The Sins of the Father

by Allan Massie

  She was born in 1926 and her name was Trudi, birthplace Danzig, where she grew up. She had not been aware that her grandmother was Jewish, perhaps because her father was a Polish cavalry officer. He had been captured by the Russians in 1939. She supposed he was dead. Then she and her mother had gone to stay with her father’s parents on their small estate some fifty miles from Warsaw. They were good people. That grandmother was German. Her grandfather bred horses. He was very proud of them, and even in the war managed to mount her on a pony. It was a chestnut mare. They all thought they were safe because her grandmother was German. They didn’t think of the other grandmother at all. Anyway, nobody talked about it.

  Then, in 1942, two days before her sixteenth birthday, German soldiers arrived and arrested her mother and herself. When her grandfather protested, they struck him and he fell down. He was a tall man, a handsome man, and he lay there and didn’t get up. She never saw him again. She and her mother were taken to a station and loaded into a cattle truck. Their journey was so terrible. It was cold and everything was so dirty and squalid. Her mother wept. She kept saying that this couldn’t be happening to them, there must be some mistake.

  The train stopped somewhere, in a grey country of barbed wire and empty fields. In the distance were some trees and perhaps a river, she didn’t know. They were in a siding. Some of the women were forced out of the trucks and driven to a long hut. There were German officers there. They selected half-a-dozen, including her mother and herself, and they were pushed into a lorry. They sat there and the train moved off and disappeared into the yellow grey of the mist.

  They waited in the lorry a long time. It was very cold, and several of the women were in tears. Trudi was the youngest, but she didn’t cry. It might be better to be in the lorry, she thought, than in the train on the way to a rumoured destination which they all feared.

  They were taken to some army barracks. There were a lot of officers with shiny boots. A woman in nurse’s uniform took charge of them. Yes, she probably was a nurse. They were told to strip and get into a bath, all six of them together. Then they were given other clothes, dresses that sparkled when they moved and silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. When her mother saw the clothes she began to scream, but another woman told her there was no sense in that, and that they must make the best of what was about to happen. Trudi’s dress was blue, like her eyes. It stopped short of her knees. She supposed she looked pretty in it. She was young, wasn’t she, and they hadn’t endured real hardship yet.

  They were taken to supper with the officers. No, Kestner wasn’t one of them, that came later. They were given wine and then each officer chose a girl or woman and took her for his. They were raped. Maybe it wasn’t always rape. Maybe some of them submitted. What else was there to do? Her mother felt shame, she knew that, but she didn’t. “If you must know,” she said, lifting her head and throwing off twenty years or more, “I thought I was probably lucky. Besides, my one was a nice-looking boy. I could have fancied him in other circumstances. He was very young, and I could see that he had to nerve himself to do it. In fact he was shy. He let me undress myself and watched me. He kept saying, ‘You’re so pretty, so lovely.’ He hesitated to take his clothes off. In fact, I had to help him. Why did I do that? If you must know, I was excited. I suppose it was some sort of nervous reaction. After that we got on all right, and I thought I was probably lucky.”

  Kestner arrived a few days later, probably on some tour of inspection. He saw her, wanted her, and took her. The lieutenant didn’t dare to protest.

  She was with Kestner for six months, even though he had told her the first evening that she was too old for his tastes. “But we’ll see,” he said, “you’ve got a very nice bottom.” Sometimes he beat her, sometimes he was kind.

  She looked across the court at the man in the cage who remained with his gaze fixed on his papers as if indifferent to what she was saying.

  “You don’t want to hear about our lovemaking,” she said, “if that’s the right word. He was a bit kinky, a bit perverted. It felt wrong to me then, though I know now his tastes were not so very unusual. No, he never showed emotion. When he beat me, which he did with a leather strap on my bottom, he did it without passion. All the same I remember thinking, ‘Perhaps he loves me to beat me like this.’ He called it beating the Jew out, and said if he took me to Berlin he could easily pass me off as an Aryan. No, I don’t think he ever intended to take me there; it was just a way of talking. He talked a lot some nights, often about what he called necessity. I think he meant feeling he was right to do what he was doing.”

  He got rid of her. One day another girl with red curly hair was there. She said she was fourteen. Make the best of it, Trudi said. Some soldiers took her away. She never saw Kestner again, not until now. She was taken to a camp. She supposed he wanted her dead. That would have been sensible, wouldn’t it? But she had learned how to survive. So she did. She wasn’t proud of it. On the other hand she wasn’t ashamed either, even though she had had a hard time after the Liberation. Some of the other women in the camp had attacked her and beaten her and stripped her and might have killed her if an American soldier, a Negro, hadn’t come to her rescue. She couldn’t blame them, she might have done the same in their place. The Negro was a lieutenant. She became his lover. Then she was put on trial for collaboration, or rather threatened with it, but he saved her again. He had got tired of her eventually. “After what I’ve been through, people do get tired of me,” she said. “There comes a time when a man looks at me and doesn’t see me but only what I have been.” Now she was the manageress of a restaurant in Johannesburg, South Africa. She supposed she was lucky. She had one regret. The doctors told her she couldn’t have children. Not after what Kestner had done to her.

  And again she looked at Kestner and this time he raised his head and turned it towards her and held it there a long time with his eyes hidden behind his dark glasses and his mouth shut as tight as a well-fitting lid.

  But she came to Franz in the night, thrown down on a pile of dirty sacks, like Bastini, her young rounded thighs quivering and streaked with blood. Then a heavy gate clanged and steel-tipped boots marched towards him down a corridor that was long and dark. He heard another gate thrown open and hands stretched towards him, and he was in his father’s cage with Becky and Alexis and Bastini on the bench looking at him with cold eyes, while Ivan Murison, in his dirty cream-coloured suit, relayed the charges brought against him, chief among which was being in every way his father’s son. And the three judges disputed among themselves the right of punishment.

  So now he lay on the bed, with his eyes heavy and his limbs trembling, and was afraid to sleep.

  * * * *

  The telephone rang.

  “Ivan here, old boy. I’m still waiting…”

  “There’s nothing I can do to help you.”

  “Then help yourself. These photographs … burning a hole in my wallet.”

  Franz put down the receiver. He waited a moment, then called Saul Birnbaum.

  “It can’t do any good,” Saul said.

  “No,” Franz said. “But I need to, for my sake.”

  “All right, I’ll see what I can do.”

  Half an hour later he rang back.

  “Amazingly, the answer is ‘yes’. I don’t pretend to understand it. I suggested my office, but that won’t do, so you go to her hotel and take the lift to the third floor, room number 345. OK. I’ll be interested to hear…”

  She was the sort of woman who can make a hotel room feel like home. He couldn’t tell why – it wasn’t as if she had filled it with personal belongings. Perhaps it was simply that she filled it with herself.

  “I don’t know why I’ve agreed to this,” she said. “I must be mad. Most people would say I am. So you’re really his son? You don’t look like him, that’s one thing. Maybe you look like your mother. He had a photograph of your mother beside his bed, I didn’t say that in court, what was the point? But I don’t remember now wh
at she looked like.”

  “She looks a little like you,” he said. “I think when you were both young, you maybe looked even more like each other.”

  “Could be. Drink?”

  She gestured towards a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  “Come on,” she said, “I’m having one. I’ve already had several, but I’m having another. I don’t think I can go through this sober. It’s a wonder to me how I managed in court.”

  “How did they find you?” he said. “How did they track you down? Or did you volunteer? Did you come forward of your own accord?”

  “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t have been interested. No, I was contacted.”

  She laughed and pushed a glass towards him. She rattled the ice in her own. Something warm and affirmative was communicated to him. At the same time he was a little afraid of her.

  “You’re the only person in this case who seems secure,” he said.

  “And I’ve no right to be? But I have. I’ve come through. So you’re his son.” She smiled. “And you’re standing by him. I like that. Are you fond of him, has he been a good father?”

  Franz made a vague, hopeless gesture, like a ruined man summoning up philosophy.

  “I don’t know. Like others, I suppose. We’ve never been close. I’ve lived with my mother. They’re divorced, you know.”

  She sat down on the sofa and patted the cushion to her left.

  “Come on,” she said, then when he had obeyed, turned the upper half of her body round, laid her right arm behind his neck, and kissed him full on the mouth.

  “There,” she said, “I’ve wanted to do that ever since you came in.”

  She crossed to the table and fed herself some more whisky. She hummed a little tune.

  “I’m like Piaf,” she said, “je ne regrette rien.”

  “Not even…”

  “Not even. There’s nothing gained by regrets. All right, so your dad was what people call a monster then. Take it from me, there are precious few who aren’t that when they are let loose. Do you know what the war did? It gave an awful lot of people the chance to live out their fantasies, that’s what it did.”

  “But they’re going to hang him.”

  “Sure they are. Revenge is the resident fantasy here, I guess.”

  “They call it justice.”

  “I bet they do.”

  She sat on the window-seat and tugged her legs up under her. It was a young girl’s gesture, and for a moment, with the light behind her, Franz saw the girl his father had abused.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said.

  “That’s good. Who wants to be understood? People complain when they’re not, they squawk louder if they think they are. Take it from me, as one who knows. Listen, my mother was killed by the Nazis. You know what happened to me. My father was killed by the Russians, nobody knows how. My Polish grandmother was strung up by her peasants, and she thought they adored her. You want me to hate everybody?”

  “But you’ve a right to hate my father surely?”

  “D’you know,” she said, “I’m hungry. Maybe if I was to ring down they would send us up some chicken sandwiches. I bet you haven’t eaten in days. Maybe you should have a steak.”

  She picked up the telephone and gave the order.

  “If you don’t hate him, why are you here then, giving evidence?”

  “I wondered when you’d get round to asking that. I was pressured. That’s right, I was pressured. There was an English journalist I had a little fling with in Jo’burg. I told him about your dad then. I don’t know why. It’s not something I often … but he knew I’d been in the camps and, hell, it doesn’t matter why, I told him. Then when this came up he rang me. Told me it was my duty. I told him what he could do with my duty. ‘The poor sod will hang without my help,’ I said. Sorry, dear, for the expression, but I’m quoting. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘but I think you’ll make an impression.’ ‘Fuck the impression,’ I said. ‘I’ve been after Kestner for years,’ he said, ‘and I think you should tell your story. And I think you will,’ he said, ‘or else.’”

  “Or else … Was this journalist called Murison, Ivan Murison?”

  “That’s the bugger. You know him?”

  “We’ve met, and I can guess, he blackmailed you. I don’t know how but he blackmailed you.”

  “Yes, you’ve met him,” she said. “That’s our Ivan.”

  Franz smiled. It felt unused.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you were the blackmailable type.”

  “Too right I’m not. But I live in Jo’burg and my boyfriend is black. Ivan had found that out. He’s got some photographs, I don’t know how. Wouldn’t matter to me, but Mike, that’s my boyfriend, is a lawyer and deeply committed. Could be hell for him, from both sides. Prison because it’s against the law for a black to fuck a white woman, and God knows what from his own side. So I said to Ivan, right, you louse, I’ll sing for you.”

  But Franz was puzzled. It seemed to him that it would have been more in character (and in Ivan Murison’s interest) if he had kept Trudi in reserve, and sprung her as his own personal scoop, either in the newspapers or in his book.

  “No,” she said. “He knew I was the one witness who might make your dad feel really bad. He couldn’t pass up on that. Ivan likes to see folks squirm.”

  The food arrived. She was right. He was hungry, and the steak was just what he needed, even if by Argentinian standards, it didn’t amount to much.

  “It’s you I’m worried about,” she said. “I am glad you came, though. Have you got a girl of your own?”

  So he told her about Becky, told her the whole story, and she listened to it like someone who needed stories, who thrived on them, and the way she listened did more than anything she had said to make him understand how she had come through, emerging with neither guilt nor resentment from an unimaginable ordeal.

  Later she nuzzled his cheek and murmured, “It doesn’t worry you what I did with your father?”

  He shook his head and pushed his face against her breasts. She stroked his hair.

  “At least I won’t beat you.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Mike does, you know. Some men need to. That’s all.”

  In the morning she drank hot chocolate with cream on top, and ate a pastry.

  “I’ve never had to worry about my figure,” she said. “I’m a big girl, but I don’t get fat.” She applied lipstick. “It wasn’t all hell, you know, even then. Sometimes he liked me to talk of my home and what it had been like before the war. Sometimes we even pretended we would be together afterwards, in a chalet in the mountains. And he played music to me, Brahms mostly. I got to quite like Brahms, I never hear that sort of music now. If you like, tell him I remember the Brahms.”

  “That’s all,” she said. “I’m flying out as soon as I can. I don’t want to see Ivan and I don’t trust Mike out of my sight a moment longer than necessary. Hope you and your girl make out all right. You’re a nice boy. But you’ve been lucky till now, haven’t you?”

  Becky listened to the murmur of conversation that came through the wall of her bedroom. The apartment was not well made. She could catch the occasional sentence. They were discussing the trial, as she had feared they would, which is why she had asked Rachel if she minded if she excused herself.

  Rachel had apologised: “It was fixed weeks ago,” she said. “It’s Luke’s publisher and they’re bringing an American who wants to take over his books in the States.”

  “That’s all right,” Becky had said, she understood. But was it all right with Rachel, she didn’t want her to feel she was using her.

  “Oh honey,” Rachel said and gave her a hug.

  So Becky lay on her bed and listened. Sometimes there was silence, and that was the hardest. She had got so she found silence tough. Which was new; until now, she had needed it often.

  There was a half-written letter on the desk. It was to her mother, but when she reached the point where she
knew she had to talk about herself and Franz she hadn’t been able to go on. The first part was all about her father, and how she understood why her mother had left him. “I never felt further away from him in all my life. But it’s not me that has moved. It’s him. I think it’s the same with you and Eli, isn’t it?”

  But she knew it wasn’t. And what she had written about herself wasn’t true either. They had all three moved.

  So now she thought about Franz. That was hard too. She was angry because he had given in to her father. He had colluded with him. They had tried to decide for her. There couldn’t be a marriage where one partner decided for the other. Not the sort of marriage she wanted. And that was new. She had never thought that before.

  Anger didn’t drive out the wanting. She knew that every time she saw him in court, where she watched the back of his head, and his neck and the way he turned half round, exposing the long fragile line of his jaw. His blondness shone in the court. Every sentence stabbed him, made him question everything he had ever thought about himself. She knew that. But he kept his distance. At the time when she needed for both their sakes to comfort him, he withdrew.

  She couldn’t offer love, because if love was rebuffed now, it was rebuffed for ever. He had to come back to her. There he would be, in his hotel room, in the other city now, perhaps lying on a bed just like her now, and longing for her as she longed for him. She had only to go through the apartment and pick up the telephone. But she couldn’t, and not only because of the people in the other room. She had to wait. Waiting, silence and the distance between them had become her weapons. But it was wrong to think of weapons in this connection.

  She remembered the Swedish professor of theology who had asked with something approaching excitement if that shooting in Jerusalem was an atrocity. If he was still in Israel, he would be made aware now of no end of atrocities. They tumbled over each other, spewed out of every mouth.