The Collaborator

by Diane Armstrong

  Annika listens to Yael with interest. This girl was so passionate about Palestinian rights despite the fact that her mother was murdered by Palestinian terrorists. It amazes her that Dov, who suffered such a tragedy, is able to discuss the issue so dispassionately with his daughter.

  Nina doesn’t take part in their argument. Her lively eyes swivel from her granddaughter to her son-in-law as she carries in platters of sliced pineapple, cheesecake, and yeast cakes filled with poppy seeds and walnuts, and she refuses Annika’s offers of help.

  ‘Sit, sit, enjoy yourself,’ she says. ‘Dov says you don’t have family in Israel. Where do your people come from?’

  ‘Hungary.’ Even as she says it, she feels no emotion, no connection with the country where her family originated. ‘I stopped in Budapest on my way here,’ she adds. ‘It’s a beautiful city but I don’t have any relatives there either. I don’t think I’ll ever go back.’ As she says this, she feels disloyal, as if she were erasing part of her life.

  Yael and Nina pick up some plates and take them to the kitchen, leaving Annika and Dov alone at the table.

  ‘Your daughter is a bright spark,’ Annika says. Dov nods but she can tell that his mind is on something else.

  He looks up and pushes his glasses further up the bridge of his nose with the palm of his hand. ‘So what’s next? Protest meetings with Eitan Nagy?’

  ‘Maybe if I lived here I’d go. I agree with Yael. She certainly has a point.’

  ‘So, you’re not planning to return to Budapest?’ He says it in a casual tone, playing with the pineapple slices on his plate. ‘What about that poor guy you left behind?’

  While she demurs, he moves closer and drops his voice. ‘Annika, there’s something…’ But before he can say any more, Yael and Nina return, and he sits back, leaving his sentence hanging unfinished between them.

  On the drive home, Yael is chattering about her school friends and the compulsory army service after high school and the trip to India many of them plan to make as soon as their military service is over.

  ‘Most of them get so stressed out, they just want to lie on a beach in Goa or laze around in a village in Nepal and smoke pot. I don’t want to walk around with an Uzi and make life tough for Palestinians at check points,’ she says. ‘They’ll have to find me a job in an office or something, like they do for those ultra-orthodox Jews.’

  Dov smiles indulgently. ‘You’re right. Stand up for what you believe in.’

  He turns to Annika. ‘Would you like to come in and see our place on the way to the hotel?’

  It sounds like a casual invitation to check out the interior design of their apartment, but the air between them is charged, and she senses that if she accepts, everything between them will change.

  *

  On a small cedar table in the corner of their cosy loungeroom, she looks at framed photographs of a woman with Nina’s smile holding a baby, and the same woman in a graduation cap and gown holding hands with a much younger, leaner Dov, whose crinkly hair was then light brown.

  Yael has disappeared into her room, Dov excuses himself for a moment to check the messages on his answerphone, and Annika comes out onto the small balcony. Although it’s late, it is still warm, and groups of people are strolling along the palm-lined avenue. Occasionally the sound of voices floats up from the street where young people are laughing and arguing under the lamp post. On the upstairs balcony of a nearby building, a man in a loose shirt leans over the rail and shouts at the revellers to take themselves and their noise somewhere else. One of the guys turns towards him and calls out, ‘Shabbat shalom to you too!’ and they all burst out laughing.

  A moment later she feels a hand resting on her shoulder, lightly at first, and then more firmly, and she likes its feel on her skin.

  ‘I presume your peacenik is related to Miklós Nagy?’ Dov says.

  ‘His grandson.’

  ‘Are you going to see him again?’

  ‘I probably will, because there’s a lot more I want to know before I leave.’

  ‘And when will that be?’

  ‘In a few days.’

  His hand is still on her shoulder. It feels strong and warm, and she leans against him. When she turns, he is looking straight into her eyes. The tension between them is increasing, and her heart is racing.

  ‘You started saying something at your mother-in-law’s place but you didn’t finish.’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says.

  She sits close beside him on the leather sofa and waits.

  He clears his throat. ‘I was going to say that I fell in love with you that day at Ari’s café on the waterfront, but I’ve always known it was hopeless because I’m much older than you, and I have a teenage daughter, and anyway you’re going back to Sydney.’

  She looks down at the sofa as her fingers trace the age-darkened creases in the leather and wonders if he can hear the beating of her heart. This is what she was hoping he would say but now that he has said it, she doesn’t know how to respond. She has never thought of him as much older. From what he has told her about himself, she’s worked out that he’s fifty-three or fifty-four. Older, but not too old. His daughter isn’t an issue either. Then she stops evaluating his comment. He has just made a declaration about his feelings for her, and he is waiting for her response.

  She looks up. He’s still waiting for her to say something and in that instant she longs to tell him that every moment she has spent with him has been exciting and stimulating, and that she waits impatiently for his calls, that she loves the feel of his hand on her shoulder, and the touch of his lips on her cheek. But she says none of these things. She knows she needs more time before she commits herself.

  He has read her answer in her silence and doesn’t press her to reply. He leans forward and gently kisses her lips. Then he says, ‘It’s getting late. I’ll take you back to the hotel.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Tel Aviv, 2005

  Annika has come back to see. There are too many unanswered questions and time is running out. This time when he opens the door, she sees him through Yael’s eyes, and understands why teenage girls think he’s cool. It’s the studied grunge look cultivated by male rock stars: unshaven face, messy hair, and an expression that hints at a mysterious past.

  ‘Don’t waste time thanking me or apologising,’ he says. ‘I have to go to a meeting soon, so just ask what you want to know.’

  She takes a deep breath. ‘Did they ever find the guy who shot your grandfather?’

  ‘It wasn’t very hard. They knew where to look: among the extremist right-wing groups. He’d migrated here from Poland, a loser in search of a cause, and found it when he joined a militant group that wanted to destabilise the government. They brainwashed him into believing that the Mapai party was corrupt and that my grandfather was a collaborator. The leaders of that group deified the Stern Gang and Irgun, and they had it in for the Mapai party, like that bastard of a defence attorney. The new recruit decided to prove his worth by assassinating my grandfather.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘Probably. Moshe Binsztok was about nineteen or twenty at the time. He killed my grandfather, caused my grandmother’s death, and traumatised my father, so he really destroyed our whole family, but he’s probably still alive. As we know, there’s no justice in the world.’

  She looks around for a place to sit, and he takes a mountain of papers off the wicker chair and gestures for her to sit down. He remains standing, leaning against the wall, and keeps checking his watch to remind her that he hasn’t much time.

  ‘Did you know your grandfather?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I was born long after he died. But from the day he died, the family hardly stopped talking about him. All those unanswered questions, endless debates, and bitter regrets, the whys and what ifs. Apparently the funeral was huge. Thousands of people turned up. My grandmother told me that when she saw the coffin being lowered into the grave, she felt like throwing
herself in there with him. She couldn’t bear the thought of him lying there in the cold earth, alone. All the politicians were there, the ones who had stood by him, and the ones who didn’t. My father used to say, “They didn’t respect him when he was alive, so why did they come pretending to pay their respects now he was dead?” He was furious.’

  She is relieved to see that he is consulting his watch less frequently. ‘How did your father cope with what happened?’

  Eitan is lost in thought for a few moments. ‘He never got over it. He was consumed by anger all his life. It crippled him emotionally and ruined his marriage because my mother couldn’t cope with his rage. He never told my grandmother that when he was about eleven he tried to kill himself because of the terrible bullying he and his brother suffered in and out of school. He couldn’t bear living here anymore, so after he finished high school he migrated to Toronto and never came back. That’s where I was born.’

  ‘But you came back.’

  He shrugs. ‘The tribal pull of heritage and history, I suppose.’

  As she reflects on that, he glances at his watch again and she returns to the subject of Miklós Nagy. ‘What happened to your grandmother?’

  ‘You could say she died of grief. She never came to terms with the loss. The injustice of it all.’

  Without prompting he goes on to describe his grandmother’s life after his grandfather’s death. He tells her that even though Miklós was exonerated by the Supreme Court, the whiff of ‘collaborator’ clung to him like dogshit to a shoe, and, by association, to her as well. But even if she had been offered any musical engagements, she didn’t have the patience to practise anymore. Music, which once had been her passion and her solace, now became irrelevant to her. Eventually she sold the piano; its presence in the apartment had become a constant reproach, and besides, as she didn’t have any income, she needed the money.

  ‘She started teaching music at a high school but her heart wasn’t in it, and she kept apart from the other teachers, convinced they were talking about her behind her back. For some strange reason, she blamed herself for everything that happened, which didn’t make sense to my father or my uncle, but I suppose when people are depressed, they don’t think straight. In any case, her heart wasn’t in teaching so she gave it up.

  ‘My father used to send her money from Canada when he started working, and I think some of the people my grandfather rescued eventually got together and organised a small pension for her, but apart from that, she had no income.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Annika says.

  ‘The other thing that got her down was something my grandfather was supposed to have said just before he died. My father told me about it. Apparently on his deathbed my grandfather mentioned someone called Ilonka. None of us had any idea what that was about. My father suspected that my grandmother knew but she didn’t want to say.’ He shrugs. ‘I suppose every family has its secrets.’

  ‘So what happened to the killer?’

  ‘He got the mandatory life sentence but somehow or other the bastard was released much earlier. Because of good behaviour, they said. He’d been rehabilitated and wasn’t likely to reoffend. That’s modern justice for you.’

  ‘Your grandmother must have been bitter about that.’

  ‘Of course she was, but in the end she said she didn’t care whether they let him out in ten years or a hundred. It wouldn’t bring her husband back.’

  ‘And the defence attorney, Amos Alon? Did he ever change his opinion about your grandfather?’

  ‘Until the end of his life he was obsessed with the idea that my grandfather was a collaborator, and he never passed up an opportunity to bring the matter up, never stopped writing letters and articles on the subject. It was a real idée fixe. I’ll give you an example. A few years after my grandfather’s assassination, Eichmann was brought to Israel and put on trial. You won’t believe this, but Alon started writing articles to the newspapers and letters to the Justice Department demanding that they reopen the Nagy case. He said they now had the perfect opportunity to find out the truth because they had in custody the man who had taken part in negotiations with Miklós Nagy! He actually thought it was reasonable to turn Eichmann into a witness against my grandfather!’

  ‘That’s incredible.’ Annika says. ‘He really was obsessed.’

  Eitan observes her with an appreciative glance. ‘I’ll tell you something even more bizarre,’ he says. ‘While Eichmann was here, a reporter asked him about Miklós Nagy. And you know what Eichmann said? He gave that insidious thin-lipped smile of his, and said, “I had great respect for Mr Nagy. He was an idealist like me!”’

  Eitan sits forward, and she realises that he hasn’t looked at his watch for the past ten minutes. ‘You asked about Amos Alon. That story has an extraordinary postscript. Did you happen to hear about the three Israeli soldiers who were captured by terrorists about twenty years ago?’

  She makes a quick calculation. That would have been in the 1980s, back in the days when she was an eager cadet at one of the Sydney newspapers, dreaming of becoming an investigative journalist like Oriana Fallaci, travelling around the world to interview powerful leaders and exposing the secrets they wanted to conceal. She can’t remember why she betrayed her dream and ended up editing a magazine that relied on gossip and rumours about egotistical celebrities.

  ‘Maybe it didn’t make the news in Australia,’ Eitan is saying, ‘but it electrified us here because our government is committed to doing everything in its power to rescue any of our soldiers that are taken hostage. Well, the captors exacted an outrageous price: they demanded the release of over a thousand terrorists being held in Israeli jails. Many of them had the blood of Israeli civilians on their hands, so you can imagine the uproar that caused.’

  Annika wonders if one of those terrorists had been responsible for the bomb attack which had killed Dov’s wife Nurit and their unborn child.

  ‘After a lot of soul-searching and bitter arguments for and against the deal, the government agreed to release all those prisoners in exchange for our three soldiers,’ Eitan continues. ‘And guess who played an important role in the negotiations for their release? Amos Alon. And to save them, he had to negotiate with the devil, just like my grandfather. I’ve always wondered if he saw the exquisite irony of that. But I don’t suppose he ever did.’

  Annika looks around the room at the papers and leaflets. ‘It’s interesting that you’re so committed to working for peace, but you haven’t found peace in your own life.’

  She hadn’t planned to say this, and she is taken aback by her own words. ‘It seems to me that you take after your grandfather,’ she continues. ‘You’re an activist like him. He was passionate about saving people’s lives, and gave up everything to do that, and in your own way, you’re trying to do the same. You’re both men with a mission to rescue people. He was determined to rescue them from the Nazis, and you want to rescue them from themselves.’

  Eitan is silent, obviously considering her words. Then he says, ‘I’ve always admired him, but I never saw that connection before. Everyone says they want peace but hardly anyone is willing to do anything about it. Peace Now is accused of being naive, and some people even call us traitors because we’re against our government’s policies towards the Palestinians. The amount of hostility we encounter during our protests sometimes makes me wonder if we’re achieving anything. But it’s interesting that you think I take after my grandfather.’

  ‘Speaking of peace, have you ever thought of forgiving that gunman?’

  He stares at her as if he’s just seen a serpent slither into the room. ‘Forgive him? You can’t be serious. Forgive the man who destroyed my family? Are you one of those people who think they can solve everybody’s problems with New Age psychobabble?’

  She manages to ignore the scathing tone and presses on. ‘I read somewhere that you have to be very strong to forgive someone but forgiveness is liberating. It’s the only way to regain power, overcome the des
tructive force of anger and bitterness, find peace, and move on.’

  He is looking at his watch again and she can tell that he is having trouble controlling his anger. ‘I don’t know where you get this stuff, but I can assure you that there’s no way I’d forgive that bastard, and even if I did, it wouldn’t help me to find peace and move on, as you put it.’

  Annika is as startled as he is by this unexpected turn in the conversation. She has no idea what has impelled her to talk about forgiveness, but despite his antagonism, she can’t let it go. ‘He was very young at the time. What if he told you that he regretted what he’d done and he was sorry?’

  ‘That he was sorry?’ He repeats her words with incredulity. ‘Look, I have to go now. Perhaps you should take your helpful suggestions to someone who wants them.’

  She is shocked by her own presumptuousness and can’t comprehend how she came to offer unsolicited advice on such a personal matter. ‘You’re right. I’m very sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s not my business.’

  He is studying her as if he still can’t believe what she has said. ‘I can’t work you out. You came here to find out about my grandfather, and now you’re telling me to forgive his killer.’

  She squirms. ‘Please believe me, I didn’t mean to say any of this, it just came out, I don’t even know why. I don’t usually shoot my mouth off like this. It just came to me that it might help. I don’t blame you for being angry.’

  Mollified by her contrite tone, he calms down. ‘Okay. Thirty seconds ago you thought you were being helpful but now you can see you weren’t. Anything else you want to know?’

  ‘That group Moshe Binsztok was involved with. Does it still exist?’

  Eitan’s mouth tightens again. ‘I have no idea. I’m not interested in right-wing fanatics. Only ten years ago, one of them murdered our Prime Minister Rabin. I’m sure you heard about that even in Australia.’