The Sins of the Father

by Allan Massie

  “Was it one day in Berlin in, I think, 1934? The street was blocked. Yet another parade, I sighed, for there were already too many of them, and they bored me. Bored me. There were days when I was consumed with boredom. Only my work saved me, only my work seemed real. But these were middle-aged men, in civilian clothes, with an air of the utmost respectability. Each of them wore a medal or a row of medals pinned to the breast pocket. They carried banners proclaiming that the Kaiser had praised them.

  “‘Who are they?’ a woman next to me said.

  “‘Can’t you read?’ her companion replied. ‘Bloody Yids, pretending they were soldiers in the war.’

  “‘But weren’t they?’ she said. ‘Look at all these medals.’

  “‘Course they weren’t,’ he said. ‘Bought them for a song off soldiers down on their luck, put out of work by their fellow Yids, that’s how they got them.’

  “I might have despaired at that moment of everything I was struggling to accomplish.

  “‘So why are they marching?’ the woman said.

  “‘Like to make a fuss, don’t they. Bloody Yids.’

  “‘They are marching,’ another man said, ‘because Our Leader has just cancelled their war pensions.’

  “I asked myself, if my father had still been alive, would he have been marching with them? Or would he have still pretended, like me, that we Jews had no need to worry?

  “It must have been that day, or soon after, that I realised my Jewishness, for I got into conversation with the man who had supplied the information about the pensions. I can’t think how I didn’t know him already. He was Wilfrid Israel.”

  The name meant nothing to Becky.

  “You will all know him,” Eli said, “as the bravest and most selfless defender of … our … people. You will know how he negotiated ransoms and escapes, resettlements and funds. No single man did more to save European Jewry.

  “We fell into conversation, a conversation that developed into argument, argument that continued in friendly and fruitful style right up to the moment of his final departure from Germany. Though morally and spiritually I recognised him as my superior, we had, intellectually, much in common. We both believed in an older Germany, enduring tenaciously, under the vile scum of the Nazi movement, a Germany which was open to reason and to what I can only call spiritual Enlightenment, the Germany indeed that was the heir of that great movement of the European spirit which we are accustomed to call by its German name, the Aufklärung, the Germany that inherited values from Goethe and Heine, Schiller, Brahms and, yes, Wagner too, whom the Nazis perverted for their own cause. It was Wilfrid who put me in touch with men like Adam von Trott and Bonhoeffer, and one who was to become my greatest friend, Albrecht von Pfühlnitz, all men who were to form the German resistance to Hitler, who were doomed to die at his hands, and with whom I am proud to have been associated. And who is to say that we did not triumph, for has not the Germany we dreamed of been reborn?

  “It was Wilfrid too who said to me, often: ‘Never forget, Eli, that it is the German people, not only the Jews, who have been the first victims of the Nazi oppression…’”

  “He urged me to emigrate. I refused. It is strange that he who believed in so much should have left Germany, while I who believed in nothing should have remained. I insisted on the all-powerful influence of fact, and yet saw only those facts I chose to see. At the Reichsbank I worked to produce figures which proved how rearmament was damaging the German economy, how it was impossible that Germany could again sustain a long war. I worked under the direction of Schacht, and when he was dismissed in January 1939, I should have known we had failed, that war was certain… Yet even after his dismissal my technical ability kept me safe. I was still, it seemed, needed.

  “I was not myself dismissed for another eighteen months, and even then I remained at freedom for another year before I was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. I shall not speak of my experiences there. There are others more entitled to testify, and some of them have already done so in this court.

  “I now turn to the prisoner, Kestner, and to my relations with him. These were never close. When I first became aware of him, as a political officer in the SS, he was a nonentity. His position was nothing in comparison with my own. I regarded him only as a squalid nuisance.

  “I met him once only, before the war. Though I steered clear of involvement in matters of refugees, it so happened that one day in the early summer of 1939 I received a message from Wilfrid Israel, asking me to act as an intermediary on his behalf. He was arranging to buy freedom for a group of Jewish academics. The financial arrangements were complicated. He thought I would perhaps be the best person to handle them. To my shame, I resisted, I tried to avoid the dangerous honour. But Wilfrid was very persuasive, and in the end I consented.

  “Following my instructions I drove east from Berlin. It was a beautiful day, and the cornfields were turning yellow. I regarded them with a sort of misery, for I knew that each day of ripening brought war closer. Hitler would move when the harvest had been gathered. And yet, though I was conscious of this, and the pain and despair those fields of ripening grain portended, I was also, I remember, curiously at peace with myself.

  “I had not been told the name of the man I was to meet at a little inn in a remote Prussian village, which had been selected for some reason never explained to me. But I recognised him as Kestner, who had been pointed out to me as what he was by my friend Albrecht von Pfühlnitz in a Berlin restaurant. So I was surprised when he announced himself by some other name, which I now forget. It was stupid since he was wearing his uniform, and I would have had means of checking if I chose. He must have known that; perhaps the alias amused him. I got the impression that the business on which we were engaged amused him.

  “There was something pathetic about him. I had not expected that this proud and brutal Nazi I had prepared myself to encounter should wear such an aura of pathos. I may say here, though it will shock many, that I had never been able to bring myself to dislike Hitler. I hated him of course, and loathed everything for which he stood. I feared his power over men’s minds. But I could not bring myself to dislike him. He always reminded me of a neglected dog, left outside in the rain and howling to be admitted. Kestner gave me the same feeling. He was a man who seemed to me injured by experience. Remove the uniform and he would be nothing.”

  Becky could not stop herself from looking at Franz’s father, who, however, remained impassive, as if indeed what Eli had to say concerned some other person. He sat back detached from what was happening around him, and then, aware perhaps that so many eyes had turned to see how he reacted to this assessment, to this attempt to strip even pride from him, the left corner of his mouth drew itself into a narrow smile. Her eyes sought Franz, on whom her father’s words seemed to have a greater effect. He had crumpled. Until now it seemed to her he had supported himself by the reflection that whatever his father had been, he had also been someone who commanded respect. And yet, Eli wasn’t speaking the full truth: for the uniform had been removed, and the man was not nothing. That was the point she couldn’t grasp. How had he transformed himself, so that the man she had met in the Engineers’ Club had seemed in every way the equal of her father? And how indeed had he brought himself to undergo that meeting, remembering as he must of his previous encounter with Eli?

  “He offered me wine. I accepted. Not only because it would have been poor tactics, perhaps even compromising my mission, to have declined, but also because refusal would have seemed to throw him back into that darkness from which it was clear he had with such difficulty struggled. But, in that judgement, I was both right and wrong. For he had indeed struggled to emerge from darkness, that was true, only to find himself not in the light of reason, but in a still denser night. And perhaps it was not darkness from which he had emerged, but only the shadows, a grey world where nothing connected, where there was loneliness and the scuttle of rats’ feet on crumbling walls.”

  Eli had forg
otten where he was. He was speaking not to the judge, nor to the court or the world’s press, but out of some secret world of sympathy, and the words stumbled forth as if each one was a new discovery even to himself. And now the man in the cage was listening. The ironic smile was dislodged. If she could see his eyes, would they reveal that he and his accuser were bound together in a private theatre of embarrassment, that each had recognised the other? She remembered that when he had urged Franz to try to arrange for him to see her father again, even here in Israel, he had insisted that “Czinner would understand.” It was too clear he did. He must have been so lonely in himself since.

  “So I accepted the wine, and we talked, of banalities, pleasantly. I remember that, because I was astonished that this creature could engage in civilised nothings. I hadn’t expected it, my experience was limited. We talked of our families, as strangers will. We even exchanged confidences. I admitted I was in love with an English girl. ‘You should join her,’ he said. ‘I respect you, Dr Czinner, but for your own sake I must tell you that you will be foolish if you remain in Germany.’ We even laughed about that. He told me he was a Saxon. ‘They call us stupid Saxons,’ he said, ‘but we’re persistent. We’re like an old dog that has got hold of a mangy bone and won’t let it go.’”

  The man in the cage nodded his head. The smile returned to the corner of his mouth.

  “And then we proceeded to our business. It was arranged with a certain sympathy. And courtesy. He understood the complicated financial arrangements very well. When we parted, he said: ‘This is not the first time I have saved a Jew’s life. Let that be remembered in my favour when we have lost the war that is coming.’ ‘Do you really believe that?’ I said. ‘That war is coming? It’s inevitable, I should have thought.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘that Germany will lose it.’ I was astonished and repeated my question, even wondering if his remark was some sort of trick – our way of life had made us so suspicious. ‘But yes,’ he said, ‘you must have made the same assessment yourself.’ ‘Then why?’ ‘Why am I a Nazi? Why do I wear this uniform? My dear Dr Czinner,’ he said, ‘I used to be a miserable clerk. Later I sold cosmetics from door to door. You can have no conception in your solid world, how insubstantial mine was.’

  “I did not think he meant me to understand that he was only an opportunist. I did not think that at all.

  “That was our only meeting in Germany. He cheated me, by the way. The men whose release I thought I had negotiated were not released. The money I had arranged to be paid in advance was not returned. It was a squalid trick.

  “Over the following years I heard much of Kestner. People spoke of him with awe as of something inhuman. Never with hatred, but always I think with a certain revulsion. He became a man of power, great power. I wonder if he ever believed in it. I have never met someone who seemed emptier.”

  He sipped his glass of water.

  “I have little more to say. A few months ago, in Argentina, where I have lived for many years, my only child, my daughter, announced that she was going to marry a German boy.”

  Franz’s head turned. For the first time since the first day of the trial he met Becky’s eyes. They looked at each other, frozen in immobility.

  “He seemed agreeable, or so my wife reported. We arranged to meet his father. I am, as you will realise, blind. In compensation my other senses may have developed an unusual acuity. I was aware very early in our meeting that I had heard this man’s voice before. It was not until he made that same remark about being a Saxon, which I have reported to the court, that I realised who he was. It was with difficulty that I held my peace. I told myself I could not be sure, it might be a coincidence, though I knew it was not, and I was sure. I telephoned the next day and lured him into repeating the remark. I had no doubt, I took the necessary steps to bring my positive identification of him as Kestner before the relevant authorities… The rest you know.

  “I have only this to add. For a long time, all my life it seems, I have struggled to avoid … to avoid … commitment. I set myself up as a judge of right and wrong, even as a judge over Israel … I was guilty of the sin of pride, guilty a thousand times over. Not even what I endured in the camps dented my pride. Now, at the cost of much pain to myself and my family, I was given the chance to make atonement. Do not think I have not suffered in doing so. But I lay that suffering on the altar of Israel … Let justice be done.”

  He sat down, wiped his eyes. There was a long moment of silence.

  The judge rose, announced an adjournment. Dr Czinner’s examination would be postponed. He was interrupted. Eli pitched forward, his hands folded over his breast. Someone cried for a doctor. Kinsky rushed forward also. Becky stood up. She drew a cardigan about her.

  “Get me out of here, Rachel. Please.”

  EIGHT

  Becky spent part of the evening at the hospital: Eli had suffered a heart attack. The doctors called it mild. He would certainly recover. There was no cause for concern. One of them laughed and said they were not going to lose such a distinguished patient so soon after his “return” to Israel.

  She telephoned Nell in England, hoping that she would get on a plane the next day. But Nell made no such suggestion, and Becky found she couldn’t ask her to come.

  “I can’t forgive your father for trying to break you and Franz up,” Nell said. “Anyway, you say he’ll recover. He’ll be happy now in Israel.”

  Becky took a bus back to Tel Aviv. Luke was out, at the office of his newspaper. Rachel asked her if she wanted food, but she was too tired to eat.

  “We’re all worn out,” Rachel said. “Except Luke. He thrives on this, you know.”

  Becky was no longer welcome. She sensed that, though she couldn’t account for the shift. Rachel could have no idea of how she and Luke had talked the previous night; and even if she had, how could it matter? Her marriage was safe, as long as she wanted it. Rachel was depressed. It was like that day when they had gone to the beach, and cowered in the sand-dunes under the fighter planes. Eli’s evidence had once again emphasised the monstrous weight of Israel. If he, after so many years, was drawn back by its magnetism, what hope could Rachel retain that Luke might ever break free? And so perhaps the sight of Becky distressed her, for she saw how Eli was prepared to sacrifice his daughter to the jealous God, as Abraham had led Isaac to the altar on the summit of Mount Moriah. “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”; and this mighty “Me” was Israel itself.

  Rachel stubbed out her cigarette. She looked at the kitchen table, with its dirty cups and saucers, packets of cereal and crumbs of toast. She pushed back her hair, and said she was going to bed.

  “I’m not going to sit up for Luke,” she said. “You can, if you like. But he’ll be hours.”

  Becky sat there, with the window open to the night air and the murmur of the courtyard. Then she went through to the other room and stood by the window listening to the night. She rang Franz’s hotel. No answer from his room. The note of the telephone sounded forlorn. Then she was surrounded by the loneliness of silence.

  She leafed through a stand of gramophone records, though she did not play one for fear of waking Rachel. But there was music you could hear in your head. Here was Gluck’s Orfeo, which her father detested. “Che farò senza Euridice?” “Get on with your life,” Eli would snap.

  But Orpheus had gone back, gone under, into the shadows to fetch his dead love, refusing to submit to death. The potency of the myth could be explained of course in psychological terms: truth was inward, in the heart of darkness. That was where it had to be sought. Or again: no man is an island. (When you were very tired, you thought in the words of others.) The bell tolls, but we cannot surrender love to death. Was she Orpheus or Eurydice? Did it matter? In the end they had lost each other. Orpheus had looked back at the wrong moment. The condition imposed on him, that he should not do so, was fraudulent, for his quest had been retrospective from the first.

  An early cock crew, though there was no light in the sky. It was
calling the morning into being from one of the yards behind the little houses beyond this street of apartments. There was no sound of traffic. Only the impatient bird. She leaned forward, with her elbows on the windowsill, listening.

  In the morning she told Rachel she was not going to the trial any more. It would be always there, but she was not going any more.

  Rachel said, “So I won’t either. I only went for your sake. I’ve hated it from the start.”

  But if they didn’t go, how to get through the day? And tomorrow, and the next day?

  “You want me to move out, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “I don’t know why, but I do. It’s nothing personal.”

  Kinsky was at the hospital when she arrived to see Eli.

  “Don’t go,” she said, “wait for me, Kinsky. Please. I must talk to you.”

  “Why should I go?” Kinsky said. “I have nothing to go for, believe me, my dear.”

  Eli would not speak. She took hold of his hand. She called him “Father”, dwelling on the word as if it would extract a reply. But even if he spoke he would not answer the question that anyway she was too proud to ask.

  “Does he speak to you, Kinsky?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Then why not to me?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps he feels you are judging him. Perhaps he is afraid of what you would reply. I don’t know. When he speaks to me, he likes to talk of Berlin before the war.”

  “Tell me about the trial. I can’t go to it any more. But I would still like to be told.”

  “It’s going. After Eli’s evidence, Kestner seems no longer interested. He pays no attention. It is as if none of it concerns him, not now.”

  “Kinsky,” she said. “I must see Franz. I can’t continue without seeing him.”

  “Very well,” he said, “I shall arrange it. I don’t see…” He spread out his hands, smiled, kissed her and led her to the bus stop.