by Allan Massie
“It was good, your press conference.” Saul clapped him on the shoulder. “You carried it off, boy.”
But what was the point of it? He couldn’t see that anything had been gained or averted. He couldn’t escape the feeling that, in talking with all the honesty he could muster, he had made a fool of himself. And he still wasn’t sure that Luke and Rachel would want to go on seeing him, and that prospect dismayed him.
“Luke is furious. He says we have to go south to recover. We’ll pick you up at the hotel. OK. What time are you back from seeing your father? Eleven? Fine. He’s so furious he’s going to take the day off work. See you – We’ll go to Ashkelon. You ought to see Ashkelon. Down the coast. OK.”
“Coming to terms, that’s the thing,” Rudi stretched himself. Sunlight glanced through the narrow grille, and lay on the table like melted butter. “I detached myself from those who had been my colleagues, the clowns or zealots, who in a fit of barely comprehensible folly, abducted your girl, Franz. They wanted to go back, to pretend, you know, that certain things had not happened. Madness. Refusal to contemplate reality. Inexcusable. Now,” he laughed, “I’ve been brought back, but in a different fashion and one which I would have avoided. Yet now that it’s happened, well, it’s happened. That’s all. Do you think this world is a training-ground for spirits?”
The question was inconceivable. That is, it was the sort of question that only students pose to each other. Franz was amazed to hear it coming from the lips of this father, whom he had accustomed himself to think a dull man, mechanical and punctilious in duty, even while he admired and feared him.
“We’ve never talked about the war, Father,” he said.
Rudi lit another cigarette, pushed the pack towards him. The two soldiers, sitting on chairs at either end of the table – so that to a casual observer the four of them might have been engaged in a game of bridge, played at a table awkwardly shaped for the purpose – fixed their eyes on the transaction. Then one of them produced a lighter and lit Franz’s cigarette. Rudi urged the pack in the soldier’s direction, and the offer was accepted.
“The war? We’re going to go over my war in too exhaustive detail. I’m not ashamed of my war. Whatever people say, war is beyond good and evil. Katyn and Dresden and Hiroshima prove it. It’s proved every day in war, only less dramatically.”
“So what do you accuse yourself of?”
“Credulity. When I was working on these remote sites, with so little in the way of congenial company, I used to read every evening. Have you read Jung, Franz? No? Do so. He wrote an essay called ‘Hitler and the Germans’. I think that was the title. It was certainly the substance. I wish I’d read it in 1933 – but it wasn’t written then.”
He laughed again, and smiled.
“It makes everything so clear. I learned one passage by heart. ‘He’ – that is, Hitler, Franz – ‘represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him. But what could they have done? In Hitler, every German should have seen his own shadow, his own worst danger. It is everybody’s allotted fate to become conscious of and learn to deal with this shadow. But how could the Germans understand this, when no one else in the world can understand such a simple truth?’”
He looked at Franz as if to say: there, everything is now understood, and therefore to be forgiven; what a clever boy I am to have seen this.
Rachel sang as they drove down the coast to Ashkelon. She sat in the back seat of the Citroen 2CV and sang the blues. They crossed over a stone bridge, and Luke told Franz that the Egyptians had been defeated there in the War of Liberation.
“This was the limit of their advance, and so the bridge is called ‘Ad Halom: Till Here’. It was, we said, as Isaiah says, ‘in that day shall Egypt be like unto women; and it shall tremble and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of Hosts, and the land of Judah shall become a terror unto Egypt…’”
“Typical misogynist brute,” Rachel said, “‘Egypt shall be like unto women.’” She switched registers: “‘Go see what the boys in the back room will ’ave,/ and tell them I’m ’aving the same.’”
The road dipped towards the sea and was fringed with flowering shrub roses. Sycamores and cypresses grew abundantly. To their right sprawled the ruins of Ashdod, the Philistine city of Dagon, the fish-headed god. Then they turned off the coast road.
“There is something I want you to see,” Luke said, and the car climbed, past a reservoir, to a high point from where they had a view of the coastal plain and the sea on one side and the mountains of Judah rolling and heaving to the east. The road wound between hills and then emerged on a plateau covered with fields of maize and wheat and orange groves. He stopped by a water-tower.
“A land flowing with milk and honey,” Franz said.
“This is Negba,” Luke said. “It means ‘To the South’. The kibbutz here was established in 1939. It was wiped out in the War of Liberation. Then it was rebuilt. Only this water-tower, which was used as a lookout point, survives from the original settlement.”
They got out of the car. Luke led them to the military cemetery and stopped before the War Memorial. It showed three huge figures, two men and a girl. They were holding hands and their chins were tilted upwards in heroic style. Its simplicity was impressive, but it also reminded Franz of posters he had seen celebrating the heroes of the Soviet Union. He was about to remark on this, then saw there were tears in Luke’s eyes as he gazed at it. Luke turned away, entered the cemetery. It was very neat and very still, and the stones were white. Only the sound of a tractor disturbed the silence. He stood before a grave, his head bowed. He had a rose in his hand. Franz hadn’t seen him take it from the car. He bent down and laid it on the grave.
“Thank you, Michael,” he said.
Then he turned away, and took Franz by the arm.
“You don’t mind that I brought you here,” he said. “I wanted to, to help you understand. Michael was my brother. He was half grown up when I was born. He was killed in the first hour of the war, defending this kibbutz where he had been accepted only six months before. His faith in Israel’s destiny was complete. This kibbutz looks to the south and God promised Jacob, ‘Thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east, and to the north and to the south, and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ Michael never doubted that: all the families of the earth, it’s significant, isn’t it?”
They lunched at a little restaurant in the old town of Ashkelon. It was cavernous, with an arched roof that dated back to the Middle Ages at least.
“Perhaps your Crusaders, perhaps the Moslems, who knows? It was a great trading city. Twenty years before your First Crusade Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela reported that there were two hundred Jews here, and that merchants came from all quarters of the world.”
“Though possibly not Germany,” Franz said.
They ordered red mullet, which tasted fresh, of the sea, and pigeon, because, Luke said, they used to worship the dove in Ashkelon, and Roman coins from the city depicted the bird.
“Herod the Great was born here. According to Josephus, he built baths and fountains, costly fountains, that were admirable for size and workmanship.”
“A jerk,” Rachel said. “You could say as much of Albert Speer. As for the Massacre of the Innocents, doesn’t that make him a prototype Hitler?”
“There’s some dispute as to whether it actually took place.”
Franz took a piece of Arab bread and mopped up the gravy on his plate. He remembered his father and Dr Czinner both doing that at the Engineers’ Club, on an afternoon when life stretched before him, green and level as a polo field. But the pang of memory was momentary. He was caught up for the first time in the romance of Israel, in the sense that what was happening here now represented a new stage in a journey that had extended from the beginning of time, that the Jews had been offered
what was denied to others, a second entry to their Promised Land. Wasn’t it in fact a third chance? There had been the return from the Babylonian captivity, though he was hazy about that.
“I wish I knew the Bible better,” he said. “I feel I’m missing so much.”
He was envious of Luke. Rachel shared something of this envy; that was why she was showing herself so crabby. And this, he realised, had been conceived by Luke as a day of reparation. He had been wounded by that newspaper caption, even though as a novelist he should have been accustomed to criticism, and as a journalist have known its worthlessness. But it had flicked an open wound. He was permitted to criticise Israel, but resented criticism of his criticism, for that suggested that he was some sort of enemy, whereas he knew he criticised as a lover, in the same way as he got at Rachel for making less of herself than she could.
Luke ordered a second bottle of wine. It was pale yellow in colour, with a taste of almonds and came from vineyards near the border with Lebanon.
“Was Goliath from Ashkelon?” Franz asked.
“No, Gath, a few miles away. Kiryat-Gat, it’s called now. Gath means a winepress cut in the rock. They are excavating the mound of old Gath now. Some people think it is not Gath itself since the findings so far offer evidence of a Jewish settlement, rather than a Philistine one. But they’ll come to that, I’m sure.”
“Does it matter?” Rachel said. “I don’t see that it matters.”
“Of course it matters.”
“Why? You don’t wear a skullcap, you’re not religious. You’re a modern man, what does it matter to you?”
“The Bible matters because it is the history of our people. It is important that it be justified.”
“Can’t you be honest, Luke? What you really want is evidence of the Covenant, anything that will let you believe that the Jews have a God-given right to this land, even though you don’t believe in God, as far as I can see. It makes me sick.”
She threw down her napkin and ran out of the restaurant. She stumbled on the top step and her sunglasses fell to the ground, but she kept on running. Franz rose, picked them up, and looked out: she had disappeared round the corner. He returned to the table to find Luke pouring more wine.
“Rachel’s afraid of Israel,” Luke said. “She hopes I may become such an international success that I am offered a Chair at an American university. A visiting professorship anyway.”
“And would you take it?”
“It would be desertion.”
Becky’s father could have got out of Germany long before the war. He was already sufficiently distinguished, sufficiently competent and experienced in any case, to have got a good job in England or the United States. What had made him stay on? Obstinacy? The feeling that that too would be desertion? And if he had not remained, perhaps none of this would have happened – but that none would have included his own meeting with Becky.
“Do you believe in Fate?”
“In what sense?”
“The obvious one, I suppose. That things are bound to happen.”
“Oh no. We are each masters of our fate, responsible for our actions.”
“And yet you believe, deep down, that God gave this land to Israel?”
Luke smiled. He shook his head, took a sip of wine, and, not looking at Franz, said, “Nothing makes sense, does it? Nothing coheres. And yet we are obliged to behave as if that wasn’t so.”
“My father has been reading Jung. Does that surprise you?”
“No. It’s natural, if he is a man of any worth, that he should be seeking explanations.”
“Is Rachel all right? Should we go after her?”
“No. Leave her alone. She’ll come back when she’s ready.” He twiddled his wine glass. “Have you ever read The Bacchae?”
“No. What is it?”
“A Greek play. Euripides. Don’t look so surprised. Why shouldn’t a Jew read Greek?”
It was, he said, a play for the twentieth century. Franz would understand why when he read it.
“But what happens?”
“Pentheus, King of Thebes, and his mother Agave, deny the divinity of Dionysus, the god of darkness and passion, and instead insist on the supremacy of reason, order and light. But it is too much of a strain, this denial. Agave becomes a secret devotee of the god she has tried to deny, and Pentheus is tempted to spy on his mother and the other worshippers in their secret rites. Inflamed by the god, they seize the king and tear him into pieces.”
“Yes?”
“You have to effect a synthesis, I suppose. You can’t become whole if you deny truths merely because they are uncomfortable.”
“Are you suggesting that I am like Pentheus?”
“God help us, we all have our moments when we resemble him. It’s one of the greatest temptations there is.”
They did not notice Rachel return, until she laid a camellia in front of each of them.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”
“You dropped your sunglasses. Here you are.”
There was no singing as they drove back to Tel Aviv. At the hotel Franz found a telegram from Becky, saying her flight arrived the following evening.
He stood at the desk, imbibing the telegram, and was turning away to mount the stairs to his room when a voice called him from the bar.
“Mr Schmidt.”
“Yes?”
He didn’t move. It was dark in the bar and the voice came from a corner.
“I’ve been waiting for you. Won’t you join me?”
It was the English journalist in the crumpled linen suit, whom, that morning, Saul had treated with a wary respect. Franz sat down.
“You made quite a hit at our little press conference, dear boy. Have some brandy.”
The Englishman snapped his fingers to attract the barman’s attention. There was nobody else in the bar.
“We are not quite strangers,” he said, “though that may surprise you.”
He was sweating despite the air conditioning, a big man, with thin sandy fair worn long at the back, bloodshot eyes, a fleshy nose and a small pursed mouth which gripped a little cigar that he didn’t trouble to remove as he spoke. He put his hand on Franz’s leg just above the knee and squeezed it. It was a light squeeze and he had removed the hand before Franz had time to protest.
“Charlie has told me so much about you, and now I find you are engaged to marry Nell’s daughter. Amazing.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
The waiter brought brandy for the Englishman and beer as he had requested for Franz.
“But that’s why I wanted to see you, dear boy. You see, I was once married to Nell, a dear girl, but restless; it didn’t take. I soon realised that her emotions were already committed elsewhere: to Eli Czinner as it transpired. Only, she thought him dead, when we married. It was a long time ago, in the war.”
When he talked of the war his voice lightened. Some of the cynicism he wore like obsolete armour fell away from him. If Franz had read Ivan Murison’s autobiography, he would have found that the war chapters sang. There was a tune there he had lost since. Yet his success, springing from the miseries of ravaged Europe, had coarsened him. Ever since, the pity he had then experienced had been directed inwards. He had spoken of the war as “setting him on the road to fame”, and it had indeed made him for a few years a best-selling author. But when, in the middle Fifties, the vogue for war books had vanished, there had been nothing to put in its place. In the Savile Club he began to find that people drifted away from his corner of the bar. He spent long afternoons at the Gargoyle or the Colony Room. A flirtation with television came to nothing, there was something antipathetic about the image he offered on the screen. He had retired to Italy to write novels. A couple were published, without success. Then he had covered the Eichmann trial for an American magazine, with only a flicker of the real flair he had once exhibited. But it had been sufficient to persuade a Sunday newspaper, whose editor remembered The German Catastro
phe and Twilight of the False Gods, to recruit him for his present assignment on the Kestner case.
Franz hadn’t known that Becky’s mother had been married twice. Did Becky herself know?
“It will be interesting to meet Nell’s daughter. You spoke so movingly about her, dear boy. When is she arriving?”
What made him think she was coming?
“I’m waiting to hear from her,” Franz said. “Why did you ask me that question this morning?”
“I wanted to hear your answer. Simple, isn’t it?”
“You must have known I couldn’t… and who is this person who has told you so much about me?”
“Charlie? Carlo Bastini. I am sure you remember the little Bastini. He speaks of you so … warmly. I call him Charlie.” He looked at Franz over the rim of his brandy glass. Franz’s cheeks warmed; it might be too dark to see the blush.
“Small world,” Ivan Murison said.
“I haven’t seen him in years.”
“A dear boy. Very sensitive. He remembers you so well. Why, he even carries your photograph. He has several of them, you know.”
His fat fingers delved into his breast pocket and brought out a tattered brown envelope. He extracted two prints and pushed them across the table towards Franz. He stubbed out his little cigar and lit another, looking over the flame at Franz, who leaned forward and picked up the photographs.
“It’s a pity the light’s not better. They’re only snapshots, of course.”
The top one showed Franz sitting on a wall or parapet. He was wearing only a pair of shorts. One leg was drawn up, the knee nestling under his chin, the other hung loose. He was smiling. It had been taken, Franz recalled, on the terrace of the hacienda Bastini’s stepfather rented a dozen miles out of the city. He had gone there, once, for the weekend. It was a weekend that often returned to him at night. Shortly afterwards, Bastini and his family had left Argentina.
