
“No. What is it?”
“A Greek play. Euripides. Don’t look so surprised. Why shouldn’t a Jew read Greek?”
It was, he said, a play for the twentieth century. Franz would understand why when he read it.
“But what happens?”
“Pentheus, King of Thebes, and his mother Agave, deny the divinity of Dionysus, the god of darkness and passion, and instead insist on the supremacy of reason, order and light. But it is too much of a strain, this denial. Agave becomes a secret devotee of the god she has tried to deny, and Pentheus is tempted to spy on his mother and the other worshippers in their secret rites. Inflamed by the god, they seize the king and tear him into pieces.”
“Yes?”
“You have to effect a synthesis, I suppose. You can’t become whole if you deny truths merely because they are uncomfortable.”
“Are you suggesting that I am like Pentheus?”
“God help us, we all have our moments when we resemble him. It’s one of the greatest temptations there is.”
They did not notice Rachel return, until she laid a camellia in front of each of them.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”
“You dropped your sunglasses. Here you are.”
There was no singing as they drove back to Tel Aviv. At the hotel Franz found a telegram from Becky, saying her flight arrived the following evening.
He stood at the desk, imbibing the telegram, and was turning away to mount the stairs to his room when a voice called him from the bar.
“Mr Schmidt.”
“Yes?”
He didn’t move. It was dark in the bar and the voice came from a corner.
“I’ve been waiting for you. Won’t you join me?”
It was the English journalist in the crumpled linen suit, whom, that morning, Saul had treated with a wary respect. Franz sat down.
“You made quite a hit at our little press conference, dear boy. Have some brandy.”
The Englishman snapped his fingers to attract the barman’s attention. There was nobody else in the bar.
“We are not quite strangers,” he said, “though that may surprise you.”
He was sweating despite the air conditioning, a big man, with thin sandy fair worn long at the back, bloodshot eyes, a fleshy nose and a small pursed mouth which gripped a little cigar that he didn’t trouble to remove as he spoke. He put his hand on Franz’s leg just above the knee and squeezed it. It was a light squeeze and he had removed the hand before Franz had time to protest.
“Charlie has told me so much about you, and now I find you are engaged to marry Nell’s daughter. Amazing.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
The waiter brought brandy for the Englishman and beer as he had requested for Franz.
“But that’s why I wanted to see you, dear boy. You see, I was once married to Nell, a dear girl, but restless; it didn’t take. I soon realised that her emotions were already committed elsewhere: to Eli Czinner as it transpired. Only, she thought him dead, when we married. It was a long time ago, in the war.”
When he talked of the war his voice lightened. Some of the cynicism he wore like obsolete armour fell away from him. If Franz had read Ivan Murison’s autobiography, he would have found that the war chapters sang. There was a tune there he had lost since. Yet his success, springing from the miseries of ravaged Europe, had coarsened him. Ever since, the pity he had then experienced had been directed inwards. He had spoken of the war as “setting him on the road to fame”, and it had indeed made him for a few years a best-selling author. But when, in the middle Fifties, the vogue for war books had vanished, there had been nothing to put in its place. In the Savile Club he began to find that people drifted away from his corner of the bar. He spent long afternoons at the Gargoyle or the Colony Room. A flirtation with television came to nothing, there was something antipathetic about the image he offered on the screen. He had retired to Italy to write novels. A couple were published, without success. Then he had covered the Eichmann trial for an American magazine, with only a flicker of the real flair he had once exhibited. But it had been sufficient to persuade a Sunday newspaper, whose editor remembered The German Catastrophe and Twilight of the False Gods, to recruit him for his present assignment on the Kestner case.
Franz hadn’t known that Becky’s mother had been married twice. Did Becky herself know?
“It will be interesting to meet Nell’s daughter. You spoke so movingly about her, dear boy. When is she arriving?”
What made him think she was coming?
“I’m waiting to hear from her,” Franz said. “Why did you ask me that question this morning?”
“I wanted to hear your answer. Simple, isn’t it?”
“You must have known I couldn’t… and who is this person who has told you so much about me?”
“Charlie? Carlo Bastini. I am sure you remember the little Bastini. He speaks of you so … warmly. I call him Charlie.” He looked at Franz over the rim of his brandy glass. Franz’s cheeks warmed; it might be too dark to see the blush.
“Small world,” Ivan Murison said.
“I haven’t seen him in years.”
“A dear boy. Very sensitive. He remembers you so well. Why, he even carries your photograph. He has several of them, you know.”
His fat fingers delved into his breast pocket and brought out a tattered brown envelope. He extracted two prints and pushed them across the table towards Franz. He stubbed out his little cigar and lit another, looking over the flame at Franz, who leaned forward and picked up the photographs.
“It’s a pity the light’s not better. They’re only snapshots, of course.”
The top one showed Franz sitting on a wall or parapet. He was wearing only a pair of shorts. One leg was drawn up, the knee nestling under his chin, the other hung loose. He was smiling. It had been taken, Franz recalled, on the terrace of the hacienda Bastini’s stepfather rented a dozen miles out of the city. He had gone there, once, for the weekend. It was a weekend that often returned to him at night. Shortly afterwards, Bastini and his family had left Argentina.
“It’s charming, isn’t it?” Ivan Murison said. “Very pretty and quite innocent. Touching that Charlie’s kept it. Look at the other, dear boy. These are only copies, of course.”
It showed Franz lying back on a low chair beside a swimming pool. His legs stretched, long, towards the camera. He might have been naked – there was what could have been a pair of wet trunks discarded to the left of the chair – but you couldn’t tell because another figure, with his back to the camera, was kneeling in front of the chair, his body between Franz’s legs, his head lowered. He wasn’t recognisable, but the shape was a boy’s and the mass of soft dark wavy hair was Bastini’s. One of Franz’s hands stroked the hair or was buried in it, the other lay or perhaps pressed on the boy’s shoulder.
“As I say, they’re copies. We have the negatives. Charlie’s stepfather took it, with a telescopic lens, I suppose. He liked doing that sort of thing. Of course, you know he was the first man to seduce Charlie, if seduce is the right word, which I suspect it isn’t. Charlie claims it was because of him he married his mother, but then Charlie likes to preen himself, as you will remember. You know, I’m almost jealous. This snap” – he retrieved it from Franz and gazed at it – “makes me feel young again, it’s so Greek, don’t you know.”
He took his cigar from his mouth and smiled, “You know, I really think you should have some brandy.” He called to the waiter. “Leave the bottle with us, will you,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“You know, Charlie was thrilled when he found out about your father. He said he could just imagine you in SS uniform. Of course, you were cadets together, weren’t you?”
“What do you want?”
Ivan took the bottle from the waiter and passed him his American Express card.
“Co-operation, dear boy. I’m not sure what form it will take, but I intend to write the book about this case.”
And he began to ask Franz all sorts of questions about his early life, his relations with his father, his memories of Rudi in Argentina, any expression of political, moral or philosophical opinions. It was thoroughly and professionally done. To his horror, Franz found himself answering, and taking trouble over his answers, as the brandy sank in the bottle, and confused memories disturbed his imagination.
He didn’t remember getting to bed. He woke – as he recorded in his journal, along with an account of this meeting and of his day at Ashkelon – with the sensation of Bastini’s rather damp mouth nuzzling his cheek. It must have been the last wisp of a dream as it slid into misty oblivion. He lay there for a long time with that past invading him, tried, in a surge of conscience, to banish it by summoning up the disgusting picture of Bastini and Ivan Murison together, as (it was clear) they must often have been. But conscious effort of the imagination did not work; it was displaced at once by Bastini’s hands fumbling at the snake-belt and buttons of his flannel shorts. He leaped from his bed, naked, and took a shower, seeking with the rush of cold water to dispel shame. But shame returned, when, after coffee, he sat at the writing-table with his journal before him.
“If Father feels no guilt,” he wrote, “is it because the past is truly dead for him, because he feels himself to be an entirely different person, and so is able to make no connection between the man he is now and the man who ordered these atrocities? If so, that is a failure of imagination. It must be. And yet isn’t it only by stifling the disturbing imagination which memory breeds that we make it possible for ourselves to advance from one stage of life to another?”
Rachel was making dumplings for goulash. She took pleasure in binding the flour with egg and suet, and forming them into neat balls. She ran her finger round the bowl, and licked it; it was an action recovered from childhood. As she worked she listened to the wireless. Someone was telling a story, a folk-tale, about a rich man who gave all his money to the poor (who can always be found to accept it), and retired to the desert to live in a community of hermits and worship God. One day, the story-teller said, the man was sent to town to sell two old donkeys. The donkeys were past working, but the hermits still hoped to get a good price for them. He stood in the marketplace, and soon a man looking for donkeys approached him, and asked if these were worth buying. “If they were worth buying do you think we’d be selling them?” the man replied. Then another prospective customer came up and asked why the beasts had hollow backs and ragged tails. “Because they’re very old,” the man said, “and we have to twist their tails to make them move.” So this customer went away and the word got round and no other buyers came near. In the evening he took the donkeys home, and his companion who had been trying to sell them with him told the other hermits about his unhelpful answers. Then they all asked him why he had answered buyers in this fashion. “Do you suppose,” he replied, “that I left home and gave away all my cattle, and sheep and goats, and even my camels, to make myself a liar for the sake of two wretched old donkeys?”
The man who was telling the story laughed, and said life was like that. He said it was extraordinary how people cut off their nose to spite their face and then protested how handsome their nose still was, calling on others to admire the way it grew.
This explanation puzzled Rachel. She didn’t think that was the point of the story at all. She wasn’t sure what the point really was, but nevertheless it seemed in an obscure way significant to her. Then it struck her that it was really rather like life in Israel, for an American like herself at least. Perhaps she had given away camels in order to tell lies about two old donkeys?
Rachel finished making the dumplings and put them in the fridge. She had invited Franz to bring Becky there for supper, and then hesitated, wondering if he mightn’t prefer to spend the first evening of her time in Israel alone with her. But he had seemed almost relieved – yes, there was no almost about it, he was relieved – to hear her invitation. Maybe that wasn’t surprising.
She listened to Luke’s typewriter in the next room. That meant he thought a chapter in the novel had reached the stage when he could lay it out for others to read. It was a step forward when she heard the machine going, even a step towards the USA. There was no chance that Luke would accept an invitation there until he had got his novel done. She had been afraid that his obsession with Franz and the Kestner case would make it impossible for him to continue the novel. But it didn’t seem to have worked like that. On the contrary, Franz had acted as some sort of agent who had released the flow. Rachel began to sing, then broke off, in case the machine stopped.
If the man had told lies about the donkeys, in what way would he have been worse off?
She put the question at supper. They had eaten the goulash and dumplings, which were spicy and very good, going well with the red wine from Sharon which Luke had chosen. Conversation had been slow, not just on account of the excellence of the food, but because each of the four was conscious of areas of talk that seemed to them forbidden territory. Consequently all welcomed Rachel’s question because it lifted the conversation away from minefields of the immediate and personal, and into the abstract and general.
“Of course, he should have told the necessary lie,” Luke said. “He had been sent out to sell the donkeys and had accepted that commission. Well, he was wrong to do so if he was going to chicken out on the deal.”
Rachel knew that Luke was talking to provoke. He didn’t really believe that the end justified the means, though he sometimes pretended he did. Maybe in some contrary moods, it wasn’t just a pretence. But now he was twisting their tails as if they had been donkeys themselves.
“That’s all very well,” Franz said. “But you know, his question was a good one. What was the point of giving up all that if it wasn’t to live in some better relation with truth?”
“If Luke’s right,” Becky said, “maybe he should have refused to take the donkeys to town.”
“Sure, OK,” Luke switched sides, “but if he had said, no deal, someone else would have done it, and told the lie. So the man would have been guilty by omission. He would have been an accomplice in guilt, like everybody who stands by and sees injustice being done.”
“Like the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan,” Franz said.
“OK, OK, that’s enough Christian one-upmanship.”
“But,” Becky said, “what could he have done?” She looked pale, and tired from her flight, and beautiful as an autumn morning. “I suppose he could have argued with his companions that they had no right to offer the donkeys for sale.”
“Then he’d have got clobbered,” Rachel said.
“So?” Luke said. “You must suffer to be virtuous. That’s the whole point of religion, all religions, I guess.”
“There is a German saying,” Franz said. “At least I think it’s a German saying, Mamma always used to quote it with a shake of her head as something her own grandmother used to repeat: ‘You need a long spoon to take meat with the devil.’”
“That’s a proverb in every language, I guess,” Rachel said.
“Yeah, and the man who made the spoons went bust,” Luke said.
“Why was that?”
“No demand.”
“Why, do you mean people no longer want to sup with the Devil?”
“Not so. I mean they don’t choose to stay on such distant terms.”
Everyone laughed. Luke poured more wine. The sound of a woman singing in a neighbouring apartment carried through the night; she was crooning in an American accent, a song that had been popular before the war. Then they found they were out of cigarettes, and Luke and Franz went down to the corner shop to fetch some. Luke would have gone alone, but Franz insisted on accompanying him. He was halfway down the stairs when it occurred to him that, after that newspaper article, Luke might prefer not to be seen with him, in his own quarter of the city. But it was too late to turn back, and he knew that if he told Luke what he had been thinking, he would receive a proud and indignant denial.
“Franz has been telling me how kind you have both been,” Becky said.
“Oh no… it’s nothing.”
“Do you think he minds me coming?”
“I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“I think he does, probably. It makes things more complicated for him, and they were complicated enough already. But I couldn’t not.”
Later, when they were alone, Rachel said to Luke, “She’s crazily in love with him. Like I used to be with you when we were first married.” So, she didn’t add, she’s afraid of him, and for him.
But, before then, when they were still all together, smoking and drinking wine, and starting conversations which stopped all at once, not because they were embarrassed with each other, but because the talk threatened to lead them into deserts where none of the four wished, or dared, to travel; when they were all the same acquiring a sense of being a quartet, making the music of their own generation as an act of liberation from history; then Becky said, out of the blue, “My father used to tell me folk-tales when I was a little girl.”
“Fucking folk-tales,” Luke said.
“They were the only Jewish things he did for me, I mean, that’s not grammar, doesn’t make sense, they represented the only sort of Jewishness he offered to me. You don’t know my father, Luke. He’s awfully down on other Jews. That’s why he didn’t come to Israel after the war, he used to say, too many bloody Jews. He’s really anti-Semitic, I tell him, for a Jew.”
“Ought to meet Rachel,” Luke said, putting his arm round his wife, hugging her, and then giving her a kiss on the cheek. “They’d be great buddies.”
“Of course I don’t remember most of them, and those I do usually puzzled me.” Becky crinkled her brows to prove the puzzlement lasted. “There was one about a Jew who worked for a Christian prince. He got across the prince, I don’t know how, and was sentenced to death. So he said, ‘Your Excellency, let’s make a bargain. You give me a year in which to teach your dog to talk, and if I don’t succeed, kill me at the year’s end.’ Well, this appealed to the prince, nobody knows why, maybe he just wanted a talking dog, and so he agreed. So the Jew went home, and all his friends said, ‘Crazy guy, have you gone quite mad? How can you teach a dog to talk?’ ‘So, maybe I can’t,’ the Jew said, ‘but a year is a long time. Much can happen. Perhaps the prince will die, perhaps the lessons will kill the dog. Or, who knows? – perhaps the dog learns to speak after all.’”
She told the story in the accents of a Jewish comedian, and then blushed, because that was how she had been accustomed to tell it, it was how her father had told it to her, and it didn’t seem right here, in Israel, where the Jews had no need to make a comedy of themselves or apologise for being.
Luke said, “Well yes, but the dog didn’t, did he? Still, I see why your poppa told that story.”
“Oh do you,” she said, “oh, I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose you’re right. I thought he just found it funny.”
“Fucking folk-tales,” Luke said again.
“Mind you,” Becky said, “I do think it’s funny.”
* * * *
“They are nice, aren’t they?” Franz said. “I told you they were.”
They were walking home, arm in arm, in a mood that was both lazy and lively with anticipation. A breeze blew from the sea, soft as love’s fingers playing over the cheek. That morning each had been nervous of the night; now they stopped and kissed under a high wall, with the scent of lemons around and the sound of Chopin coming from an apartment block across the street. There was even a moon.
“Yes,” she said, “I like them. Rachel’s on edge though, isn’t she?”
“Everyone’s on edge, here. It’s a place where you feel things may happen at any moment. Not like Argentina.”
“But things happen there.”
She didn’t add: look what happened to me.
“They’re incredible, even so,” he said. “In Argentina, any action is a sort of protest against despair.”
They strolled on, alone, in the night street, with Chopin fading into silence. She had been suspicious of Luke and Rachel; she couldn’t understand how they had come, as it were, to adopt Franz, to take him under their covering wing. It didn’t make sense in the circumstances. Then she saw them all together, at the supper table, saw the look in their eyes, and she knew that there would always be someone willing to do this for Franz, that it was perfectly natural. It was one reason why she loved him herself, if it was also a reason she resented.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t want to,” he said. His left arm lay under her neck, tickled by her hair, and he stroked her left arm and her breast, just above the nipple. “It really frightened me.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because of what you said that day. That’s Jewish flesh.”
“Oh that.”
“I’m no closer to understanding him,” he said. “Every time I visit him in that neat antiseptic visiting room, with the two soldiers watching over us, a chill enters the air, though in fact the room is overheated.”
She had never been able to imagine what he hoped to achieve by coming here. She found the whole thing odd. When she first met Franz, and loved him almost at once, he had seemed indifferent to his father. Oh yes, he respected him, in his old-fashioned way, was perhaps somewhat in awe of him – which was gauche and youthful and lovable – but didn’t give her the impression of anything more. She had been able to envision a married life in which Franz’s father represented little more than the dullest sort of dutiful Christmas present, and perhaps lunch twice a year. Why should he matter more now that he stood revealed as a monster? Was Franz simply reacting, again in an awkward and immature fashion, to the glamour of notoriety? Or did he feel that he had an essential part in a terrible drama that was being enacted? But the truth was: the drama was a damp squib. She could see its ending so clearly. For them it was merely a matter of holding on, six months, nine months, until it was over and they could resume their life. And yet she had made that remark – “that’s Jewish flesh” – there was no getting away from that.
He hadn’t dared ask her why she had come. And now that they had made love, and it was all right, they had found each other again, perhaps he would be even more frightened to put that question. Which she didn’t know that she could answer: except to say, I came to make love to you, for fear that if I didn’t we would never be able to do so again.
“I didn’t know that your mother had been married before.”
“Why should you? It’s not something she talks about. I don’t suppose it’s the sort of thing people do talk about. I only found out myself by accident.”
“Well, her first husband’s here. He’s a journalist or something. He made himself known to me the other night. I didn’t like him.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I think he’ll make trouble if he can.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nobody can make worse trouble than there is.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s my father, this time. He intends to come to give evidence.”
She screwed round to kiss his mouth. Their legs intertwined. They pressed against each other, bone against bone.
“It can’t make any difference,” he said.