by Allan Massie
Though Rudi had been held in Tel Aviv, the trial would take place in Jerusalem. Security reasons had been given as the explanation for keeping him in Tel Aviv, out of the divided city. The authorities feared the possibility of a rescue, effected with Arab assistance. It was not a fanciful notion: to lose Rudi Kestner would be a propaganda setback for the Israeli government. But the symbolic importance of putting Hitlerism again on trial in the sacred city of Jerusalem, in the very heart of world Jewry, now overrode the security considerations. The fears seemed exaggerated in any case: the efficiency of Israel was such that Franz was sure there was no real chance that they would lose their prisoner. And he couldn’t anyway contemplate how his father would live if he were freed. It certainly wouldn’t be in what anyone might understand as freedom.
But had Rudi ever known freedom?
Rudi’s own interest in the trial did not rise above the technicalities of his defence. He was ready to discuss those as if the trial were a chess game. But whenever Franz tried to bring up the subject of what he thought of as the moral significance of the trial, Rudi’s mouth shut close, he tapped out a cigarette for himself, he blew smoke in his son’s face.
Franz, chilled by the atmosphere of these conversations, attempted to get his father to speak of his childhood. He had been incurious about this. Curiosity had never been either encouraged or discouraged. It had just been assumed that there was nothing of that sort to talk about. He hadn’t even known, until that lunch with Becky and her parents at the Engineers’ Club – a lunch that now seemed to have belonged to another, now buried, civilisation – that his grandfather had been a postal official, and a Saxon.
“Did your father fight in the First War?” he asked Rudi. “No, he was too old. Already too old.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Besides, he disapproved. He was an old social democrat, though he concealed his views on account of his official post, and he disapproved of his party’s acquiescence in the war. It did him little good. He died in the influenza of 1919. My mother wanted me to become a priest, did you know that?”
“No, I know nothing of your family … our family.”
Rudi smiled, “Josef Goebbels used to say his mother had the same ambition for him. Perhaps we were both spoiled priests. I often thought that in Argentina.”
Hadn’t the SS, Franz thought, seen itself as a corps d’élite, like the Jesuits, or more precisely, the Teutonic Knights? Wasn’t it perhaps a parody of a religious order, founded on hate and not love?
Luke had said, the other night as they walked through the inky violet of the still hours, “Do you know what the Germans themselves called the camps, the extermination camps? Der Arschloch der Welt – The arsehole of the world.”
Franz looked across the table at his father, whose fingers, despite the heavy cigarette smoking, were kept free of nicotine stains by use of a pumice stone.
Rudi said, “I hated my mother’s weakness, and so I hated her Church. Its doctrines of self-abasement stank in my nostrils. Now I see it is more complicated than I supposed. We thought we had come in our generation to supersede Christianity, to sweep away what we thought of as a faith fit only for slaves and women. But it has since occurred to me that we realised its most lurid fantasies. We made what it had only imagined. Hell. But even that claim is excessive. Hadn’t the Inquisition in Spain prefigured our endeavours? Isn’t that hatred for the other, for all those outside the tribe, built into the human psyche? Wasn’t our chief offence that we compelled others to confront that reality? You know what Freud said, my son: ‘Endlich muss mann beginnen lieben, um nicht krank zu werden’? Man must constantly strive to love, so that he doesn’t become sick. Are you surprised to hear me quote a Jew, Franz? Well, perhaps it is because I have come to accept the truth of his words, and so to feel the necessity of ‘beginnen zu lieben’. Does that amaze you so much?”
Rudi said, “You must understand, my son, that, though I shall fight to the last for my life, because that is the duty of man, and I may add in passing that it was their failure to do this, their acquiescence in our plans, that so disgusted me with the Jews, though, as I say, I shall do this, like a bull in the arena, or a bear tied to the stake, I nevertheless accept my fate. I shall not be testifying on behalf of anything or anyone but my own being. Like Luther, I shall say, Here I stand, Rudi Kestner, as I have made myself. Now that I am in your power, you may make of me what you please. That will not alter. And there is an irony, which is inconceivable to anyone who has not felt the lightness of freedom from the immense and relentless exigencies of abstraction, that I have been brought here to the cradle of what Nietzsche called ‘die ungeheuerlichste aller menschlichen Verirrungen’ – the most monstrous of all human errors: monotheism. For if the Jews were our victims, they were also, I insist, the begetters of the error into which we fell: the denial of multiplicity…”
Rudi said: “When I was at the same time master and servant of a bureaucracy of admirable complexity, I was a simple man. Now that I am nothing, I find myself growing daily more complicated.”
“Are you, were you, can you still be, proud?”
“Proud of playing God? Who can be? Then again, who can fail to be?”
Rudi said, “No one could have betrayed the Jews if they had not first betrayed themselves. They prated of the truths of self-abnegation, of the lonely spirit in the desert. And they lived a truth of exploitation, thrusting Saxon peasants ever deeper into remorseless debt.”
Franz had always known his father as a force. But that force had been contained, like a river that had been embanked and could no longer flood a city. Now it was in spate, the walls had broken, and the torrent tumbled through the civil streets bearing its cargo of fractured nature, broken statues, dead dogs, corpses of sheep, cattle and the occasional child. When the floodwater ebbed away, creeping back into the river’s channel, a residue of mud and filth made the houses noisome.
Franz wondered if his father was indeed going mad. “You can’t imagine the incoherence of his talk,” he said to Becky. She suggested that perhaps he was doing the exact opposite, going sane, and floundering in the attempt like an inexpert swimmer: which wasn’t, in the circumstances, surprising. Franz pretended to agree, or at least to be ready to be convinced, or comforted; nevertheless he wrote in his journal:
Becky doesn’t hear his voice. It rings in my ears from one session to the next. It comes between me and sleep at night. When we have made love, and Becky lies naked in my arms, and I ought to be invaded by tenderness, even by that melancholy which is the sequel to lovemaking and which is also (I am sure) evidence of the intensity of that love and of one’s fears for its permanence, even then I hear instead that flat, droning monotone regurgitating bits of reading and memories of experience of the utmost horror, which nevertheless I am certain he does not feel, does not allow in any true sense to touch him. It is always as if he is watching something which doesn’t concern him, which perhaps – and this is surely still more horrible – never concerned him at any deeper level of his being – if indeed he has such a level. That’s what I scream to myself, silently, in the night, as the girl I love murmurs in my arms.
And I write this now, and read it over, and am horrified by myself. Aren’t I perhaps guilty of the same fault? This is my father who is in terror or torment. He must be, though he doesn’t show it. This is my father who has never been anything but just and kind to me, even when severely kind, who has never (I am certain of this at least) had anything but the best intentions towards me, and who has kept my own best interests at heart: and I analyse him in this manner. Can that be right? Can it be avoided? Am I to blame? If so, of what am I culpable? I never asked … but that’s pathetic.
I am pathetic. If it wasn’t for Becky, I would … no, I don’t suppose I would have either the courage or, to be honest, the lack of curiosity, to kill myself.
I write, “if it wasn’t for Becky” and that is true. I need her more, and more sharply and urgently, than I could e
ver have imagined myself needing anybody. But, but, but, last night, I dreamed twice, or one dream split in confusion, I don’t know. I was again in that hut at the Academy with José-Maria and Luis. It smelled of rotten earth and the dirty sacks on which the naked body of Bastini crumpled. Only this time, I joined in the beating, whipping him till the blood ran and the sperm spouted. There was joy in his degradation, music sounded about us. And then – I don’t know what there was between, whether I had woken and then drifted again beyond the margins of sleep, or whether the camera cut to the next scene, but I was walking up a staircase with Alexis. It was a grand staircase thickly carpeted, with marble surrounds. She was dressed all in black, a dingy cap like a railway porter’s perched on her head. We mounted the stairs entwined. I felt her fingers on my buttock, slipped down within my waistband. I looked at her breasts which her silk shirt was unbuttoned sufficiently to disclose. She wore a black leather jacket. It was shabby and there was a right-angled tear on the right thigh of her jeans. Everyone watched us as we mounted the stairs. Everyone, I knew, envied me. Then we were in a room. It was a big room and half-dark and there was no furniture there. Cobwebs dangled over the window and from the chandelier. I turned to kiss her, but she slipped away. She raised herself on her toes, and kissed me on the left cheek. It was no more than a brush of her lips, a promise, a sigh, an expression of regret. It was very cold in the room and there was no bed and then I was alone. I stretched out my hands as if reaching for the shore where she had stood, and they were grey with spiders’ webs. And then I woke. I reached out for Becky and she was not there. My eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, and she was sitting by the window gazing out on this city which could be hers and never mine. “I was thinking of Jerusalem,” she said, and for a moment did not stir when I begged her to return to our bed.
“You were dreaming,” she said, “twitching like a dog hunting rabbits in his sleep. Was I in your dream?”
“Yes,” I lied. “No,” I said, “I don’t know. It’s vanished.”
Ivan Murison has invited us to lunch today. I would have refused but Becky has a natural curiosity to meet her mother’s first husband. When I see him, I am afraid that I will again see Bastini weeping on the dirty sacks…
They were both nervous as they prepared for their meeting with Ivan Murison. Becky felt she was somehow betraying her father – perhaps her mother too – in accepting his invitation. It was as if she was eager to spy on their past, on a part of their lives which did not belong to her, to enter a forbidden chamber.
Yet the mood slipped away in the consciousness of her happiness. She couldn’t account for that either. She was afraid that things were going to happen, things over which they neither of them possessed any control, which could scatter their happiness, which would blow the structure of love they had made for themselves utterly apart. Perhaps that itself was reason for happiness now. They were like lovers in wartime who may any night find everything destroyed by the bombers that occupy the darkness.
That was true. It would have been easy to advance simpler explanations for her happiness. She had been afraid of coming here. She had been afraid she would find Franz no longer loved her. The intimation of his feeling for Alexis had woken that fear. The knowledge of her father’s part in the drama they were experiencing had fanned it. And that drama was all the more terrible because they hadn’t been engaged as performers. It was rather as if they had been invited to make up the audience in a theatre, been sent complimentary tickets, and then discovered that what was happening on the stage involved them: as if, for instance, Macbeth’s murderers had slunk into the auditorium seeking out fresh victims. That was how the Jews themselves must have felt in pre-war Germany: they hadn’t hired out to be players, but had been conscripted. Perhaps that is the meaning, and the horror, of history: that it spills off the stage. If only it could be left to those who enjoy the game.
They took a taxi to the restaurant which Ivan Murison had chosen, which had tables on a terrace within view of the sea. He was waiting for them there, with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket by his side, and a glass between his fingers. He rose to meet them, and because the table was on a higher level, one step above them, appeared huge and dominating. His cream suit was crumpled and stained, but he exuded a sense of superiority, as if the state of his suit was a mark of his sublime indifference, as if only trivial people needed to take trouble with their appearance. Becky was glad she hadn’t put on any lipstick, which she rarely did, but had thought of doing on this occasion.
He had already ordered for them: lobster, and she knew he hoped that one of them would protest a dislike for lobster. He seized the bottle by the neck and poured the wine, and when he passed a glass to Becky, placed his free hand under her chin, lifting it up so that he might scrutinise her.
The gesture was insolent. She resented it, but could not, without equal insolence, repudiate him; and was incapable of that. He held her chin there a long moment, like a man considering whether to buy a horse.
“I see a resemblance,” he said. “How is your mother? Does she still love Czinner? Or has that marriage bored her in its turn?”
Becky flushed.
“Father’s blind,” she said, and then wished she hadn’t; she had no desire to offer him to this man as an object of pity.
Ivan Murison smiled, as if her answer satisfied him. Then he talked of coincidence: how strange it was that his friend Charlie should have been at school with Franz.
“And to think,” Ivan Murison said, “that Rudi Kestner, whose traces I tried to follow through Germany eighteen years ago, should present himself in such an intimately connected fashion to me now. Well, it just goes to show. I always regarded him as one of my failures: he seemed to have vanished so completely. I never believed, as some said, that he died in the last days in Berlin. Oh no, not old Rudi. But how he got away, who helped him – for he must have had help – these remained mysteries.”
His voice sank on the last word, like that of an actor in an old-fashioned melodrama. Then he began to talk as he forked lobster thermidor into his mouth. He talked first of his experiences in Germany, of how he had been one of the first reporters into Belsen and Buchenwald, of how the horrors he saw there had filled him with a loathing of the whole German people. Yet, in his speech, the loathing and repulsion spread further; they seeped into everything he said, soaked up so that it was like a newspaper spread on the floor where a bitch has squatted to urinate. He had never been an idealist; Franz got the sense of a man who had always taken a narrow view of experience, whose response to everything had been, “What’s in it for me?” Well, he had got something out of the concentration camps: a book and a reputation. The camps had, in a sense that was almost as horrible as anything which had happened there, made him. Now he dwelled on what he had seen with a relish that suggested it meant no more to him than photographs too often thumbed over, photographs from which the original horror had been drained away, leaving instead even a certain enjoyment. They couldn’t know how he had really felt. Perhaps it had never been possible to establish that. But now, as Ivan Murison rolled the details around, and dug his fork into the lobster, piercing a thick gobbet of sea-flesh, as he dwelled on the terror of the last camp prostitutes with rags of their tawdry glamour still clinging to them as they ran here and there, desperate because they didn’t know whether they would be aligned with the victims or their torturers, it seemed that a transference had taken place. By brooding on horrors, Ivan Murison had changed sides; contemplation of pain and terror had made him an addict. His imagination could now be excited only by what had once made him tremble.
Becky pushed her chair back, so hard that it fell over, clapped her napkin to her mouth, and fled.
“I’m afraid I’ve upset her, old boy,” Ivan Murison said. He sipped his champagne and his eyes searched for Franz’s over the rim of the glass; found them and held them.
“But people should know these things. I’ve made it my life’s work, dear boy, to force the
face of the public into them.”
“What do you want with us?” Franz said.
Ivan Murison called for the waiter and ordered brandy. “Bring the bottle,” he said again.
He sat, red-faced, sweating, and smiling until it came, then poured himself a big balloon. He swirled the liquid round in the glass, and drank. Down in one, then poured another measure. “Charlie told me you were an innocent,” he said. “Charlie’s not innocent, dear boy. He knows the sink the world is. Very well, you’re impatient now to get away from me, to see what has happened to Nell’s daughter, you wonder if she’s all right. You little fool. Nobody’s all right. Don’t you know that?”
He put the glass down, and lit a cigar. He blew the first smoke straight at Franz. “I want an exclusive with Czinner when he arrives, and I want the details of your father’s escape from Germany. Names and dates. Just that. Two simple requests. Nothing to it, old boy, for one in your position. Don’t let me down now.”
“I can’t fix that… I don’t see how.”
“Oh, I think you can and do, darling. That photograph I showed you might excite Nell’s daughter differently from the way it does us, mightn’t it now? One other thing. Steer clear of Luke Abramowitz. He’s a Zionist. That means he’s using you for his own purposes.”
* * * *
At the Mandelbaum Gate, Luke said, “We can go no further. We cannot enter the Old City, not even Rachel, though she has an American passport. You can of course, Franz. I doubt if it will be possible for Becky. In any case, not today. You require permission, first from our District Commissioner, then from the Jordanian authorities, who have never been known to grant permission to a Jew. So, you see, Franz, even in our own Holy Land, in the Holy City of Jerusalem, the way is barred to the Jew.”
