by Allan Massie
He laughed. They withdrew, retracing their steps towards the Tomb of David. They mounted to the roof, from where they could gaze into the Old City. They could see the crenellated wall, the upper part of Zion’s gate, the Temple area with the huge dome of Omar’s mosque scintillating in the sunlight, and a corner of the Wailing Wall.
“Jerusalem the Golden,” Luke laughed again. “Also Jerusalem the Forbidden. Perhaps that is just as well. Do you know what I’ve been thinking? As long as we are denied Jerusalem, our exile is not over. We still have something to hope for.”
“Luke,” Rachel said, “you’re talking the most God-awful nonsense, darling. Keep it for evening classes. I’m hungry. I’m so hungry I could eat a camel.”
They had come to Jerusalem that morning. They all had their own reasons for seeking escape: Luke from the sterility of his novel, which he had begun to hate, Rachel from their apartment that in the last days had come to represent a denial of every picture she had ever had of her life, Franz from the fears which Ivan Murison had aroused, Becky from … she wasn’t sure what. She just knew, looking around her, that her need was the most urgent of all. Her father would be arriving in two days; she wasn’t ready to meet him.
They lunched at an Armenian restaurant below the tomb. Each time she found herself at a restaurant table now, Becky was more ill at ease. Their position was false, pretending to be tourists. The waiter had led them to a table on the terrace. There was a drop below to a chaos of red-tiled roofs, terraces, abundant flowers. She took her camera, and, hoping none of the others saw, dropped it over the wall. Rachel’s eyes were on her.
Becky said, “I just couldn’t stand it any more.”
“What do you mean?”
“This game we’re playing.”
The waiter brought meze, little pastries stuffed with aubergine, rice balls, cucumber and salted lemon, tiny fried fish like whitebait, radishes, yoghourt, and pastries with minced meat. He placed a carafe of wine on the table with a lordly flourish.
“But that was a good camera,” Rachel said. “It was a Leica, I saw.” She laid down her napkin, got to her feet, and left them.
“I’m sorry, I seem to have upset her,” said Becky.
“Not to worry,” Luke said. “Eat. We all need food.”
She saw Franz looking at her, worried. The sun had bleached his hair a paler gold, there were lines formed by fatigue and anxiety on his face. He doesn’t need a neurotic like me, she thought. Maybe he needs someone like Alexis after all.
Luke was talking. She didn’t listen. He was always talking and while it was good listening, it was too much. He talked about ideas, which didn’t help. It wasn’t ideas they needed. It was a means of getting through the next weeks without breaking. The prospective trial excited Luke. It excited all of them. And yet Luke didn’t need excitement, as an Argentinian might. He wasn’t suffering from cafard. She picked up a pastry and nibbled it.
A car backfired in the street below. For a moment there was a stiffening of postures on the terrace. Only the two Protestant clergymen, eating a large meal in the corner – there were already a couple of empty wine bottles on their table – paid no attention. They belonged, Becky supposed, to a culture where the sound of a backfire was always and only a backfire, world without end, amen.
“We had lunch,” Franz said, “with a disgusting man the day before yesterday. An English journalist called Ivan Murison. He made his reputation with his accounts of the death camps, but I mentioned him to my father yesterday morning, and he said that in Germany in the middle Thirties Herr Murison was well known for his sympathetic attitude towards the Nazis. What do you make of that?”
“The Holocaust was the greatest crime in history,” Luke said.
“Worse than Hiroshima?” Becky said, crumbling her pastry.
“Yes. Much worse than Hiroshima. I’ll explain why later, if you like. So it was the greatest crime, but you cannot understand it if you don’t realise that Hitler held out the offer not only of revenge.”
“Revenge for what?”
“What you like. Let us say for the humiliation of existence. Not only revenge, but hope. A clean sweep. A new purified beginning. You cannot understand it unless you are prepared to accept how attractive Nazism was in its early days, if you can’t appreciate the appeal it made to the best in men like your father, Franz, as well as to the worst… If I had been a German, and not a Jew, I would, no, I might well, have been a Nazi in 1928. Or even later. Think of what had happened. Defeat, betrayal, total social disintegration. And as for the Holocaust, I am inclined to blame the collapse of the currency. It cost men their sense of reality. Large numbers became playthings. Besides, it is easier to kill a million men than ten. The ordinary person couldn’t even bring himself to kill a single calf, but the slaughterhouse worker kills hundreds and goes home to a good supper.”
“I don’t understand you, Luke.”
“I don’t understand myself, Becky. There are days, and this seems to be one of them, when I seem to understand nothing. But it’s on such days that one may receive sudden shafts of light.”
“Yes, Luke,” Franz said. “Ever since it started, I’ve been asking myself: would I have gone the same route as my father? And I can’t arrive at a negative answer.”
“But I told you, Franz, we are all Eichmann’s children and we have our own Jews in Israel, whom we call Arabs. I say these things often. Do you wonder that I have enemies who write pieces in the papers which they hope will destroy me?”
Rachel approached the table. She laid Becky’s camera down without a word, and resumed her seat. She was a little out of breath, but also pale and when she tried to lift her glass her hand shook.
“What is it, darling?”
“I saw a man shot. He was only a boy. A young Arab, wearing shorts. He was shot in the stomach and the blood ran out at the leg of his shorts. The man who did it ran away. The police are there now, waving clubs to keep people back.”
But, around them, lunch went on. A party of tourists arrived and occupied the next table. There were three, father, mother and daughter, all tall, blond, and heavy: Swedes perhaps. They talked in a rapid tack-tack that Becky could not identify. Each laid a camera in a heavy leather case on the table; you could draw a little triangle joining them round the bowl of flowers in the middle. The cameras were equidistant; the triangle would be regularly equilateral.
“Did you see the murderer? I suppose it was murder.”
“Yes, but he could have been anyone or anything, a thin man in jeans and a white shirt.”
“They won’t catch him. It’s a rabbit warren below.”
The Swedes ordered their meal, with many questions. Why shouldn’t they? What concern was it of theirs, even if they knew of the shooting; and probably they didn’t. But it wasn’t what they had come to see. Their own lives were – that was certain – orderly. Nobody was shot in a street in Stockholm, not even perhaps for personal reasons. So? That was no reason to feel that these Swedes were somehow inadequate, because they escaped, evaded, were unacquainted with, the violence that is itself the product of inadequacy. Becky wished Rachel hadn’t gone to fetch her camera. She really wanted to be rid of it.
“Maybe they won’t want to catch him,” Rachel said.
“Why?” This from Franz. He was crumbling a pastry on his plate. Then, having asked his question, he licked his fingers, and wiped them with his napkin.
“Oh, because … well, in the first place it depends who the boy was, whether he was significant, and of what sort of significance.”
“Please,” it was the male Swede leaning over, “do I understand you? There has been a shooting? But why? Is it an atrocity?”
“We don’t know,” Luke said. “Maybe it’s only a street killing. My wife saw it.”
“Indeed?” The Swede looked at him. “Excuse me, please, I think you are Luke Abramowitz. I read your novel. Very good.”
“Which one?”
“Ah, you have written more than
one. I did not know. It was called Messenger from Gilboa. Very good.”
“Ah,” Luke said. “I would rather you had read the other one, Husband. It’s better, isn’t it, Rachel? Oh sorry, this is my wife, and our friends, Franz Schmidt and Becky.”
It was tactful the way he omitted her surname.
The Swede reciprocated. Wife and daughter as she had supposed. Name of Johansson, ordinary as Schmidt.
“Are you a journalist, Mr Johansson?”
“No, why do you ask that? I am a theologian.”
“He is a professor of theology,” the daughter said. “He has this ridiculous idea that it is boasting to tell people that. I say,” – she beamed on them – “we are not living in the nineteenth century now, and nobody thinks anything of professors of theology. So it is not boasting. It is only accurate.”
“My daughter is a freethinker. She does not understand that Protestant theology is freethinking itself nowadays…”
He smiled at her. The girl was big and doughy, and had a rough laugh and horse’s teeth, but Becky could see that her father adored her, perhaps with a special tenderness simply because she was awkward. Was that why God had chosen the Jews? For their cussedness?
The professor wanted to talk of Luke’s novel. He dilated on it at some length. It interested him partly, he said, because it offered a new slant on what was familiar. They were fortunate in Sweden of course; they had never felt under any kind of racial threat. But Luke seemed to be suggesting that when peoples experience such a threat it is never altogether unfounded. Was that what he really thought now? Now? Didn’t that make things difficult for him, as a prominent Israeli figure, with this Kestner trial coming on for example? Because, if Luke really believed that, then it followed, didn’t it, that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not entirely, not entirely, unjustified?
The professor was prolix. His lectures were not likely to enthuse his students. But there was something sharp and probing in his determination to investigate his point; you didn’t expect a big heavy fellow like that to behave like a terrier at a rabbit-hole.
Luke said, “Feelings can be justified, when actions can’t.”
“Yes, that is a good distinction. And I sense something else underlying your thought, something with which I find myself in agreement: that the Holocaust itself has had what is now called a side-benefit. The moral relativism which Freudians made fashionable is now impossible for us. Who can now deny the reality of evil?”
He smiled on them.
“That doesn’t sound like freethinking to me,” Rachel said.
Franz crumbled another pastry. “I don’t understand,” he said. “If you take that line, aren’t you suggesting that somehow God permitted it?”
“Of course God permitted it,” Johansson approved, “he grants us free will.”
“And so in some measure is responsible for it, as if it was all part of his plan?”
“My dear boy,” Johannson leaned across and laid his hand on Franz’s shoulder. “It is now you who are old-fashioned. God does not have a plan, in the sense that our good Social-Democratic government may have a plan. God does not seek to regulate the human economy.” He laughed. “Oh no. God has given us Life and Freedom and the Hope of Glory. But we have to struggle to attain it, which we do first by coming to an acceptance of reality, and that necessarily includes evil.”
“Sounds to me,” Rachel said, “as if it’s all a piece of theatre to your God.”
“But sublime theatre!”
“You mean he settles back in the stalls and watches the play? With a box of chocolates on his knee perhaps?”
“Ah, but the struggle is played out in each individual soul. Even this Kestner’s perhaps, even now.”
The waiter brought them coffee; another, food to the Swedes’ table. Professor Johansson took a card from his wallet, wrote the name of his hotel on it, passed it to Luke.
“Please get in touch,” he said. “It would give me pleasure to have an opportunity to discuss such matters with you further. Your novel made me think. That is always good.”
Then he turned away and picked up his knife and fork.
The electricity failed within the restaurant; it might even have been Argentina. But only for a moment. There was a flicker of light, brief darkness, and normal power was resumed. They drank their coffee, paid the bill. Becky picked up her camera. “Thank you,” she said to Rachel. “It was silly of me. I don’t know what got into me.”
Outside, there was now no sign of the shooting.
“It was just there,” Rachel said.
“They’ve cleared it up nicely,” Luke said.
Heavy clouds had gathered while they were at lunch. The air was dense. There was a darkness over the Old City.
Franz said, “I meant to tell you, Luke, I was warned against you yesterday.”
“Oh yes?”
“By that English journalist. He said you were a Zionist, who would use me. He didn’t say how.”
“You didn’t believe him?”
“No.”
“That’s right. Just remember, kid. The war nowadays is between generations. It’s turned horizontal. So the four of us contra mundum. OK?”
Rachel said, “The boy who was shot, he was even younger than us. He was an Arab, I think. Did I tell you I thought he was an Arab?”
“Sure, but you don’t know. Maybe it was love, not politics. People still kill for love as well as hate.” Luke put his arm round her.
Franz and Becky dropped a few paces behind. “Let’s go back to the hotel,” Becky said. “I want you.”
FOUR
Rudi said, “When I was a young man, I made my way to Berlin. Why? For the most old-fashioned reason. I thought I might escape in the city. I was desperately poor. You must understand. This was 1922, I was sixteen. I lodged in a poor working-class quarter. It disgusted me. These people, I said to myself, are animals. They have no aspirations except to fill their bellies – and they are not even good at that. My landlord was a Jew. Every Saturday night he went round the rooms where his lodgers lay drunk if they had been paid that day, and shook all the money he could find out of their trouser pockets. He did that though it was his Sabbath. The lodgers were too stupid to realise what he did, and in any case most of them were so drunk that they did not know how much money they had spent or how much they should have left. Then, on the second or third day of the week, or even earlier on the Sunday, when they needed money for tram fares if they were working, he would offer to lend it to them. It was their own money he was lending, and if they did not pay him back, with 50 per cent interest, then they were out on the street.
“I saw that happen to many of them.
“I had one friend. He was called Karl. Sometimes he was in work as a barman, but often he was not. I didn’t know what he did then, and I didn’t suspect, though Karl was a strong handsome blond fellow. He was the only one of us who was not undernourished even though he was often out of work. As for me, I had found a job, as a clerk in a factory where they made glue out of bones. The stench was appalling.
“I tell you this, Franz, that you may understand the care I have had for you in your childhood, my determination that you should never suffer as I suffered.
“Well, one day – it was winter and raining – Karl came to me and said, ‘Will you help me?’ ‘To do what?’ I said. ‘Kill the Jew.’ I thought about it, and replied that I didn’t approve of violence. Besides, I said, what was the point? Karl explained. The Jew had a wife, a thin bedraggled wretch, bullied and tormented by her husband. I don’t know whether she was a Jew or not, I think she was perhaps Hungarian. Karl had seduced her. It wasn’t difficult, he said, seduction was too grand a word. ‘She was dying for it,’ he laughed. She would marry him if her husband was dead, and then the lodging house would be his. He promised me a share in the takings. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘the man who has not killed is a virgin.’ In those days I was a virgin in the normal sense of the word. Sex disgusted me, and continued to d
o so until I was in a position to have a bath every day and live in a house with a bathroom. ‘Have you killed a man?’ I said. Karl laughed. He put his hands on his hips and laughed. I can see him now, in that filthy bug-infested hovel, and hear him laughing as if he was a god. ‘What do you think?’ he said. So I said I would think about it. That Jew would be no loss, I told myself. He was loathsome. But then, to be an accomplice to a murder! So I asked Karl what his plan was, and I saw that it was more likely to be dangerous for me than for him. ‘I must keep in the background,’ he said, ‘on account of my affair with Lola.’ That was the wretch’s name, Lola, not very suitable. And so I told the Jew what was going on and what was planned.
“I saved that Jew’s life. And then I left, because I was afraid of Karl. As for the filthy Jew, he struck his wife so hard that she fell, hitting her head against the kitchen sink, and was killed. That was the result of my benevolent intervention. Somehow or other, I heard later that the Jew was acquitted of manslaughter. They said he bribed the judge. Or perhaps the judge was a Jew. Many were, in those days.
“As for Karl, I came across him, years later. He had become a Communist. He was always scum, I knew that. But for a time I was fascinated by him, and he had almost persuaded me to join him in the murder he desired but did not dare to commit. Later I despised him for not daring.”
Neither of the two young soldiers who acted as warders paid any heed to what Rudi was saying, except that once, as he hesitated, the younger of them caught Franz’s eye, and lifted his own left eyebrow. A whiff of friendship was carried across the zoom, rising with the cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. The other warder plugged in the electric kettle, and put tea bags into mugs.
Rudi said, “I hated my work. The bone factory stood in a dismal eastern suburb of the city. Suburb is the wrong word; it will give you the wrong impression. It was a place where the city trickled like dirty water into a countryside that had no grace or charm about it. The factory stood between a canal that needed dredging and a railway line. Trucks bearing bones from various abattoirs halted there. There were fat yellow and white maggots clinging to the bones, to which a few shreds of flesh and sinew were still always attached. If you picked up a bone a handful of maggots would fall off. That wasn’t the worst of it. Far worse was the stench from the furnaces. It hung over the dismal quarter. Even the beer they served in the two bars at the end of the street tasted of that smell. It was never my job to touch the bones, I was a clerk keeping records, but I would sit at the grimy window overlooking the yard and watch the seagulls that picked at them, always quarrelling. And though I never touched the bones, the smell clung about me. However often I scrubbed myself in the public bath-house it was there. There was a girl who worked in one of the bars who would sell herself to the workers, and when she leant over the table, exposing her breasts, the stench came off her, and I was nauseated. Yet I stuck to the job eighteen months. It was miserably paid, but it was a job and in Berlin in 1923, you didn’t abandon a job because of a bad smell.