The Sins of the Father Page 5

  What distressed her most was to see the way in which so many of the former Master Race fawned on their conquerors, quick to assure anyone who might even possibly listen that they had never believed in Hitler. The fact that this was true of her own German friends didn’t stop her from finding these protestations pitiable. It was a terrible thing to have to apologise for what you had believed or, even worse, to lie about it.

  She had known from the start that her principal motive in taking this job was less the desire to be of help than the hope that she might find out what had happened to Albrecht and Kinsky and of course Eli. She had not realised how hard it would be to seek information in the midst of chaos. She got nowhere. They were, it seemed, among the millions who had simply been erased. But she couldn’t think of them as three among millions; she refused to accept that her friends could be reduced to statistics.

  The further she pushed her enquiries, the more difficult it became. She realised that people just didn’t want to know: her friends were the wrong sort of German. They had been neither outright Nazis to be punished, denazified, redeemed; nor the open enemies or victims of the regime. Even Eli’s Jewishness was of no help; he was seen as a sort of Jewish Quisling by those few who had heard of him. She had thought that perhaps Albrecht might have been one of the heroes of the July ’44 plot against Hitler; but that didn’t seem to be the case. His name didn’t appear in the lists of victims of Hitler’s panicky and infuriated revenge. Had he, she wondered, perhaps compromised with the regime, his nerve failing, and gone under with it, or slunk off, disguised by a new identity?

  As for the Gräfin, who might have helped, she was surely dead. The quarter where she had lived had been right in the line of the Russian tanks.

  That winter Europe froze hard. The mud stood up in great ridges resembling a lunar landscape in miniature. Crows fell dead from the trees. Fuel was short. When people returned exhausted from the work of reconstruction, they crawled into bed, and huddled under the blankets. It was worse than the war, they said; the electricity supply failed so often, they might as well have had the black-out again. There were no bombs, but it seemed that the world was held in suspended animation, awaiting the bomb to end bombs. Then it snowed. In the little town in Bavaria where Nell was stationed it snowed for four days without stopping. Nothing could move anywhere. The scene resembled an idealised nineteenth-century illustration, except that there was no joy in the cold. The weather and the world were joined in hostility to man.

  When movement at last became possible, a new truckload of refugees arrived, displaced Germans driven in terror from an East eager to be rid of them, stripped of their possessions, stripped, for the moment, of their conviction of their own virtue. Nell moved among them and was aware yet again of the difference of her feeling. Whatever they had done wrong, whatever evil individuals among them had committed, they had now been reduced to mere humanity. They were abased.

  One day, Glenys Middleton, one of the few colleagues for whom she felt any warmth, said to her, “One of the mutts has been asking questions about you.”

  “About me?”

  “It was your voice, he said.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Moved on, I think. Pity you weren’t here. Or perhaps not.”

  “But who was he? What was he like?”

  “Like them all. A skeleton.”

  It could have been any of them, removed from this chance of a chance encounter by the action of someone passing a piece of paper from one office to the next. But equally it might have been someone compromised by his experiences, whom she had met briefly, but who recognised her, and who feared that she might identify him, ripping away the facade of a new personality which he had constructed. Such a one couldn’t know that her integrity was corroded, even corrupted, by pity: that she would have let him pass, leaving punishment to God or conscience. It might even, she thought – “Don’t be absurd,” she told herself – have been that spy in dark glasses. But she could not anyway have identified him, had never known his name, retained no memory of his personality except for the sense of menace that she had felt behind the dark glasses, and the taste for conventional rectitude, for doing things by the book of rules, which she remembered from the thin mouth. Of course, he wasn’t to know that she could never think to know him, and it would be natural for him to remember the English blonde he had questioned and feel uneasily certain in his narrow self-limited world that she could never forget him. How could she, he would think, do so, when he was his own entire world?

  These were fantasies, mad thoughts that came to her in long hours of sleeplessness. She had grown accustomed to waking after three or four hours’ sleep, and lying restless, anticipating the dawn that brought with it the resumption of her chilling and miserable task, which she felt was nothing more, when you came down to it, than the cataloguing of a Hell in which no one had believed. For Nell, who had been brought up to say the General Confession and who had chanted the Magnificat at Evensong Sunday after Sunday, concluded in these months that Nietzsche, whom Albrecht had so fervently expounded to her, was right, whatever anyone said to the contrary: God was Dead. We lived with the consequences of his demise, and the first manifestations had been grotesque parodies: Communism and Nazism.

  Her response to insomnia was correctly English. She began to take long walks every afternoon. There was a touch of spring; crocuses were in flower. She would have liked a dog at her heels. But there were few dogs in Germany then. Who could feed one?

  She returned from one of these walks to find Eli sitting on the hard chair in the corridor outside her office, emaciated but unmistakable. He smiled to see her. She all but fainted. How had he got there?

  “I walked.”

  “Yes,” he said, in response to the question she hadn’t yet dared to ask. “I was in a camp. Yes, Auschwitz. And then in Russian Poland. And then I walked. But let’s not discuss it. Tell me about yourself.”

  Grotesque, again. Your lover reappears from Hell, and is smoking an English Goldflake cigarette which he has cadged from an orderly, and which he holds in precisely the old manner in the right corner of his mouth while he talks from the other side; and it is all the same, all at once, though he has no teeth. Almost seven years have passed, and he has indeed crossed from the other side. Without trumpets.

  “Now we can get married,” he said.

  “But I am married.”

  “That doesn’t interest me.”

  “No,” she said, “it doesn’t interest me either.”

  THREE

  Nell said to Eli, “Don’t you think they might have just the same sort of certainty that we had?”

  “That is stupid. How could they? A little boy and a little girl.”

  “I was a little girl in Berlin in 1939, and I was quite certain then. So were you, even though you tried to deny it.”

  “I never denied it. I merely couldn’t give it precedence.”

  That was of course what she had never been able to forgive him, even though in the first years of their marriage she had pretended otherwise. Curiously, it wasn’t until after Kinsky had followed them to Argentina – not that he knew he was doing so – and they had met him again and resumed their conversations, that she was able to confess her resentment. For Nell, Kinsky came to take the place of a priest.

  So, now, she called on him at his gallery. He was busy setting up a new exhibition.

  “You don’t like it?” he said.

  “Not much.”

  “Well, it’s new. So you wouldn’t, my dear.”

  “Is it really new, Kinsky?”

  “Of course not.” He made her a cup of coffee from the espresso machine which he had installed at the end of a corridor between the two rooms of the gallery. “There’s nothing new and there’s nothing true, and it don’t signify. Who said that?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Your English novelist Thackeray. See how well read I am. Do you think it’s true?”

  “I don’t know.”
>
  “Well, it can’t be, can it, if it is. What’s wrong, my dear?”

  “Eli.”

  “Oh,” Kinsky said, and sat down, balancing his coffee-cup at a precarious and awkward angle, as if it had nothing to do with him.

  “He still refuses to see Franz. Becky’s miserable, and he doesn’t care. I think he’s jealous.”

  Kinsky smiled.

  “It’s not that he has a phobia about the Germans,” she said. “I could understand it if he had. But you know he hasn’t. He still thinks of himself as German as well as Jewish. He still thinks – oh I don’t know what he thinks. Will you talk to him, Kinsky?”

  “My dear Nell, I have been talking to Eli for thirty years, and never once in that time has he taken my advice. Have you thought of turning round and opposing the match?”

  “Of course, but he would know what I was doing.”

  Kinsky was the only person who guessed how deeply and frequently she now disliked Eli, how she was repelled by his certainty of virtue.

  He said, “I have something to tell you.”

  He had had a visitor the previous day. An American in a seersucker suit, who had pretended to be interested in painting, but was utterly ignorant. “He said that picture over there reminded him of Klee. Well, it couldn’t be less like a Klee, could it?” No, Kinsky had at once read him for what he must be: CIA. The man had been curious about Kinsky’s history, and then had mentioned Eli. “He was well informed, acquainted with what must, I suppose, be a fullish dossier, even if it evidently stops short of absolute knowledge at important points. But he knew that Eli had worked with Schacht, and of what had happened to him in the war, and after, and then he asked, why didn’t he go to Israel?”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him what Eli always says: that there are too many bloody Jews there. He didn’t laugh, but he made a note.”

  “I can’t think why the CIA should be interested in him. Not now.”

  “It’s their job to be interested in people.”

  “But Eli?”

  “Yes, even our blind economist. All the same, I can think of an immediate reason. There is after all only one.”

  “Oh yes,” Nell said, understanding.

  “After all, Franz’s father is German, and any German in South America has secrets, and fears, and friends on whom he relies and has relied?

  “Do you, Kinsky?”

  “Of course. An old queer needs all the friends he can muster, especially in a police state.”

  Nell knew Kinsky was right. “Has Franz spoken to his father yet?” she asked Becky that evening.

  Her daughter sat at the little table in her bedroom with a textbook open before her. She didn’t lift her head when Nell spoke, and her long dangling hair hid her face.

  “Not exactly. But his mother has written to him. Maybe Franz too. I’m not sure. Anyway, I can’t see that it matters. It’s our life.”

  Nell sat down on the bed and leaned on one elbow. She thought of saying, “We only want you to be happy,” but didn’t. Becky turned round, lit a Kent, blew out smoke.

  She’s writing to you, asking us both to tea.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “Mm. She’s all right.”

  “Kinsky’s fond of her, I think.”

  “Can’t Kinsky talk to Daddy?”

  “I think maybe he will.”

  The invitation came. Nell dressed herself in a tweed skirt and twinset bought at the Scotch Shop; she wore a string of pearls. “You can’t go in jeans, darling.”

  “Why not? I feel … oh,” seeing her mother’s face, “all right, I won’t argue, this time.”

  “What time will you be back?” Eli said.

  “About six, I suppose.”

  “Very well.”

  They left the apartment to the sound of Brahms.

  “Does he know where we are going?”

  “He pretends not to.”

  Franz’s stepfather, being a General, had an apartment in a big block behind the Plaza de Mayo. Something about the blank‑faced building, its determined and unconvincing grandeur, reminded Nell of pre-war Berlin. They ascended in a lift, made in Birmingham in 1924. The lift shaft was enclosed in a metal grille, so that, as you mounted, you might see people from the lower apartments waiting to descend. But this afternoon, they passed nobody. Even the house plants in tubs outside the apartment doors had a dusty air, as if they had been there a long time, untended and forgotten, house plants of a dreaming city.

  A stocky Indian maid, wearing a black dress and a plain white apron, opened the door. The lobby of the apartment was very dark, the air close and heavy. Nell anticipated the aroma of boiled cabbage which she had known in Berlin, but the smell was cloying and spicy; like a convent, she thought. It was a place where reality was kept at a distance.

  The drawing room was large, running the width of the apartment and opening on to a terrace where sad oleanders were speckled with the dust that pervaded the city centre in dry weather. The maid, clicking annoyance, closed a French window that opened on the terrace, cutting off the sound of traffic in the street below. She told them to sit down. Becky took a tissue from her bag and wiped her hands. Nell peeled off her gloves and laid them on the arm of the chair. The maid went out. They didn’t speak.

  The mood lightened with Franz’s entry. He shook Nell’s hand, kissed Becky, who had leaped to her feet.

  “My mother won’t be a moment. She apologises. Someone has just telephoned.”

  He was restless, talked about trivia – the weather, rumours at the University, the American Presidential election. An elaborate French rococo clock – imitation French rococo, Nell thought – chimed four.

  “It’s always going fast,” he said. “I’m sure it’s not more than quarter to.”

  The wind rose outside, throwing black shapes of birds across the winter sky.

  Ilse entered, stout, apologetic, in a yellow frock.

  “This Argentina, always confusion…”

  She paused.

  “Shall we speak English?” she said. “It gives me pleasure to speak English.”

  “Or German?” Nell said. “Would we be more comfortable?” she asked in that language.

  “Does Rebecca speak German? I hadn’t realised.”

  “Oh yes, often, with Daddy…”

  “That is nice.”

  The maid wheeled in a trolley, poured tea. Franz handed round a plate of egg sandwiches, made in the English style, with crusts removed. The maid returned with a cake stand, in silver Art-Nouveau elaboration, like something from a Viennese coffee house, 1910. There were petits fours, a fruit cake and a magnificent Sachertorte.

  “Franz’s favourite, he adores chocolate. So do I,” Ilse giggled.

  “I haven’t had a tea like this in years,” Nell said.

  “Oh, I adore tea, my favourite meal, Earl Grey from Jacksons of Piccadilly. I hope that is all right. We have friends in the Embassy in London who supply us.”

  “It couldn’t be better.”

  Ilse beamed her pleasure.

  “This is nice. Of course Kinsky has told me so much about you. He adores you.”

  Nell felt an alliance forming. Kinsky was right. Ilse was nice. She pressed food on them. Nell found herself eating with pleasure. Franz urged Becky to try the Sachertorte. She blushed, then had a second slice.

  “Gosh, it’s good,” she said.

  The teapot was refilled, the maid being summoned by a tinkling handbell. Ashtrays were indicated.

  “Franz, take Rebecca and show her the apartment. Play her some of your barbaric music. Jazz,” she said to Nell. “Actually, to let you into a secret, I adore it myself.”

  “Oh, so do I,” Nell said. “After all it’s our generation. Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Venuti, the Hot Five… She invoked the names tenderly, summoning up afternoons of dancing to windup gramophones.

  “Red Nicholls and the Five Pennies, Benny Goodman…” Ilse giggled. “They condemned it as barbari
c music. My brother and I had to hide our records and could only play them when we were alone in the apartment, with the windows shuttered.”

  Nell thought of an afternoon in a punt, drifting down the Cam, her own brother working the pole, while Bix’s trumpet soared into “Goose Pimples” and “Since My Best Gal Turned Me Down”.

  “Eli, my husband, hates jazz. He plays Brahms and Schumann.”

  “Oh,” Ilse said, “that’s something he has in common then with Franz’s father. He adores Brahms. Aimez-vous Brahms?” she giggled again.

  “Not much,” Nell said.

  They paused, silent, at the brink.

  “You know Eli’s a Jew,” Nell said. “Franz has told you that, hasn’t he?”

  “Oh, I think that’s all terribly vieux jeu. It was all such a mistake, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a matter one is bound to bring up when speaking to Germans. In circumstances like this, I mean. Of course, Eli still thinks of himself as a German too. He likes me to read German poetry to him, Hofmannsthal and of course Goethe. Then he criticises my accent. He’s blind, you know.”

  Ilse poured Nell another cup of tea, freshened the pot, poured one for herself.

  “Such a tragedy,” she said, “and a brilliant man too, Kinsky tells me. Franz is afraid of his father. It’s sad. Of course he doesn’t know him very well…”

  “I realised,” Nell said, “that he was finding it difficult to tell him about Becky. I’m sorry it makes things so difficult, but I’m glad to find this is the reason, I had thought there might be something more to it…”

  “Oh no, I am sure not,” Ilse said.

  Nell wondered whether Ilse still saw her first husband, what terms they were on, why the marriage had broken up, but didn’t care to disturb the mood by asking any of these questions.

  For some years now, since he had finally gone blind, Eli had ceased to be troubled by nightmares. Nell found this strange, for in sleep time does not pass, but all moments are as one, and it was hard to understand why one period of a life, so long dominantly oppressive, should all at once be eliminated from the imagination that works in the darkness. While Kinsky was still fearful to sleep without drugging himself heavily, Eli, who for years had woken up screaming and had had to change out of pyjamas soaked with the sweat of his terror, now drifted through the night like a boat on calm water. Nell was distressed to find that she found this distressing. It seemed his new tranquillity diminished both him and what she felt for him. Comforting his nightmares had given her a deep pleasure; now she was denied the certainty that in his worst moments he needed her most. His blindness was no substitute; it irritated her as his nightmares never had.