When the trial was over and his father had been sentenced to death and they were waiting for the appeal, Franz’s way of life fell into a routine.
He rose early and walked up the hill to the Tomb of David from where he could gaze over Jerusalem. Then he had a cup of coffee and a bagel in a little bar, and returned to the hotel. He studied Hebrew for an hour, and then read philosophy. Sometimes he explored the city for an hour before lunch; some days he swam in the pool at the YMCA. He had got himself a visa that enabled him to pass beyond the Mandelbaum Gate into the Old City denied to Israelis. He read the newspapers over lunch: the Jerusalem Post, which was written in English, and the Yediot Hayom which, despite its Hebrew title, was a German-language daily, and usually a selection of the foreign press. He spent the first part of the afternoon in a café, studying the newspapers over glasses of mint tea. At four o’clock he went to the prison for his half-hour with his father. Though they knew him well and were friendly, he was still searched every day. Some of the guards made jokes about it.
“We don’t forget Goering,” one said.
“What do you mean?” Franz asked.
“The Reichsmarshall – poisoned himself, didn’t he?”
But mostly the guards treated him very gently. He played chess with his father, and Rudi told him what he had been reading. He no longer spoke of the past, and he did not believe in his appeal: it was a device which would allow him to play so many more games of chess and work his way through Dostoyevsky’s novels, which he had never read before. “We were stupid to despise the Russians,” he said. “Dostoyevsky … it is as if my own mind is revealed to me.”
When he had kissed his father goodbye (getting a whiff of the aftershave lotion which was delivered to Rudi in tiny sachets every day), Franz went to the American Express office to collect his mail. Becky wrote to him every evening, but the post was irregular and some days there were no letters, others two or three. She always told him how she missed him and longed for him. She was taking a secretarial course with a view to getting a job in London. She and Nell were very short of money. Franz had no worries in that respect; his stepfather was making him a generous allowance. The General was pleased to have him out of Argentina, but he had no need to be anxious; it was unthinkable that Franz should return there. His stepfather told him that the murderers of the policeman, Lieutenant Vilar, had not been found. “It has been thought better to dismiss it as the consequence of his perversion.”
The evenings were the worst time. Melancholy and loneliness hung over Jerusalem as daylight withdrew; the mountains closed in on the city.
There was Kinsky, but Eli was demanding and Kinsky was seldom free. Besides, he was diminished; he had no purpose there except to care for Eli, and that was a penance. With the loss of his independence, his old vivacity was dulled. He had dwindled into a sort of nursemaid and, conscious of what was happening to him, was querulous whenever they spent the evening together.
Sometimes Franz took the bus to Tel Aviv and had supper with Luke and Rachel. In the first weeks Minty Hubchik was there. Then she left, on another assignment, and after that Rachel was often bad-tempered; she drank her wine too quickly and sniped at Luke. When she talked of America now, it was in the past subjunctive, “If we had gone.”
It was better when Luke came into Jerusalem and they had dinner in a little Viennese restaurant in Agrippas Street. Then they talked as they no longer could when Rachel was present. It saddened Franz that they couldn’t talk that way when she was there. The trial, as she had feared, had bound Luke tighter to Israel. But they did not speak of the trial. They talked of literature and history and marriage and the philosophy Franz was reading. He had gone right back to Plato. “Don’t think I see my father as Socrates waiting for death, however,” he said.
“So we are all dreamers,” Luke said. “No life is ever fulfilled. When I write a novel the book that is published is a shadow of the book that was there to be written.”
“And love?” Franz said.
“Sure, the person we love is always someone we have made for ourselves.”
One evening he took Franz to the café in Gehenna where Becky had met Ivan Murison. He felt responsibility for the boy Yusuf.
“After all, I denied him the Côte d’Azur, or wherever,” he said. “Not the Cities of the Plain, I guess he’ll find those wherever he is. But he’s a nice kid. Besides, as Einstein said, the test of Israel is the manner in which we treat our Arabs.”
“When you say ‘our’ Arabs, isn’t that itself a sign that you regard them as inferior?”
“I wish it wasn’t, but it is.”
The boy Yusuf was resentful. Luke persisted. Perhaps he had chosen Yusuf as his own personal Arab; if he did well by him, then Israel could come to some form of accommodation with the Arabs in general. That wasn’t absurd, or rather the principle behind it wasn’t absurd. Everything begins at the personal level; as long as you keep things personal, individual, you can’t fall into the abstractions which allow you to judge people by the label you have attached to them. The boy sat at the table with them, chewing melon-seeds. They drank beer. There was no one else in the dusty garden of the little café.
When Luke went for a pee, Yusuf spat out a melon-seed, and smiled for the first time.
“You like boys?” he said. “You like me? I do what you want.”
He unzipped his jeans.
“Look,” he said, “nice.”
Franz shook his head.
“OK. Is all right. You give me a cigarette.”
“Sure.”
“My friend Ivan tells me about your father. Good man, OK. He has right idea about bloody Jews. Yes, sure has. I think they hang him, yes?”
“Yes.”
All the same he found himself returning there, two or three evenings a week. He sat in the warm twilight and watched the moon rise over the mountains of Judah. Sometimes he talked with other Arab boys, Yusuf’s friends. They all spoke English of a sort. They made him think of Argentina: they spoke of great things which they would do, tomorrow, if only … and they spread their hands. They quarrelled with each other and went home arm in arm. They sipped Coca-Cola and cursed the United States. Sometimes one of them would have a car, not his, or only for the night, and half a dozen would pile into it, and roar into the darkness. The air of that unfinished improvised place hummed with the murmur of their discontent, as they spat melon-seeds at chickens and claimed hits.
One evening he arrived to find Yusuf with a bruised eye and swollen lips.
“Bloody Jews beat me up. Go home, fucking Arab queer. Is my home, I say. So they beat me up. Bloody Jews.”
He grinned and touched his lower lip with his tongue.
“Bloody sore. So I’m queer, I say. Should be OK for you, I don’t make no Arab babies, yes? So they beat me up. Crazy.”
Franz had resumed his journal:
I’m tempted to introduce Yusuf to Kinsky. Mightn’t it be the answer for both? And I wonder if Luke was right to drive Ivan Murison away. Mightn’t it have been better for Yusuf to have gone with him? What future is there for him here?
Hatred is felt as liberation. When you hate, everything is permitted to you, and you become an avenging God. It doesn’t matter what the object of your hatred is: Jews, Arabs, queers, women, the poor, the rich, blacks. As soon as you admit your hatred you are filled with what I think must be exultation. The object of your hatred becomes automatically your inferior, your enemy, your prey.
I should have known this in Argentina, but I’ve had to come here, and listen to my father speaking as he would never have spoken if he had not been brought here, to endure his trial, to understand this.
But something more horrible: when Yusuf described what had happened to him, he frightened me. It was like my dream of Bastini.
And then I saw that this liberation is entirely illusory. It’s a cheat. When you surrender yourself to it, you do not become free, for how can a prisoner be that?
I tried to write some of this to Becky, but I couldn’t. I love her, I need her, I cannot imagine life without her, and yet I can’t speak to her about things that matter. And something else: the more I know my need for her, the more I want to escape. Ivan Murison recognised this, I think Luke suspects it. I even found myself wondering if Luke took me to the café in the hope that I would, or as an experiment? Because the thing is, as he confessed to me, or almost confessed, he too is in a different way in love with Becky. But he also loves Rachel, who adores him and is yet going away from him.
So love itself is a prison. And in a curious way it’s quite separate from sexual desire, which presents itself as not only a temptation, but also as a means of evading the responsibility of love. The contemporary dream: sexual fulfilment without emotional attachment. Which is crazy, because there isn’t fulfilment, ever, without feeling for something more than the shape of a body, the touch of skin, the pressure of lips. But I know the temptation: Alexis, and now.
I’m a little drunk. When I got back to my room I opened a bottle of whisky and it’s sinking … like … like … I’m lost.
My stepfather once said to me: “Remember, in Argentina everything is very simple and the simplest things are impossible.”
Love is very simple and …
Another drink.
I went to the café today from Saul’s office. He called me to give me news of the appeal which has been rejected. He will tell my father tomorrow morning.
So they have set a date.
And I write this stuff about sex.
I went to a church this morning. I entered the confessional. When the priest spoke, I found that words had deserted me. I stepped out of the box and knelt and tried to pray. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the priest.
He said, “If you can’t confess, my son, perhaps you would like to talk.”
It crossed my mind that I was trying to talk to God, but … I think I dialled the wrong number.
The priest knew who I was. That frightened me. I had thought I would be anonymous there. So I told him I was afraid, and then I asked him if he would be prepared to go to speak to my father.
“He nearly became a priest himself,” I said.
“Oh yes, I guessed that,” he said.