The Sins of the Father

by Allan Massie

  “I thought you called yourself a Peronist?”

  Luis lit an American cigarette – a Chesterfield.

  “Indeed yes. Perón is the only solution left to us. Peronism is a great national movement.”

  “And yet you would let a girl who resembles the Sainted One do that to you, debase herself in that way?”

  “You don’t understand. It’s precisely because she is like that that I need her to do that. She is everything at once, queen and victim, saint and debauchee. Why don’t you join me?”

  Franz shook his head.

  “Sometimes,” his friend said, “I wonder if you like women. They used to say at school that you were a queer. Is that what you really like? Don’t be ashamed to admit it, dear boy.”

  “No,” Franz said. “I’m in love with Becky.”

  “Oh, a romantic? In 1964. I congratulate you, and commiserate with you.”

  Franz felt himself flushing. But it was true. It was the truth he had to hold on to. What he wanted was to be with Becky. That way he would be free of himself. Marriage was a refuge.

  Eventually friendships come to depend most on having experiences in common. It was like that with Eli and Kinsky. They met once a week to play chess, and though they rarely talked of the past, it was the past that held them together. “We are both refugees from reality,” as Kinsky said, more than once, in the little antique shop-cum-gallery which he kept. The reality they had in common was too awful to be the subject for reminiscence. But it bound them together. No one who hadn’t endured it could understand what it had meant. Both, in certain moods, despised everyone who had not lived in Hell. At other times, they simply despised each other. Eli was an intellectual, at once “arid and sentimental” in Kinsky’s opinion; Kinsky was an aesthete, “with the brains of a chicken”, according to Eli. Kinsky deplored Eli’s taste in music, “typical of the worst sort of 1880s’ Gemütlichkeit. Eli agreed with Adolf Hitler on one point – in finding the Expressionists to whose work Kinsky was devoted “deranged and decadent”.

  Kinsky was ten years younger, born 1910. He had got his looks back. Sometimes he said that losing them, feeling himself daily grow uglier, had been the worst of it. “The first time I saw myself in a mirror when they let us out, I wept,” he would say, patting his hair into place. He was Viennese, and adored his city, but could never live there again. “I can’t forget how the crowd cheered the Anschluss, and screamed with delight the day the Nazis marched in. Don’t allow anyone to tell you that we Austrians were Hitler’s first victims. Most of us were his most willing accomplices. And why not? Wasn’t his mind formed in the slums of Vienna? Wasn’t it there he learned to hate and fear the Jews?”

  Kinsky wasn’t a Jew himself. “Indeed,” he had been known to say, “God forgive me, when I was young, I was anti-Semitic. It was the one point on which I agreed with Hitler. I still am, deep down. It’s ineradicable, you know. I tell Eli that, and he agrees with me. Anti-Semitism is an inescapable feature of European culture. The thing to do is to recognise it, not to hide from the truth.”

  Eli agreed with him there. If you had asked him how he reconciled this agreement with his opinion, equally often expressed, that the attempt at the Final Solution was inspired by the horror of the realisation that people like himself were Germans too, he would have puffed the smoke from his cheroot in your face and answered that the test of a first-rate mind was the ability to hold incompatible opinions steady, and still continue to function.

  “Well, my dear,” Kinsky would say, “I’ve never boasted that my own little mind was first-rate, but I quite agree. After all, it was just the same with us, wasn’t it? The whole appeal of the Nazi movement was camp as they come, and yet they killed six hundred thousand of us for being as we are.”

  Kinsky adored Franz. He met him first when Franz was fifteen, and Kinsky sold Franz’s mother a painting by a young (and rather bad) neo-expressionist, whom he had taken up and was promoting. He delivered it himself to her apartment, because he had found that personal service of this kind was not only good business, but could lead to interesting social encounters. That was certainly so in this case. Franz admitted him to the apartment, and explained that his mother had telephoned to say she had been delayed, and she hoped Señor Kinsky would forgive her and await her arrival.

  Kinsky giggled. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it always seems so silly to me when we Germans call each other Señor and Señora.”

  Franz was embarrassed by the giggle and by the way Kinsky was looking at him.

  He said, “I don’t know why, sir, but I always feel uncomfortable when I have to speak German. Except with my father. You must think me very silly.”

  “Only in the nicest way,” Kinsky said. “And don’t call me ‘sir’, dear boy, it makes me feel antique, like something out of one of those dreadful novels by Thomas Mann.”

  “I haven’t read any Thomas Mann.”

  “Why should you?”

  “So what should I call you?”

  “Call me Kinsky, just Kinsky. Everyone else does. And do you think I might have a glass of whisky?”

  Franz flushed again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I should have offered you…”

  “Would you like to see the painting I’ve brought your mother?” He unwrapped it. Franz looked at it.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think I understand this sort of art.”

  “Look,” Kinsky said. He took Franz by the elbow. Franz was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and Kinsky held the cool flesh of his arm between thumb and forefinger. “Look,” he said again, and with his other hand traced an imaginary line in the air, first one way, then the other. He released the boy’s arm.

  “I’ll teach you about painting,” he said. “To be honest, this one isn’t terribly good. But I have others which are better. Come to my gallery some afternoon, and I’ll give you a lesson in appreciation. Really, I mean it, it would give me pleasure. Shall we say Wednesday? Are you free on Wednesday? About four o’clock? Good. Here’s my card.”

  He was on his most lively form when Ilse, Franz’s mother, eventually appeared. He stayed an hour, and told them anecdotes of Vienna between the wars, leaving before they were tired of him.

  “He’s delightful, isn’t he?” Ilse said. “So sophisticated and European.”

  Before he left, Kinsky had obtained the Señora’s permission for Franz to visit his gallery “to learn something about art.”

  “Perhaps I’ll form a little club,” Kinsky said.

  That was four years before Franz met Becky and fell in love with her. Meanwhile Kinsky had become Ilse’s pet. She invited him to all her parties, and relied on him to smooth out her social arrangements. He was grateful. He often told her she was his dearest friend, and that she supplied the family he had lost.

  “You remind me so much of my poor sister,” he said. “We were very close.”

  When Franz fell in love with Becky, Kinsky was jealous. But he had known something of the sort would soon happen, and didn’t make a scene. He had long ago learned to make do with less than everything he might want. Besides, he really preferred looking and imagining to physical encounters; he had countless photographs and a nude drawing which he had made himself and Franz still visited him and smiled at him and made him his confidant. It was as much as he could hope for; perhaps it was as much as he really wanted. He had learned to distrust the idea of possession.

  So now, when Eli pushed the chessboard away, and lit a cheroot, and said, “You know the family, don’t you?” Kinsky smiled and said, “Ilse is one of my dearest friends. She’s charming. And Becky couldn’t be more fortunate. Franz is a sweet boy.”

  “Hmph,” Eli said, “I don’t trust your judgement.”

  Nell looked up from her sewing.

  “Don’t be rude, Eli.”

  “It makes me uncomfortable,” Eli said.

  It was a hot evening and the windows were open. Swifts darted to and fro among the rooftops and television
aerials. The music of a mandolin wafted a sentimental tune from a balcony across the street, mingling with American jazz from a neighbour’s wireless. Kinsky sipped the red Chilean wine that Nell bought from the corner shop in three-litre flasks. He lit a Gauloise cigarette, holding the match in his fingers until it burned itself out, and curled round, black and tapering. Eli’s face was troubled; hair sprouted white and wiry above the second button of his open-necked orange Aertex shirt; his fingernails, Kinsky noticed, were bitten short. It was curious that he had never observed this before. Did Eli sit by the open window, isolated by blindness in the midst of life, gnawing his nails?

  “Uncomfortable?” Kinsky said. He repeated the word, first in English, and then in Spanish.

  “Uncomfortable,” Eli repeated, still in German. “It’s the same feeling whichever language you use.”

  “I am not certain of that,” Kinsky said. “Do you know, Franz and his mother prefer to talk Spanish when they are alone. Isn’t that strange?”

  “What’s she like, Kinsky?” Nell said.

  “Ilse? She’s blonde. I suppose she looks a little like Ingrid Bergman. Yes, you could say she resembles Bergman. She has the same liquid eyes. And of course, you have met Franz, he takes after her.”

  He got to his feet. It was late, he must go home. He had enjoyed the game of chess, been able to tolerate – he smiled at this – the Brahms Eli had insisted on playing, even though he knew his (Kinsky’s) opinion of Brahms, which, not wishing to be offensive, he wouldn’t repeat. He touched Eli on the shoulder, as near as he could ever go to expressing the affection which, despite everything, all their differences and their inherent opposition to each other, he supposed he felt. Eli grunted; Kinsky hadn’t given him what he wanted.

  And then Kinsky said, “Remember, old friend, I have nightmares too. Literally. I sometimes wake up shivering and wet with sweat.”

  (“Kinsky was always dapper,” Nell said once. “That was what makes me remember this confession.”)

  “I’ve let you down,” Kinsky said.

  “No.”

  “Yes, I have. I’m sorry. But I don’t know the boy’s father. I think however he is a good father. Stern, demanding, in the old style. Franz always speaks of him with respect. But I know why you are worrying. We are bound, aren’t we, always to be suspicious of a German who has prospered here. Still, the suspicion isn’t always justified. That’s what I must point out. After all, I have flourished myself.”

  Nell accompanied him through the kitchen and out on to the landing beyond the door of the apartment. She shut both doors behind her.

  “He can’t sleep at night,” she said. “Sometimes I think he chooses not to.”

  “Is he afraid?”

  “Yes, that’s what it is, he’s afraid; it hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “When is Franz coming here?”

  “I can’t answer that, he still refuses to let the boy come. And you’re right, he’s a nice boy, I’ve told him that. Sometimes, I tell myself that everything will be all right when he agrees to meet Franz, he’ll be charmed. But I don’t believe it. Oh, he is difficult now; you don’t know how difficult he can be.”

  “He was always difficult, my dear. He survived by being difficult. Then he made his reputation – for the second time, don’t forget – by being difficult.”

  “Oh Kinsky, I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  “You must meet Ilse soon. That will help. Shall I arrange it for you – a tea party at my place?”

  “Sweet of you, but I think I had better fix it myself. I’ll telephone her tomorrow, I promise I will.”

  “Do remember, it’s the children’s lives…”

  “I know.”

  “And they’re good children.”

  “Of course they are.”

  Kinsky kissed her. She held him to her a moment, then listened to his steps dancing down the stone stairs and into the night, with a lonely and defiant gallantry that always pained her.

  TWO

  Nell and Eli went back further than they usually let on. There was guilt in their silence and some discomfort. It had been her grandfather, Marcus Sueffer, who had insisted that she spend some months in Germany in 1938. He was a music critic, and the author of a biography of Wagner whom he adored. It wasn’t just the music that he loved; he was besotted by everything Wagnerian; he was perhaps the only person who had ever written enthusiastically about the maestro’s sense of humour. He despised Nell’s schoolmaster father, despised his daughter for having married him, but, for no reason Nell could account for, took a fancy to her. This expressed itself in his determination to see to it that she was liberated from the dismal Englishness of her father’s house. Her father was himself doubtful.

  “Of course I understand that Herr Hitler has done wonders for his people, and I admire him for that, but there’s something about the man I can’t like. He’s a fanatic, you know, and it seems that some of the chaps around him are no better than thugs. They are bullies, and I have always detested bullying.”

  Nell disliked bullying too, but the prospect of a visit with her grandfather to Bayreuth (where they lunched with Cosima Wagner herself, and heard the grand old lady babble her adulation of “dearest Wolf”, as she called the Fuehrer) and a subsequent six months in Berlin staying with her grandfather’s old friend the Gräfin von Pfühlnitz, was sufficiently exciting to make her ignore her father’s words, which didn’t anyway carry much conviction. In fact, he pushed the subject aside, remarking that young Hutton had made another century, and was in his opinion promising to be the best batsman since Hammond had appeared on the scene. “Nothing flashy about him, that’s what I like.”

  Nell liked the Gräfin from the start. She was an old lady who held herself very straight, partly perhaps to compensate for the perpetual tremor of her hand, and who looked down her nose at the world. She was a Prussian aristocrat, and sniffed at the mention of the Nazis. She made Nell welcome, and spoke so fondly of her grandfather that, years later, remembering this, Nell wondered if they mightn’t have been lovers in the distant past. At the time it was impossible for her to imagine that the Gräfin could ever have performed the sexual act. Despite this difficulty, there were two children, both of course grown-up, to account for. Her son, Albrecht, was an official in the German Foreign Office, a mild-mannered man, forever flicking cigarette ash from his lapels; the daughter Magda, a beefy blonde, was married to a Saxon baron who had found it expedient to join the party almost as soon as it had come to power. “Saxons are idiots, my dear,” the Gräfin said. “That’s something you have to understand.” All the same, the old girl wasn’t above making use of this connection with the ruling party, and finding reassurance in the security it seemed to offer.

  Nell found everything strange and enthralling. She liked the big ugly apartment with its heavy knobbly black furniture; the windows were never opened, and that seemed to emphasise the difference between here and home. She was just at the age to be seeking the experiment of living in a manner that was altogether foreign, and though the stuffy rooms gave her a headache towards four o’clock every afternoon, just before she generally went out for a walk, she yet relished the sense they imparted of there being another separate but parallel form of existence which was completely new to her. When she tried to explain this in letters to her cousin Sheila, her words made no sense at all, but the sensation was real enough.

  She formed the habit of walking the Gräfin’s Pomeranian in the late afternoon. She loved the streets, the bustle, the sharp Berliner humour, the variety of types; she would sit at a café on Unter den Linden and drink coffee and eat cream cakes; she always ordered too many and gave one to the little dog. What she liked most about these afternoons was the sensation of being solitary, incognito; she had lived all her life in the family atmosphere of schools where such a luxury was impossible.

  Naturally she soon fell in love, a little. She was nineteen, and, though she didn’t realise it, had come to Berlin in search of love
. She fixed her attention on Albrecht; she and her girl-friends had long ago agreed that boys of their own age were callow. And Albrecht was a diplomat at a time when diplomats had a glamour for a whole generation of well brought-up girls. Moreover, he looked sorrowful; she was sure there was something sad in his past, which she would be able to cure.

  Albrecht may have been somewhat embarrassed to find this pretty English child (as he thought her) in such unguarded pursuit. She wasn’t his type of thing at all. But she was a nice child, and talking to her was in some degree at least a relief from the cares and perplexities which occupied him. Besides – and here he was callous – he soon realised it didn’t do him any harm to be seen about with a blonde English girl. It distracted attention from his other interests, other activities, from the fact that, in more ways than one, Albrecht was an unsatisfactory subject of the Third Reich. He was careful to conceal this, but he lived with the fear of discovery. Nell represented relief from strain. For the truth was that, in almost every way, Albrecht was disaffected. He regarded the Nazis as scum, dangerous, disreputable, and wholly unattractive. His distaste was first aesthetic, secondly social.

  On Sundays he would sometimes drive Nell out to an inn some thirty miles from the city, on the fringe of the forest. They ate sausages and fried potatoes and drank beer, and looked to the East: “Germany’s unfinished business,” Albrecht said.

  “You don’t believe that? That’s what Hitler says, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the one matter about which he is right. Our family estates are over there, you know, in what is now Poland.”

  On Thursday afternoons the Gräfin held a soirée, or conversazione. Nell soon realised that she was meeting a Germany of which most people at home were ignorant. Her grandfather of course was a devotee of German music, German philosophy, German civilisation, but he was known to be eccentric. It was the general consensus, she had found, that the Germans weren’t civilised. “There’s no such thing as a German gentleman, you know,” her father would say. “The concept is foreign to the German nature.” Well, the people whom she met at the Gräfin’s would have proved him wrong. They seemed to her to leave the English suburbs and the Home Counties nowhere. The thing was: these people knew about life. They had suffered and survived; they had lost illusions. That’s what she thought then.