by Daniel Silva
“Who ran Mannheim?”
“It was an American camp.”
“Do we know how he managed to escape Europe?”
“No, but we should assume that he had help.”
“The ODESSA?”
“It might have been the ODESSA, or one of the other secret Nazi aid networks.” Rivlin hesitated, then said, “Or it might have been a highly public and ancient institution based in Rome that operated the most successful Ratline of the postwar period.”
“The Vatican?”
Rivlin nodded. “The ODESSA couldn’t hold a candle to the Vatican when it came to financing and running an escape route from Europe. Because Radek was an Austrian, he would almost certainly have been assisted by Bishop Hudal.”
“Who’s Hudal?”
“Aloïs Hudal was an Austrian native, an anti-Semite, and a fervent Nazi. He used his position as rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German seminary in Rome, to help hundreds of SS officers escape justice, including Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.”
“What kind of assistance did he provide them?”
“For starters, a Red Cross passport in a new name and an entrance visa to a country far away. He also gave them a bit of pocket money and paid for their passage.”
“Did he keep records?”
“Apparently so, but his papers are kept under lock and key at the Anima.”
“I need everything you have on Bishop Aloïs Hudal.”
“I’ll assemble a file for you.”
Gabriel picked up Radek’s photograph and looked at it carefully. There was something familiar about the face. It had been clawing at him throughout Rivlin’s briefing. Then he thought of the charcoal sketches he’d seen that morning at the Holocaust art museum, the child cowering before an SS monster, and he knew at once where he’d seen Radek’s face before.
He stood suddenly, toppling his chair.
“What’s wrong?” Rivlin asked.
“I know this man,” Gabriel said, eyes on the photo.
“How?”
Gabriel ignored the question. “I need to borrow this,” he said. Then, without waiting for Rivlin’s answer, he slipped out the door and was gone.
15
JERUSALEM
IN THE OLD days he would have taken the fast road north through Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin. Now, even a man with the survival skills of Gabriel would be foolhardy to attempt such a run without an armored car and battle escort. So he took the long way round, down the western slope of the Judean Mountains toward Tel Aviv, up the Coastal Plain to Hadera, then northeast, through the Mount Carmel ridge, to El Megiddo: Armageddon.
The valley opened before him, stretching from the Samarian hills in the south to the slopes of the Galilee in the north, a green-brown patchwork of row crops, orchards, and forestlands planted by the earliest Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine. He headed toward Nazareth, then east, to a small farming town on the edge of the Balfour Forest called Ramat David.
It took him a few minutes to find the address. The bungalow that had been built for the Allons had been torn down and replaced by a California-style sandstone rambler with a satellite dish on the roof and an American-made minivan in the front drive. As Gabriel looked on, a soldier stepped from the front door and walked briskly across the front lawn. Gabriel’s memory flashed. He saw his father, making the same journey on a warm evening in June, and though he had not realized it then, it would be the last time Gabriel would ever see him alive.
He looked at the house next door. It was the house where Tziona had lived. The plastic toys littering the front lawn indicated that Tziona, unmarried and childless, did not live there anymore. Still, Israel was nothing if not an extended, quarrelsome family, and Gabriel was confident the new occupants could at least point him in the right direction.
He rang the bell. The plump young woman who spoke Russian-accented Hebrew did not disappoint him. Tziona was living up in Safed. The Russian woman had a forwarding address.
JEWS HAD BEEN living in the center of Safed since the days of antiquity. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Ottoman Turks allowed many more Jews to settle there, and the city flourished as a center of Jewish mysticism, scholarship, and art. During the war of independence, Safed was on the verge of falling to superior Arab forces when the besieged community was reinforced by a platoon of Palmach fighters, who stole into the city after making a daring night crossing from their garrison on Mount Canaan. The leader of the Palmach unit negotiated an agreement with Safed’s powerful rabbis to work over Passover to reinforce the city’s fortifications. His name was Ari Shamron.
Tziona’s apartment was in the Artists’ Quarter, at the top of a flight of cobblestone steps. She was an enormous woman, draped in a white caftan, with wild gray hair and so many bracelets that she clanged and clattered when she threw her arms around Gabriel’s neck. She drew him inside, into a space that was both a living room and potter’s studio, and sat him down on the stone terrace to watch the sunset over the Galilee. The air smelled of burning lavender oil.
A plate of bread and hummus appeared, along with olives and a bottle of Golan wine. Gabriel relaxed instantly. Tziona Levin was the closest thing to a sibling he had. She had cared for him when his mother was working or was too sick from depression to get out of bed. Some nights he would climb out his window and steal next door into Tziona’s bed. She would caress and hold him in a way his mother never could. When his father was killed in the June war, it was Tziona who wiped away his tears.
The rhythmic, hypnotic sound of Ma’ariv prayers floated up from a nearby synagogue. Tziona added more lavender oil to the lamp. She talked of the matsav: the situation. Of the fighting in the Territories and the terror in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Of friends lost to the sha-heed and friends who had given up trying to find work in Israel and had moved to America instead.
Gabriel drank his wine and watched the fiery sun sink into the Galilee. He was listening to Tziona, but his thoughts were of his mother. It had been nearly twenty years since her death, and in the intervening time, he had found himself thinking of her less and less. Her face, as a young woman, was lost to him, stripped of pigment and abraded, like a canvas faded by time and exposure to corrosive elements. Only her death mask could he conjure. After the tortures of cancer, her emaciated features had settled into an expression of serenity, like a woman posing for a portrait. She seemed to welcome death. It had finally given her deliverance from the torments raging inside her memory.
Had she loved him? Yes, he thought now, but she had surrounded herself with walls and battlements that he could never scale. She was prone to melancholia and violent mood swings. She did not sleep well at night. She could not show pleasure on festive occasions and could not partake of rich food and drink. She wore a bandage always on her left arm, over the faded numbers tattooed into her skin. She referred to them as her mark of Jewish weakness, her emblem of Jewish shame.
Gabriel had taken up painting to be closer to her. She soon resented this as an unwarranted intrusion on her private world; then, when his talents matured and began to challenge hers, she begrudged his obvious gifts. Gabriel pushed her to new heights. Her pain, so visible in life, found expression in her work. Gabriel grew obsessed with the nightmarish imagery that flowed from her memory onto her canvases. He began to search for the source.
In school he had learned of a place called Birkenau. He asked her about the bandage she wore habitually on her left arm, about the long-sleeved blouses she wore, even in the furnacelike heat of the Jezreel Valley. He asked what had happened to her during the war, what had happened to his grandparents. She refused at first, but finally, under his steady onslaught of questions, she relented. Her account was hurried and reluctant; Gabriel, even in youth, was able to detect the note of evasion and more than a trace of guilt. Yes, she had been in Birkenau. Her parents had been murdered there on the day they arrived. She had worked. She had survived. That was all. Gabriel, hungry for more details
about his mother’s experience, began to concoct all manner of scenarios to account for her survival. He too began to feel ashamed and guilty. Her affliction, like a hereditary disorder, was thus passed on to the next generation.
The matter was never discussed again. It was as if a steel door had swung shut, as if the Holocaust had never happened. She fell into a prolonged depression and was bedridden for many days. When finally she emerged, she retreated to her studio and began to paint. She worked relentlessly, day and night. Once Gabriel peered through the half-open door and found her sprawled on the floor, her hands stained by paint, trembling before a canvas. That canvas was the reason he had come to Safed to see Tziona.
The sun was gone. It had grown cold on the terrace. Tziona drew a shawl around her shoulders and asked Gabriel if he ever intended to come home. Gabriel mumbled something about needing to work, like Tziona’s friends who had moved to America.
“And who are you working for these days?”
He didn’t rise to the challenge. “I restore Old Master paintings. I need to be where the paintings are. In Venice.”
“Venice,” she said derisively. “Venice is a museum.” She raised her wineglass toward the Galilee. “This is real life. This is art. Enough of this restoration. You should be devoting all your time and energy to your own work.”
“There’s no such thing as my own work. That went out of me a long time ago. I’m one of the best art restorers in the world. That’s good enough for me.”
Tziona threw up her hands. Her bracelets clattered like wind chimes. “It’s a lie. You’re a lie. You’re an artist, Gabriel. Come to Safed and find your art. Find yourself.”
Her prodding was making him uncomfortable. He might have told her there was now a woman involved, but that would have opened a whole new front that Gabriel was anxious to avoid. Instead, he allowed a silence to fall between them, which was filled by the consoling sound of Ma’ariv.
“What are you doing in Safed?” she finally asked. “I know you didn’t come all the way up here for a lecture from your Doda Tziona.”
He asked whether Tziona still had his mother’s paintings and sketches.
“Of course, Gabriel. I’ve been keeping them all these years, waiting for you to come and claim them.”
“I’m not ready to take them off your hands yet. I just need to see them.”
She held a candle to his face. “You’re hiding something from me, Gabriel. I’m the only person in the world who can tell when you’re keeping secrets. It was always that way, especially when you were a boy.”
Gabriel poured himself another glass of wine and told Tziona about Vienna.
SHE PULLED OPEN the door of the storeroom and yanked down on the drawstring of the overhead light. The closet was filled floor to ceiling with canvases and sketches. Gabriel began leafing through the work. He’d forgotten how gifted his mother was. He could see the influence of Beckmann, Picasso, Egon Schiele, and of course her father, Viktor Frankel. There were even variations on themes Gabriel had been exploring in his own work at the time. His mother had expanded on them, or, in some cases, utterly demolished them. She had been breathtakingly talented.
Tziona pushed him aside and came out with a stack of canvases and two large envelopes filled with sketches. Gabriel crouched on the stone floor and examined the works while Tziona looked on over his shoulder.
There were images of the camps. Children crowded into bunks. Women slaving over machinery in the factories. Bodies stacked like cordwood, waiting to be hurled into the fire. A family huddled together while the gas gathered round them.
The final canvas depicted a solitary figure, an SS man dressed head to toe in black. It was the painting he had seen that day in his mother’s studio. While the other works were dark and abstract, here she strove for realism and revelation. Gabriel found himself marveling at her impeccable draftsmanship and brushwork before his eyes finally settled on the face of the subject. It belonged to Erich Radek.
TZIONA MADE a bed for Gabriel on the living room couch and told him the midrash of the broken vessel.
“Before God created the world, there was only God. When God decided to create the world, God pulled back in order to create a space for the world. It was in that space that the universe was formed. But now, in that space, there was no God. God created Divine Sparks, light, to be placed back into God’s creation. When God created light, and placed light inside of Creation, special containers were prepared to hold it. But there was an accident. A cosmic accident. The containers broke. The universe became filled with sparks of God’s divine light and shards of broken containers.”
“It’s a lovely story,” Gabriel said, helping Tziona tuck the ends of a sheet beneath the couch cushions. “But what does it have to do with my mother?”
“The midrash teaches us that until the sparks of God’s light are gathered together, the task of creation will not be complete. As Jews, this is our solemn duty. We call it Tikkun Olam: Repair of the World.”
“I can restore many things, Tziona, but I’m afraid the world is too broad a canvas, with far too much damage.”
“So start small.”
“How?”
“Gather your mother’s sparks, Gabriel. And punish the man who broke her vessel.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Gabriel slipped out of Tziona’s apartment without waking her and crept down the cobblestone steps in the shadowless gray light of dawn with the portrait of Radek beneath his arm. An Orthodox Jew, on his way to morning prayer, thought him a madman and shook his fist in anger. Gabriel loaded the painting into the trunk of the car and headed out of Safed. A bloodred sunrise broke over the ridge. Below, on the valley floor, the Sea of Galilee turned to fire.
He stopped in Afula for breakfast and left a message on Moshe Rivlin’s voice mail, warning him that he was coming back to Yad Vashem. It was late morning by the time he arrived. Rivlin was waiting for him. Gabriel showed him the canvas.
“Who painted it?”
“My mother.”
“What was her name?”
“Irene Allon, but her German name was Frankel.”
“Where was she?”
“The women’s camp at Birkenau, from January 1943 until the end.”
“The death march?”
Gabriel nodded. Rivlin seized Gabriel by the arm and said, “Come with me.”
RIVLIN PLACED GABRIEL at a table in the main reading room of the archives and sat down before a computer terminal. He entered the words “Irene Allon” into the database and drummed his stubby fingers impatiently on the keyboard while waiting for a response. A few seconds later, he scribbled five numbers onto a piece of scratch paper and without a word to Gabriel disappeared through a doorway leading to the storerooms of the archives. Twenty minutes later, he returned and placed a document on the table. Behind a clear plastic cover were the words YAD VASHEM ARCHIVES in both Hebrew and English, along with a file number: 03/812. Gabriel carefully lifted the plastic cover and turned to the first page. The heading made him feel suddenly cold: THE TESTIMONY OF IRENE ALLON, DELIVERED MARCH 19, 1957. Rivlin placed a hand on his shoulder and slipped out of the room. Gabriel hesitated a moment, then looked down and began to read.
16
THE TESTIMONY OF IRENE ALLON: MARCH 19, 1957
I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead. I will not tell you all the unspeakable cruelty we endured at the hands of the so-called master race, nor will I tell you the things that some of us did in order to survive just one more day. Only those who lived through it will ever understand what it was truly like, and I will not humiliate the dead one last time. I will only tell you the things that I did, and the things that were done to me. I spent two years in Auschwitz-Birkenau, two years to the very day, almost precisely two years to the hour. My name is Irene Allon. I used to be called Irene Frankel. This is what I witnessed in January 1945, on the death march from Birkenau.
To understand the misery of the death march, you must fir
st know something of what came before. You’ve heard the story from others. Mine is not so different. Like all the others, we came by train. Ours set out from Berlin in the middle of the night. They told us we were going to the east, to work. We believed them. They told us it would be a proper carriage with seats. They assured us we would be given food and water. We believed them. My father, the painter Viktor Frankel, had packed a sketchpad and some pencils. He had been fired from his teaching position and his work had been declared “degenerate” by the Nazis. Most of his paintings had been seized and burned. He hoped the Nazis would allow him to resume his work in the east.
Of course, it was not a proper carriage with seats, and there was no food or water. I do not remember precisely how long the journey lasted. I lost count of how many times the sun rose and set, how many times we traveled in and out of the darkness. There was no toilet, only one bucket—one bucket for sixty of us. You can imagine the conditions we endured. You can imagine the unbearable smell. You can imagine the things some of us resorted to when our thirst pushed us over the edge of insanity. On the second day, an old woman standing next to me died. I closed her eyes and prayed for her. I watched my mother, Sarah Frankel, and waited for her to die, too. Nearly half our car was dead by the time the train finally screeched to a stop. Some prayed. Some actually thanked God the journey was finally over.
For ten years we had lived under Hitler’s thumb. We had suffered the Nuremberg Laws. We had lived the nightmare of Kristallnacht. We had watched our synagogues burn. Even so, I was not prepared for the sight that greeted me when the bolts slid back and the doors were finally thrown open. I saw a towering, tapered redbrick chimney, belching thick smoke. Below the chimney was a building, aglow with a raging, leaping flame. There was a terrible smell on the air. We could not identify it. It lingers in my nostrils to this day. There was a sign over the rail platform. Auschwitz. I knew then that I had arrived in hell.