The Sins of the Father Read online

  “I don’t know what makes you think that.”

  “I can tell. I have heard about your fiancée. Saul has told me. Has she recovered?”

  “I think so. Yes. Thank you.”

  “And you have left her in Argentina? Notwithstanding everything that has happened. I confess I don’t understand that. For me, personal relations come before everything.”

  “Even Israel?” he said.

  “I don’t make a distinction,” she said, “between Israel and personal relations.”

  A breeze stirred from the sea. The bray of a donkey came from an olive grove. They were on the fringe of the town. Franz could see orchards of orange trees, olive groves, and then, there was emptiness, the desert.

  “So you think it strange that I have come?” he said. She licked a foam of beer off her upper lip.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Yes, strange. It’s a question of morality. There are actions that cancel out bonds, yes? But not for you? That I find strange.”

  “There are moments,” he said, and paused.

  She cut into the silence. “You don’t dare to ask, but I will answer: my father, four grandparents, two brothers and my sister. My mother died giving birth to me. A friend, the wife of a Protestant pastor, took care of me. I’m twenty-one.”

  “I understand,” he said, “you must find my behaviour inexplicable.”

  “Not that, no, strange.”

  He wrote an account of this meeting and conversation in the journal he had determined to keep:

  She said she didn’t want vengeance, only justice. I wish I understood what people mean by the word. Then she asked me to a party: “Why not? Nobody blames you.” I said my presence might make others uncomfortable, as well as myself.

  Saul Birnbaum collected him the next morning. Franz had hesitated over what to wear: settling first on dark blue linen trousers, brown slip-on shoes, and a blazer. But it was too hot for the blazer; he exchanged it for a cotton combat jacket, disliked the connotations, finally met Saul in a white cotton cardigan worn loose. It was 8.30; the lawyer was half way through a thick cigar. He said, “We have to get your dad some cigarettes, he’s started smoking again.”

  They stopped at a bar, which was also a tobacconist’s, for coffee. Saul laid aside his cigar and crammed a doughnut into his mouth.

  “I aim to eat nothing before lunch.” He patted his belly. “It never works.”

  He bought a ten-pack carton of Chesterfield.

  “Shouldn’t I pay for these?”

  “Not to worry.”

  Franz didn’t know who was meeting Saul’s fees. That was a point he must bring up.

  “Have the journalists got at you?”

  “No.”

  “They will. Like I said, refer them to me. But there’s one chap you should meet. He’s a novelist who has a column in one of our dailies. Very young. Maybe twenty-five. He’s called Luke, he’ll get in touch.”

  In the months Franz hadn’t seen his father, the two photographs used by the Press – of the dapper officer in SS uniform and the weary hangdog figure in handcuffs, the one fusing with the other as a type of sadomasochistic fantasy – had made it increasingly difficult for him to recall the father he thought he had actually known. And this father was not restored by the man who sat waiting for them behind a large bare table, and who rose, a little stiffly, to his feet as they entered.

  Rudi had put on weight. There was a suggestion, never previously present, of a double chin. And he hesitated a moment before advancing to embrace Franz, as if he feared that his son might refuse that sort of recognition. But Franz laid his cheek against his father’s and felt him tremble.

  “I was sorry,” Rudi said, “for what those fools did to your fiancée. Sorry, angry and ashamed.”

  They sat down. Saul pushed the cigarettes over to his client, who however took one from a pack already open in his breast pocket, and lit it from the book of matches which was the only object on the table.

  “I haven’t brought you anything, just myself, I’m afraid,” Franz said. “I thought I would wait and see what you needed.”

  “There’s a good library here,” Rudi said.

  Franz had a photograph for him, the one of himself as a boy with the spaniel Mutzi, but he didn’t know how to give it to him.

  “How’s your mother?” Rudi said.

  “She’s all right. She’s distressed, but she’s all right “

  “All this must be a check to her social ambitions. I’m sorry.” He seemed to speak without irony. “And perhaps to your marriage, but I hope not.”

  “It was Becky’s father who recognised you.”

  He hadn’t meant to say that.

  “So I understand. Well, you’re a different generation.”

  Saul Birnbaum took a maroon leather case from his bag and extracted a cigar. He cut the end off, and removed the band. It lay on the table: Franz picked it up: H. Upmann. Saul held a match to it in mid-air, and put the cigar in his mouth and lit it. He blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “I tell you again, you ought to smoke these, Rudi. They do you so much less harm than cigarettes.”

  “Cigarettes are better suited to my nervous condition.”

  “They exacerbate it.”

  It was, Franz saw, already a ritual between them.

  “Besides, I don’t know that I am in a position to worry about the long-term effects of cigarette smoking.”

  Saul laughed, “You see, Franz, your father is in excellent spirits, as I told you. Now I must go. I must work. I have arranged for a taxi to collect you in half an hour, which is all that is permitted, and take you back to your hotel. I will tell Luke to ring you there. OK?”

  Dearest Mamma,

  I saw Father this morning. He appears well, both physically and mentally. His first question was how you were.

  I went to the prison with his lawyer, who is very genial. He seems confident. I hope he is as able as he evidently thinks he is. I don’t think we need doubt his commitment, even though I confess I don’t understand it. But then I understand so little. Least of all why he has received me as a friend, as has his assistant or secretary, a girl called Anna, despite the fact that her own family … but you don’t want to hear about horrors.

  I haven’t yet had an opportunity to discuss the line of defence with Dr Birnbaum (that’s the lawyer – Saul). But I can’t see that it can be other than that Father was a mere functionary; and that line didn’t save Eichmann, nor did it work for others.

  We must therefore nerve ourselves for the worst. The question is not the verdict but the sentence. There I think Saul may be effective. He acts as if he has a card up his sleeve…

  Franz laid down his pen. Saul wore short-sleeved shirts. Well, it was only an expression. He added some enquiries about his mother’s health and his stepfather’s. Sent love, and signed off. It wasn’t a good letter.

  He picked up his journal:

  How to understand Father’s equanimity? It is as if he has been preparing himself for this moment since he accepted that the war was lost. He asked me if I believed in God. I said no; then I remembered that before leaving Buenos Aires I went to the Church of the Solitary Virgin and lit a candle for him, and admitted this. “Oh,” he replied, “that’s just like turning the money over in your pocket when you see the new moon, I’ve always done that. Now I’ve no money to turn and I can’t see the moon from my cell, which has no windows, anyway.” He knew I wanted to talk about the war, which we have never of course done. “I never had any doubts, you know,” he said. “That’s what they’ll get me for, that I never had any doubts … I don’t see myself as a monster. Is that a failure of my imagination?”

  “The fact that you can ask me such a question proves that your imagination is active.”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, “that that reply isn’t merely clever. Don’t be merely clever, Franz.”

  My impression: that the balance between us has shifted, and that, as a result, we are for the first ti
me growing close. What does that say about me?

  The telephone rang. It was the journalist Luke. Franz didn’t catch his surname. He would pick him up for lunch.

  Darling Becky,

  It’s hell without you, but would it be anything other than a different kind of hell if you were actually here? That’s what I ask myself. By accident, I have put such a load on you that I don’t see how we can ever get rid of it, or how we can live under it. This is not a rejection, but it’s how I see things. For the rest of our life together, I am going to have to be making amends, to be careful. I’m not sure even now that it’s possible. That’s why I slept with Alexis if you want to know. It wasn’t simply physical attraction, though that was there. It was the fact that I didn’t owe her anything.

  This is a lie. I never slept with Alexis. She wouldn’t let me. But you were right: I wanted to. I still do. Sex free from obligations and values. You can’t imagine what that would mean to me.

  My father knows it was your father who informed on him. I almost wrote “betrayed”.

  If I had written “betrayed” it would have proved we have no possible future.

  And yet if I can’t imagine a future with you, I can’t tolerate the prospect of one without you.

  Sartre was a fool when he said Hell was other people. Hell is oneself.

  Father as Faust??

  The letter had drifted into his journal. That was where it belonged. He took the sheet and placed it between the pages of the book, and started again.

  Darling Becky,

  I’m no good at letters, but I miss you awfully.

  I could write about my feelings, and we are going to have to try to come to terms with the mesh of obligation, recrimination, guilt, fear, tenderness and love, some day, some day.

  I went to see him this morning. He is very calm, and he is still himself as I knew him. Does that make it worse or better?

  When I look at the people in the streets or the waiters and barmen and chambermaids in the hotel, I see orphans my father made. Do you understand how terrible that is?

  He knows it was your father who… I don’t know the word to use, but perhaps I don’t need one. He was horrified by what happened to you. I think he was sincere. You may say, to hell with his sincerity, and I will understand that, but I thought I would tell you.

  Please write to me. I love you.

  He put the letter in an envelope before he could change his mind, and took the two down to reception and got stamps and posted them. Then he stood in the doorway of the hotel looking out on the street. A mother passed with four curly-headed children in tow; they all wore shorts and the sun shone on them. The children were eating ice cream or sucking lollipops. Across the road a group of young people hung around a café. They were passing a bottle of Coca-Cola from hand to hand. He looked at his watch. It was half an hour until Luke was due. He crossed the street and sat at one of the tables and ordered coffee. Nobody paid him any attention. He wished he could understand what these boys and girls were saying. He didn’t even know what language they were speaking. They might be Arabs.

  He bought a postcard to send to Alexis. But what could he say, except, “Wish you were here, to make things less complicated”? Which could anyway only be true in one sense.

  The young man greeted him in the hotel lobby. He wore jeans and a pink shirt, and his handshake was warm. He was short, three or four inches shorter than Franz, and stocky. He wore a cigarette in the corner of his mouth like Humphrey Bogart.

  “Luke,” he said, and clapped Franz on the back. “We’ll go for lunch.”

  He took him to a restaurant, where he ordered lamb kebabs and rice, and a bottle of local wine. The kebabs were spicy and came with yellow and red peppers. Luke tore at the bread and smiled at Franz. It was a good smile, friendly and without calculation. They could have been old friends.

  “I’m not giving you an interview,” Franz said. “I’m not ready for interviews. I don’t know if I ever will be.”

  “Sure.”

  “Saul told me you were a novelist as well as a journalist. Why has he taken my father’s case?”

  “You’d have to ask him that. No, I just wanted to meet you. Call it curiosity. We’ve a lot in common.”

  “Nice of you to say so, but I don’t see it.”

  “Sure, we’re both Eichmann’s children… know what I mean?”

  The phrase was absurd. Franz accepted that heredity for himself; it seemed he had no choice, but for a Jew to claim it? He looked at the nose which had been broken (playing football, Luke said, touching it) and the brown eyes that flickered with humour, and the strong brown hand that tore at the bread and poured the wine, and he was puzzled.

  “German, Jew, Gentile, Israeli, everything we do, all the attitudes we adopt, are the expression of that inheritance. Do you see? Besides, we’ve got our Jews here, only we call them Arabs. There are Zionists whose idea of dealing with the Palestinian problem is a sort of Final Solution.”

  “You’re not one of them, I take it?”

  “No, I’m not. What are your impressions of Israel, Franz?”

  “I’m impressed, and disappointed. Impressed by the energy and the friendliness, disappointed by what you’ve made of it. Sólo faltó una cosa: la vereda de enfrente.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a line of Borges: ‘Only one thing was lacking: the other side of the street.’”

  Luke laid his hand on Franz’s.

  “You feel that too. Maybe we can build it.”

  For a moment the hands rested together, the warm brown on the white.

  In the afternoon Luke drove him out of the city and across the country towards the Jordan. They passed a town on a hill.

  From the road the apartment blocks looked mean and jerry-built.

  “Bet Shemesh,” Luke said. “Maybe you should see it. It’s not nice.”

  Franz was surprised.

  “I thought you would want to show me the best of Israel.”

  “Everyone else’ll do that. Not me.”

  The apartments were set with distances between them, empty lots either awaiting new buildings or perhaps intended to be covered with vegetable gardens, miniature orchards or chicken runs. Some of the buildings were constructed on top of concrete pillars, and stood disconsolate like stranded storks. Weeds grew in abundance and from the clotheslines, stretched above the dusty ground, hung shabby garments which no washing could, it seemed, render clean. There was a square on the top of the hill, a square open at one side, and in fact shaped like a horseshoe.

  Luke stopped the car there. It was late afternoon now and most of those in the square were in work-clothes, blue cotton overalls, the uniform of the Mediterranean.

  “It’s not what I expected,” Franz said.

  Luke smiled, lit a cigarette, gestured towards a group of middle-aged men, mostly unshaven, who were standing smoking outside a café.

  “What was your Borges line?” he said.

  Franz repeated it. “Are these Arabs?” he asked.

  “No, they hate the Arabs. These are what we call Oriental Jews, from Iraq maybe, or North Africa. They hate me too, or they would. As a kibbutznik, you see, or as a cit from Tel Aviv. Doesn’t matter. I’m an Ashkenazi, a European Jew, a socialist. But you can’t tell them from the Arabs, can you, just as my grandfather who was a doctor of medicine was indistinguishable from his colleagues in Danzig. Let’s go have a beer.”

  Franz laid his hand on Luke’s arm, arresting him.

  “You won’t let on who I am?”

  Luke smiled: “Who do you think I am, baby?”

  “But what are you trying to prove?”

  “Nothing. Do you know what my party says? – it says we must change these people immediately, refashion them in our image.”

  “But I know them,” Franz said, “they’re what we call in Argentina the shirtless ones, or just el pueblo, the people. In Argentina, they look to Perón. He wrote a book called La Fuerza es el Derecho de
las Bestias, Force is the Right of Animals, or perhaps, the Law of the Jungle.”

  “Oh,” Luke said, “we have our Perón, a Perón in waiting. I’m very much afraid his time will come.”

  “So will Peron’s: again. I see why you brought me here: to make me talk about Hitler.”

  “We’ll do that, but later. Now let’s have that beer.”

  It was night and they were in Luke’s apartment in the city. The ashtrays were full. They had finished eating, stew of kid with dumplings, followed by fruit. Luke opened another bottle of wine. His wife, Rachel, removed her shoes and stretched out on the rug. A violinist played Hungarian gypsy music on the gramophone.

  Rachel said, “Between the three of us we’re not seventy.”

  “If you mean,” Luke said, “that we are too young to take the weight of the world on our shoulders, then I can’t agree with you.”

  She lifted her hand. Their fingers intertwined.

  “Your fiancée’s Jewish, isn’t she, Franz?” She looked up at him and smiled.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You don’t know what you have let yourself in for.”

  “Her father was in Auschwitz. Before that he worked for the Reichsbank. He’s a famous economist. He collaborated with Schacht. It was he who recognised my father … and made arrangements for his capture.”

  He spoke the words as if they had nothing to do with him, as if he were recounting a history lesson: “In 1870 Bismarck, realising the opportunity afforded him by the French insistence that the Hohenzollern candidate for the Spanish throne should renounce his claim permanently and irrevocably, suppressed the conciliatory telegram which the Kaiser wished to send, and thus precipitated the war by which the German Empire was created…”

  It meant nothing, put like that. “Luke hates this trial,” she said.

  “Let’s change the music,” Luke said. He put on a record of Edith Piaf. “Have you been to Paris, Franz?”

  Franz shook his head. Rachel and Luke were no longer holding hands, but the bitter-sweet music that filled the air bound them together; yes, and Franz with them. Smoke pricked his eyes.