by Allan Massie
Then Franz recoiled from politics in the early Eighties. I met him soon afterwards. He was in London and telephoned me, seeking news of Jessica, and finding himself “suddenly” as he put it, reluctant to speak to Becky.
“I don’t know why, since I never think of her except with tenderness. Perhaps it is because to speak with her risks opening wounds for both of us, wounds which time has, or should have, healed.”
I suggested we should meet.
After some hesitation, he agreed.
“But not for a meal,” he said. “I have come to detest that. I no longer feel comfortable if I have to encounter someone across the lunch table and give orders to waiters.”
He paused.
“I detest the falsity of the relationships established,” he said.
He was leaning against the parapet of the Embankment, waiting for me. He was thinner than ever and the coat which he wore over a grey suit hung loose from his shoulders. His hair was lank and grey. At our last meeting he had still looked younger than his years; now he might have been ten years older than he was. He turned away, stretching his hand towards the dull swell of the river, on which two stationary barges were the only craft.
“And this too has been one of the waste places of the earth,” he said. “You read Conrad, don’t you, Gareth?”
We walked downstream, towards the distant sea. A cold wind, spitting rain on the water, tossed discarded newspapers and dead leaves around our feet. Traffic rumbled past, making conversation difficult. We walked on for perhaps twenty minutes, a mile to the east. Then Franz turned aside and leaned over the parapet, gazing down on the oily water which now flowed black below us. Office lights on the South Bank shone from tall buildings whose tops were already lost in dark mist.
“Jessica first,” he said. “I’ve failed by her, but I’d like to see her. Will Becky object?”
“Why should she? She is your daughter.”
“No, Gareth, she’s yours. Let’s not pretend.”
“Does it matter?” I said.
“You can hardly expect me to say that genetic inheritance is not an important factor.”
He smiled for the first time.
“Anyway,” I said, “legally she’s yours. You speak as if you were going away. For a long time, I mean.”
He turned and resumed our walk, at the same steady pace. Seagulls swooped and howled around us. The rain was heavier, settling in for the wet night. It was necessary to lower your head and drive into the wind. I was aware of a hole in my right shoe, leaking badly. It was half-past five.
“I’d like a drink,” I said. “Does your anti-restaurant ideology permit pubs?”
“Oh yes. It’s not like that, you know.”
“Well then, let’s look for one, though it’ll be full of office-workers, I’m afraid.”
We found one, a mean place, which had mysteriously escaped redevelopment, even there, so close to the City. It had a long public bar and men in overalls arrayed on the line of barstools. I got two whiskies, and we retired to a corner, out of range of the dartboard.
“Bars are different,” Franz said, “not everyone is pretending to be happy here.”
I looked about me.
“No,” I said, “no, they’re not…”
I lit a cigarette, and waited. I like bars when they have just opened in the evening. There is a rhythm to English life which will be destroyed when we all adapt to the Continental practice of the ever-open pub.
“Do you know,” he said, “the temptation that has attacked me, again and again? It is to throw off all my clothes in a public place, and cry out, ‘I’m Kestner’s son. I’m the son of a mass murderer, Rudi Kestner.’ And when I’ve done it in dreams, an old woman comes up to me and puts a coat round me, and says, ‘But you’re an ordinary man, an ordinary average miserable specimen of humanity.’ Don’t you think that’s crazy?”
“If you did it now,” I said, “chances are that nobody here would know who your father was. And if they did, they’d behave like the old woman.”
“Once, in Rome,” he said, “I went to bed with a girl, and, after we’d made love, or what passed for love, I told her then. And she replied: ‘Yes, darling, that’s why you’re here.’ What do you make of that?”
Without waiting for an answer, he picked up our empty glasses and went to the bar. I heard him ask for doubles.
“I’ve often thought,” he said, “about the part chance plays. Or is it some sort of joke, some joke of a malicious Fate. Think: you know the circumstances in which my father was identified by Becky’s. Suppose he had failed to do so, as he might easily have done – remember he was blind. Or suppose he had had his suspicions and said to himself, maybe I’m wrong, or again maybe Becky’s happiness is more important than justice. Another man might have said that. Alternatively, suppose my father had found his moment of truth at a Communist meeting rather than a Nazi one – and he might have done so. Suppose any of these things. Does it make sense?”
He sipped his whisky.
“You used to study chaps, didn’t you, Gareth, who believed in a magical basis to things, theories of eternal recurrence and so on?”
“Oh yes,” I said, “they believed all sorts of things.”
“The transmutation of base metal, that was one of them, wasn’t it?”
“That too. It was all nonsense.”
“No,” he said, “not nonsense, it’s what happens. It’s what life is all about, it’s the meaning of life. It’s building the other side of the street. I must tell you, I have become a Catholic.”
“Well,” I said, “there’s your answer. Maybe that’s what it was all for. Maybe that’s how it makes sense.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Only up to a point.”
Eighteen months previously in Paris, Franz was with an Arab boy whom he had picked up because he looked like a boy he had known in Jerusalem. He had gone back to boys. It was perhaps, he wasn’t sure, an expression of despair, self-hatred. And yet it was also because, even today when everything was permitted, it was for him the acceptance of the condition of an outlaw. He didn’t expect that to make sense to others, but that was how he felt. Besides, always, in bed with a boy, he remembered his father’s account of the Night of the Long Knives, and saw Roehm’s boy wipe sleep from terrified eyes and Roehm himself pad across the floor, with the guns trained on him, to fetch his trousers.
He had spent two weeks in Venice with his friend Charlie Bastini, and it had been an orgy. He had come to Paris, satiated, but then there was this boy at the Gare de Lyon, in a pink shirt and torn jeans and eyeshadow, and now they were in a little bar with its posters of boxers and ballet dancers and footballers, and they were drinking Pernod and were both a little lit…
He smiled to remember that bar; it had been such an absurd and ultimate example of its type.
He told me all this without shame and with that smile which I had thought he had lost.
There was an old man in the bar, perhaps sixty. He had a boy with him, of course, a Michelangelo type in T-shirt and jeans with curls falling over his brow. And the man, who was heavily built and bald and soft-faced, kept looking at Franz until at last he rose and approached their table and said, “You’re the young Kestner, Franz isn’t it?”
He spoke in German.
“Don’t deny it,” he said, “I used to be a priest…”
And Franz knew who he was, though not his name. He was the German priest who had attended his father in the death cell in Jerusalem, and who had argued theology with him, and then refused him the last sacraments Rudi had, without warning and after hours of contemptuous rejection, requested.
Franz stood up and hit him. He smacked his right fist straight into the small, full-lipped mouth of the man who admitted he had been a priest: that priest. He fell backwards against a table, and Franz hit him again, this time with a left in his stomach. Then the Michelangelo type hit Franz, and the Arab grabbed the type’s arm, and there was a general scuff
le and confusion. Somebody blew a whistle and the boys were all at once not there. Franz was left with the priest, who was leaning over the table against which he had fallen, and panting for breath. He held out a hand towards Franz.
“Don’t go,” he said, “there are things I must say to you.” He straightened and looked around.
“Or rather, let us both go. There are things which perhaps are better suited to a different ambience.”
Franz looked up. I indicated his empty glass. “Another?”
“Warum nicht?”
The priest led Franz back to his room in a small shabby hotel, the kind of place where even those who stay for months know they are transients. He took a bottle of brandy from the bottom of the wardrobe and rinsed two glasses. He filled them and pushed one to Franz.
“I’m not surprised you hit me,” he said. “I’d have done the same in your place. I should have introduced myself more gently.”
“Your mouth’s still bleeding.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He hesitated. He began by saying his name was Ernst, and repeating that he was no longer a priest, “though of course, unless you are unfrocked, you are always a priest, and I have not been unfrocked. But I have been destroyed by doubt, and your father is at the root of my perplexity.”
He had been both excited and appalled when assigned to Kestner. It was the greatest challenge he could imagine; yet at the same time, the prospect of spending hours in talk with such a monster (which was how he had thought of him, one moreover who had contributed to the great sin that had brought shame on the whole German nation) was terrible. He had been still more appalled when he found himself liking Kestner, who impressed him by his good manners, intelligence, courage in his predicament, even charm. The intellectual duel too was fascinating, and when he realised that Kestner was indeed contemplating submission and a return to the Church, Ernst’s joy knew no bounds. He was exhilarated with an assurance of triumph.
“But was my father serious, truly serious?”
“He was serious, and yet not serious. There was something playful about him, and at the same time obdurate. Ultimately, he would not repent; ultimately he could not accept the enormity of his actions. He saw it was all a mistake, but he did not understand the concept of sin. How could I commit to God’s mercy one who could not confess himself a sinner? To the last, he was arrogant. It was a bargain he was trying to conclude with God. And then I saw something else. He was attempting to make a work of art of his life. His reception into Holy Mother Church would make a great curtain. He even said so, with that laugh that always disturbed me. But a life is not a work of art; a life belongs to God, I told him. ‘Well, I’m willing to sell mine,’ he said. It was not his to sell. ‘What you can surrender, you can sell,’ he said. And so … nothing …
“Nothing. I refused. And I have never known if I did right. I was correct, there is no question of that. His proposed submission was a lie. That was my judgement, and I have never known if his attitude was a test of my judgement or a comedy which put me in the place of the sinner… And though I have never ceased to trust in the mercy of God, my faith in myself as a priest began to crumble.”
“But surely,” Franz said, “you separate the priest from the man? Surely the efficacy of the priesthood does not depend on the qualities of the man?”
“Indeed, no,” Ernst said. “Nevertheless …”
Franz looked up.
“And that was it. The Michelangelo type returned, and I made myself scarce. But that evening changed me, I don’t know how, and so, here I stand, a Catholic. More whisky?”
He paused putting the glasses down. “That’s partly why I wanted to see you, and speak to you. I may not come back. No,” he gave me a smile that took twenty years from his face, “it’s nothing romantic. I’m not that sort of character. It’s not a leper-colony or anything like that. It’s quite simple and straightforward. I’m joining a team engaged on famine relief. That’s all. Besides, it’s East Africa, the southern Sudan, not the heart of darkness.
“But I would like you to be my executor. Will you do that for me, Gareth? I’m quite rich, you know, since my mother and stepfather died, and, despite my vicissitudes, I have retained enough sense to play the stock market quite successfully. That surprises you, eh? You see, I’m not exactly the broken man you may have been imagining.
“My will’s lodged here, in London, because, despite everything, London is still where I feel things are safe; and most of my money is in this country. I’ll send you the details, if you accept. You will accept, won’t you? Good. And there are papers, several boxes, diaries, letters, and things relating to my father. It would please me if you would take charge of them, if anything happens to me. It’s quite simple. There’s a Trust Fund, with income to go 50 per cent to Becky, 40 per cent to Jessica and 10 per cent to Khaled.”
“Khaled?”
“Yes, the boy from the Gare de Lyon. I’ve taken charge of him, seen to it that he gets an education. That’s all, now, that’s between us. I try to practise chastity. The Trust will be wound up when Becky dies, and then be divided between Jessica and Khaled in the proportion of nine to one. I’ve put you down as the trustee, with my solicitor. All right…? It’s a long time since I’ve drunk so much whisky.”
He sat back. Whatever I’d expected from this meeting, it wasn’t this. He smiled again.
“You once said: it’s no bloody Ism that’s to blame. Do you remember? What do you say to Original Sin?”
“The same,” I said.
In a little we left the pub and went out into the darkness of a street where the lighting had failed.
“There’s no chance of a taxi here,” I said.
“Then we must walk.”
“I do practise chastity,” he said. “It’s not so difficult, you know.”
SIX
I think he meant it as a farewell. He didn’t seek death, but he expected it, I don’t know why. But he did come back, and I went to see him in the Middlesex Hospital, where he was stretched out, thin and bony, and looking as if he had already put off the flesh.
“It’s not AIDS,” he smiled, “it’s some rare blood disease, it really is. Nell comes every day,” he said, “it’s more than kind. I’m glad Jessica’s in California. You’ll tell her I was thinking of her. Tell her you’re her father, if she doesn’t know. I wouldn’t like her to imagine she had my father’s genes.”
“Do you want to see Becky?”
“What’s the point?”
All the same I urged her.
“No,” she said, “it’s finished, it was finished a long time ago. You disgust me, Gareth, you pretend to be tough and you’re a bloody awful sentimentalist at heart.”
The priest tripped through the funeral service as if to deny the meaning the words were meant to bear. Perhaps he didn’t believe in them, in the resurrection of the body or eternal life; perhaps it was all a jaded metaphor to him. Then the drizzle began, and we turned away, a few shapes moving between the yew trees and people not speaking to each other. A young man in a duffel coat came up and said that Barbara had sent him, she wished she could have been there herself; and a man in a mackintosh looked hard at him, and I wondered if, even after all these years, he was Special Branch. It would have amused Franz if it had been true.
Then Nell placed her hand on my arm, demanding as a brown envelope you don’t want to open, and I forgot the man in the mack.
“Becky didn’t come.”
“Well, no, as you see, she didn’t think…”
“She should have been here … she’s a selfish, cold-hearted bitch, even if she is my daughter.”
In her old age Nell has got this habit of saying what she shouldn’t, and wouldn’t have ten years ago when she still had her judgement and respected conventions. The freedom she has taken in her old age is disconcerting.
“You know that’s not true,” I said.
“He was worth ten of her. I always adored him.”
I st
eered her towards the gates. I had sent Khaled a telegram. He could have made it from Paris, but he hadn’t come either. Franz said he’d forbidden him the hospital, but perhaps that was only a last flicker of pride.
“She should have come,” Nell said again. “Poor boy, nothing went right for him.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Well, she should have come. I’ll never forgive her.”
I had tried to persuade Becky the night before, in the basement flat where she now lived, in West Kensington, with its smell of sour milk, cats, Virginia tobacco and loneliness. No, she had said, talking instead of a television serial she watched, and of how Jessica had telephoned from California about a part she had been offered in a play.
She had drunk too much gin, as she always did when we met now, and probably when we didn’t. I told her he never stopped loving her, and she said he was “sentimental and guilty, a rotten combination”.
“She couldn’t make it,” I said again.
I ought to have had an umbrella to hold over Nell. The rain dripped off the collar of her dirty mackintosh and made rats’ tails of her white hair, which had once been abundant and was now thin.
“Well, there’s us anyway,” she said, and squeezed my arm, and warmed by her implied praise, and touched by her refusal to surrender as perhaps everyone else had done, I fingered the notes in my breast pocket and said I would buy her lunch in a pub.
“I came by Tube,” I said. “Do you have a car?”
She pointed to a shabby Volkswagen, B-registered, parked near the cemetery gates.
She picked up a locket on a chain from the pigeonhole to the right of the steering wheel.