To Kill The Truth

by Sam Bourne

  He never spelled out the criteria by which Jason was meant to make such a judgement. But recently, especially after their work together on that London operation – involving that woman in the stairwell – he had formed a sense of it. And now, given what he’d learned, he wondered if this latest target failed to meet the unspoken standard.

  Her face was still looking back at him. He skimmed the details of the newspaper once more. Esther Gratzky of the Detroit suburb of Sherwood Forest, who had introduced a local screening of Schindler’s List in 1993. Then aged sixty-four, she had taken questions after the film as she recounted her own experience of life in a Polish ghetto. The newspaper reported that most of the audience had been moved to tears, while Gratzky herself remained dry-eyed throughout.

  There had been more such talks, noted on Facebook. But her activities had dropped off. The health records suggested no dramatic developments, but she was very old now.

  All of which lent force to the question now nagging at Jason, as his finger hovered over the button that would action this work plan. Esther Gratzky, Holocaust survivor, now living in Detroit, Michigan: did she deserve to be ‘filed’ or not?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Washington DC, 6.55pm

  Maggie had been staring at Uri for the best part of two minutes before she realized what she was doing. Watching him working intently at his laptop at her kitchen table, she was daydreaming, drifting somewhere between memory and fantasy, as she pictured – recalled, really – the two of them in bed together, in this very apartment. Their lovemaking had been intense, and somehow serious. As if they were engaged in an ongoing conversation of great import, the two of them unpeeling more and more of themselves each time their bodies met. The sex with Richard, her last boyfriend, just a few months ago, had been compulsive, even addictive. But it lacked whatever it was she had had with Uri. Looking back now, she supposed that difference was love.

  ‘What?’ Uri’s eyes hinted at a smile.

  ‘What do you mean, “What”?’

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  Maggie wanted to answer truthfully. She wanted to say, ‘You.’ But she worried that would load more weight onto the moment than it could bear. Or more than she could bear, anyway.

  So instead she said, ‘Nothing.’ And then, after a pause that lasted a half second too long, she said: ‘What have you got?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might be nothing. I mean, there might be an explanation.’

  ‘For what?’ She moved from her chair too fast, so that her scalded skin seemed to pull tight. She grimaced as she said, ‘An explanation for what?’

  ‘We know the UVA library lost its digital archive, right? So I was checking at Yad Vashem.’

  ‘To see if the same thing happened to them?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Look.’

  The screen displayed an error message: This site can’t be reached.

  Maggie took it in and said: ‘So what’s the other explanation?’

  Uri flicked to another tab on the screen, opened to Twitter. It showed the list of trending topics, with Yad Vashem at the top. He pointed at it. ‘It’s the big story, people are curious, they google Yad Vashem, system gets overloaded, system goes down.’

  ‘OK. Well, that makes sense.’

  ‘Maybe. We’ll see if it comes back up. What about you? Found anything?’

  Maggie looked down at the pad on which she’d scribbled a few disparate items that she’d spotted after a wide, but shallow, Google trawl. First on the list was a story she’d picked up already. It had led the local news on the radio as she’d made the two-hour drive back to DC from Richmond. Several guides at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington said they had been assaulted on their way to and from work in the preceding twenty-four hours, in what appeared to be an organized, even systemic attack. The home of the museum’s director had been daubed with graffiti, including the slogans Fake news and Stop the lies. At the museum itself, a crowd had surrounded one official guide, badgering him to tell the truth, jabbing him on the chest and calling him a liar.

  Maggie also noted an outbreak of E. coli at an academic conference – on reparations – in Oklahoma and a remarkably similar outbreak at the history faculty in Maine. An eminent historian of the nineteenth-century United States – specializing in slavery and the American civil war – had been found dead in Amsterdam, where he had been on a one-year sabbatical. Police said that he appeared to have been caught up in an armed robbery.

  There was one more story that didn’t quite fit the pattern, but which she noted nonetheless. In London, the family of Holocaust survivor Judith Beaton rejected a provisional police finding of suicide after the woman was found dead at the bottom of a stairwell in her apartment building. The daughter’s words, quoted in the news report, had leapt out at Maggie. ‘My mother lived to tell the world of her experience in Auschwitz and on the death march in 1945. She regarded every day she had been granted as precious – as a gift – and was determined not to squander even a moment of it. The idea that she would have taken her own life is absurd and an insult to her memory.’ The Beaton family said they were sure that once the coroner had assessed the evidence, they too would ‘throw out’ any talk of suicide.

  Maggie mentioned all of this to Uri who, on hearing the Beaton story, suddenly sat upright, as if he’d heard an alarm bell ring. He opened up a new tab on the computer and Maggie watched over his shoulder as he typed the words ‘Shoah testimony project’ into the search bar. The first answer came up announcing something called the Shoah Foundation. Uri clicked.

  To Maggie’s relief, there was no error message like the one at Yad Vashem. This page did load, bringing up the About Us page, which confirmed that this was the archive founded by one of Hollywood’s biggest directors in the early 1990s, an attempt to record on camera the testimony of every last living witness and survivor of the Holocaust. It announced that it had so far collected fifty-five thousand interviews in forty-two languages, a monumental effort to ensure the horror was fully documented while it still remained in living memory, to record it before it was too late.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Maggie said, watching as Uri clicked his way towards the search option and then typed in the name ‘Judith Beaton’.

  The machine recognized it and rapidly generated a page with a paragraph or two of information below a small video player screen. It showed a still image of an elegant woman, her chin raised. Uri clicked the play button but nothing happened. He clicked it again. Still nothing. And then, as he tried a third time, the machine did something strange.

  The page appeared to melt before their eyes. The words, the graphics, the small, unresponsive screen within the screen – they all began to lose shape and drip, like candlewax. The molten letters tumbled to the bottom of the page, where they gathered in a pool, useless and illegible.

  ‘Try another one,’ Maggie said.

  Uri backed out of that page and found the search bar again. His fingers hesitated. Maggie couldn’t keep the urgency out of her voice: ‘Anyone, Uri. Anyone.’

  Uri muttered something about an old friend of his father’s, a fellow archaeologist who had been in the ghetto in Kaunas, Lithuania. He typed the name, and the page appeared. A man, then in his seventies, wearing what appeared to be a safari suit. Once again, the play button on the video player was useless. And a second later, the page began to melt.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Maggie said.

  Uri was frantically jabbing at the keys. ‘It’s some kind of hack.’

  ‘I can see that! But what the fuck is going on?’

  ‘It depends if the people behind this are—’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s going on, Uri. This isn’t just about slavery. Someone is trying to destroy the evidence of the greatest crimes in human history. And as of this moment, they’re succeeding.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Washington DC, 8.55pm


  Maggie needed water. She felt her temperature rising, though whether that was the result of the burns on her blistered skin or the realization now coursing through her, she could not tell. She went into the kitchen, filled a glass and drained it before she could even set it down on the counter. She filled it again, then left the tap running so she could splash a few drops on her face.

  Her phone buzzed. A one-word text, from Governor Morrison. Anything?

  She thumbed out a two-word reply – Not yet – and filled another glass for Uri, then headed back out into the living area. It was now converted into an impromptu research centre, with piles of papers, take-out cartons and notepads arranged around the two computers and the tangle of cables and phone chargers that lay between them.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, continuing out loud the train of thought that had been running through her mind and which she assumed Uri would automatically follow, the kind of assumption that she had made only with him. ‘I’ve dealt with some shitty people in my time. Doing really shitty things. Driving a good president from office. Keeping a bad president in office. Sabotaging a Middle East peace deal.’ For that last one, she gestured in Uri’s direction, as if to say: You don’t need me to tell you about that, you were there. Which indeed he was.

  ‘I’ve seen plenty of bad stuff, I really have.’ She took a swig of water, which did nothing to reduce the heat on her face. ‘But this? This is something else completely.’

  Uri looked at her and listened, as he had done a thousand times before.

  ‘It’s killing those people all over again. It’s enslaving them all over again. You put a person in chains, you’re saying: you’re an animal. Your life is worth nothing. Your life means nothing. And then, years later, you say it didn’t happen? You pretend it didn’t happen? You’re saying the same thing to them all over again: your life has so little value, we’ll destroy all the proof you ever existed. We’ll forget you were ever here.’

  ‘Maggie—’

  ‘And the Holocaust, Uri? Can you believe that? The world did nothing for those people. They stood by and let it happen. Six million people. Why am I telling you? You don’t need me—’

  ‘Maggie, please.’

  ‘It’s OK. I’m OK.’ She took another chug of water, wishing the burning would stop. ‘I’m all right. I’ll be all right. I was just going to say: remembering is all we can do for those people. It’s the least we can do. Literally, the very fucking least. Otherwise, we’re just the same as the people who stood and watched and maybe tutted and said, “That’s a shame, dear”, and just let it happen. And I don’t want to be one of those people, Uri. I don’t want to live in that world.’

  She let herself fall into a chair. The stinging sensation made her eyes smart even more, but somehow she welcomed the physical pain: it would provide a cover for the tears’ true source.

  Uri passed her a tissue. He took her hand and said, ‘You know, maybe this can be healing.’

  At first, she thought he was talking about them. That sharing this moment, enduring this horror together, might bind them together. But his eyes said otherwise.

  ‘What could be “healing”?’

  ‘All this. What’s happening.’ He pulled his hand from hers, confirming her hunch. ‘Wiping the slate clean.’

  ‘Are you serious? Tell me, for fuck’s sake, you’re not serious.’

  ‘Well, if you think—’

  ‘These people are torching libraries, Uri. They’re burning books. I mean, that surely rings a few bells.’

  ‘Obviously I hate the way they’re doing it, Maggie. Obviously. No one in their right minds could support that. But if this is about there being too much history, then . . . then, I understand where they’re coming from.’

  ‘I don’t believe this.’

  ‘It’s possible to have too much history, that’s all I’m saying, Maggie. I come from a country buried up to its neck in the past. Not up to its neck; up to its eyes! I grew up in Jerusalem. You know what that place is like. All around, every little side turning or alleyway, it’s a stone from the time of Abraham or it’s the tomb of Rachel or the cave of Jesus or the rock of Mohammed – people who may, or may not, have lived thousands of years ago – and people fight and kill each other now, today, over the “memory” of these people. People that of course they don’t remember. Not actually remember. But they tell themselves they do, with all that bullshit about “collective memory”. Worshipping every stone they pull out of the ground, every grain of dust, saying, “This proves it! This proves we belong here.” Or more often, “This proves that here belongs to us.” ’

  ‘It was your father’s work, Uri. His life’s work.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I know that. Like it wasn’t enough that I got all this history in school, and on the radio, I had it every day in my home, thanks to my father, the great Shimon Guttman, archaeologist and excavator of the heroic Jewish past! The past filled my home, Maggie. Every inch, every shelf. The air in that house was filled with dust, no matter how hard my mother worked with her cloths and her polish and her broom. The dust of thousands of years of history. History so thick you could choke on it.’

  Maggie was shaking her head. ‘But without history, Uri, why on earth . . . I mean, it would make no sense. None of it would make any sense. Why would you be in Israel? Why would any of us be anywhere? We’d just be like . . . animals. Dumb, pointless animals.’

  ‘We’d be people, Maggie. Not “A People”. But real people, individuals, not little bit players in some bullshit epic story. And the story is almost always bullshit, isn’t it? Some murderous butcher whipping his people up, saying, “We must rise up and kill those people, over there, to avenge what they did to our ancestors. They humiliated us a thousand years ago. They killed your grandparents. They did a massacre here in the year eleven hundred and bullshit. Now it’s time to settle the score.” It’s the same story wherever you go. It can be Israel, it can be Rwanda, it can be Bosnia. I go with my camera, and I hear it again and again. “We owe it to the dead. We must honour the past.” ’

  Now he smiled. ‘Shit, Maggie, listen to me. I’m lecturing Maggie Costello on this ? Maggie Costello from Ireland. Our countries are the joint champions, yours and mine, Ireland and Israel, top of the leaderboard in history mania. You’re as bad as we are. All those flags and slogans demanding revenge for deaths that happened four hundred years ago, as if they were just yesterday. You were brought up to be as crazy as us!’

  Maggie tried to be calm, to adopt her quieter, steady voice. Even though Uri would know the instant he heard it that Maggie was, in fact, more livid than if she were screaming.

  ‘I understand that it’s possible to be stuck in the past, Uri. But the solution to that is not to destroy the past. It’s not a solution to wipe out the historical record. We need that record. It’s such a cliche, it’s embarrassing to even say it, but it’s true. “Those who cannot remember the past—” ’

  ‘Are condemned to repeat it. Sure. But we can’t keep saying that any more, Maggie. We just can’t. Because we do remember the past and we still repeat it.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Like “Never Again”. I mean, that’s the fucking national anthem in my country. “Never Again shall a people commit genocide against another people.” But it did happen again. It happened in Cambodia. It happened in Rwanda. It happened in Srebrenica. We had all the museums, Maggie. We had all the libraries. And all the movies. And all the great novels that I had to read in school. And all those historians. We had it all. Everyone knew what happened in the 1940s. But did it stop anything? I don’t have your accent, Maggie, but like you would say, “Did it fuck?” ’

  There was silence now, while Maggie stared at her fingers. She’d forgotten this side of Uri, the passion that he forced down below the surface, as if keeping the lid on a cauldron filled with spitting, boiling oil. She once thought she liked it, but now he just felt far away. Unbidden, she remembered being in that burning library and looking over her sho
ulder to see that Uri had . . . gone.

  ‘The funny thing is, Maggie, I learned this from you. When we met, you were a peace negotiator. Sent into the Jerusalem madhouse to deal with all those crazy Israelis and Palestinians. And what you always said was – and it stayed with me – you said, if you want to end a war, you have to choose. Sometimes you get peace, sometimes you get justice, but you don’t get both. It was a choice. “Either you get a reckoning for the past, or you can have hope for the future.” That’s not me saying that. It’s what you said. I remember it, because it made so much sense. And it was so wise. And so few people in my country ever, ever talked like that.’

  ‘But not like this, Uri. It can’t be like this.’

  ‘I agree. Not like this. It’s horrible and it has to stop. But maybe something good can come from it, all the same. I just know that the one thing my country needs most is a chance to forget.’

  ‘ “We should raise a monument to Amnesia and then forget where we put it.” ’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Just because I know the quote, Uri, doesn’t mean I agree with it.’ She sighed. ‘If we don’t know about the past, I don’t know who we’d be. We’d be like goldfish, living in this moment, then this one, then the next, then the next. Living for two seconds, forgetting it all and then starting all over again. We’d never get anywhere. We’d be trapped in this permanent present. I’m only me because I remember my past, where I’ve been, what I’ve done. Who I’ve loved and who’s loved me. Otherwise, I’m just a bunch of . . . I don’t know, neural fucking inputs. And that’s not just true of individual human beings, that’s true of the human race.’

  They were silent for a while before she spoke again. Again, her voice was soft.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m on my own.’