The Sins of the Father Read online

  The manager of the site had sent a car for him, an old Chevrolet. The driver chewed an unlit cigar. Franz hesitated whether to get into the front beside him, or to travel in the back like someone superior. He wondered which his father would have chosen. The driver made no move to help him decide, and when Franz opened the front door and settled himself beside him, neither removed the cigar nor made any remark. The radio whined love-songs. The man drove fast, not well, with much crashing of the gear box and sliding at corners. The car’s tyres were lacking in tread.

  Dr Santander, the site manager, received him in his office. There was coffee waiting, also anis. Dr Santander sipped at a sticky glass, and gave off a smell of unwashed flesh and unwashed clothes. He wore a short-sleeved flowered shirt, and sighed heavily.

  “It is most inconvenient,” he said. “You speak Spanish?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It is most inconvenient,” Dr Santander said again. He pushed a stubby glass across the desk towards Franz, swatted at a fly with an American girly magazine, missed.

  “Three days ago,” he said, “he didn’t report for work. Perhaps he is ill, I thought. But no, his room is unoccupied. It is most inconvenient.”

  “And there was no message?”

  Dr Santander sipped his anis.

  “You don’t drink,” he said. “Why not?”

  “Sorry.” Franz picked up his glass, and sipped.

  “We are busy here, very occupied. There is a penalty if the bridge is not completed on time, and now my second-in-command … evaporates …”

  “Did he take luggage with him?”

  Dr Santander sighed. He turned down the corners of his mouth, and picked up his magazine again, holding it aloft as if daring the fly to settle.

  “It is possible,” he said. “On the other hand it is possible not.”

  “Do you mind if I have a look at his house? It is a company house?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Have you reported his disappearance to the police?”

  “Three days is inconvenient for me, but for the police, not so much. Maybe he has a girl…”

  The blonde on his magazine cover was arched backwards over a low bench in what must have been, even for a gymnast, an uncomfortable position.

  “Yes,” Dr Santander said, “that is possible.” The fly settled on his blotter. He struck, missed again, then, laying the magazine down, traced the line of the model’s curves.

  “Or perhaps something has happened to him. Perhaps he has been kidnapped. Isn’t there perhaps some political group that doesn’t want your bridge to be finished?”

  “No,” Dr Santander said, “everybody wants our bridge. It is a noble work. I am sorry there is nothing I can tell you. By all means, go and examine your father’s house. By all means. I am happy to offer you my co-operation. Perhaps you will find evidence of a girl.”

  “And the police? Do you object if I consult the police?”

  Dr Santander poured himself another anis, and sighed again.

  “Up here, my young friend, people do not consult the police. The police consult them. Ask my secretary to direct you to your father’s dwelling.”

  Dr Santander’s secretary was a plump woman in her early thirties, who quickly told Franz that she was not Argentinian, despite her name, but French, and that she preferred to be addressed as Yvette rather than as Señora Jimenez.

  “I don’t choose to remember my husband too much,” she said, “but it’s better, I find, to be a married woman up here. Of course your father was always a gentleman.”

  “Dr Santander thinks he may have gone off with a girl. Does that seem likely?”

  “It seems likely that Dr Santander would think so.”

  She escorted him to a concrete bungalow with an unfinished look, standing in a shabby street on the fringes of the little town. It was about two miles from the construction site.

  “His car is here, you see,” she said, pointing to a dark green Volkswagen, about five years old. “Nobody told me his car was still here. Of course he sometimes rode into the site on his bicycle. For exercise, he said.”

  She produced a key.

  “Pedro – that’s one of the office clerks – who went to look for him, found the door open, but locked it and brought the key to the office. It seemed the best thing to do.”

  There were two rooms in the bungalow, a narrow bedroom with a camp bed, a chest of drawers and a rail on which three suits were hanging, and a slightly larger living room with two wickerwork chairs, a television set, a row of bookshelves, and a table, with a single wooden chair thrust back from it. A recess contained a sink, a refrigerator, and a cooker. The plaster in both rooms was cracked, and a long wavy line ran across the ceiling of the living room. Bluebottles buzzed round a plate which lay on the table; there were scraps of potato, already acquiring a sheen of mould. A half-empty beer bottle and a smeared glass stood beside it. The single chair suggested that no one was ever invited to eat there. Apart from the evidence of the meal, the room was very neat. There was a pile of carefully folded newspapers beside one of the wicker chairs. The walls were bare of pictures, but there were two photographs on the top shelf above the books. Both were of Franz, one as a small boy kneeling beside a spaniel; the other, taken when he was about sixteen, show him in the cadet’s uniform of his school. Franz picked up the one with the dog; the spaniel, Mutzi, had been the principal casualty of his parents’ divorce. Ilse had insisted on keeping him, but the dog had pined for Rudi and died within the year.

  “A house is a machine for living in,” Yvette quoted, “if you call it living.”

  “I feel ashamed,” Franz said. “It never occurred to me that he was so lonely.”

  He picked a record off the turntable – Schubert’s Winterreise – dusted it, and restored it to its sleeve. Then he noticed that the control knob was still in the “on” position. He turned it off. He pulled open a drawer at the other end of the table from where his father ate. It contained some papers. There was a batch of his own letters, tied up in red ribbon, a bank book, bank statements and papers relating to tax. The drawer was very neat. There was space between the different bundles; pens, pencils and a rubber were precisely aligned.

  The sound of cars driven fast, then stopping outside, disturbed them. Doors slammed, footsteps approached the house. The door was thrown open and a police lieutenant marched in followed by two other uniformed officers. All were armed, and one of them had his pistol out of the holster. The lieutenant paused, smiled, inclined his head.

  “It was reported to me that you had arrived.”

  He picked up the photograph of Franz as a cadet.

  “Yes,” he said, “I should have recognised you in any case. I am Lieutenant Vilar. Jorge Vilar. I think we must talk. I think we should talk alone. Forgive me, Señora Jimenez, my men will take you home.”

  “I have my car here, Lieutenant.”

  “In that case, they will follow you and see that you arrive safely. As I have remarked before, it is not wise for a lady to travel by herself after dark.”

  When they were alone, he took two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, and knocked the caps off. He handed one to Franz and waved him towards a chair. He himself stood in the middle of the room sucking at the neck of the bottle. His boots gleamed.

  “So,” he said, “this is a bad business.”

  “I understood from Dr Santander that he had not reported my father’s … disappearance. He believes there may be a girl in the case.”

  “It was not necessary for him to report it. I already knew. What I didn’t know, and don’t know, is why, and being ignorant of that I have not known whether I should report it elsewhere.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.”

  Lieutenant Vilar perched on the corner of the table. He drank from his bottle, dangled one long shiny boot, which held Franz’s gaze.

  “It is possible,” he said, “that I know your father better than you know him yourself. You se
e, he has been in a sense my responsibility.”

  “I’m sorry,” Franz said again, “I’m afraid you have lost me. Why should he be your responsibility?”

  “At the same time, because of that, I have spent many evenings here, in conversation. He had much to teach me.”

  “But why was he your responsibility? Is it usual for police officers to be assigned responsibility for individual citizens?”

  The lieutenant waved the idea away with his beer bottle. For a few minutes he did not speak. Instead he gazed at Franz. It was a sort of scrutiny, like the preliminary to investigation. Franz dropped his eyes.

  “I flew up here, because we were worried. My mother had tried to telephone my father.”

  “On account of your forthcoming marriage?”

  “Yes. How did you know of that?”

  “It doesn’t matter how I knew,” he said. “Go on.”

  “No, I suppose not. Well, anyway, she was worried, and it seems rightly. I don’t think he left of his own accord,”

  “No?”

  “This meal, not cleared away, that’s not like him. And you say there is no girl.”

  “No, I didn’t say that, but there isn’t.”

  “Well then…”

  Franz was at a loss. He had flown up not knowing what to expect, and everything since his arrival had confirmed his feeling of insignificance. He had led a sheltered life, he was accustomed to things happening as he wanted them to. He had rarely had to ask hard questions of himself; life fitted him like a well-made suit. It came to him that his lack of curiosity about his father had been total, reprehensible also. It had never occurred to him to wonder what his father was like when he himself wasn’t there; it was as if his father had existed only for him. Of course, he had his excuses; he had always known that his father’s past covered tracts of forbidden territory. But he had been happy never to seek to withdraw the blanket. Now he was the one who felt naked.

  The lieutenant eyed him. Franz shifted in his chair.

  “Your father has needed friends. I have been their representative. People only need friends when they already possess enemies. Hadn’t you thought of that?”

  He got off the table, flicked a speck of dust from his boot. “We will go and eat,” he said. “Then I will tell you what you need to know.”

  They drove into the little town, and through it, to where a suburb straggled along the riverbank, and stopped at a tavern on the outskirts. The lights of the car showed up the rippling water, and the lieutenant said, “There used to be a dock here. Gone now. Finished.” The tavern was a single long room with a line of tables against the wall. The lieutenant led Franz to the far end, and they settled themselves. There were only half a dozen other diners and the lieutenant had put a lot of space between them and the other occupied tables. He produced a long thin cigar, bit the end off and offered it to Franz. Then he lit one for himself and sat back against the whitewashed, but now grubby and smoke-stained wall. When a waitress approached he ordered steaks and a bottle of wine without consulting Franz.

  “It is all they know how to cook,” he said. “That and eggs. But I think you need a steak. When I have come here with your father, he always orders eggs but they are cooked in poor quality oil, I am afraid.”

  The waitress was a big girl, a mestiza, with wide hips and a sullen expression. The lieutenant scarcely looked at her, but Franz watched her progress up the room. She wore sandals which flapped as she walked. A man at another table stretched out his hand and pinched her bottom as she passed, but she paid no attention.

  “Your father made love to her once a fortnight,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t think he even knows her name. She doesn’t cost much.”

  Franz blushed.

  “I wasn’t thinking of her like that,” he said.

  “No?”

  The lieutenant drew on his cigar.

  “Is it possible,” Franz said, “that my father has been kidnapped? By guerrillas?”

  “We have no guerrillas in this district.”

  “It was only an idea I had. You said you were assigned to keep an eye on my father. Why was that? He’s not a criminal.”

  The lieutenant laughed. It was a soft laugh, an expression less of amusement than of his sense of superiority.

  “I am a philosopher,” he said. “Perhaps you have studied philosophy at the University? I never had that opportunity, but nevertheless that is what I am. An existentialist. You know what that means? It means that reality is now. That is the only reality we have. Memories are real because they belong to now, but the past is not real, it is dead. So? You wonder why I tell you this. Well, for me, you see, your father is the man I have known, honourable, unambitious, thoughtful, yes perhaps a little dull, but nevertheless one with whom it is possible to converse. A luxury that, in a place like this! Very well, so I say to myself, perhaps he was not always that, but he is now. It is what he has made himself, what he has become. Life is a perpetual journey of becoming. Do you agree?”

  Franz said, “I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it. I suppose I would say we are what we are rather than what we seem to be.”

  And then he thought of Luis standing naked over the girl who, he insisted, resembled the Sainted One, in the tawdry gold and purple of Rosita’s establishment, and of Luis escorting Gabriella, and…

  “So I am not interested,” the lieutenant said, “except in my professional capacity in what a man may have done. What he is doing now is the expression of what he is, for we all possess the capability of performing the extremes of what is commonly called virtue and vice. We are all capable of anything, it seems to me.”

  “Are you saying there is no difference between a good man and a bad man?”

  “The concepts are meaningless. There are only acts.”

  “But what has this to do with my father, or his disappearance?”

  The waitress brought them their food and the wine. The lieutenant introduced Franz to her as Dr Schmidt’s son. She made no response. Perhaps she was afraid of the police officer. As she passed the farther table, the same diner again pinched her bottom, and again she proceeded as if nothing had happened. And it might be that it was nothing. The lieutenant ate very quickly, but without giving the impression that food was important to him. When he laid down his knife and fork, he slipped his hand into the inside pocket of his tunic, and took out an envelope. He removed a photograph from it, and laid it face down on the table.

  “There are people who would pay tens of thousands of dollars for this photograph. Or would have done so.”

  He pushed it towards Franz.

  There was writing on the back: “For Jorge in settlement.”

  “Pick it up. Take a good look. Examine it carefully.”

  It showed a young officer, in jackboots, with swastikas on his epaulettes. He wore the Iron Cross, and stood before a gate, with the legend Arbeit Machts Frei in the sky above him. Barbed wire rolled over the walls to his right and left.

  “So?” Franz said. “I have always known my father was in the Wehrmacht.” He turned the snap over. “You are Jorge? In settlement for what?”

  “A debt. It is unimportant.”

  “I don’t understand. You make it sound as if you were, I don’t know what – blackmailing him?”

  “No,” the lieutenant said, “we were friends. But that is the uniform of the SS.” He put his hand on Franz’s arm. “This doesn’t matter to me. It was a long time ago. But it explains why it was my duty to, shall we say, keep an eye on your father. He had friends sufficiently powerful to arrange that.”

  “It seems you failed in your duty.”

  “Yes.” The lieutenant took out a nail file and tapped the table. “Your prospective father-in-law is a Jew.” He began to file his nails. “Why don’t you ask him where your father is?”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Franz said, “Dr Czinner is blind. Didn’t you know?”

  “I know that your father was very nervous before meeting him.”


  “Besides, he regards anti-Semitism as out of date.”

  “I’m sure he does.” The lieutenant bit off the end of another cigar, and lit it. “The question is whether Jews share his opinion. He would not have agreed to meet Dr Czinner – surely it should be Professor? – but for you. But for his love for you. At any rate, you have a coincidence here, that is something at least. So I repeat: ask Dr Czinner.”

  Franz knew he couldn’t: either Becky’s father would laugh in his incredulity, or he might confirm the lieutenant’s suspicions; and that would be worse.

  “Come, I shall take you to the hotel.”

  “I left my bag there. But first I would like to spend some more time in my father’s house.”

  “In the morning. You will have time in the morning before your plane.”

  Franz acquiesced. It seemed he had been doing nothing else since the lieutenant had broken in on them. And he still couldn’t understand his interest. He attempted a direct question. The lieutenant smiled; he had told him all he thought it prudent to say.

  “But you think he is in some danger.”

  “That depends on what you mean by danger. His life is not immediately threatened. That is not the way these people work.”

  “Which people?”

  “You do not really need to ask that, Franz. But if you do, I repeat that you should enquire of Dr Czinner.”

  “And what should I tell my mother when I call her?”

  “That he has indeed disappeared. That is all you know. And that you will be on the midday plane. If you still wish to see your father’s house again, call this number and I will have you fetched. But you will learn nothing. If he kept a diary for instance, that too is gone. But what could he have put in it?”

  He led him to the car. When they stopped outside the hotel, he turned himself round and looked Franz in the eye, while the feeble street lamp threw his own face into shadow.

  “You’re a nice boy,” he said, “as your father spoke of you. But you don’t know yourself very well, do you? I am afraid you are going to find out a lot, about yourself and others. And then you may no longer seem such a nice boy.”