The Sins of the Father

by Allan Massie

  “It’s charming, isn’t it?” Ivan Murison said. “Very pretty and quite innocent. Touching that Charlie’s kept it. Look at the other, dear boy. These are only copies, of course.”

  It showed Franz lying back on a low chair beside a swimming pool. His legs stretched, long, towards the camera. He might have been naked – there was what could have been a pair of wet trunks discarded to the left of the chair – but you couldn’t tell because another figure, with his back to the camera, was kneeling in front of the chair, his body between Franz’s legs, his head lowered. He wasn’t recognisable, but the shape was a boy’s and the mass of soft dark wavy hair was Bastini’s. One of Franz’s hands stroked the hair or was buried in it, the other lay or perhaps pressed on the boy’s shoulder.

  “As I say, they’re copies. We have the negatives. Charlie’s stepfather took it, with a telescopic lens, I suppose. He liked doing that sort of thing. Of course, you know he was the first man to seduce Charlie, if seduce is the right word, which I suspect it isn’t. Charlie claims it was because of him he married his mother, but then Charlie likes to preen himself, as you will remember. You know, I’m almost jealous. This snap” – he retrieved it from Franz and gazed at it – “makes me feel young again, it’s so Greek, don’t you know.”

  He took his cigar from his mouth and smiled, “You know, I really think you should have some brandy.” He called to the waiter. “Leave the bottle with us, will you,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “You know, Charlie was thrilled when he found out about your father. He said he could just imagine you in SS uniform. Of course, you were cadets together, weren’t you?”

  “What do you want?”

  Ivan took the bottle from the waiter and passed him his American Express card.

  “Co-operation, dear boy. I’m not sure what form it will take, but I intend to write the book about this case.”

  And he began to ask Franz all sorts of questions about his early life, his relations with his father, his memories of Rudi in Argentina, any expression of political, moral or philosophical opinions. It was thoroughly and professionally done. To his horror, Franz found himself answering, and taking trouble over his answers, as the brandy sank in the bottle, and confused memories disturbed his imagination.

  He didn’t remember getting to bed. He woke – as he recorded in his journal, along with an account of this meeting and of his day at Ashkelon – with the sensation of Bastini’s rather damp mouth nuzzling his cheek. It must have been the last wisp of a dream as it slid into misty oblivion. He lay there for a long time with that past invading him, tried, in a surge of conscience, to banish it by summoning up the disgusting picture of Bastini and Ivan Murison together, as (it was clear) they must often have been. But conscious effort of the imagination did not work; it was displaced at once by Bastini’s hands fumbling at the snake-belt and buttons of his flannel shorts. He leaped from his bed, naked, and took a shower, seeking with the rush of cold water to dispel shame. But shame returned, when, after coffee, he sat at the writing-table with his journal before him.

  “If Father feels no guilt,” he wrote, “is it because the past is truly dead for him, because he feels himself to be an entirely different person, and so is able to make no connection between the man he is now and the man who ordered these atrocities? If so, that is a failure of imagination. It must be. And yet isn’t it only by stifling the disturbing imagination which memory breeds that we make it possible for ourselves to advance from one stage of life to another?”

  Rachel was making dumplings for goulash. She took pleasure in binding the flour with egg and suet, and forming them into neat balls. She ran her finger round the bowl, and licked it; it was an action recovered from childhood. As she worked she listened to the wireless. Someone was telling a story, a folk-tale, about a rich man who gave all his money to the poor (who can always be found to accept it), and retired to the desert to live in a community of hermits and worship God. One day, the story-teller said, the man was sent to town to sell two old donkeys. The donkeys were past working, but the hermits still hoped to get a good price for them. He stood in the marketplace, and soon a man looking for donkeys approached him, and asked if these were worth buying. “If they were worth buying do you think we’d be selling them?” the man replied. Then another prospective customer came up and asked why the beasts had hollow backs and ragged tails. “Because they’re very old,” the man said, “and we have to twist their tails to make them move.” So this customer went away and the word got round and no other buyers came near. In the evening he took the donkeys home, and his companion who had been trying to sell them with him told the other hermits about his unhelpful answers. Then they all asked him why he had answered buyers in this fashion. “Do you suppose,” he replied, “that I left home and gave away all my cattle, and sheep and goats, and even my camels, to make myself a liar for the sake of two wretched old donkeys?”

  The man who was telling the story laughed, and said life was like that. He said it was extraordinary how people cut off their nose to spite their face and then protested how handsome their nose still was, calling on others to admire the way it grew.

  This explanation puzzled Rachel. She didn’t think that was the point of the story at all. She wasn’t sure what the point really was, but nevertheless it seemed in an obscure way significant to her. Then it struck her that it was really rather like life in Israel, for an American like herself at least. Perhaps she had given away camels in order to tell lies about two old donkeys?

  Rachel finished making the dumplings and put them in the fridge. She had invited Franz to bring Becky there for supper, and then hesitated, wondering if he mightn’t prefer to spend the first evening of her time in Israel alone with her. But he had seemed almost relieved – yes, there was no almost about it, he was relieved – to hear her invitation. Maybe that wasn’t surprising.

  She listened to Luke’s typewriter in the next room. That meant he thought a chapter in the novel had reached the stage when he could lay it out for others to read. It was a step forward when she heard the machine going, even a step towards the USA. There was no chance that Luke would accept an invitation there until he had got his novel done. She had been afraid that his obsession with Franz and the Kestner case would make it impossible for him to continue the novel. But it didn’t seem to have worked like that. On the contrary, Franz had acted as some sort of agent who had released the flow. Rachel began to sing, then broke off, in case the machine stopped.

  If the man had told lies about the donkeys, in what way would he have been worse off?

  She put the question at supper. They had eaten the goulash and dumplings, which were spicy and very good, going well with the red wine from Sharon which Luke had chosen. Conversation had been slow, not just on account of the excellence of the food, but because each of the four was conscious of areas of talk that seemed to them forbidden territory. Consequently all welcomed Rachel’s question because it lifted the conversation away from minefields of the immediate and personal, and into the abstract and general.

  “Of course, he should have told the necessary lie,” Luke said. “He had been sent out to sell the donkeys and had accepted that commission. Well, he was wrong to do so if he was going to chicken out on the deal.”

  Rachel knew that Luke was talking to provoke. He didn’t really believe that the end justified the means, though he sometimes pretended he did. Maybe in some contrary moods, it wasn’t just a pretence. But now he was twisting their tails as if they had been donkeys themselves.

  “That’s all very well,” Franz said. “But you know, his question was a good one. What was the point of giving up all that if it wasn’t to live in some better relation with truth?”

  “If Luke’s right,” Becky said, “maybe he should have refused to take the donkeys to town.”

  “Sure, OK,” Luke switched sides, “but if he had said, no deal, someone else would have done it, and told the lie. So the man would have been guil
ty by omission. He would have been an accomplice in guilt, like everybody who stands by and sees injustice being done.”

  “Like the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan,” Franz said.

  “OK, OK, that’s enough Christian one-upmanship.”

  “But,” Becky said, “what could he have done?” She looked pale, and tired from her flight, and beautiful as an autumn morning. “I suppose he could have argued with his companions that they had no right to offer the donkeys for sale.”

  “Then he’d have got clobbered,” Rachel said.

  “So?” Luke said. “You must suffer to be virtuous. That’s the whole point of religion, all religions, I guess.”

  “There is a German saying,” Franz said. “At least I think it’s a German saying, Mamma always used to quote it with a shake of her head as something her own grandmother used to repeat: ‘You need a long spoon to take meat with the devil.’”

  “That’s a proverb in every language, I guess,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah, and the man who made the spoons went bust,” Luke said.

  “Why was that?”

  “No demand.”

  “Why, do you mean people no longer want to sup with the Devil?”

  “Not so. I mean they don’t choose to stay on such distant terms.”

  Everyone laughed. Luke poured more wine. The sound of a woman singing in a neighbouring apartment carried through the night; she was crooning in an American accent, a song that had been popular before the war. Then they found they were out of cigarettes, and Luke and Franz went down to the corner shop to fetch some. Luke would have gone alone, but Franz insisted on accompanying him. He was halfway down the stairs when it occurred to him that, after that newspaper article, Luke might prefer not to be seen with him, in his own quarter of the city. But it was too late to turn back, and he knew that if he told Luke what he had been thinking, he would receive a proud and indignant denial.

  “Franz has been telling me how kind you have both been,” Becky said.

  “Oh no… it’s nothing.”

  “Do you think he minds me coming?”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t.”

  “I think he does, probably. It makes things more complicated for him, and they were complicated enough already. But I couldn’t not.”

  Later, when they were alone, Rachel said to Luke, “She’s crazily in love with him. Like I used to be with you when we were first married.” So, she didn’t add, she’s afraid of him, and for him.

  But, before then, when they were still all together, smoking and drinking wine, and starting conversations which stopped all at once, not because they were embarrassed with each other, but because the talk threatened to lead them into deserts where none of the four wished, or dared, to travel; when they were all the same acquiring a sense of being a quartet, making the music of their own generation as an act of liberation from history; then Becky said, out of the blue, “My father used to tell me folk-tales when I was a little girl.”

  “Fucking folk-tales,” Luke said.

  “They were the only Jewish things he did for me, I mean, that’s not grammar, doesn’t make sense, they represented the only sort of Jewishness he offered to me. You don’t know my father, Luke. He’s awfully down on other Jews. That’s why he didn’t come to Israel after the war, he used to say, too many bloody Jews. He’s really anti-Semitic, I tell him, for a Jew.”

  “Ought to meet Rachel,” Luke said, putting his arm round his wife, hugging her, and then giving her a kiss on the cheek. “They’d be great buddies.”

  “Of course I don’t remember most of them, and those I do usually puzzled me.” Becky crinkled her brows to prove the puzzlement lasted. “There was one about a Jew who worked for a Christian prince. He got across the prince, I don’t know how, and was sentenced to death. So he said, ‘Your Excellency, let’s make a bargain. You give me a year in which to teach your dog to talk, and if I don’t succeed, kill me at the year’s end.’ Well, this appealed to the prince, nobody knows why, maybe he just wanted a talking dog, and so he agreed. So the Jew went home, and all his friends said, ‘Crazy guy, have you gone quite mad? How can you teach a dog to talk?’ ‘So, maybe I can’t,’ the Jew said, ‘but a year is a long time. Much can happen. Perhaps the prince will die, perhaps the lessons will kill the dog. Or, who knows? – perhaps the dog learns to speak after all.’”

  She told the story in the accents of a Jewish comedian, and then blushed, because that was how she had been accustomed to tell it, it was how her father had told it to her, and it didn’t seem right here, in Israel, where the Jews had no need to make a comedy of themselves or apologise for being.

  Luke said, “Well yes, but the dog didn’t, did he? Still, I see why your poppa told that story.”

  “Oh do you,” she said, “oh, I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose you’re right. I thought he just found it funny.”

  “Fucking folk-tales,” Luke said again.

  “Mind you,” Becky said, “I do think it’s funny.”

  * * * *

  “They are nice, aren’t they?” Franz said. “I told you they were.”

  They were walking home, arm in arm, in a mood that was both lazy and lively with anticipation. A breeze blew from the sea, soft as love’s fingers playing over the cheek. That morning each had been nervous of the night; now they stopped and kissed under a high wall, with the scent of lemons around and the sound of Chopin coming from an apartment block across the street. There was even a moon.

  “Yes,” she said, “I like them. Rachel’s on edge though, isn’t she?”

  “Everyone’s on edge, here. It’s a place where you feel things may happen at any moment. Not like Argentina.”

  “But things happen there.”

  She didn’t add: look what happened to me.

  “They’re incredible, even so,” he said. “In Argentina, any action is a sort of protest against despair.”

  They strolled on, alone, in the night street, with Chopin fading into silence. She had been suspicious of Luke and Rachel; she couldn’t understand how they had come, as it were, to adopt Franz, to take him under their covering wing. It didn’t make sense in the circumstances. Then she saw them all together, at the supper table, saw the look in their eyes, and she knew that there would always be someone willing to do this for Franz, that it was perfectly natural. It was one reason why she loved him herself, if it was also a reason she resented.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t want to,” he said. His left arm lay under her neck, tickled by her hair, and he stroked her left arm and her breast, just above the nipple. “It really frightened me.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because of what you said that day. That’s Jewish flesh.”

  “Oh that.”

  “I’m no closer to understanding him,” he said. “Every time I visit him in that neat antiseptic visiting room, with the two soldiers watching over us, a chill enters the air, though in fact the room is overheated.”

  She had never been able to imagine what he hoped to achieve by coming here. She found the whole thing odd. When she first met Franz, and loved him almost at once, he had seemed indifferent to his father. Oh yes, he respected him, in his old-fashioned way, was perhaps somewhat in awe of him – which was gauche and youthful and lovable – but didn’t give her the impression of anything more. She had been able to envision a married life in which Franz’s father represented little more than the dullest sort of dutiful Christmas present, and perhaps lunch twice a year. Why should he matter more now that he stood revealed as a monster? Was Franz simply reacting, again in an awkward and immature fashion, to the glamour of notoriety? Or did he feel that he had an essential part in a terrible drama that was being enacted? But the truth was: the drama was a damp squib. She could see its ending so clearly. For them it was merely a matter of holding on, six months, nine months, until it was over and they could resume their life. And yet she had made that remark – “that’s Jewish flesh” – there was no get
ting away from that.

  He hadn’t dared ask her why she had come. And now that they had made love, and it was all right, they had found each other again, perhaps he would be even more frightened to put that question. Which she didn’t know that she could answer: except to say, I came to make love to you, for fear that if I didn’t we would never be able to do so again.

  “I didn’t know that your mother had been married before.”

  “Why should you? It’s not something she talks about. I don’t suppose it’s the sort of thing people do talk about. I only found out myself by accident.”

  “Well, her first husband’s here. He’s a journalist or something. He made himself known to me the other night. I didn’t like him.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I think he’ll make trouble if he can.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nobody can make worse trouble than there is.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s my father, this time. He intends to come to give evidence.”

  She screwed round to kiss his mouth. Their legs intertwined. They pressed against each other, bone against bone.

  “It can’t make any difference,” he said.

  THREE

  Preparations for the trial advanced. Witnesses arrived from the United States, Europe, even Australia. Depositions were taken and scrutinised. Franz found himself engaged in long conferences with Saul, who declared himself anxious about Rudi’s indifference. Franz realised that professional zeal now dominated Saul; he was a man of law for the moment, not a Jew. Franz was amazed by his ability to put personal feelings aside, to appear to live the part he was playing.