The Sins of the Father

by Allan Massie

  “Jewish flesh,” he said.

  “That’s not the reason. None of that matters.”

  “You’re not being reasonable. Can’t you see it’s for …”

  “Of course I’m not. I’m afraid. I’m afraid if I go and you stay here, that’s the end of it. It’s you who don’t see what they’re doing to us, what’s happening to us.”

  She looked up.

  “Let’s go and see Luke,” she said. “Let’s talk to Luke about it.”

  The taxi driver was talkative. That helped; it kept them from each other. Yet they held hands, or rather Franz had laid his hand on Becky’s, and she didn’t resist or try to move hers. They scudded through the streets and the driver talked of America where he had grown up. He would have been a rich man if he had stayed there, but what the hell – Israel was a duty.

  “Every Jew feels it in the end,” he said. “Look at this Kestner trial. There’s this economist, blind they say, who’s come to testify. I’m told he fought the idea of Israel, tried to escape it, but we’ve got him in the end. You can’t escape the destiny of the Jewish people. We have made ourselves out of suffering and strife.”

  He sucked on a cheroot and spoke out of the corner of his mouth, throwing remarks at them over his right shoulder, as he lurked at traffic-lights which he broke on the first show of amber.

  “Know what I’d do with this Kestner? I’d put a bullet in him. Like that. Save the state the expense of a trial. I mean, what’s the point? Everybody knows the truth. We don’t need it all repeated.”

  “But isn’t that just what people want?” Franz said.

  “What the hell.”

  Luke opened the door to them. He wore blue running shorts and a yellow sweatshirt, and he smelled of sweat and embrocation.

  “So how goes it? I’ve been exercising. On the mat.”

  He opened a bottle of wine, explained that Rachel had gone down to the grocery store, would be back in a minute. He was full of fizz and bounce. He kissed Becky.

  “Didn’t your folks get here today? Of course they did. I heard it on the news. Your father’s arrival has made quite a noise.” Rachel returned. She cried out on seeing them, put carrier bags on the kitchen table, retrieved an aubergine which fell to the floor and rolled under a chair. She kissed them, still holding the aubergine in her right hand. She rubbed it against her cheek.

  “I like the feel,” she said. “Has Luke told you?”

  “Hell no, they just got here. I don’t shout my wares straightaway. I let our guests play their tunes first, before I blow my trumpet.” He took hold of Becky’s hand and swung it up and down in the manner of children impatient to start on a dance. “But it looks like the tunes are sad. Something’s up. What’s wrong?”

  “Let’s have your trumpet first.”

  Luke dropped her hand. The trumpet worried him. He had done something which pleased him, but which, he feared, they mightn’t like.

  “He’s committed himself,” Rachel said. “Against the trial.”

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t know. It could still be stopped. Maybe you’d better read it. Dammit, it concerns you.”

  He went through to his study. Rachel began to put vegetables into dishes and a basket.

  “You’re pleased?” Becky asked.

  “Sure.”

  Franz put down his wine glass and helped Rachel. He hadn’t met Becky’s eyes since they entered the apartment.

  “So, what’s wrong?” Luke said. He held a couple of sheets of paper. “You’ve quarrelled. Well, OK, you know you’ve had me worried the way you never quarrel. It’s healthy to quarrel. We quarrel all the time, don’t we, Rache? It’s creative.”

  Becky sat down. She couldn’t trust her legs. Voices, raised in anger, came from the apartment across the courtyard.

  “Just listen to them,” Luke said. “They’re called Shegin and they have five kids under the age of eight. We should hear the crockery fly any minute.”

  “They want to send me away,” Becky said.

  “It’s not that at all,” Franz said. “Why do you distort things? It isn’t like that, or if, yes, it is, then it’s for her own good.”

  “I’m here, you know. Sitting here. Don’t speak of me as if I wasn’t. You can do plenty of that when you’ve got rid of me.”

  Franz began to explain. He told them of Eli’s anger. His voice trembled. She heard its fatigue. Maybe her presence did add to the strain he was under. Why “under”? Yet, if he let her, she could give him support. It was why she had come. If he rejected that support, how could they ever be what she wanted them to be? He was denying her, agreeing with her father. The light picked out the down on his cheek which shimmered golden. His face was thinner. The cheekbones stood out in a way that people called Slav. It didn’t make sense sending her away. What was she expected to do if she went?

  “Can I stay here? With you, Rachel?” she said. It hadn’t been in her mind to ask. That wasn’t why she had come here. It was only seeing Franz looking so tired and drawn that gave her the idea.

  “My father says it’s indecent me living with Franz. So can you put me up? Please.”

  She kept her eyes fixed on the table, on a ring burned by a hot plate or coffee pot, and they looked at each other, all three, over her head.

  “I can’t go to England and watch it on television.”

  Rachel hugged her.

  “Sure.”

  Luke held up the sheaf of papers.

  “I don’t see why that should make any difference,” Rachel said.

  “Maybe not. I hope not.” He lit a cigarette, and grinned. “I’m a fool. I’d forgotten you don’t know Hebrew. I’ll have to translate as I go along.”

  He pushed the bottle towards them. Rachel set a dish of nuts and another of pastries which she’d bought at the market on the table, and he began to read an English version of his article. Sometimes he paused, searching for a word or the best way to turn a phrase, so that his delivery was slow and a bit awkward. When he was lost for a word, he would glance up and smile. A couple of times Rachel put her hand on Becky’s knee and squeezed. Franz kept his eyes on the table. He held his wine glass in both hands, but drank nothing.

  There is not a citizen of Israel who has not learned that it may be necessary to die for Israel, and we are ready to do so. Most of us know also that we may be required to kill for our country and on behalf of our people and future generations. Our way to Israel has been rough. It has been cruel and difficult. We have journeyed through the valley of humiliation, we have crossed desolate mountains, we have endured dry seasons, parched in the wilderness, without shelter. Our country has been formed through suffering and our people shaped in adversity. There is not a single family in Israel which does not mourn its murdered members, which does not recall its martyrs in sorrow, grief, pride and anger.

  We have been taught by experience, and we know we must be vigilant in defence, not merely of our homes, but of our very lives. We have learned to strike first and to repay blood with blood. We have earned respect.

  It is natural in our condition of perpetual crisis, conscious as we are of the stark existential realities that confront us every day, if we have come to neglect tender emotions. There will be a time for them later, we think, when we are at last secure. We would wish for instance to do justice to our Palestinian neighbours, to the Arabs within our State, for we recognise and honour justice. We would wish to be generous and to live in peace, for we know that generosity is the glory of man, and peace what he most desires.

  But that, we say, must wait…

  He looked up, smiled.

  “I quote Auden here,” he said. “Maybe you know it in the original, Becky?”

  She made a small negative motion of the head. She couldn’t see where this article was taking them. But Rachel had said “yes”, hadn’t she? She clung to that. She couldn’t be shifted unless she chose.

  “It’s from ‘Spain’,” he said. “You know, the bit about tomorrow the bicycle ri
des, the young poets exploding like bombs, but today the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder. I can’t quote it right in reverse. But I’ve always thought it good.”

  He resumed:

  But that tomorrow, which we long for, is always postponed. There are new dangers, new emergencies, and we live not with tomorrow but with today, and always too with yesterday, which we employ in a manner that is almost shameful in its pride in suffering, to justify ourselves, to account for and excuse that postponement and also indeed whatever brutalities we may feel called upon to perform today.

  And now, with a zest which I find unholy, we are about to enact another drama for today, a drama which is in truth, no more, or little more, than yet another performance of a ritual that commenced as consolation but is in danger of becoming a macabre form of celebration instead. I refer of course to the approaching trial of Rudi Kestner.

  Now of this I shall say only that it will tell us nothing new. Of Kestner I shall add only that it is impossible for anyone to pay even lip service in this instance to the principle that a man must be presumed innocent until proved guilty. There is no doubt of Kestner’s guilt, of his willing, even eager, participation in the most horrible of crimes…

  “I am sorry if that pains you, Franz.”

  “Carry on.”

  It is precisely because there can be no doubt, no rational doubt of this, that the time has come to cry “halt!” The moment has indeed arrived when we must ask what this endless repetition of these matters – this grand theatrical recital of offence and horror, which is what we mean by a trial for war crimes – to ask what it is doing to us. To us ourselves, rather than to the decayed villains who perpetrated the atrocities that we recount.

  Isn’t it the case that we have come to delight in them? To take a hideous pleasure in presenting the story of the Holocaust yet again to the world – certainly, a world, I admit, which is inclined to forgetfulness? But hasn’t it become for us a form of self-gratification? Aren’t we claiming, when we remind the world of what we Jews have suffered, when we rub the faces of the Germans yet again in their atrocious guilt, that our suffering has rendered us who survived it, and who are its heirs, strangely privileged beings? Aren’t we asserting, or at the very least appearing to assert, that on account of the crimes committed against us, all must now be permitted us? Doesn’t this terrible memory allow us, in a narrow immediate political sense, to forget those whom we have dispossessed and indeed subjugated here in Israel?

  And there is another consideration, still more grave. By dwelling on the insult to humanity which the Jewish people suffered, isn’t it apparent that we are enabled in our turn to deny or devalue human values? We talk of justice, but the word in our hearts is revenge. Many will say this is justified, but man entertains revenge at his peril. Indulgence in its joys lures him towards another delightful engine of self-destruction: the will to power.

  What can we set against this? We may timidly advance what are usually called “human values”. The term is inadequate and false, for who can deny that the lust for revenge and the will to power are themselves human values? This indeed can only be denied by those who would elevate humanity to a status it has done little to deserve. Nevertheless, in using this expression, “human values”, we imply a recognition of what we judge to be good. It tells us what we aspire to be. And the emotions to which we apply this term are: tenderness, generosity, sympathy, friendship and love.

  He coughed, sipped his wine, and began to read again.

  Let me tell you a story. It is a very simple and common one. Perhaps I don’t even need to recount it. The title may be sufficient: Romeo and Juliet. A boy and a girl, the son and daughter of two families locked in vendetta.

  “Hey, Luke,” Rachel said. “You can’t use that. You just can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Hell, can’t you see? It’s corny. Kansas in August also ran.”

  Becky said, “I see where this is going.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I liked everything before it. The last bit said what I really believe, really and truly.”

  “But you don’t like this?”

  She looked at Franz. His face was in shadow. He had moved back into the shadow. He was withdrawing from her, and as he did so beauty was deserting him. He looked pinched and starved, like one of those boys who used to enter the buffet of the main railway station in Buenos Aires, moving on automatic pilot, their eyes roving the room in search of something which they never found. They used to puzzle her as she waited there for the train that would take her back to school.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. I’m sorry, Luke. It’s kind of you.”

  “It’s corny,” Rachel said again.

  Franz got to his feet, into darker shadow. He stood very still in his expensive Scotch navy cashmere jersey and his cheap cotton trousers. He pressed his hands on the back of the chair. The veins stood out.

  “It’s no good. It’s none of it any good.” He passed the back of his hand over his forehead. “You mean well. I know that. But they’re going to hang him. There’s no question. It’s just a matter of getting through the days till it’s done. He knows that himself. It’s why he’s gone back into the past.”

  * * * *

  When Franz stumbled out of Luke’s apartment, he had no idea where he was heading. He began to walk, making speeches in his mind. He used angry words, which he could not have brought himself to say aloud. He walked faster, then he began to run, to stop the words. It was quiet in that part of the city. The shops were closed. People were taking their evening meals in their apartments, or watching television, enjoying family life, already perhaps making love. He stopped running and leaned against a lamppost at a street corner, out of breath. His chest heaved. But the run had done him good. He felt that when he had rested a couple of minutes.

  He hadn’t been able to tell Becky, because of what Eli had sprung on them, but his visit to his father that morning had been a disaster. At first Rudi had seemed as usual. But then he had begun to talk. In the last few days his talk had become less and less controlled. It was becoming daily harder for Franz to recognise in the figure on the other side of the table the taciturn, austere father he had known. This morning the words had been a torrent. And they meant nothing, that was the terrible thing. They were a babble. Sitting there for maybe quarter of an hour, even twenty minutes, Franz had been compelled to let them flow over and around him. They tumbled forth, like a river in spate, carrying all sorts of debris, filth, spume, the irrelevancies of a life that – it was clear – Rudi had, overnight as it were, despaired of. Self-pity, recriminations, rage, protestations had bobbed around him. He was divided between disgust and pity. Then all at once the torrent stopped. For a moment Rudi lifted his gaze from the table where it had been fixed. There was a game which Franz had seen played in a low cantina to which Luis sometimes took him; they drew a chalk line on the floor and placed a cockerel on it, pressing his beak down against the mark. And the creature was powerless to lift its head, although in reality nothing held it there, except the conviction, he assumed, that it was tied to the mark. As Rudi broke now, it seemed to Franz that he had been exactly like that bird. It was horrible.

  But then Rudi had raised his eyes and looked beyond Franz, at the blank wall over his shoulder. His face crumpled. Whatever he saw there was too much for him. Tears trickled down his cheeks. He uttered a sound between a strangled cry and a sob. The young soldiers guarding him looked at Franz, sharing his horror; and then Yakov drew a shawl around him, almost like a mother comforting a child.

  Franz looked at his own face in the mirror behind the bar which he couldn’t remember entering. He searched in it for symptoms of the same disintegration. He was holding a glass in his hand. Brandy. He ordered another, then another.

  It hadn’t been like that at all. He was imagining things. It had been a normal morning. Yes, Rudi had talked freely, but not in that manner. He had talked of Heydrich, had
n’t he? Or was that the previous day? And anyway Franz knew nothing, or almost nothing, of Heydrich. He drank his third brandy and pushed the glass across the zinc counter. The barman hesitated. Then he sighed, and, saying nothing, tilted the bottle. He named a price. Franz dropped some notes on the bar, and took the glass over to a little table in the corner.

  Perhaps he was going mad. It would be a sort of solution. Had he dreamed what he had heard that morning, or was it conceivably some sort of precognition? He held out his hand. It was steady. It had no right to be steady. Or had the brandy created that right?

  He had run away again. That was the worst of it. And Becky? She couldn’t really believe that he didn’t want her, when he had proved his need. All the same, her father was right. There was something shocking in their being together – if you were anyone else, that is.

  Luis used to say that men and women needed each other in different ways. It was one of his favourite remarks. But Luis, as an Argentine, saw the relationship as a war. There was the macho boast: la tuve en el culo – I’ve had her in the arse.” That was their way. That expressed male authority. Woman was dishonoured even in the moment of the man’s triumph. Franz couldn’t think of it like that. Yet the temptation was there. He could feel it. It was a way of saying, “Nothing is good, and yet I assert myself.” Most girls rejected it. Those who didn’t, who instead submitted, achieved their own victory, even in the moment of degradation. He laid his knuckles against the swelling over his right thigh.

  Wasn’t that also what his father could have said of the Jews: los tuve en el culo?

  SIX

  Eli had been almost silent since they left Buenos Aires. He had spoken to Kinsky only to give orders, which Kinsky had carried out without resentment. It was why he had come. He was making his own act of atonement. It was absurd. He had been a victim himself. Yet the insistence on German communal guilt hung so heavy around him that he felt as if he too had been associated in the crimes for which Rudi Kestner now stood as symbol. And there was a sense, Kinsky knew, in which he had indeed shared in that guilt. He had made more than his own share of anti-Semitic remarks. No one from his background, in his Vienna, could have done otherwise. It was as if he and his friends had encouraged the whole terrible business to buy indulgence for themselves. Well, it hadn’t worked. Standing naked, having just emerged from the bath, he fingered the still legible tattoo of his concentration camp number. He slipped on a silk dressing gown and went through to the sitting room of the suite where Eli sat facing the window gazing, blind as Samson, over the Promised Land where he had at last arrived after so much resistance.