by Allan Massie
“Will your father mind,” she had said, “you not being there today?”
“Will he notice?” Franz said.
“I’m sure he’ll notice.”
She said goodbye to Eli.
“I’ll be out in two weeks,” he said. “I’ll see the end of the trial. They’ve excused me cross-examination. It’s not necessary. Saul Birnbaum admits that. He’s a good lawyer. His aunt married a cousin of ours, a long time ago. No, they’re not alive; they were among the slaughtered. Young Kestner isn’t going with you, is he? Good. It wouldn’t have worked, Becky.”
“It will.”
“Well, we’ll see. I may be in London in the autumn. I’ve been asked to lecture. I’ve become a celebrity again, for the third time.”
He didn’t send any message to Nell.
“He’s cut her out,” she said to Franz. “Right out. Just like that. You won’t cut me out, will you? Never?”
“Never.”
She telephoned Rachel from the airport, to say thanks and goodbye.
“Minty wants a word.”
“Is she there again?”
“I think maybe she’ll move into your room. Here she is.”
“Hi, kid, just remember what I said. Don’t let them fuck you up. Remember, life’s horizontal.”
“Give my love to Luke, ask Rachel to give my love to Luke, and thanks again.”
“I hate airports,” Franz said. “They’re so anonymous. Odd, isn’t it, when there’s nothing I would like more than to be just that.”
“Will you be all right?”
“It’s better this way,” he said.
“When you see Luke, ask him about the boy Yusuf, he’ll understand. Franz, I love you. Always.”
“Always,” he said, “for ever and ever, amen. We’re going to be all right, remember that. Last night…”
“… was wonderful.”
“Better than that. It …”
“… sealed things.”
“That’s your flight being called. Oh Becky.”
“Franz. We’re lucky, in spite of everything.”
They embraced. Then he held her face, a hand on each cheek, and kissed her again with lingering lips. He drew his index finger along the line of her jaw.
Beyond the barrier, at the corner of the stair, she turned and he was standing there, hands stretched towards her as if reaching for her on a distant shore.
The aeroplane lifted, pointing its nose to the heavens. The sea danced beneath them as they left Israel behind. She started to cry. The man in the next seat passed her a handkerchief.
“So, you have left your lover,” he said. “That is always sad. But remember, without parting there can be no beautiful reunion. Hey, think of that. Is that not a beautiful thought, beautifully expressed? You have a good cry, daughter. You don’t mind that I call you ‘daughter’? You are in love? Yes? That’s good. Without love, life is bubkes. You know what that means, daughter?”
“No,” she said. She dabbed her eyes and passed him back his handkerchief.
“It means a big nothing. That is what bubkes means. Yes, without love, life is a big nothing.”
NINE
When the trial was over and his father had been sentenced to death and they were waiting for the appeal, Franz’s way of life fell into a routine.
He rose early and walked up the hill to the Tomb of David from where he could gaze over Jerusalem. Then he had a cup of coffee and a bagel in a little bar, and returned to the hotel. He studied Hebrew for an hour, and then read philosophy. Sometimes he explored the city for an hour before lunch; some days he swam in the pool at the YMCA. He had got himself a visa that enabled him to pass beyond the Mandelbaum Gate into the Old City denied to Israelis. He read the newspapers over lunch: the Jerusalem Post, which was written in English, and the Yediot Hayom which, despite its Hebrew title, was a German-language daily, and usually a selection of the foreign press. He spent the first part of the afternoon in a café, studying the newspapers over glasses of mint tea. At four o’clock he went to the prison for his half-hour with his father. Though they knew him well and were friendly, he was still searched every day. Some of the guards made jokes about it.
“We don’t forget Goering,” one said.
“What do you mean?” Franz asked.
“The Reichsmarshall – poisoned himself, didn’t he?”
But mostly the guards treated him very gently. He played chess with his father, and Rudi told him what he had been reading. He no longer spoke of the past, and he did not believe in his appeal: it was a device which would allow him to play so many more games of chess and work his way through Dostoyevsky’s novels, which he had never read before. “We were stupid to despise the Russians,” he said. “Dostoyevsky … it is as if my own mind is revealed to me.”
When he had kissed his father goodbye (getting a whiff of the aftershave lotion which was delivered to Rudi in tiny sachets every day), Franz went to the American Express office to collect his mail. Becky wrote to him every evening, but the post was irregular and some days there were no letters, others two or three. She always told him how she missed him and longed for him. She was taking a secretarial course with a view to getting a job in London. She and Nell were very short of money. Franz had no worries in that respect; his stepfather was making him a generous allowance. The General was pleased to have him out of Argentina, but he had no need to be anxious; it was unthinkable that Franz should return there. His stepfather told him that the murderers of the policeman, Lieutenant Vilar, had not been found. “It has been thought better to dismiss it as the consequence of his perversion.”
The evenings were the worst time. Melancholy and loneliness hung over Jerusalem as daylight withdrew; the mountains closed in on the city.
There was Kinsky, but Eli was demanding and Kinsky was seldom free. Besides, he was diminished; he had no purpose there except to care for Eli, and that was a penance. With the loss of his independence, his old vivacity was dulled. He had dwindled into a sort of nursemaid and, conscious of what was happening to him, was querulous whenever they spent the evening together.
Sometimes Franz took the bus to Tel Aviv and had supper with Luke and Rachel. In the first weeks Minty Hubchik was there. Then she left, on another assignment, and after that Rachel was often bad-tempered; she drank her wine too quickly and sniped at Luke. When she talked of America now, it was in the past subjunctive, “If we had gone.”
It was better when Luke came into Jerusalem and they had dinner in a little Viennese restaurant in Agrippas Street. Then they talked as they no longer could when Rachel was present. It saddened Franz that they couldn’t talk that way when she was there. The trial, as she had feared, had bound Luke tighter to Israel. But they did not speak of the trial. They talked of literature and history and marriage and the philosophy Franz was reading. He had gone right back to Plato. “Don’t think I see my father as Socrates waiting for death, however,” he said.
“So we are all dreamers,” Luke said. “No life is ever fulfilled. When I write a novel the book that is published is a shadow of the book that was there to be written.”
“And love?” Franz said.
“Sure, the person we love is always someone we have made for ourselves.”
One evening he took Franz to the café in Gehenna where Becky had met Ivan Murison. He felt responsibility for the boy Yusuf.
“After all, I denied him the Côte d’Azur, or wherever,” he said. “Not the Cities of the Plain, I guess he’ll find those wherever he is. But he’s a nice kid. Besides, as Einstein said, the test of Israel is the manner in which we treat our Arabs.”
“When you say ‘our’ Arabs, isn’t that itself a sign that you regard them as inferior?”
“I wish it wasn’t, but it is.”
The boy Yusuf was resentful. Luke persisted. Perhaps he had chosen Yusuf as his own personal Arab; if he did well by him, then Israel could come to some form of accommodation with the Arabs in general. That wasn’t absurd, or
rather the principle behind it wasn’t absurd. Everything begins at the personal level; as long as you keep things personal, individual, you can’t fall into the abstractions which allow you to judge people by the label you have attached to them. The boy sat at the table with them, chewing melon-seeds. They drank beer. There was no one else in the dusty garden of the little café.
When Luke went for a pee, Yusuf spat out a melon-seed, and smiled for the first time.
“You like boys?” he said. “You like me? I do what you want.”
He unzipped his jeans.
“Look,” he said, “nice.”
Franz shook his head.
“OK. Is all right. You give me a cigarette.”
“Sure.”
“My friend Ivan tells me about your father. Good man, OK. He has right idea about bloody Jews. Yes, sure has. I think they hang him, yes?”
“Yes.”
All the same he found himself returning there, two or three evenings a week. He sat in the warm twilight and watched the moon rise over the mountains of Judah. Sometimes he talked with other Arab boys, Yusuf’s friends. They all spoke English of a sort. They made him think of Argentina: they spoke of great things which they would do, tomorrow, if only … and they spread their hands. They quarrelled with each other and went home arm in arm. They sipped Coca-Cola and cursed the United States. Sometimes one of them would have a car, not his, or only for the night, and half a dozen would pile into it, and roar into the darkness. The air of that unfinished improvised place hummed with the murmur of their discontent, as they spat melon-seeds at chickens and claimed hits.
One evening he arrived to find Yusuf with a bruised eye and swollen lips.
“Bloody Jews beat me up. Go home, fucking Arab queer. Is my home, I say. So they beat me up. Bloody Jews.”
He grinned and touched his lower lip with his tongue.
“Bloody sore. So I’m queer, I say. Should be OK for you, I don’t make no Arab babies, yes? So they beat me up. Crazy.”
Franz had resumed his journal:
I’m tempted to introduce Yusuf to Kinsky. Mightn’t it be the answer for both? And I wonder if Luke was right to drive Ivan Murison away. Mightn’t it have been better for Yusuf to have gone with him? What future is there for him here?
Hatred is felt as liberation. When you hate, everything is permitted to you, and you become an avenging God. It doesn’t matter what the object of your hatred is: Jews, Arabs, queers, women, the poor, the rich, blacks. As soon as you admit your hatred you are filled with what I think must be exultation. The object of your hatred becomes automatically your inferior, your enemy, your prey.
I should have known this in Argentina, but I’ve had to come here, and listen to my father speaking as he would never have spoken if he had not been brought here, to endure his trial, to understand this.
But something more horrible: when Yusuf described what had happened to him, he frightened me. It was like my dream of Bastini.
And then I saw that this liberation is entirely illusory. It’s a cheat. When you surrender yourself to it, you do not become free, for how can a prisoner be that?
I tried to write some of this to Becky, but I couldn’t. I love her, I need her, I cannot imagine life without her, and yet I can’t speak to her about things that matter. And something else: the more I know my need for her, the more I want to escape. Ivan Murison recognised this, I think Luke suspects it. I even found myself wondering if Luke took me to the café in the hope that I would, or as an experiment? Because the thing is, as he confessed to me, or almost confessed, he too is in a different way in love with Becky. But he also loves Rachel, who adores him and is yet going away from him.
So love itself is a prison. And in a curious way it’s quite separate from sexual desire, which presents itself as not only a temptation, but also as a means of evading the responsibility of love. The contemporary dream: sexual fulfilment without emotional attachment. Which is crazy, because there isn’t fulfilment, ever, without feeling for something more than the shape of a body, the touch of skin, the pressure of lips. But I know the temptation: Alexis, and now.
I’m a little drunk. When I got back to my room I opened a bottle of whisky and it’s sinking … like … like … I’m lost.
My stepfather once said to me: “Remember, in Argentina everything is very simple and the simplest things are impossible.”
Love is very simple and …
Another drink.
I went to the café today from Saul’s office. He called me to give me news of the appeal which has been rejected. He will tell my father tomorrow morning.
So they have set a date.
And I write this stuff about sex.
I went to a church this morning. I entered the confessional. When the priest spoke, I found that words had deserted me. I stepped out of the box and knelt and tried to pray. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the priest.
He said, “If you can’t confess, my son, perhaps you would like to talk.”
It crossed my mind that I was trying to talk to God, but … I think I dialled the wrong number.
The priest knew who I was. That frightened me. I had thought I would be anonymous there. So I told him I was afraid, and then I asked him if he would be prepared to go to speak to my father.
“He nearly became a priest himself,” I said.
“Oh yes, I guessed that,” he said.
TEN
My dear Franz, my dear child, my son:
It was good of you to send that priest to me; but also foolish. We talked, we argued. In the end he denied me. He could not believe my protestations.
And do I believe them myself? I wish I knew.
Is it because I believed too much that I believe too little now? Or is it that even my former, and so impassioned belief, was an act of self-deception, in which I assumed conviction to persuade myself that I was capable of such attachment?
So: this will be the last letter I write to you, the last letter I write, and we shall not see each other again. Tomorrow, at 8.30, I shall be no more. Curious to have been provided with this certainty.
I am grateful to you, and I am grateful also to have been granted this opportunity which, had things gone otherwise, would not have come to me, of knowing you truly, and of achieving a closeness denied to me in any other relation. It has been good also, my son, to have had the reassurance of your devotion.
And so, by the time you read this, I am dead. But these are not yet the words of a dead man.
It is a moment when I should sum up my life, as I failed to do in that trial, which nevertheless was not the parody of a trial I once feared.
But what can I add to the hours of talk we have had?
Only this: that I repeat my wish that I should have been granted a conversation with Professor Czinner.
You remember his testimony, which I did not question. It was impressive, I think, but it was also misleading.
There was one error, or an error of implication. It was not my fault that the Jews whose release we negotiated did not escape. Matters were taken out of my hands. I always regretted that, for I have ever tried to be a man of my word. As for his complaint that the money he had paid was not returned, that is only in a sense true. In fact, I arranged for a credit to be transmitted to the Jewish Agency in Zurich. What happened subsequently to that money, I do not know, but the responsibility for its disappearance rests with the Jewish Agency, not with me.
Czinner chose his words carefully. Let me remind you of what he said. “I met him once only, before the war,” and “that was our only meeting in Germany.” A supreme example of suggestio falsi. His intention was to suggest that the occasion when I advised him to leave Germany was our only encounter.
But we did meet again, in Poland, in the autumn of 1944. Czinner, having failed to make use of the great latitude which had been extended towards him, on account of his previous services to the Reich, was by then in Auschwitz. I discovered this, and, on the occasion of a routine visi
t to the camp, asked him to be brought before me. I dismissed my attendants and we talked in private.
Naturally I cannot repeat the whole substance of our talk, but I remember he asked me if I understood the full evil of what we were doing. And I answered him, as he must have expected, with Nietzsche. “Do you not remember,” I said, “that ‘evil is man’s best strength … Man must become better and more evil … The greatest evil is necessary for the superior man’s best … I rejoice over great sins as my great consolation.’”
Czinner was silent for a moment. He was in good physical condition, but he grew pale at my words, and I rejoiced, for I knew that I had spoken what in his own heart he believed.
“Yes,” he said at last, “is there nothing you would not betray?”
“Dr Czinner,” I replied, “there is nothing either of us would refuse to betray if it seemed necessary.”
“One cannot betray oneself,” he said.
“That exception was understood,” I said. “It is why you are where you are, and why I am here before you today. Why do we pretend that we are free agents? Necessity is the law of life. The expression ‘crime’ comes from a world that has been superseded. There are only positive and negative acts… You would not hesitate, Dr Czinner, to advocate the closure of a factory in the name of economic necessity, though hundreds were thrown into misery as a result… What else am I doing?”
Franz, I told you Czinner would understand me. He has always understood me. He looked at me as I said this with a profound respect. I knew then that like me he had always striven for a higher goal, and would permit nothing small or tender or scrupulous to defeat him. The goal of life is self-realisation: to find out and perform the utmost of which we are capable.
When Czinner informed on me, he broke a thousand small things on behalf of a greater.
Be strong, Franz.
It is ironic to reflect that it was my succumbing to my affection for you, my wish to do what seemed most desirable to you, that has brought me here. I am not suggesting you are culpable. The fault was in me, as Czinner would tell you.
