by Allan Massie
This wasn’t a discovery. But I wouldn’t have been bold enough to say it before all this.
“Oh, that’s all over,” Kinsky said. “I gave up crying for the moon a long time ago.”
We spoke about Mummy and Daddy. He said that Daddy had always been afflicted by self-righteousness. It had caused all the trouble in his life. As for Mummy, “You remind me of the way she was in Berlin, my dear.”
“Do I? How?”
“Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée…”
“That’s nasty.”
“Believe me, I don’t mean it that way. I think it’s beautiful.”
When I got home, Mummy and Daddy were eating toasted cheese. They weren’t speaking. Then Daddy stretched out to put a record on the gramophone.
Mummy said, “If that’s your bloody Brahms, I’m off to bed.” But she would be able to hear it from their room.
At the bottom of the last typewritten sheet, Becky had scribbled:
I shouldn’t send you this, there’s too much about you, and much too much about how I feel. But maybe if we are to have a chance, it’s necessary. I’m going to talk to Mummy about a flight to Israel in the morning.
He passed the sheets to Rachel, and smoked a cigarette while she read Becky’s words.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “I hope for your sake she comes.”
TWO
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?”
“Shouldn’t you learn it?”
“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 F
ranz 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.”
&
nbsp; “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.
