The Sins of the Father Page 10

  FIVE

  There was a fortnight of nothing. Franz met Becky the day after his return from the North, and for the first time quarrelled with her. He accused her of resenting his anxiety. She told him that was silly; of course she understood it, and felt for him. She wanted to be of some use, but – she said – he was shutting her out. Was it going to be like that in their marriage?

  He looked at her as if he didn’t understand what she was talking about. Then he said, “If we are ever married. I don’t see how we can be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But he turned away and wouldn’t answer. She started to cry, and he made no move to comfort her. She picked up her satchel and ran. That evening he telephoned to apologise. He didn’t know what had come over him.

  He tried to force his mother to the point they had always avoided. He told her of the photograph the lieutenant had shown him.

  “I realise I’ve been a coward,” he said. “But so have you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The war. Why have you never spoken to me about the war?”

  “We agreed we wouldn’t. Your father and I agreed that. It is not a subject either of us has enjoyed discussing. And it couldn’t affect you, Schatz.”

  “It couldn’t?”

  She pulled at a handkerchief.

  “It’s caught up now, hasn’t it?” he said.

  “We don’t know, we must wait, wait and pray. Perhaps there is some simple straightforward explanation. I hate to say it, but perhaps he has met with some accident.”

  “In the middle of his supper?”

  “Yes, that would be best.”

  “Leaving a bottle of beer half-drunk?”

  Self-pity is the most corrosive of emotions, and is abrupt in its ability to take over the unwary. Franz knew that his reaction to whatever was happening was adolescent. His anxiety was justified; the response, “Why should this happen to me?”, was not. And yet what other response could he make? He was a child of the sun who now found his thoughts tending towards that “virgin for those who have nobody with”. Which was absurd: he was rich in friends.

  “I’m contemptible,” he told Kinsky. “What I had never realised was that my father lived for me.”

  “You will always find people ready to think they are doing that, my dear boy. Only, in truth, nobody ever does live for another person. That is a comforting delusion, what Shakespeare called ‘a flattering unction to lay to your soul’.”

  “You should get drunk,” Luis said. “Come with me to Rosita’s. Or just get yourself laid.”

  “A gentleman called you,” his mother’s maid told him. “Will call again.”

  He was surprised to discover that it was Lieutenant Vilar. “Have you any news?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Then why are you calling?”

  “I was worried about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Because you understand so little. About yourself, about everything. That made me worried. Tell me I am stupid.”

  “No,” Franz said. “I am grateful. I am worried myself. But about my father. What can have happened?”

  “Be patient. These people will not, as I assure you, kill him.”

  “You speak as if you know who they are.”

  “Oh, I think we both know who they must be. Have you spoken to Dr Czinner?”

  “No.”

  “Are you afraid to do so?”

  Franz laid down the receiver. He looked at his face in the glass. “I’ve got a weak mouth,” he thought. He went through to the bathroom and showered. Naked, he felt both guilty and vulnerable. Lieutenant Vilar understood him too well: he had always known he was a coward. A couple of years before he had been involved in a certain incident at the Military Academy where he was studying. A boy in their class, a few months younger than himself, Bastini, had complained to the authorities that Luis’s cousin, José-Maria, had stolen his essay, copied it out and presented it as his own, while he, Bastini, had had no work to hand in, for which omission he had been punished before lodging this complaint. The matter was investigated and Bastini was proved right. The proof wasn’t difficult. Bastini was a clever boy, while José-Maria was a dolt. He was such an idiot that he hadn’t realised that Bastini’s work was far better than anything he could have done, or that at least was what Franz believed. Anyway, José-Maria was reproved, though not punished because his father was an under secretary at the Ministry of Defence. Even the reproof infuriated him, and he determined to have his revenge on Bastini. Luis smiled and agreed with him that Bastini was “a little cad”. Franz nodded, not caring to advance a contrary opinion, though he had always rather liked Bastini, who was amusing and pretty as well as intelligent and quick-witted.

  Anyway, he was committed to help, if only because he was afraid of what Luis and José-Maria might think if he refused. So the three of them ambushed Bastini after Chapel that evening and hustled him off to a gardener’s shed in a corner of the grounds. José-Maria had bribed the gardener to let him have the key, allowing him to believe it was a question of a girl.

  “What are you going to do with me?” Bastini said, when he saw José-Maria lock the door of the shed.

  “We’re going to punish you. Take off your clothes.”

  Bastini had soft curly hair and very long lashes over big brown eyes which now filled with tears. Nevertheless he obeyed, whimpering, perhaps because he was afraid things might be worse if he didn’t.

  José-Maria picked up the cherry-coloured trousers the boy had discarded, and sniffed inside them.

  “He’s not fit to wear a uniform,” he said, and passed them to Luis. “He really is a disgusting beast. Say, ‘I’m a disgusting little Italian.’ Go on. Say it.”

  He picked up a cane which he had concealed in the shed earlier in the afternoon.

  “Bastini, say it.”

  The boy, who was now naked and whose skin had a curious translucent quality – later Franz wondered if this was how terror manifested itself – was shaking with fear or revulsion and threw a look of anguish at Franz, who didn’t know how to reply to it and averted his eyes. Then he heard Bastini mutter the words.

  José-Maria commanded the boy to bend over a bench. He obeyed. The cane swished and cut into the buttocks which, Franz noticed, were rather plump and quivering. This happened three times. The first time, Bastini uttered a yelp. Then he screamed. José-Maria tossed the cane aside.

  “This is too easy. The little brute’s such a coward, it’s no fun. So we’re going to bugger you, Bastini.”

  The boy squirmed, and again uttered that beastly little yelp. José-Maria undid the belt of his trousers, and Luis held Bastini’s shoulders. Afterwards, José-Maria and Luis changed places.

  “Your turn, Franz.”

  “No,” Franz said. “I don’t want to. I couldn’t bring myself to.”

  “Well, I see your point,” José-Maria said. “He is such a little beast. Very well.”

  He threw Bastini on to a pile of dirty garden sacks where he lay sobbing. Then he tossed the key on top of him.

  “See that you give this to Pedro,” he said. “You’ll be in worse trouble if you don’t.”

  He took Franz’s arm as they left.

  “That was clever, Schmidt,” he said. “I could see you wanted to, but it was you he really wanted to do it to him. So your contempt hurt him more than anything Luis and I could do.”

  Franz shuddered. For the truth was, he had indeed felt an enormous desire to do just as José-Maria asked, and if he had been alone… But what puzzled and disturbed him more was that throughout the whole episode he had felt himself to be one with Bastini, he had been both torturer and tortured, and he knew that in some recess of his being Bastini had really welcomed his degradation.

  “Do you know why Bastini sneaked on my cousin?” Luis asked when José-Maria had swaggered off. “It’s because he was jealous. He used to be José-María’s bitch, and then my cousin threw him over for y
oung Ovaldes.”

  “No,” Franz said, “I didn’t know that.” He longed to ask Luis what he had felt, but did not dare to do so.

  That wasn’t quite the end of it, for a couple of nights later Franz was awakened to find Bastini sitting on his bed. Without saying anything Franz put his hand on his thigh. Bastini fell over him kissing him on the lips, then crawled into his bed. They were lovers for two months, until Bastini disappeared without warning at the end of that term. Later Franz got a postcard from him, sent from Rome; it came in an envelope and showed the statue of the boy with the thorn in the Capitoline Museum. Bastini said his family had come back to Italy and that Franz was the only person he missed. “Otherwise I hate Argentina.” He gave an address, but Franz never replied. There was nothing to say, and everything that Bastini had taught him about himself had frightened him. They had never talked about the episode in the shed.

  But now that he was frightened again himself, he stood towelling his body and thought of Bastini. What had happened to him? What could have happened to someone so lustful and so cowardly who in the end scarcely seemed to exist for Franz outside what they had done together? But when Bastini, in his jealousy, had told tales on José-Maria, hadn’t he known what he was inviting? And hadn’t he, therefore, wanted it? He put his hand on the basin to steady himself: trying to picture Bastini now, he had transposed Becky’s face over the boy’s naked body.

  He got into his two-seater – an English car, a Triumph TR3 and drove round to the Czinner apartment. He drove fast, either to give himself the chance of an accident which would avert his visit, or to prevent himself from changing his mind. Even so, he hesitated before getting out of the car; there was still a chance of putting it off. But then he heard his name called, and, looking up, saw Nell waving to him from the balcony.

  The evening sun slanted into the apartment, falling on the aquatint reproduction of Turner’s painting of “The Golden Bough”, which Nell had inherited from her grandfather, and giving it a ruby richness that, while not bringing its resemblance to the original exactly closer, nevertheless imparted to it a strength and profundity it usually lacked but which did indeed belong to the painting itself. “It used to terrify me when I was small,” Becky had once told Franz, “and truth to tell, the story still does. It’s a horrible story.”

  “I don’t know it,” he had said.

  “Well, the man in the picture is a priest. He is also a runaway slave and he guards the Golden Bough which is sacred to Diana, and he has won the post by killing the previous priest, and all the time he is on the look-out for the new contender who will kill him.”

  “I remember,” he said. “Isn’t there something also about him guarding the entrance to the Underworld?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Isn’t that a different story?”

  “Maybe it is, but they’re both about power, and how you can’t enjoy it because you are always alert to whoever is going to try to deprive you of it. It’s all very like Argentina, it seems to me.”

  But this evening wasn’t somehow at all like Argentina. It wasn’t only that everyone there – Franz and Becky included – had loyalties that bound them to older countries, with longer and still more twisted histories, which had also some sort of moral and cultural integrity that no one could find in the land where they had all arrived; where they had arrived too, Franz thought, not in hope, as immigrants should travel, but rather in what amounted to abdication from hope, effort and responsibility. Yet, for this moment, as Nell passed him a coffee cup and a slice of cake, and Becky opened another bottle of a fruity and aromatic pink wine that Kinsky had brought, the hopelessness which was the pervasive mood of the country, breeding resentment and apathy, shot through by spurts of random violence, was dissipated. Franz sat deep in his chair and watched the sunlight play on Becky’s cheek and turn loose strands of hair the colour of harvest. He couldn’t think why he had been loath to come. He was at peace here. It was home, and love.

  “We were talking,” Kinsky said, “of whom we would like to bring back from the grave. Myself, I can’t decide between Socrates and Oscar Wilde.”

  “Socrates would make us think,” Eli said. “Too dangerous. Besides, there was something decadent about Socrates.”

  “When I was a girl,” Nell said, “I was in love with all sorts of dead people: Disraeli and Lord Rosebery. Leonardo, and Cesare Borgia, and the Viper of Milan.”

  “Who was the Viper of Milan?”

  “I can’t remember. He was the Duke in a story, and a terrible villain, but so attractive, a sort of Renaissance Heathcliff with polish.”

  “That doesn’t help, Mummy. We don’t know who he was either. No,” Becky screwed up her face, wrinkling her nose. Her eyes sparkled. “I would bring back George Orwell, to let him see how wrong he got everything.”

  “Everything?” Eli said. “It’s an interesting idea. But no. I used to meet him in London and found him tiresome.”

  “Would you bring back Brahms?” Franz asked.

  Eli laughed.

  “Oh no, his music I already have, and Brahms himself wasn’t interesting. He had the same woman once a week in a brothel for more than twenty years, and when she died he transferred to her daughter. No, it has to be Goethe, the only man who ever indicated to the Germans what a good life could be like.”

  “Ah,” Kinsky said, “how occupied we all still are with the idea of ‘good Germans’.”

  “It’s natural, isn’t it,” Franz said. “After all, everyone here is or has been involved in – what would you call it, sir?” – he inclined towards Eli, forgetting that he could not see his gesture – “the melodrama, perhaps of Germany. And we are all, whatever passports we hold, to some degree Germans, except …” he paused; he had not yet found a satisfactory means of either addressing or referring to Becky’s mother.

  “Except me, you mean. But my grandfather, whom I adored, brought me up to love Germany. He was himself obsessed by things German. So I have never been able to escape it either.”

  There was a silence as if everyone was brooding on Nell’s use of the verb “escape”.

  “Twenty past, angels passing,” Becky said. She put her hand on Franz’s. “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she whispered while Nell rose to make another pot of coffee.

  “All the same,” Eli said, “the two great Germans – I speak of teachers, not musicians – must be Goethe and Nietzsche, and of the two, I think … I think, for an evening like this, Goethe. Both understood, you could say incarnated, that essentially Nordic passion for the ancient world, which curiously you find so much more strongly expressed in the Anglo-Saxon races than among the Latins who inhabit the lands of Antiquity. Sun, sea and the clear light that dispels illusions. Whatever is best in the German character tends towards Italy.”

  “Italy,” Nell said, pouring coffee, “what wouldn’t I give to see Italy again, to be in Rome or Florence or one of those little towns of the Castelli, or on the Bay of Naples and the Sorrentine peninsula. You can’t imagine the beauty, children.”

  “Yes,” Eli said, “it’s the primal source of life. Whatever the archaeologists say, we are bound to believe that life as we know it originated in Greece and Italy.”

  “How can you, a Jew, speak like that?” Kinsky said.

  “Oh, I do not underrate what we have given the world, but nevertheless it appears to me that all this monotheism was a mistake, one that has led the world into a blind alley.” He laughed. “How much more sensible, how much closer to one’s experience of what is real, to divide one’s worship between Apollo, Dionysus and the Great Mother. How much more sense Adonis makes than Christ! How much more sense even that descent into the depths, which I assume still hangs on the wall there – I refer to the rendering of ‘The Golden Bough’ – fanciful though it is – than our stern and life-denying moralities!”

  To Franz it seemed at first as if Eli was talking merely for rhetoric’s sake. Perhaps it appeared that way to Nell also, for she smiled and said, “
That’s all very well, my dear, but to me Italy means first of all spaghetti al pescatore under a vinewreathed arbour overlooking the campagna. Do you remember that restaurant at Ariccia called Il Paradiso?”

  Becky said, “Well, I shouldn’t mind living in Italy myself.”

  “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t,” Franz said. “We’re not bound in any way to Argentina.”

  “An apartment in Rome,” Becky said.

  “Within five minutes of Piazza Navona,” Kinsky said. “There’s no doubt I should come to stay with you. Do you remember, Nell, that fountain with the boys and the tortoises?”

  And he proceeded to tell of how a certain Count, or possibly Prince, Mattei had had the fountain built as a present for his wife, and transported to the little piazza outside the family house, between the old ghetto and Largo Argentina – “yes, indeed”. The job had been done at night, and in the morning the Count opened the shutters of their bedroom, called his wife to the window, and there it was – “the most beautiful little fountain in the world”.

  “Do you hear that, Franz? I’ll expect no less.”

  “Alas, there’s no such workmanship now,” Kinsky said. “In our century we have preferred to direct our superior talents to destruction.”

  “Poor Italy!” Eli said. “Raped a thousand times by Nordic invaders, and yet still our inspiration.”

  Franz thought of Bastini who had wanted life to be sweet and comfortable, and had obeyed the laws of his own nature, and lived in fear as a result. He pressed Becky’s hand.

  “I must go,” he said. “Shall we have lunch tomorrow?”

  As they passed through the kitchen, Nell laid her hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “You are being very brave. I haven’t asked you about your father, because you would have told us if you had any news. But we feel for you, and remember, we are on your side, and Becky needs you – yes, you do, darling. I wouldn’t normally say it, but Franz isn’t living through a normal time.”