by Allan Massie
When Franz’s father met her in the Engineers’ Club and looked her over, had he imagined stripping her and beating her as he had stripped and beaten that woman who had given evidence today? Would she have been rejected as too thin, too angular – she lifted her leg off the bed and held it aloft in the air. Or had he put aside all that, after the war, in his new life? Was a new life possible? Surely, essentials remained.
Nobody brought up in Argentina could dissociate pain from pleasure.
There was a knock, a gentle knock, on the door, and her name was called. She didn’t reply. The knock was repeated, a little louder.
“Are you asleep, Becky?” Luke said.
She slid off the bed, in sudden shame as if she had been taken in self-abuse. She was trembling, as she opened the door a crack.
“Won’t you come through?” he said. “I know you and Rachel decided, but maybe the company would do you good.”
“I’m half-naked,” she said.
“So? Put some clothes on. Or come as you are.”
“Give me five minutes.”
When they had gone, Rachel upbraided Luke. It had been too bad of him, dragging the poor girl through to show her off, as if she had been some sort of freak. When she said that, Luke caught Becky’s eye and they both giggled.
“Aw, have some more wine, Rache. Nobody thought of her as a freak or treated her that way. Did you feel a freak, Becky?”
She shook her head, still giggling.
“Honestly, I don’t understand the pair of you.”
“No,” Becky said, “They were nice. I was silly in the first place, that’s all.”
And she had handled it well. She knew that. Even when Luke’s prospective American publisher, a fat balding man called Ed, had suggested that, hey, there would be a book in her story, she didn’t respond badly.
“Well, Luke’ll have to write it. I couldn’t. Nor could Franz. Maybe you should sign Luke up.”
Since that was precisely what Rachel hoped Ed would do, admittedly for a quite different book, it wasn’t a bad answer. “What about it, Luke?” Ed said.
“Luke’s gotten himself into enough shit over this shitty trial already,” his Israeli publisher, a bright-eyed, keen-faced girl called Miriam, said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take to live down that article, Luke baby, but,” she threw her arms up in mock hopelessness. “You know what the schmuck did, Ed? He called for forgiveness. In Israel.”
“So?”
“Forgiveness is a Christian concept, that’s so?”
“What’s the Jewish equivalent?” Becky said.
“Atonement. You ought to know that, being a Jew yourself.”
“Not on my mother’s side. It’s the mother’s side that counts… isn’t it?”
“Your father gives evidence tomorrow, they tell me.”
“Yes.”
“Should be interesting,” Ed said.
“Yes.”
“He’s quite a guy, isn’t he?”
“Maybe you should sign him up, Ed,” Luke said.
“Maybe I should. Maybe I will. But I was offered a book already today. By a British author. Seems he’s got a London publisher, but no New York one signed up. There’ll be a lot of books, maybe I have to move fast.”
“This author. He’s not called Ivan Murison by any chance?”
“That’s right. You know him? Used to have some kind of reputation, I gather.”
“Used to,” Luke said. “Don’t touch it, Ed. It’ll stink.”
“But the whole trial stinks,” Ed said. “So why shouldn’t I publish a book that stinks?”
Now they sat round the table, drinking wine and smoking, and none of them wanting to go to bed.
“Do you believe in evil, Luke?”
It was silly to ask him that. He was so obviously good himself. Franz and she had agreed on that. But how did you define good? Was it simply that life seemed more significant, more positive, whenever Luke was about, or indeed, whenever you thought of him? Franz had said it was more than that, that there was something which emanated from him: benevolence was a weak, dead word. So it was more than benevolence. On the other hand he frequently exasperated Rachel. Becky had seen that. He was doing it now as he played with a cigarette before answering. And, though Luke was intelligent – as intelligent as anyone she had met except her father – it wasn’t that which impressed her; and in an odd way the feeling you got from him was the same feeling you got from association with a healthy animal. So, she asked Luke, was evil, if it existed, only something negative?
“Oh yes, it’s negative,” Luke said. “You’ve read Macbeth, I suppose? Don’t you get the impression as Macbeth stumbles into the dark that everything is departing from him, that his world is narrowing?”
“But this catalogue we have been listening to, which is so terrible it makes you feel sick at the stomach, and dirty as if you couldn’t remember when you were last clean, both at the same time, it is all indescribably horrible, and yet I can’t escape the impression that even for the witnesses who tell these awful stories, it seems like a bad dream.”
“It was the realisation of a nightmare,” Luke said. “Even the Germans knew that, even while they were making it happen. They called the camps ‘The Arsehole of the World’, did you know that?”
“Do you know something?” Rachel said, “I want to get drunk.”
“We all want to get drunk. We’ve had too much of the nightmare of reality. For almost two thousand years the Christians set themselves to imagine the geography of Hell. Then when they no longer believed in Hell, or in Heaven, or atonement or redemption, or anything, except good manners and culture, they were able to make Hell real in the Third Reich. If they had still believed in Hell they couldn’t have done so.”
“What about the Spanish Inquisition? What about the witch-hunts?”
“They were different. They were perpetrated for the sake of a faith that still believed in all these things which the Nazis rejected. The terrible thing about the Nazis is that they believed in nothing beyond themselves.”
“Drink some more wine, Becky. Open another bottle, Luke. I am going to get drunk, there’s nothing else for it…”
Becky frowned.
“If we were drunk,” Rachel said, “none of this would matter. The only good thing I know about the Holocaust is that some of the soldiers and guards had to be drunk to be able to do what they had to do. The drunkards among them retained some moral feelings.”
“I don’t think Franz’s father was ever drunk.”
“No,” Luke said, “I think he was an idolater.”
The telephone rang. Luke rose to answer it. She heard him speak a denial, then another. It was, she was sure, a good denial; no cocks would crow.
“Very well,” he said, “but no. Don’t call again, please.”
He opened the new bottle, as Rachel had asked, and filled the three glasses, and resumed his seat. He sat frowning. The refrigerator in the kitchen beyond began to hum. A large moth battered itself against the light-shade. Silence of the dark night rose from the street below. Then from an apartment across the courtyard, someone laughed. It was a sharp laugh, like a fox’s bark, and there was no mirth in it. It was a laugh directed at misfortune.
“We were talking of evil,” Luke said. “That was small evil, undistinguished evil. That English journalist we were talking of, Ivan Murison. He wanted to speak to you, Becky. You don’t mind that I said no, that I spoke for you, you don’t mind, do you?”
He put his hand on hers, and let it lie there, pressing gently. “No,” she said, “this time I don’t mind. He gives me the creeps.”
“He’s a shit,” Rachel said, “that’s all. He’s a shit in spades, redoubled. I’ve seen him look at you in court.”
“He wanted to come here. I wouldn’t have it … he said he’d something for you. I said he could give it at a better time.”
Even his name disturbed her. It sucked something out of the room; a moment of peace, ench
antment, was destroyed. “He gives me the creeps.”
Perhaps because he sensed the effect of Ivan’s name, Luke now put some music on the gramophone. Becky didn’t recognise it. Then a trumpet floated, melancholy, away from the band. It left the beat, the rhythm behind, and moved into a world of its own making. It was like evening by a great river in autumn, when the dying sun has no power to warm, but only casts lurid streaks on the still water, while mists gather. It was music that was maybe played in a nightclub but spoke of a world which the player, confined in the smoky dark, had lost long ago.
“Bix…” Luke said. “Bix Beiderbecke. There’s no one like him. Do you know what his secret was?” he said, as the music died and he rose to turn the flip side of the record. “He knew that the music he played so beautifully was foreign to him, that it wasn’t in his blood, that however beautifully he played it, he was outside it. He could only clutch at the magic which always receded from him. That’s why he is for me the most poetic and most truthful of jazzmen. Of course, he’s the most truthful because he is the most poetic. It’s an image of the Ideal that he makes. Rachel’s asleep.”
He smiled.
“Always the same. She wants to get drunk, poor girl, and always she passes out first. It’s a mark of virtue perhaps. Who knows? Do you want to get drunk?”
“No, no.”
“Me neither.”
He put the cork back in the bottle, screwing it well in so that the wine would still be drinkable the next evening.
“Not with your dad giving evidence tomorrow.”
“I hate the thought of it.”
“It’ll pass. Hold on to that, kid. All this will pass. You and Franz. You can still be all right. You can still make it.”
“I don’t know, Luke. Jewish flesh.”
“Like I’ve said, we’re all Eichmann’s children. We’re the heirs of the hell he made. Rache says I say that too often. Maybe I do. Am I a bore, Becky? Am I boring you?”
“No,” she said. “No.”
“Honest?”
“Honest. I don’t think you could.”
He picked up the glasses and took them through to the kitchen and rinsed them under the tap. She followed him, emptying ashtrays.
“You know, Becky, I could fall in love with you. Easy.”
“I think maybe I could fall in love with you too, Luke.”
“Better not, eh?”
“Better not.”
He took her arm and led her to the window that looked over the street. He pointed to a group of lights faint in the distance.
“That’s not a farm. They’re watch-towers, keeping us safe. I often think of them when I lie in bed, those boys out there, in the frost, on the edge of the desert.”
He kissed her cheek.
“There’ll be other light there in an hour. Dawn. Rosy-fingered and all that. Time for bed. I’d better get Rache through. Poor girl, she wants to get drunk and she passes out. But it’s better this way.”
“Yes,” she said, “much better. Thank you, Luke. For everything.”
I could finish my letter to Mother now, she thought, but better not. Sleep first, sleep.
SEVEN
Guided by attendants, Eli stumbled on his way to the witness box. He corrected himself quickly, shaking off the hand which would have supported him. He lifted his chin, throwing back the mane of white hair (not cut since his arrival in Israel). He wore a dark pinstriped suit, which Becky could not remember having seen. It had a waistcoat, and the thin gold chain of a pocket watch flashed as he mounted the steps. She wondered if others were struck by the incongruity of a blind man providing himself with a timepiece which he could not read. He had resurrected, though she did not realise this, a pre-war persona. He was dressed as he would have dressed to go to work in the Reichsbank. His collar was as stiff as Hjalmar Schacht’s used to be.
He would give his evidence, it was announced, in the form of a statement on which he could subsequently be cross-examined. Becky glanced at Saul Birnbaum to see if he would protest; but he kept his seat.
Eli began to speak. He spoke in German, apologising for the inadequacy of his Hebrew.
“But in any case,” he said, “I wish the accused to be able to understand what I say without the possibly distorting medium of simultaneous translation, though I would also pay tribute to the excellence of the translators’ work.
“You will forgive me if the first part of what I say, which is also the reason for the unorthodox approach – in which context allow me to add that I am grateful for the understanding which the defence lawyers have extended towards me – if this introduction takes the form of a personal memoir, an essay in autobiography. I may claim a certain right to this indulgence since it was on account of my action, my recognition of the man posing as a German-Argentinian engineer calling himself Rudolf Schmidt, as Kestner, that this trial has been made possible. You will come to understand what anguish that recognition cost me, and you will in this way understand the overriding importance of this trial.”
(But had there been anguish? Hadn’t there been, as her mother thought, a proud and steely joy in what he did?)
“I was born a German. I was also of course a Jew. We were three generations from the ghetto, perhaps four. I was born in 1904. We had travelled from Vienna to Frankfurt to Hamburg, where my grandfather was director of a bank and a steamship company. He was a great figure in the city. Our house might be called a mansion, and the drawing rooms were full of flowers that grew only in hothouses. When the Kaiser visited Hamburg and was given a dinner by the Chamber of Commerce, my grandfather was selected to second the address. He had, I believe, little admiration for that bombastic and inadequate figure, but an immense veneration for everything that he represented. His speech was widely admired; even twenty years later old men remembered it and spoke to me of the effect it had made on them.
“In 1914 my father was recalled to the colours. He served on the Western Front, and was awarded the Iron Cross. In 1917 he was gassed. His health never recovered.
“After the war he no longer went to the synagogue. I never asked him why. Religious practices dwindled in our household; my mother, a beauty, was more interested in fashion. We had preserved our fortune, by good management, but my father was embittered. Like many, he believed that Germany had been betrayed. I grew up aware of the enemy within, whom my poor father identified with the Bolsheviks, and even the Social Democrats. He admired Rathenau, later adhered to the German Conservative Party. Franz von Papen visited us. There was much talk of reconstruction and the need to stabilise the currency.
“I grew up deeply conscious of the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles. The clauses concerning reparations seemed monstrous; they were, I was told and I believed, a crime against the German people. Except that I actually understood economics and finance, my views on such matters did not differ greatly from Adolf Hitler’s.
“But, when the Nazi Party started to grow, we had no time for it. We despised Hitler and his gang as ignorant opportunists.”
He looked up and smiled, directing his blind eyes at the cage where Kestner sat, very straight, his mouth a little open and his tongue wetting his lower lip.
“I may say that I have never altered that opinion, at any time.
“We were, however, assured, by von Papen and others, that the Nazis were necessary; that they diverted support from the non-German or international parties, and because they were nationalists, of the most fervid sort, they could be employed by their betters in the service of the nation.
“This seems naive now, but I have observed often how the received wisdom of one generation seems simple folly to its successors.
“I grew up scorning conventional economics, hating the irresponsibility of those who had permitted the great inflation which condemned millions of Germans to degradation and poverty. But I must say that I knew nothing of this at first hand. Our family affairs were well arranged. The hothouse flowers were replaced before they wilted.
“So
, ignorant of the passions and the hatreds surging and seething below the agreeable surface of my personal life, and below the less agreeable surface of national life, I was confident of my own abilities and of my place in the world. Only in one respect was I idealistic: I wanted to serve Germany. For I must stress, that with our familial attachment to Judaism so diluted, I identified myself absolutely and unquestioningly with Germany. Only a few of you listening to me now will be able to comprehend that patriotic intensity.
“Even now, I sigh when I recollect the sweetness of that lost bourgeois way of life.
“Hitler came to power. I was only a little disconcerted. My Conservative friends assured me that he would be given only so much rope. Besides, they said, if he offends, the Generals will deal with him. I had a great faith in the integrity and sagacity of the German Officer Corps.
“Besides, I was engrossed in a great work. Why, I might have asked myself, should the work cease? I had been chosen by Hjalmar Schacht, on the strength of personal recommendation and the effect made by my dissertation on the relations between the availability of credit and economic activity, to assist him in the financial and economic reconstruction of Germany. If I had paused to question the work we were doing, I should have stilled my conscience by arguing that as the Nazis were the product of a sickness caused by the slump, so they could be eradicated or at least emasculated by renewed prosperity.
“Later, in many conversations, as war approached, I justified my position by arguing that the best way to cheat the revolution was to lead it.
“Both arguments, I came to see, were sophisms. But I had to endure much before I arrived at that opinion.
“When did I begin to know that I was still a Jew, and was perceived as a Jew?”
He paused, sipped water, dabbed his temple with a white handkerchief. The question was not directed at the court. He seemed oblivious of his audience. At times his voice had dropped to a murmur, so that even Becky had to strain to catch his words.