by Allan Massie
Yakov switched on the electric fan. It dissipated the cigarette smoke. He made more mugs of tea. Franz said he must go. He had an appointment with Birnbaum.
“Saul could arrange for me to see Czinner. Ask him to do so.”
“Father, it is impossible. Besides, what would be the use of it? What can you have to say to each other?”
“Czinner would understand me,” Rudi said.
Becky was meeting Minty Hubchik in the bar. She took Nell’s letter, postponing still the moment of reading it. As she left the apartment, Kinsky said, “You will tell Franz that I would like to see him?”
“Of course. But, Kinsky, is my father right? Are we wrong to be together?”
“He is quite right and absolutely wrong. It is in his word unseemly, but I don’t see how you could do anything else, darling.”
“Thank you, Kinsky, that’s a help.”
“No, it’s only the truth. How can it be a help?”
The hotel bar was dark and international. There was nothing of Israel in it. Minty Hubchik was waiting for her. She was sitting in a corner with a file on the table in front of her beside her glass, which was empty but for an olive on a cocktail stick. She wore big-framed spectacles that made her features look small and juvenile. She smiled at Becky as if they were old friends.
“I don’t know why I’ve come here,” Becky said. “I don’t want to talk to any journalists.”
“All right,” Minty Hubchik said, “don’t think of me as a journalist, just think of me as another girl.”
She ordered drinks – a Coke for Becky and another Martini for herself. Then she called back the waiter.
“Make it a Gibson,” she said, “I can’t stand these lousy olives.” She smiled at Becky.
“It’s crazy,” she said, “I still get a kick out of being a girl on my own in a place like this and knowing I have the right to be and do what I like. It’s like I haven’t gotten used to being adult and free.”
Then she began to talk about herself, about a childhood in Toronto which had seemed to promise only security and prosperity. She could see a round of social events, fund-raising coffee mornings, sherry at gallery openings, stretching before her, a good marriage and well-scrubbed obedient children. Her father was a surgeon, he could buy anything he wanted. Her mother smiled when she thought anyone was watching her daughter. They were proud of their only child.
“It was the best cotton wool they wrapped me in.”
She took the onion from her cocktail glass and sucked it.
She was something new to Becky, who was dazzled by her trim confidence. Sure, she said, her parents were Jewish, but it didn’t signify. She was Canadian herself. What did she mean by that? Canada has certainly its tight little, right little, conventional side, but for Minty that wasn’t important. She laid down the cocktail stick, sipped her Gibson, lit her Peter Stuyvesant. She was going places, that’s what it meant, and going easy because there was no harness holding her. Life was what you made of it; Canada had afforded her that gift.
“I guess it’s different in Argentina,” Minty said. “You want to cut loose. Life’s become horizontal, hadn’t you noticed?”
“No,” Becky said, “and I don’t know what you mean.”
“Maybe you have to be Canadian,” Minty said. “I mean you can move, you don’t have to listen to what’s going on in the mine-workings of the past.”
“But you’re interested, or you wouldn’t be here, doing this job.”
“Sure, but it’s academic in one sense. I’m interested in what happens from here, not in what went on then. I’m more interested in you, Becky, than in your dad and his memories and guilts. I’m more interested in you than in Franz’s father, I’m human. How are you going to make out, kid?”
And then Becky, who hadn’t meant to, unfolded her doubts, her love, her fear, her suspicions. She talked as if they had met on a train journey and would never see each other again, as if they were blessed with anonymity.
“Look,” Minty said, “Look, baby, this is where it’s at…” She was full of phrases of that sort, they tripped off her tongue. She had a little girl’s voice, and at first it sounded like silly, slot-machine talk, the ill-digested jargon of some thin philosophy. But she stuck to it, she urged Becky, who could not understand her concern, to begin life now, her life, assumed by her alone without reference or responsibility to anyone or anything that belonged to an older generation. “It’s all part of what I mean by horizontal,” she said.
“The past fucks you up,” she went on. Her own parents had gotten free of it, that was one thing she had to be grateful to them for. Sure, they were Jewish, but they weren’t obsessed by it. They were Jewish the way their neighbours were Scots or Irish. It meant something, but not much. Minty was a propagandist for the Now. “You can get free,” she said. “All you gotta do is be yourself. Nobody else is gonna be you, that’s for sure. Nobody else can live your life. All this dead shit, forget it.”
What sort of voice was hers? (She ordered another Gibson.) Was she a new breed of serpent, denying good and evil? Or was it, as she suggested, that humanity had a duty to get beyond those concepts? She was an unlikely emissary; even Becky saw that, even then. And yet, horizontality, living life on the plane of the present … Becky looked at the small-featured face that was pale even in the shadows of the bar, and found the offer it held attractive.
“What do you really want?” Becky said.
She looked away from Minty’s answering smile, and then Kinsky entered the bar.
He came towards them with that walk of his like someone moving on ground that shifted under his feet. He was wearing a white suit now, and it was too youthful for him, stressing that he was no longer a dandy but instead only a man who had once laid legitimate claim to that description. He sat down and the waiter approached and Kinsky looked quickly at him, and then away, and ordered whisky for himself and whatever the girls wanted.
“Am I interrupting?” he said. “This isn’t an interview, I hope?”
“No,” Minty said, “it’s all off the record, I’m here as a friend.”
“Have you known …?” He paused.
“No,” Minty said, “not long, but well enough.”
Becky nodded, “It’s all right, Kinsky.”
She didn’t explain Kinsky to the other girl, who had anyway seen him at the airport and probably gathered what she needed to know.
“We’ve had telephone calls,” he said. “I hoped you would still be here.”
“Telephone calls?”
“Yes, from Franz among others. Your father insisted on speaking to him.”
“Oh God! What did he say?”
“What he said to you.”
“And …?”
“And at first Franz protested, I think, because Eli grew angry. Then there was a change. ‘I’m glad you see reason,’ Eli said. ‘You have behaved like children, irresponsible children. You might have done incalculable damage.’”
“Who to?” Minty said.
Kinsky smiled, “Perhaps Eli would ask whether damage is ever, can ever be, restricted to particulars. His own experience, his own guilt might drive him to reject such a notion. I don’t know, my dear, I am only an ageing antiquaire who never had any talent for general discussion and who is lost when the conversation moves away from the few things I cherish. Anyway, there was a long silence, or Franz may have been speaking, I don’t know. But in the end it seems that Franz promised he would send your things round. So I said, no, don’t do that, I’ll come and fetch them.”
“And where do I come in?” Becky said. “Don’t I have a say?”
“Well, my dear, Franz and Eli are agreed.”
“Bloody hell,” Minty said.
“In any case I’m coming with you,” said Becky.
“Me too,” Minty said.
Kinsky sighed, drank his whisky, assented. Perhaps he had been expecting, even hoping for, this response. After all, he was on her side, wasn’t he?
&n
bsp; The evening was spread out peacefully as they left the hotel, and looked for a taxi. It was the wrong hour of the day. They turned towards the sea front. A red gash of light was thrown by the setting sun down to the distant water and upwards until it was lost in the heavens that turned first violet then shades of ever-darkening grey. Heavy clouds massed landward. They walked between the two worlds in silence. At the third junction, they left the sea and the colours behind them. Becky thrust her hand into her jacket pocket and touched her mother’s letter. She bit her lip. Minty took hold of her elbow and squeezed.
Franz’s hair was wet and tousled. He kissed Becky, allowed Kinsky to brush his cheek with his lips, and looked over his shoulder at Minty.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said, holding Becky again. He was near tears. Had he been crying already?
Becky kept hold of him.
“How were things today?”
“How they always are, only worse.”
He looked at Minty.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m off duty. It’s off the record.”
“I’ve seen you before,” he said. “I don’t know where.”
“Sure, at that Press Conference you gave. Minty Hubchik.”
She held out her hand.
“I don’t understand,” he said, taking it.
“It’s all right,” she said again, “it’s off the record. I’ve been giving Becky moral support, that’s all. She needs it, you know.”
There were suitcases on the bed.
“Your father telephoned,” Franz said. “He was very firm. He told me our being together, now, was scandalous. He said he’d spoken to you.”
Becky wanted to lay her finger on his upper lip and arrest its quiver. He wasn’t in a state to be by himself.
“I think you should go,” he said. “I think you should leave Israel, wait for me somewhere, London perhaps.”
“No,” she said. She shook her head. “No. Don’t you see? It’s surrendering to them, to the past. I won’t.”
She went through to the bathroom, sat down and drew her mother’s letter from her jacket pocket …
Darling: I am letting you down by not coming to be with you. I am sorry, more sorry than I can say. But I can’t be with you because I can no longer be with your father. All this has ended our marriage. In my opinion he has gone mad. He sees this business of Franz’s father as a means of expiating the guilt he has always felt and never admitted. He doesn’t admit it even now, but to get rid of it, and make himself acceptable, as he believes, to the Jewish people, he is ready – no he is more than ready, he is charging like a mad bull at the possibility – to break everything. I have argued with him till I am hoarse: “The past is the past, Becky and Franz are the future, why do you choose the past?” He won’t listen. He is as deaf to reason as an Old Testament prophet. I think he sees himself as an Old Testament prophet. When he speaks to me, I hear hatred in his voice, as if he blames me for his failure over so many years to make his peace with his people. As if I wasn’t ready in the years after the war to move to Israel with him, and as if he wasn’t the one who said, “Certainly not, too many bloody Jews.”
Darling: I’m leaving him. I’m going back to England. Kinsky has promised to take care of him, I don’t know why; he says he has been looking all his life for someone to take care of; you know how he jokes.
So I am returning to England. I shall go to stay first of all with my cousin Sheila. But I can’t stay there long, Sheila and I used to get on, but now of course we don’t know each other at all. Besides I shall have to find a job of some kind, I’ve no money. I don’t know what. It’s too early to think about that. Matron in a boarding-school perhaps, I do know schools after all. But I’m rambling.
It’s you I’m worried about, not myself. I don’t know if this terrible time will break your love for Franz and his for you. I pray it won’t. I really mean that, I pray. I went to the Cathedral the other day, and knelt and prayed till my knees were sore. Words I hadn’t said for years flooded back into my mind. “Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord,” I said, “and visit this habitation.”
Becky, be guided by your feelings, not by what people say.
Your father is very angry that you are with Franz. There are moments when I think it is just the jealousy that fathers feel, that he hates Franz as fathers often hate the young men with whom their daughters – especially an only daughter – may fall in love. But I know it is more than that. He is horrified, he shudders to think of that man’s son touching his daughter. It is irrational and hateful, yet I understand this.
He is also afraid there will be a scandal. Sometimes I sympathise because I am afraid of how such a scandal will hurt you. Hurt you both. But when I argue that there would be no scandal if you were left alone to allow your love to grow and perhaps be strengthened by these terrible events, and that this would be possible if he remained here in Buenos Aires, and left it to others – and there are hundreds of them – to give evidence in the trial, he shuts his face against me. It is like arguing with a Communist: all you hear is nyet. It is like praying to a stone idol.
And so he insists. And I say to him, “If you go to Israel, to give evidence, don’t expect to find me here when you return.” “Very well,” he says, “I shall remain there. I shall make my home in Israel, and lay my bones in the Holy Land.” Those were his words; he has gone mad to speak like that.
Darling: I don’t know what you will do. I don’t even know what you should do. Because I would not wish to have you hurt, visibly and perhaps irremediably hurt, I would urge you to join me in England until the trial is over. Then I would hope that Franz will come to us, and you can get married.
I can even see the church. It is fifteenth-century Decorated, a victim of Victorian restorers, but in a country churchyard with yew trees and flat tombstones.
Talk about it with Franz. I do not think you can help each other in Israel with this going on.
Remember: I love you. M.
There was a post-script.
It is decided, and he is definitely going. So I have asked Kinsky to deliver this to you. Silly: you will know all that by the time you have read even the beginning of my letter.
But I am reluctant to let it go. It is as if you are being torn from me, and yet as long as I write I still feel the touch of your fingertips.
Give my love to Franz, tell him how much I admire his courage.
She folded the letter, returned to the bedroom. It was in darkness. For a moment it seemed as if all had deserted her, in a wilderness of rock with no shelter. Horns sounded from the street. The traffic was caught in a jam, exhausting patience. Then Franz spoke from the bed, “Are you all right?”
The inadequacy of the words emphasised his seriousness. He could find no better ones because his imaginative and inventive powers were stunned. She heard despair in his tone. He had shut out Kinsky and Minty Hubchik, turned off the light, stretched himself face down on the bed, and asked this question which contained no note of enquiry. The answer, he knew, couldn’t be other than negative.
The width of the room hung between them. She couldn’t cross the desert of carpet that intervened between her and the bed. On the contrary, for a moment she was tempted to retire again into the bathroom, lock the door behind her. But she did not move. She stood there in silence for a long time, perhaps three minutes, perhaps five. Franz’s shape came into focus. He was lying on his front, his head turned to one side, the face towards the wall. His cheek was pressed into the pillow. Shouts from the street entered the room. Still she did not move. The telephone rang. Neither lifted a hand to answer. They had made the room empty of all but themselves. Silence resumed, and still she stood there.
“Why don’t you go?”
Muffled words, to which she made no reply. Her weapon was pathos; it was all she had left. She was the Lily Maid, Iphigenia dressed for sacrifice, Andromeda chained to her rock. She felt this, despised her weapon, yet employed it. In response, Franz swu
ng himself off the bed, advanced into the middle of the room, poured himself a glass of brandy, and stood with his back to the open street.
“We’d better talk.” His tone was judicial, “Your father’s right. I’ve been off my head. I’ve been as mad as my father.”
“Mummy thinks my father’s mad as well.” She held out the letter. “You’d better read this.”
Her pose broken, she sank into a chair. For a moment she feared he would refuse to read the letter, but, with a sigh, he laid down his brandy glass, and complied.
“Well,” he said, “that settles it. It’s the solution. I’m very grateful to her.”
“What do you mean?”
“That you must join her, it’s the solution.”
“Don’t you want me here?”
“Becky…”
She had thought her presence helped him. She was revolted by the eagerness with which he seemed to welcome her departure. When he said – as she had known he would – “It’s for your own sake,” she accused him of lying. “Like your father,” she said.
“You want rid of me,” she said, and more in that vein. She wept, as she had resolved she wouldn’t.
He protested, swore he loved her, couldn’t expose her to the horrors that were in store, accused himself of selfishness in the past.
“You want rid of me,” she repeated. It was the sole line that he could disprove only by action; and then, as if coming to the end of a long tunnel and seeing an unsuspected garden laid out before her, she said: “I’ll leave, if you will come with me.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Why not? You can do nothing for your father, any more than I can for mine. Let them fight it out. Let their generation deal with its own affairs. What have we to do with any of it? I bet, if you put it to your father even, he would agree with me.”
“No,” Franz said, “he still has things to tell me.”
“You can’t make me go. Nobody can make me go.” He turned and was going to kiss her.
“No,” she said, “if you don’t want me here, you can’t kiss me. Don’t even touch me.”
