The Sins of the Father

by Allan Massie

  “I wish I knew the Bible,” Kinsky said. “My ignorance of the Old Testament is complete.”

  “I always thought of myself as a German. I’ve told you that often enough, Kinsky. What a charade I made for myself.”

  “But you were a German,” Kinsky said. “I should say you still are.”

  “No,” Eli said. “I am a naked man, neither Jew nor German.”

  “Aren’t we all, my dear?”

  Eli drummed a little tune with his fingers.

  “I almost envy Kestner,” he said.

  Kinsky mixed them both a whisky and soda. Eli’s face had changed. It had taken on a look he had never seen. He had often seen him angry or obstinate; never until now implacable. More than thirty years ago, in Berlin, they had stood together before a painting in an exhibition. It was a landscape by Max Ernst, a ravaged wilderness with trees like broken crosses, and, in the background, the figure of a man turned half away from them and lurching into … what? The night? Oblivion? Nothing? And Eli had turned to him and said, “Yes, it disturbs me, but I would still call it cheap. It’s life-denying, you know, and that is always a pose.” That had been their first meeting. Kinsky had laughed. Everyone else in the gallery had frowned on them. It was too much to say they had been friends from that moment. Or was it? Hadn’t their friendship been founded in fact on their agreement that to indulge in despair was a species of emotional masturbation? But if Kinsky now said, “Do you remember the Max Ernst?” Eli would deny it.

  Eli said, “Yea, though I take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost part of the sea, yet art Thou there also.”

  “Kestner must feel like that about you.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Answer it, Kinsky. Send whoever it is away, unless it is Becky.”

  It was Franz. He was not quite steady, and he looked lost, and touched his lower lip with his tongue before he spoke.

  “I must see him, Kinsky. I must speak to him.”

  “Wait here.”

  He went back to the chair by the window and spoke to Eli, who shook his head. Kinsky continued to urge him. “It’s necessary for all our sakes,” he said.

  “Send him away.”

  Kinsky whispered to Franz.

  “Go down to the hotel bar. I’ll join you there as soon as I can.” He closed the door.

  “You ought to have seen him.”

  “Never say ‘ought’ to me, Kinsky. Nobody tells me what I ought to do. You should know that.”

  It was half an hour before Kinsky entered the bar. He was afraid Franz might not have waited, but he was still there, at a corner table, with an empty glass before him. He stared straight in front of him, as if he was gazing at nothing and seeing too much.

  “I only wanted to tell him he had won,” he said. “It’s only Becky who doesn’t yet concede his victory. She won’t go home. She’s staying with friends, Jewish friends. Kinsky, what’s happening to us?”

  “What’s happening is that you’ve been taking too much strain. Maybe you should go to bed, my dear.”

  “That’s the worst time,” Franz said.

  Kinsky sat down, and laid his hands on the boy’s arm. The waiter hovered over him. He ordered whisky for himself and “whatever my friend’s been having for him”.

  “Did it feel like this in the war?” Franz said. “In the last weeks perhaps?”

  “You forget. I was, as it were, out of action. The last weeks were for me a time of mingled terror and hope.”

  “Hope? There’s none of that now.”

  Later they walked out from the hotel and towards the sea.

  “So we move to Jerusalem tomorrow,” Kinsky said. “Remember, my dear, Israel is an impossibility made actual. Or that’s how it seems to me.”

  They leaned on the rail, listening to the sea lap against the wall below them.

  “I wanted to get drunk,” Franz said. “I couldn’t manage it. Why couldn’t I, Kinsky? Will you to try to persuade Becky to go to her mother?”

  “No,” Kinsky said. “Becky must choose her own course. She’s not a child to be told what to do and what not to do. Eli doesn’t realise that. I had thought you did.”

  He laid his arm around the boy’s shoulder.

  “Remember, it will end,” he said.

  “That’s a lie. It’s not true. We’re here now precisely because things don’t end.”

  “But they do. Tomorrow we go to Jerusalem. That’s the beginning of the end, my dear, I promise you. Don’t be too hard on Eli. He is suffering too. Coming to Israel has brought him face to face with the guilt from which he has been fleeing for more than thirty years. Do you know why he is blind? Sometimes I think it is so that he does not have to look at the faces of his fellow-Jews and see the reproach in their eyes. For him, this trial is a sort of purification. He will accept any sacrifice to achieve that.”

  “Will he sacrifice Becky’s happiness?”

  “Oh yes, he will willingly sacrifice that.”

  Becky arrived at the courthouse with Luke and Rachel. They had been compelled to park several blocks away. There was a blue sky, gentle breeze and light, dancing air. Sour saliva filled her mouth. She took hold of Luke’s arm, then released it: there was a photographer lurking. They encountered Franz at the entrance to the courthouse, under an inscription she could not read. He was waiting for them and he was pale and looked too young to be there.

  “According to you, we can’t even sit together,” she said. “No,” she said, “you’d better not kiss me. Photographers.”

  “I won’t be used,” she said to Rachel as they mounted the steps.

  “Franz didn’t mean it that way. You know he didn’t.”

  She had dressed in a grey suit, bought in a department store in Buenos Aires, at her mother’s insistence. It was a dull anonymous thing that didn’t prevent her knowing she was beautiful that morning. She wasn’t always that; some days she thought herself ugly, mostly plain, which she never was, but couldn’t see. She held her head up and her back straight. They all had to submit to a body search before entering the building, even Luke, even though the guards had recognised him and one of them had slapped him on the shoulder as an old comrade. The public gallery was small. Only ticket-holders were admitted. Luke left them, waving his press pass. He entered by a different door and by the time they had been admitted he was in his seat. Minty Hubchik was to his left. She waved and smiled to Becky, and then said something to Luke, who gave her that open smile of his that made the world seem a franker, more generous place. An usher of some sort escorted Franz to a seat reserved for him just behind a glass box which dominated the centre of the court and which resembled a telephone booth. It was empty and Franz was put behind it and just to the left within touching range. He was isolated there. Everyone else in that part of the room was still standing, mostly in attitudes which suggested that all this was nothing out of the ordinary; none of them was within ten feet of Franz. He lowered his head. It looked as though he was praying.

  But it was the glass box that held her attention. She hadn’t expected it, though she had seen the television pictures of Eichmann in his transparent bullet-proof cage, connected to the rest of the world only by the earphones clamped to his head and relaying the simultaneous translation of the narrative of his atrocities.

  “To catch a fox, and put him in a box, and never let him go.”

  That was silly, that nursery rhyme: the point of the box was to isolate the prisoner, to remove him from humankind, to consecrate him to death.

  He was led in. They had permitted him to wear the dark glasses which a thousand press photographs had made familiar. Perhaps they had done so because people wouldn’t have recognised him without them. He was surrounded by soldiers carrying guns; at the ready, though it was absurd to suppose that anyone could attempt a rescue there. And who, anyway, would want to? Surely it had been agreed that he was to die. It only awaited public confirmation. The thought that the aimless and incompetent people who ha
d kidnapped her and Gaby could somehow interfere was ridiculous.

  Kestner paused before Franz, and inclined his head; only a couple of inches. Then he was in his box. A grey-faced man who was some sort of court attendant brought him a cup and saucer.

  “Do you see that?” Becky whispered to Rachel.

  “Sure, they can always astonish you. They astonish me after five years living here.”

  Then he was hidden from sight by his lawyers joining the guards and standing round the box. The big man, who was Saul Birnbaum – she recognised him from Franz’s descriptions – crossed over and spoke to Franz. He squeezed his shoulder. It was a physical place, Israel, given to body contacts.

  There was a late arrival in the press box. It was Ivan Murison in his dirty cream-coloured suit. He caught Becky’s eye and waved to her. Then he made a gesture like a prize fighter, clasping his hands over his head and waving them, and then took his seat. She was aware of the other occupants of the press gallery being disturbed by the manner in which he settled himself. He took out a big, red, white-spotted handkerchief and ran it round the back of his neck, and dabbed his temples with it.

  The court rose for the judge. So that was why Franz’s father had been permitted to keep his dark glasses. Without them, he and the judge might have been brothers.

  There were earphones attached to each seat. You pressed a button and got translation in the language you had selected. But she didn’t put them on. They had discussed it, and Luke had assured her that the first day would be taken up with legal argument. She preferred to watch. She knew from Franz that Saul Birnbaum would challenge the right of the court to try the accused, the grounds being that his arrest had been illegal, an offence against international law. But, Franz had said, “There’s no chance that it will succeed. Apart from any other considerations — and there are plenty of them — I talked about it with my stepfather. He is adamant that the Argentinian Government isn’t going to protest about the violation of its territory, or whatever it is that has been violated. It’s just a ploy of Saul’s. he concedes, even to me, that it will be futile.”

  Then why’s he doing it?”

  So, instead of listening, she watched. She was at an angle to Franz’s father, so that his face was in half-profile from the rear. He cupped his chin in the palm of his hand and leaned his elbow on the shelf in front of him. He wore his earphones, but after a few minutes, removed them and sat back and crossed his arms. Saul Birnbaum was speaking, and it was as if Kestner had satisfied himself that the argument was proceeding along agreed lines, and so required none of his attention. Perhaps his eyes were closed behind the dark glasses.

  The air in the room was already sultry. Saul Birnbaum’s forehead sparkled with beads of sweat. He moved his shoulders as he spoke. The tone was level. Becky had been led to expect histrionics, but he might have been debating an insurance case.

  The previous evening, after Franz had left them, they had all three sat up drinking wine. At first they talked about Luke’s article.

  “All right, I’ll tear it up,” he said.

  “No,” Becky said, “publish it. Only please leave out all the bit about Franz and me. It’s bad enough as it is. I don’t think he’s ever going to want to marry me anyway after this. It’s turning everything sour.”

  Luke opened another bottle of wine.

  “Does the word herem mean anything to you?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not. You’ve never really thought of yourself as a Jew, have you?”

  “I haven’t been encouraged to. So what does it mean? Why’s it important?”

  “It’s only just occurred to me,” Luke said. “Herem was a form of ritual slaying. The Greek word is anadema, and it corresponds, I believe, to the Latin consecratio. In time of war – I’m referring, you understand, to Old Testament times – an enemy and all his possessions were dedicated to Jahweh. They became herem, a consecrated thing, removed from ordinary use. It was forbidden to spare any of them because to do so meant that you had withheld what was due to Jahweh, who would then revenge himself by taking life for life. Do you see, do you follow? The Romans explained their rite of consecratio and the slaughter that went with it by saying it represented the devotion of the enemy to the gods of the dead. But the Jewish practice was older and different, since it was to God himself that the enemy was devoted. I remember reading that it was originally a form of magical rite. The walls of Jericho fell down of their own accord because the city had been devoted to herem. It was a sort of curse, you see: what the Christian church later styled ‘anathema’, which is of course the Greek again. Later, in the time of the kings, the execution of criminals was performed under the guise of herem. But earlier it was perhaps a sort of taboo. Perhaps some member of the tribe had violated customs and so offended the deity; very well, let him be removed. He had become unclean. It’s a sort of herem we are about to enact now. Looked at like that, I may be wrong, and it may indeed be necessary. Psychologically necessary.”

  “OK,” Rachel said, “but am I right in thinking it was a German custom too?”

  “I think it may be universal. Only, on account of the apocalyptic nature of Judaism, and the accompanying morality, it has a peculiar urgency with us, which even millennia later we can’t escape.”

  “What I’m getting at,” Rachel said, “is that the Jews were maybe herem to the Germans.”

  “Sure they were,” Luke said.

  “Wasn’t King Saul punished,” Becky asked, “for sparing the people of some conquered tribe?”

  “He was indeed. And do you think our leaders have forgotten that?”

  Birnbaum was speaking. He paused, made an abrupt remark. Rudi Kestner turned his head towards him and nodded. He smiled. Then he removed his headphones and dabbed a handkerchief at his temples. The smile stayed fixed. Becky leaned forward. She saw Luke in the press gallery make a note. She was aware that Minty Hubchik was trying to catch her eye. Ivan Murison withdrew a small flask from his breast pocket, and gulped. A guard frowned and gestured as if it had occurred to him that he should perhaps confiscate the flask; perhaps drinking in court was an act of contempt. A formal offence? It seemed probable.

  Birnbaum shuffled his papers. He paused for a long time, as if he had lost his place. But perhaps it was calculated, for when he resumed, he spoke with fluency. Twice he stabbed his finger through the air in the direction of the judge, who was himself writing industriously.

  “If Father defends himself,” Franz had said, “he will speak in defence of the bureaucratic institution to which he belonged. He will tell how everything – identification, transportation, selection for work duties or for immediate extermination – proceeded according to prescribed form, which was adhered to with the utmost scrupulosity.”

  “That sounds more horrible than anything,” she had said.

  “But his only defence can be to deny personal responsibility, or at least to limit it, by throwing everything on to the machine. You’re right, it’s horrible. He toys with that defence. He sees it as some sort of game.”

  But wasn’t it precisely sport of a similar nature which was now being enacted before her? After all, there was nobody in court, least of all Franz’s father himself, who had any doubt concerning the outcome.

  “Of course, in other moods,” Franz said, “he glories in doing his duty. I think he baffles Saul. And Saul is very clever.”

  The judge rose. They would adjourn for lunch.

  It was the evening of the seventh day of the trial. Franz lay on his bed. He had refused Saul’s invitation to supper. He was exhausted.

  The nightmares had begun after the third day, which had been the first on which survivors of the death camps had given evidence. Some of them were more than survivors. They had made good. Their dress and their well-fed condition made that clear. Yet, as they spoke, as they pointed towards his father (though there were two who could not bring themselves to look directly at him, even when they were asked by th
e judge to identify the man in the cage as Kestner, whom they were accusing of atrocities which would have been unspeakable if they had not nevertheless contrived to speak them), even as they relayed their catalogue of horror, the years fell away from them; they grew simultaneously younger and immeasurably old. They resumed their former personalities: you saw the Jewish student, the young mother whose children had been torn from her arms, the bank clerk who looked like Kafka. These figures stood in the witness box, having taken possession of the lecturer in statistics from an Australian university, the plump satiny matron of a nursing home in Indianapolis, the financier whose story was utterly convincing but whom you would not have trusted with an investment. (He had indeed, as Saul extracted from him in what was no more than a perfunctory effort to undermine his credibility, served a four-year prison sentence in Belgium for fraudulent conversion, and somehow this admission of human frailty made his willingness to enter a court of law again, this time to testify to what he knew to be the truth, seem more impressive.)

  It was, however, a woman who made the nightmares.

  She entered the witness box with a toss of shoulder-length hair, dyed blonde, and she held her head at an angle that recalled certain American film stars of the 1940s. She looked straight at his father. It was impossible to see movement behind the dark glasses, but he sat down, as he was permitted to do on account of a medical report presented on the first day by Saul Birnbaum, and lowered his head to examine his notes. He didn’t then alter his position throughout her evidence.