Throwing his tracksuit jacket on the chair, he goes into the kitchenette. This is her only chance of finding out about the assassination, so while he is gone, she tries to organise her thoughts into questions that won’t irritate him. Looking around, she flops onto a sofa with scratched wooden arms and brown upholstery that resembles the fur of a mangy dog. She realises that at night it probably opens up into his bed. A kettle whistles, and he emerges from the kitchen with two mugs of black coffee and drops into a folding canvas chair.
‘I work as a night cleaner at the Menachem Begin Museum,’ he says.
That name gives her an opening. ‘Wasn’t he a member of the Irgun, like some of the people in your group?’
He gives her an ironic look. ‘So you’ve been doing your homework. You’re not a journalist by any chance, are you?’
This time she decides to come clean. ‘I am a journalist,’ she begins, and he’s already on his feet, like a wild animal about to spring. Her heart is pounding and she speaks very fast. ‘Please believe me, this has nothing to do with my profession. As I told you, I’m here on a private visit, and my interest in this affair stems only from my grandmother’s connection with Miklós Nagy. I’ve been reading about that case, and that’s why I wanted to meet you.’
‘So you’ve come here to look at the man who killed your hero.’
She shakes her head. ‘No, I only want to hear your side of the story.’
He looks straight into her face for the first time. ‘You know, you’re the first person who has ever wanted to hear my side of the story,’ he says slowly. ‘Everyone always assumed I was a gun-happy extremist ready to commit any crime to ingratiate myself with my group.’
‘But you weren’t?’
He sinks back into his chair and shrugs. ‘I don’t know what I was. How do you put yourself back into the head of the person you were fifty years ago? That person doesn’t exist anymore. I never talk about what happened that day but you said you wanted to hear my story, and that’s what it is, a story about a stranger I now despise.’
‘Despise? Why?’
‘What I did that day has ruined my life, and that’s why I don’t want to talk about it. There hasn’t been a day when I didn’t wish I could turn back time.’ He is staring into space now, and he seems to be musing aloud, as if he has forgotten she is there. ‘You hear about people overcoming all kinds of disasters and tragedies, but how do you get over killing someone for the wrong reason?’
She is taken aback. She had expected him to give excuses on account of his youth or the political climate at the time, not to confess his guilt.
‘I’ve heard that murderers often say they have no recollection of what they did, that their mind went blank or they lost consciousness, as if someone else pulled the trigger or wielded the knife,’ he continues. ‘But I remember every detail as if it happened yesterday, and when I close my eyes, I replay the whole scene, as if it’s happening now. I often have nightmares about it. I dream I’m about to pull the trigger and I sit up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, horrified by what I’ve done. That’s my curse.’
Annika thought she would be repelled by the man who had killed Miklós Nagy, but she is moved by his remorse. This is a man haunted by his crime. Then she wonders if he is manipulating her, trying to work on her emotions with calculating words. She looks at his downcast face and decides to trust her instinct. Moshe has been paying for his crime for over fifty years, a far longer sentence than any judge could have imposed.
‘You said you killed him for the wrong reason. What did you mean?’
He seems startled by the sound of her voice, and the anger flares up again. ‘You’re a leech, sucking my blood. You’re trying to claw into my soul.’
His attack shocks her but she remains silent. It was no use giving excuses or apologies. The trust between them, flimsy as it was, had been rent. But a moment later he surprises her by saying, ‘I’ll start at the beginning. I was born in a stetl in Poland …’
As he speaks, his life unspools before her. The terrified ten-year-old boy running into the forest in panic when his parents and young sisters are rounded up, living by his wits for the next few years, sometimes joining groups of partisans, always hoping that when the war was over, he would be reunited with his family. When the war finally comes to an end, and he goes back to his village, he discovers that his whole family has been murdered in Auschwitz, and his neighbours have moved into his home and appropriated all the possessions that had been left with them for safekeeping. He thought they’d be happy that he’d survived, but the way the men look at him with knives in their eyes makes him shiver. A neighbour warns him to leave as soon as possible and never come back. He is fourteen years old and he is alone in the world.
She can see him in Warsaw, a ragged, skinny kid knocking about among the ruins of the devastated city, scavenging for food and sleeping in doorways. He joins a gang of street kids living hand to mouth, stealing food from market stalls and selling contraband cigarettes. One day a black marketeer he deals with offers him a glass of vodka, and from that moment he is hooked. Alcohol takes away his pain, his fear, and his grief, and brings blessed oblivion.
‘I would have died drunk in a gutter if someone from a Zionist youth group hadn’t picked me up,’ he says. ‘They were looking for orphaned Jewish kids and sending them to a scout camp. For the first time in years, I had discipline and purpose in my life. They weaned me off alcohol and steered me away from crime.’
They look at each other as he says that, both aware of the irony of that statement. Engrossed by his story, she has let her coffee grow cold, and he limps to the kitchen to refill her mug. He is talking even before he sits down, and she senses that now the floodgates of painful memories have opened, the story pours out in a torrent, unstoppable and uncontrollable. All she has to do now is let him talk.
‘By the time I arrived in Israel at the end of 1948, I was like a pressure-cooker, with no outlet for the steam to escape,’ he says. ‘Israel had been held up to us as the promised land where we would be among our own kind, and I couldn’t wait to get there, but it wasn’t like that. Far from it. No-one seemed to want to know what happened in Poland during the Holocaust.
‘The survivors didn’t want to talk about it and the locals didn’t want to hear about it. They were busy congratulating themselves on their victory over the Arabs. They boasted they were Sabra Jews, not stetl Jews, victors, not victims, as if they were some kind of superior race to the rest of us. Some of them even talked disparagingly about European Jews going like sheep to slaughter.’
The recollection of that slur rekindles his anger and he stops talking. Annika doesn’t take her eyes off him, and waits.
‘I didn’t know what to do with the rage I felt. I thought I’d explode,’ he goes on. ‘So I joined a militant right-wing group and as you already know, many of them had been Irgun members or sympathisers with a grudge against the government and everyone in it. For the first time I was among people who were as angry as I was. I was relieved that they shared my rage but I didn’t realise they were using it as a weapon.’
Over the next few years, Moshe was indoctrinated with the subversive views of his leaders. According to them, all the problems of this country were caused by the Mapai party which, they claimed, had ignored the plight of Europe’s Jews, and later betrayed the courageous fighters of Irgun over the Altalena affair. When the Nagy trial began, they found their target. They told him that Miklós Nagy was a quisling who was being protected by the treacherous Mapai party, that he had collaborated with the Nazis, hobnobbed with prominent SS officers, and done a dirty deal with them to rescue a few of his own relatives and friends in return for colluding with them on the deportation to Auschwitz of the remaining Jews of Hungary.
Moshe is clasping and unclasping his hands as he speaks. ‘I believed them. They worked on me until I was obsessed with the idea that this man was a traitor to our nation, that he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds o
f thousands of Jews. I lost my whole family in Auschwitz, and I knew it was my sacred duty to avenge their deaths by killing this collaborator.’
As Annika listens, she feels a shift in her attitude. The preconceived ideas she had about the perpetrator and his unforgivable crime seem to blur and dissolve in a perplexing stew of moral ambiguity. She abhors his action but at the same time she is coming to understand it in the context of his experiences and his indoctrination. Perhaps no sin is unforgiveable if you can understand the sinner.
Moshe now comes to the fatal night, and he describes it as if it he is reliving it.
‘I can still feel the heavy coldness of the revolver in my hand,’ he says. ‘When you hold a gun, the tension builds up and your finger itches to press the trigger. I can still see the palm branches swaying in the wind, and the leaves of the oleanders rustling while I waited in the bushes for his car to pull up. I had intended to say This is for the murdered Jews of Europe, but when the moment came and he got out of the car, I was too nervous to say anything. I just wanted to get it over with and get away before anyone saw me.
‘I made sure it was him and pulled the trigger. He looked at me for an instant and saw the revolver, but he didn’t look shocked, not even surprised. It was as if he expected this to happen. The revolver didn’t feel cold anymore. I fired twice, but hearing the gunshots made me jump. I’d forgotten about the sound they would make, and I broke out in a cold sweat. I was sure everyone would hear it and come after me. I panicked and ran down the street as fast as I could, scared as hell, but proud that I’d obeyed the order and done my duty.’
Spellbound by his story, Annika feels as though she has witnessed the shooting herself. Recalling his earlier comment, she says, ‘But now you say you shot him for the wrong reason. What did you mean?’
The irritation comes back into his voice. ‘Don’t rush me. I’m coming to that. Not long after they sent me to jail, one of the prisoners cornered me in the laundry and attacked me.’ He points to his leg. ‘You probably noticed my limp. He lunged at me with an iron bar, yelling that he was going to kill me because I’d killed his hero. He kept whacking me until I blacked out. I stayed in hospital for a couple of weeks. My leg was broken in two places, and I had some broken ribs. While they were healing, I brooded about paying him back. I decided I’d get my people to deal with him. But I had a lot of time to think in hospital, and I started thinking about the crazy thing he said, that I’d killed a hero. I couldn’t work it out. He wasn’t one of those violent inmates that everyone steered clear of, so why had he picked on me? In the end, I knew I had to confront him and sort it out one way or another. When they sent me back to jail, I looked for him, but he warned me to keep away or next time he’d kill me. Eventually he calmed down and talked to me. I think it was because I never told the screws he was the one who had attacked me.
‘And this is more or less what he said: “Miklós Nagy saved my life, and you’re a fucking moron to believe that right-wing garbage about him only rescuing friends and family. I wasn’t friends or family and he rescued me, along with about a thousand other strangers, and put me on that train. And he had to deal with that monster Eichmann to do it. He did something no-one else had ever done, and only a pathetic half-wit like you could believe that he collaborated with the Nazis to send Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.”
‘He got so worked up about it that his eyes bulged and his face went red, and I thought he was going to bash me again. He said what I’d done was worse than a crime because a judge could make you pay for your crime, but only God could forgive a sin.
‘He was released a short time after that, and I didn’t think I’d ever see him again, because they sentenced me to fifteen years, but to my surprise they released me earlier, for good behaviour. In or out of jail, it didn’t make any difference to me. I’ve been living in my personal prison ever since. In my own hell.’
He looks down at his hands while she thinks about his words. ‘Do you think you’ll ever forgive yourself?’
He doesn’t reply, and looking at him she realises the corrosive power of guilt. Perhaps it required even more strength to forgive yourself than to forgive others. She thanks him for talking to her, and she is almost at the door when she remembers something he said.
‘You said that the guy in jail told you that Miklós Nagy rescued him, that he was on that train. Can you remember what he said about it? Did he mention anyone in particular?’
Moshe shrugs. ‘What am I, a genius? How do you expect me to remember what he told me forty years ago? But if you want to know something about that train, ask Shmuel.’
‘Shmuel?’
Moshe points to the ceiling. ‘Upstairs. That’s the guy I was in jail with.’
‘The one who bashed you up?’
‘When I got out, he helped me find this flat. Don’t look so amazed. You know what they say, that when you rescue someone you become responsible for them for the rest of their life? Well, he reckons he saved me because I never went near that extremist group again. But part of him still hates me for what I did. He’s got a shocking temper and it doesn’t take much to get him worked up into a frenzy about it. He’ll probably enjoy talking to you about his hero. Only don’t tell him I said we met in jail. He’s sensitive about his past.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Tel Aviv, 2005
At the top of the stairs, she knocks, and recognises the man who opens the door. It’s the one who leaned over the balcony earlier that day, and told her that Moshe would soon be home.
‘You talking to Moshe, yes?’ Shmuel booms, a cigarette stuck to his bottom lip. She can hear music playing inside his flat. It sounds ethnic, and reminds her of the rhythmic melodies the musicians played when she and Jansci were in the café in Budapest. It’s a pleasant memory, although it feels far away.
The stale smell of thousands of cigarettes smoked in this room over decades has seeped into the walls and ceilings, and left tea-coloured stains. Shmuel tamps his cigarette in a metal ashtray overflowing with butts, and scurries to a battered old radio in a walnut case. ‘Bartók,’ he says as he switches it off. ‘Hungarian music. Very good.’ He scans her face. ‘Why you here?’
Using simple language and speaking slowly in the hope that he can understand what she is saying, she explains that she had heard that he was rescued by Miklós Nagy. ‘I came so you could tell me whatever you can remember about that train journey,’ she says.
Lighting another cigarette, he says, ‘Long time ago. Too long. Old story.’
‘But it’s such an important story,’ she says and looks straight into his eyes with a candid expression that she hopes will convince him. ‘The whole world should know about it, especially as some people still regard him as a collaborator.’
As soon as he hears the word, he bristles. ‘Collaborator? Fucking lie!’ he shouts, and immediately apologises for his language. ‘Nagy Miklós hero. Best man in Hungary. He save my mother and he save me. He save more than thousand Jewish peoples. This is collaborator?’
He has now worked himself up into a fury and occasionally sprays saliva as he talks. ‘Judge, idiot. Say Mr Nagy collaborator. Never collaborator. Lawyer also liar. Says he will call me to talk in court for Mr Nagy, but he not call. Never.’
She tries to untangle the diatribe. ‘So you offered to give evidence in court but they didn’t call you?’
‘Yes, I say this.’
‘You must have been upset that you didn’t have the chance to tell the District Court judge about your experience. That might have influenced his decision. That’s why it’s so important to tell the truth about him now, isn’t it?’
He looks at her suspiciously. ‘How you know about me?’
‘From Moshe,’ she says, and immediately realises her faux pas.
‘Moshe say you about me?’ he shouts, and leaps to his feet, looming over her, his face distorted with rage. ‘Fucking mamser.’
Annika is in a panic. She knows why he is so furious, but it’s too lat
e. All she can do now is back-pedal.
‘He said he was grateful to you because you made him understand that Miklós Nagy was a hero. He said that if I wanted to find out more about him, I should ask you, because you knew the truth,’ she says quickly.
He sits down again and she heaves a sigh of relief. Having seen this demonstration of his erratic temperament and the ferocity with which he defends his rescuer, she can imagine him picking up a weapon to bash the man who killed Miklós Nagy.
To calm him down, she tells him that Miklós Nagy saved her grandmother.
‘Why you not ask grandmother about Nagy Miklós?’
There’s no way she will tell him that Marika refuses to talk about the man he venerates. ‘She’s old, she can’t remember things,’ she says, and to mollify him, she adds, ‘Because it’s such an important story, I want to find out as much as possible about him from people he rescued.’
Her approach works. He leans back in his large armchair and lights another cigarette from the stub of the one he’s been smoking.
‘Yes, we all old now. I old also. Soon no peoples left to tell stories.’
With an ease that surprises her, he starts reminiscing, and sixty years melt away as he describes life in his provincial town near the Romanian border when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. ‘Some peoples believe Germans that they go to other town for work, they go into German trains, but my father, he not trust Germans. Peoples going on trains. Never coming back. Then, miracle.’ He claps his big hands. ‘Nagy Miklós. He brave man. He argues with Nazi monster Eichmann — you know who is Eichmann? Nagy Miklós comes to Kolostór to save Jewish peoples.’
Shmuel stops talking and leans towards Annika, wagging his finger at her for emphasis. ‘Look, we not family, we not friends, we not rabbis. We nothing. But Nagy Miklós sees mother sick, very poor. He saves us. We go on special train.’ A beatific expression comes over his face as though he were speaking about a saint.
The Collaborator Page 34
