The Sins of the Father

by Allan Massie

  They parked the car. She took her old Harris Tweed coat from the boot, and stomped across the field, a little flat-footed in English brogues. It was the first Saturday of autumn.

  “I wish you had had some lunch though,” she said. “It’s not good for a girl of your age to miss meals.”

  Her own father had never been able to eat lunch on the day of a school match. He had had no sense of proportion, poor man.

  They positioned themselves on the touchline. There were only a few spectators, mostly girlfriends. Becky knew them of course. Nell was glad to hear her laughing with them. She sounded happy, as a girl in love is supposed to be.

  The game began. There was no doubt Franz was very graceful. Nell had had an old-fashioned Classical education and thought that with his long sunburned legs and his blond hair he had the look of Achilles; or perhaps Patroclus. Or the doomed Hector. She didn’t know, but it was that kind of association, a Flaxman engraving. He played with dash and ran well and elegantly. Once he dropped a pass because he was looking at the player approaching to tackle him, and once he missed a tackle rather badly when a big forward ran straight at him. Towards the end of the game he broke through on the opponents’ twenty-five and scored a try under the posts, touching the ball down with a flourish that called for admiration. Becky jumped up and down cheering. But his side lost all the same.

  He approached them, his long legs glistening with sweat. He shook Nell’s hand before he kissed Becky.

  “It was so kind of you to come, Señora,” be said. “I hope you enjoyed it. We’re not very good, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I loved it.”

  Becky swung on the boy’s arm. Her thin face, usually so white, was pink.

  “Franz wants to take me dancing. Is that all right, Mummy?”

  “As long as you’re not late. You know how your father worries. And Franz, you must come to lunch with us. Perhaps next Sunday?”

  “Why not tomorrow, Mummy?”

  “Perhaps Franz already has an engagement tomorrow. Next Sunday?”

  “That would be delightful, Señora. And you’re right. I do have an engagement tomorrow. It’s my father. He’s in the city, only briefly, so of course I must see him.”

  “When can I meet him?” Becky said.

  “Later.”

  “I wish it could be tomorrow, I’m longing for Daddy to meet you.”

  It was a lie, or a piece of self-deception. She was afraid of that meeting, because she cared for both of them too much; but she was anxious to get it over. In those days Becky ran towards danger naturally.

  Nell returned home alone. She travelled slowly. She found an excuse to stop at two or three shops, and then she went to a café and had a pot of tea and a cream cake. She no longer denied to herself that she was putting off the moment of return. She was everything a good wife should be, considerate to her husband who had endured so many tribulations and bore them with courage and without overt repining. She would never leave him. But she took her time about returning to that four-roomed third-floor apartment filled with the stench of cheroots and the sound of music.

  “Brahms,” he used to say, “to understand the Germans you must listen to Brahms. People talk of Wagner as expressing the soul of Germany, but they are wrong. Brahms is the test. Behind the sound there is a vast and terrible emptiness which he yet regards with a primeval humour. Germans flock together for fear of the solitude that Brahms reveals as the natural and awful state of man…”

  “Can’t you forget Germany?” she once said.

  “How could I? I am German. Germany made me what I am. Their greatest crime sprang from their greatest horror: the realisation that we were Germans also.”

  The street-lamps were lit when she emerged from the cake shop. In those days the public electricity supply rarely failed in the capital. “We are Europeans, you see,” the native-born Argentinians of good birth, her friends, would explain. “Things work in Argentina, despite everything.”

  “Everything” included inflation running at more than 25 per cent and a peso that had fallen from 8 to the dollar when they had arrived there in 1948 to 220. But they were right; it was still a country where Europeans felt at ease. Despite much, Eli had been comfortable until his sight went, and despite their galloping impoverishment, Nell still thought of the place as a southern hemisphere Surrey. And children were still taught manners; that mattered to both of them.

  An army officer, wearing the uniform of a captain, and following with intent eyes and greedy open mouth the progress of a mulatto girl on the other side of the street, bumped into Nell. He recognised her as a lady, took off his cap, and apologised. Then, his boots glistening, he strode across the street, disdainful of the hooting and snarling cars, and took the girl by the elbow. Without pausing, he whisked her up a side-alley. She would obey him in whatever he wanted. Nell was sure of that.

  But the city still neither frightened nor disgusted her. It was where she had made her life. Much had gone wrong, as lives do. Nell smiled it off. She was fortified by the great British delusion: that she had no illusions.

  The front door of the apartment opened into a little hall, which then led into the kitchen, so that all their visitors – but there weren’t many – had to pass through the kitchen first. This had come about when the original apartment, built in 1900 in the Jugendstil which had already been imported to smart, “European” Buenos Aires, had been divided by them towards the end of the Peron era. They let the two other apartments which they had formed by the division, and this supplied them, or had supplied them, with the greater part of their income. But now rents were (temporarily?) frozen, and rendered worthless by the inflation. So Eli’s brother supported them, with an allowance from the United States. For a long time, Eli had refused offers of help from his brother – to make him fully experience the guilt of his own freedom from history, as he had put it once. Now, since blindness had overtaken her husband, Nell did not scruple to deceive him in this way. She had written to Solomon, explaining their position. She excused herself with the reflection that being allowed to help removed a weight from Solomon’s mind – she was sure of this though she had never met her brother-in-law. If she had not been so sensitive about Eli’s blindness she might have quoted the saw: “What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for”; but she couldn’t bring herself to put her feelings in those precise words. But she approached them, and she had moments when she suspected that Eli knew what she felt, blamed her for it, but would not speak of it. Then she accused him of hypocrisy. And then she felt guilty and told herself that if anyone had a right to hide from the truth, it was Eli.

  Because of the layout of the flat, it had become her custom to occupy herself in the kitchen before going through to see Eli. So now she made tea and, since she had been out so long, a sandwich for him of pumpernickel bread with pickled gherkins and sliced sausage bought from the German delicatessen on the corner of the block. Schumann’s A minor Piano Concerto sounded from the sitting room, and she waited for the music to stop before carrying the tray through to Eli.

  He didn’t ask her about her day. He had abandoned that form of curiosity. Instead he said, “This marriage is a nonsense. Rebecca’s far too young.”

  “It may be only a boy and girl romance. There’s no need to worry. But he’s a nice boy.”

  Franz feared disapproval. He reproached himself for cowardice, but couldn’t eradicate his fear. He suspected that others saw him as confident, beyond the point of self-satisfaction. There were moments when he wished this was true. Many of his friends at the University envied him; he was what they would have liked to be. He stepped out of the shower and looked at himself in the long mirror of his mother’s bathroom. He was just the right height, tall without being gawky, blond, smooth-skinned, free of body hair. Sometimes he was afraid he was merely pretty – his mouth too soft, too red-lipped, petulant in repose. To tease him, Luis had once said, “If you do your military service in the wrong regiment, my frie
nd, they’ll use you like a woman.” The words – and the memory now – made him shudder. He ran his hands down his thighs and between his legs. Then, he threw himself on to the floor, and did a dozen press-ups. He took the shower attachment and squirted himself with cold water, all over, and wrapped a towel round his waist. He stood at the basin and began to shave. He had shaved the previous morning, and didn’t really need to do so every day, but he was meeting his father for lunch, and wanted to be absolutely smooth-skinned. As he drew the razor down his face, stretching the skin on his cheek with the other hand, he thought of Becky pressing herself against him while they danced the foxtrot at the University Club (where rock-and-roll was still forbidden) and of how she had murmured her love for him. The towel slipped from his hips. He took another cold shower and, half-dressed, rubbed lotion over his cheeks, which were now free of down and quite smooth and soft.

  Because he was meeting his father, he eschewed the jeans he would normally have worn on a Sunday, and instead put on grey flannels. He knotted a dark blue tie, and wore a pale blue blazer over his white shirt. He arrived at his father’s club exactly one minute before the appointed hour.

  Rudi was already there. Franz laid his cheek against his father’s, which was rough and a little bristly, though he too had shaved as he did every day, even up at the works. He was shorter than Franz, dark-haired, thin and wiry, and when he had returned his son’s embrace, he resumed the dark glasses which he had removed at his approach. It was dark and cool in the club, and he was drinking beer. He ordered a Stein for Franz, without consulting him.

  For a little they talked about the boy’s work. Rudi fired questions at him. They were pertinent and demanding. Sometimes Franz hesitated for an answer and then Rudi frowned. It was worse than the sort of oral examination the students were expected to undergo once a session. When he was satisfied, Rudi sat back, took a draught of beer and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief that he kept in his hip pocket solely, it seemed, for that purpose.

  “You’re not making a fool of yourself, at least,” he said.

  There was silence. Franz searched for a subject. He had promised Becky he would speak to his father about her, but it was too early. He had explained to her that he never found it easy to speak to his father. “It’s not that I am afraid of him, or that he is particularly difficult. He’s a wonderful father, really,” he had said. “It’s just that I never seem to know how to approach a subject with him, even when I know what I have to say, and it’s important. Indeed the more important it is, the more difficult I find it.”

  “I know,” she had replied, “it’s like that with mine too.” He took her hand in his, affirming their solidarity.

  Then, to his surprise, Rudi started talking about his own work. They had been having difficulties at the bridge with the labourers and the local firm of sub-contractors. It was not an engineering problem. For technical problems there were always solutions.

  “It’s a problem,” he said, “really of man-management, and human problems rarely lend themselves to neat solutions. That is one of the first things you must learn, son. Man-management is an art, not a science. It’s something you can’t be taught in school, but must acquire by experience. Fortunately I served my own apprenticeship in the art in demanding circumstances.”

  He paused.

  “In the Wehrmacht?” Franz said, prompting him, without thinking. At once he regretted it. Mention of the war to his father led into a minefield. But this time Rudi smiled.

  “In a special branch of the Wehrmacht,” he said. “But that is forgotten. The war, and everything that happened then, now looks like a mistake. We have a new life, to make a success in.”

  And saying this, he got up and led his son to the dining-room.

  It was called the Engineers’ Club, and it was very European. They ate Wiener schnitzel with sauerkraut and potatoes roasted with onions, and drank Moselle. Rudi employed his knife and fork with brisk precision. When he laid them down, his plate was absolutely clean. Franz wondered how he could approach the subject that was on his mind. The dining-room was quiet, as usual on a Sunday. The only other diners were two very old men, who ate together every week, and had done so for half a century. They were thought to be pederasts, and Franz was always made uncomfortable by the rapid, and – it seemed to him – greedily assessing glances which they shot at him. His father did not speak while he ate. Franz seemed to himself to be holding the stem of his wine glass with an unnecessary and embarrassing delicacy. The waiter removed their plates, and almost at once placed a concoction of fruit, cream and pastry in front of them. It was the club speciality. Though Rudi claimed that he was ascetic by nature, capable of subsisting for days on dry bread and water, he had his spoon in his hand almost before the pudding plate touched the table. The sound of a military band came from a gramophone in the room beyond. The gramophone was being played by the two aged pederasts: “A little Sousa after luncheon?” one always asked the other, who nodded. It was a routine which was almost a ritual; they couldn’t have digested their lunch without it. The music made the silence of the dining room all the heavier. It was dark and there was no sense of the city beyond. As they left the dining room and passed through the so-called library to the hall, Franz felt the pederasts follow him with their eager and hopeless gaze.

  Was it because of them, and the discomfort they caused him, that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to say anything to his father on the subject that was nearest his heart? Or was it because he was a coward? And were these things connected? Franz thought a lot, then and always, about cowardice.

  His father seemed satisfied, though they had scarcely spoken after his initial inquisition. It was perhaps enough to have seen his son, to have gone through the paternal motions. Now they embraced. Rudi nodded, and Franz turned towards the door through which sunlight was streaming. They would not see each other for a month. He wondered how his father would pass the afternoon, until it was time to take the plane back to the north.

  Franz loved the city. If you had asked him why, then, he couldn’t have answered. Later, in exile, he would say, “Because it’s only half made-up. It’s a city of unfinished business which gives you the feeling, the conviction deep in your heart, that the business will never be finished. And that’s what I prize. The sense of entropy. It’s a city full of ambition that yet mocks ambition.”

  Now, that afternoon, he paused at a church, the Church of the Solitary Virgin, where a Mass was advertised to begin shortly, a special Mass, against the evil eye, el mal de ojo. “If you have been harmed, or think you have been harmed, don’t fail to turn up.” Luis would laugh at that; no question. “This is Argentina, brother,” he would crow, “where we take no chances because we know that life is nothing but chance. So you don’t believe in the old mal de ojo? All the more reason to take precautions. And you’ll see – the types that turn up!”

  And he was right of course: there, for instance, thrusting her silken leg out of her Mercedes and now advancing, was a lady in a pastel-shaded gown that had Paris, or school of Paris, written all over it, and swaying high heels to her strapless shoes, a Pekinese pressed to her bosom: you never knew, one of the servants, or her lover’s wife, or her husband … Franz pushed into the church behind her. There were stalls selling charms and reliquaries and crucifixes, and there were consulting booths, where the consolations of religion and medicine and magic were inextricably offered. It would have made Rudi furious, but would his fury have been also a sign of fear?

  A little priest, a fleck of saliva at the corner of his mouth, accosted him. Franz hesitated, explained that he was only curious. Did all these people really believe in the operation of the evil eye?

  “You must understand,” the priest said, “we are all, each of us, individually, the source of power, and powerful emanations, even if unaware of it. We are all subject to mental waves which can occasion ill health or misery, and this is the visible sign of the evil spirit. Why should you suppose yourself unaffected?”
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  A fat man passed them, a white cockerel held under his arm.

  “What will he do with that bird?”

  “Who knows?” the priest said. “Depend upon it, it will fulfil a purpose. What would you like? This amulet to protect you?”

  Franz turned and fled.

  Later that evening, on the Florida, he encountered Luis. Luis was a little drunk, and was amusing himself by imitating the strut of a jack-booted soldier who paraded the street some twenty yards ahead, with an Alsatian dog on a chain leash. Luis laughed when he saw Franz, and hustled him into a café for a drink.

  “So what did your father say?”

  Franz screwed the whisky glass round in his fingers.

  “Ah, your nerve failed?” Luis said. “So you are not yet an affianced man? All the better. Take Courage. Do you know, when I visited England as a boy – when my father was chargé d’affaires at the Embassy there, I was impressed to see advertising hoardings urging the people to Take Courage. I thought that very fine, that the Government should be so concerned for their moral welfare. Then I discovered Courage was a beer.”

  Franz leaned on the bar counter; examining his fractured face in the minor. Two businessmen with women, probably prostitutes, were drinking brandy at a corner table, and laughing. One of them had a look of Rudi, but it wasn’t his father, who wouldn’t anyway – Franz was sure – have consorted publicly with a woman like that.

  Luis said, “I am going on to Rosita’s. Coming?”

  Franz shook his head. He was tempted, as always, by the city at night. The sense of danger thrilled and frightened him: he became a different person, one to whom anything might happen. Nevertheless he shook his head.

  “There’s a little girl with big juicy red lips made for my favourite diversion,” Luis said. “She looks like the Sainted One herself.”