The Fury of Rachel Monette Page 26

  Calvi noticed the cold cigar between his fingers and let it fall to the stones. He watched the American family trail across the square in the direction of the Jaffa Gate and a late lunch. “It’s not the fraud you think it is,” he said to Rachel. He drew his hand away and twisted on the bench to face her:

  “You are right. I am not a Moroccan Jew. But I am a Jew. A Jew and a German.” Rachel watched the gray eyes closely but they were opaque and far away, in space and time. “If real name means the one you are born with, then Reinhardt is no more my real name than Calvi. Even less.” His voice rose: “I made Simon Calvi real, far more real than Victor Reinhardt ever was.”

  “What name were you born with?” Rachel asked softly.

  For a long time Calvi said nothing. The bearded old men rocked back and forth, each one alone with the pitted stones. The wall answered all their prayers just by being there.

  Calvi raised his eyes up, over her head, toward the horizon. “Victor Mendel,” he said at last, as if he had gone to the edge of memory to find his name.

  He laughed a short laugh. An embarrassed laugh. “Victor Mendel. Who the hell was he?” And suddenly he looked at Rachel as if they were old friends sharing a joke from long ago. The surprise made her inhale sharply, the surprise of his familiarity and her reaction to it: she wanted more knowledge of this man for its own sake. Wild thoughts darted through her brain. I’ll sleep with you if you tell me where Adam is. He probably has no idea where Adam is, and if he does he probably doesn’t know he knows. I’ll sleep with you anyway. Rachel bit hard on the inside of her mouth, to bring her mind to order. She tasted blood on her tongue.

  “Who was Victor Mendel?”

  But he chose to start somewhere else. Old friends have time to digress. “Names. They can be as dangerous as wearing the wrong uniform in a battle. What is wrong with giving them up if they become unsafe?”

  Rachel was not sure whether the question was rhetorical, but she had an answer: “Because whenever you do you give up a little of yourself.”

  The gray eyes fastened on her own; there was a gentleness she had not expected. “I suppose all women must learn that when they marry,” he said.

  At that moment Rachel remembered the guidebook lying on the bench between them. It occurred to her that she was invading her own privacy as much as his.

  Calvi patted his pockets, but he had no more cigars. His last one lay at his feet. He left it there. “Statistically,” he said, “Victor Mendel was a very lucky boy. He exists. He still exists. How many Jews who were living in Munich in 1938 can say the same?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Very few. Ninety percent of the Jews alive in Germany before the war were dead by the end. And the war ended a long time ago. That war. So I am a survivor. I don’t make a cult of it the way some others do, but I am a survivor with my dues paid in full.”

  As he spoke his eyes grew less watchful, the muscles in his face relaxed. Rachel knew there would be more and waited while he thought.

  “Innocence is the currency. Survival is bought with innocence. You are born with an abundance of innocence and no knowledge of how to survive: you spend your life trading one for the other. But it only works one way. You can’t buy back your innocence.” Calvi rubbed his hands together as though they were suddenly cold, despite the afternoon sun. “My account has been overdrawn for years.” His tone was light, and had nothing to do with the look in his eyes. They were sad and lonely.

  “Tell me about Munich in 1938.”

  “Everyone knows about Munich in 1938. There is nothing to tell.”

  “I meant how did you go from Munich into Rommel’s army?”

  The sadness and loneliness sank out of sight as quickly as lead in water. Calvi glanced at Sergeant Levy, who had begun pacing slowly back and forth. “You know so much about me, Miss Bernstein. It’s very disquieting.”

  “I haven’t heard what I need to know.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about your son. No amount of pressure will force me to reveal something I don’t know. You are making a mistake.”

  “No.”

  Calvi sighed. “What do the police say?”

  Rachel answered with a sarcastic grunt. For a minute or two they both watched Sergeant Levy walk. There was nothing lumbering about the way he did it—he had the quick sure stride of a gymnast or fencer. His size made it look dainty.

  “Munich. 1938.” Calvi’s hand moved from his thigh to his pocket, stopped, and returned to the thigh. “How old are you, Miss Bernstein?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “So the war was finished before you were even born?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever heard of Kristallnacht?” The German was music on his lips.

  “Of course.”

  “Not of course, Miss Bernstein. People forget. Soon it will be just a footnote in a textbook. Kristallnacht. November the tenth. It was the night that the Jewish community in Germany was shattered like a pane of glass. Did you know that for months after Kristallnacht over half the Jews who died in Germany were suicides?”

  “No.”

  “From that night on everyone knew. We knew, even if we did nothing about it. What message could be clearer? We were finished. Many heard the message but did not believe it. My father was one of those. I suppose he had a lot to lose, my father. He was a doctor. We had a big house, a maid, a cook. I was the only child. I went to a good school. On weekends I rode through the countryside with my Aryan friends, on my own horse. Mozart, I named him.” He shook off the memory. “I’ve never told this to anyone. Why you?”

  “I asked.”

  Calvi smiled, and continued. As he spoke the smile faded like a last firework against the night sky. “My father was already a doctor in the past tense by November the tenth. Jews had been forbidden to practice medicine a few months before. He was not even permitted to treat Jewish patients, except as an orderly. But through all this he was convinced that the persecution was temporary. He was a cultured man. The Nazis were common hoodlums, drawn from the lowest elements of society. He made that point many times to my mother when she tried to persuade him to take us out of the country while we still had a chance. ‘The natural order will reassert itself,’ he would say. He didn’t understand that was exactly what was happening.

  “On Kristallnacht a band of thugs came to the front of our house. My father went to the door. I wanted to go with him but my mother made me hide with her upstairs. I was sixteen years old and could have insisted that I stay with my father, but I was afraid and yielded to her. We watched from a window on the third floor. My father was a big man, as big as I am. He opened the door. No one hit him. No one tried to force his way into the house. Their leader, a man half my father’s size, simply stepped up to him and spat in his face. The saliva slid down his chin, onto his silk cravat. They laughed and went away. We were lucky.

  “Even then my father was unable to understand that German society would never make a move to stop the hoodlums. He couldn’t see they were the same people. My mother pleaded with him. He told her to be patient. But he allowed her to send me away, to stay with a Christian family she knew living in a little village near Balderschwang on the Austrian border. I never saw my parents again.

  “This family hated the Nazis. When I arrived in the village they let it be known that I was a cousin whose parents had died in an automobile accident. They adopted me legally as their son. I took their name. Reinhardt.

  “As a German with full citizenship I was naturally obligated to serve in the army. In 1940 I was taken into the Afrika Corps and sent to North Africa.” Calvi looked up over the Wailing Wall at the golden dome of the great mosque. “Kopple must have told you the rest.”

  “Some of it. I don’t know exactly what happened the day the woman escaped.”

  Calvi shrugged. “Nothing happened. I used the opportunity to escape myself.”

  “Why then?”

  “I didn’t know if there would be a b
etter chance.”

  “Had you intended to desert for a long time?”

  “Not consciously.” Rachel thought that Calvi’s face seemed older than when they had first sat on the bench, as if talking about years gone by had given them another go at aging him. But it did not make him weak or pathetic or diminish the feeling his physical presence gave her.

  “What became of the woman?”

  “I have no idea.” They both thought about that.

  “Why don’t you ask if Kopple told me the woman was found?” Rachel asked.

  “It wasn’t even important to me at the time. It is less important now. I never had any intention of looking for her.”

  “What if she survived to tell the whole story?”

  “Then I would have heard it.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you—what they did to the women at Siegfried?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not of course,” Rachel said quietly. She looked again for the wince in the gray eyes, and saw it. “How can the man who wants everyone to remember Kristallnacht keep his mouth shut about something like that?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You know the answer. It is not merely a question of my career. I am in a position to help a lot of poor people. Not a little of the social reform enacted in this country in the last ten years has been due to me personally. Is dredging up the past more important than that?”

  “You put yourself in a flattering light. I’ve heard that you’ve been splitting Israel down the middle so the Arabs won’t have to work up a sweat when they march in.”

  Calvi jumped up and faced her. “My movement is completely legitimate,” he shouted. “Completely.”

  “But you’re not.” Was he a man who believed his own lies? In the square, Sergeant Levy was watching them carefully. “That is a fact. I know it. Maybe someone else knows it too. Someone else must at least be suspicious. Does that explain Sergeant Levy? I thought bodyguards kept their eyes peeled for potential attackers. He keeps his eyes on you.”

  She saw Calvi stop himself from turning around to look. He sat down. Only after a few seconds did he glance across the square. Sergeant Levy had resumed his pacing. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said to Rachel coldly.

  “Perhaps not, but I’m making good guesses.”

  “You delude yourself.”

  “Then help me. Explain how you passed as a Moroccan Jew, for example.”

  “I am not obliged to explain anything to you.”

  Rachel laughed in his face. “That’s true. And I’m not obliged to stop myself from calling Sergeant Levy over here and telling him all about Victor Reinhardt.”

  The gray eyes showed anger, fear, nothing. Calvi made a gesture of acquiescence with his hand. “There is very little to tell. I found my way to Taroudant, in the Atlas. There was a large mellah there, very ancient, very crowded, very poor. I went to the chief rabbi and told him I was a Jew on the run from the Nazis. He gave me protection. I stayed there for three years. I learned the jewelry trade. I learned to speak Arabic. And Hebrew. The rabbi was surprised I knew so little Hebrew. Assimilation was a foreign concept to him. Later I went to Fez and lived among the Jews there as a Moroccan Jew. Any oddness about my mannerisms they attributed to my origin in the backward south. In 1948 I came to Israel and after a while got interested in politics.” He leaned back on the bench. “Now you know all there is to know about me. I am at your mercy.” He was very calm about it.

  “Are you married?” Rachel heard herself asking.

  “No.”

  “You didn’t marry during all those years in Morocco?”

  “No.”

  Rachel suddenly felt a tremendous fatigue, a tremendous sense of futility, as though a much thicker atmosphere than she was used to was pressing on her body. Simon Calvi was adapted to that pressure; perhaps he thrived under it; perhaps he was its source. She remembered the twelve-month pregnancy of her dream. A thousand clues had led her to a puzzle that had nothing to do with Adam. Rachel tried again. She spoke quietly, without passion:

  “Simon. I don’t agree with you. I think you can make deposits in the innocence account. That is what doing good is about. I want my son back.”

  “I told you—”

  She held up her hand. “I know. I accept your word that you didn’t take Adam, didn’t have him taken or have anyone killed. But there is a connection between us and if we examine it carefully I’m sure we will find someone or something else connected to us both. I’m asking you to help me.”

  Calvi put his hand on her knee. “How can I, Miss Bernstein?”

  “Rachel.”

  “Rachel.” He used the Hebraic pronunciation. “How can I?”

  “I don’t know. We can start by going over our stories together, line by line. Something you know that seems trivial or irrelevant may mean everything to me. You see that by now, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” He removed his hand, leaving her knee warm where it had rested. “I will do what I can to help you. But you must wait.”

  “Why? There may not be much time.”

  “Only until tomorrow. Tomorrow morning I am giving a speech at the university.”

  “I saw a poster.”

  “It’s an important policy speech, one we’ve been planning for a long time.” He looked at his watch. “I’m now two hours late for the final preparatory meeting. But tomorrow after the speech I can see you for as long as you like. Does that seem reasonable?”

  “I don’t have much choice.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Rachel. It’s less than twenty-four hours.” He rose. “Why not come to the university tomorrow morning? My speeches are said to be entertaining, if nothing else. We can meet after and go somewhere from there.”

  “All right.”

  “Until then I don’t have to tell you to be very careful. The boy’s life may depend on our discretion.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. Then he turned and walked toward Sergeant Levy. Together they crossed the square toward the southern wall of the Old City.

  Rachel felt the hot circle of his lips on her skin. She pulled the strap of the tape recorder over her shoulder, took the guidebook in her hand and stood up. Immediately a dizziness flowed through her body: white mist rose on the edge of her vision, obscuring the mosque, the wall, the stones of the old square. Rachel lowered her chin to her chest and it slowly dissipated.

  She left in the opposite direction to that taken by the two men. Behind her a little boy ran to the bench, picked up Simon Calvi’s cold cigar and stuck it in his mouth.

  29

  “Was she a good interviewer?” Sergeant Levy asked as a way of making conversation. In his hands the Fiat’s steering wheel was a baby’s toy, easily crumpled.

  “Not bad,” said Simon Calvi. He had endured enough conversation. As they drove toward Rehavia he was thinking about it. In his whole life he had never once loved a woman, but it hadn’t troubled him at all until today, until a few minutes ago. It was too late. Of course he didn’t love the woman—he knew that without a doubt. And yet he had fought a strong desire to tell her what he supposed she wanted to know. He had even tried to convince himself that it was a sensible idea: he could set her on the Captain. But the Captain was far too smart for her; so was he, for that matter. Perhaps later, he told himself, he could find a way to send her a message. It was possible.

  “She was Jewish, wasn’t she?” Sergeant Levy said.

  “Nominally.”

  “It’s so hard to tell with some of the Americans. They don’t speak Hebrew, they don’t speak Yiddish, they have their faces reshaped by plastic surgeons.”

  “This one kept her real face,” Calvi said. Something in the way he spoke made Sergeant Levy glance at him from the corner of his eye.

  “What was the interview about?”

  “The usual subjects. The survival of ethnic cultures, the Arab threat, the peace talks.”

  “You must get bored answering those questi
ons all the time.”

  “It’s part of the job,” Calvi replied. “You must get bored watching me all day.”

  Sergeant Levy turned and gave him a big smile. “I enjoy every minute of it.” A battered pickup truck, crammed with passengers, cut sharply in front of them. Out of the back popped an iron washtub. It bounced on the road, scattering dozens of dried salt fish on the pavement. Sergeant Levy swerved smoothly around the tub. The pickup pulled over to the side of the road. Women began yelling angrily in Arabic.

  Sergeant Levy parked in the shade of the carob tree. From one of its lower branches a long seed pod dropped, falling on the hood of the car with a soft thud. Calvi started involuntarily at the sound. He noticed that Sergeant Levy did, too.

  “They make good cattle fodder,” Calvi said opening the door.

  “I didn’t know that.” Sergeant Levy watched it carefully through the windshield.

  Calvi entered the villa and went into the kitchen. In a cupboard above the sink he found a box of cigars. He lit one and drew the smoke to the back of his throat, let it linger there, and slowly breathed it out through his nose and mouth. He felt his body begin to relax. As he was about to bring the cigar to his lips again, he heard a muffled squeak somewhere above his head. It was the kind of sound bedsprings might make.

  Very quietly, taking his weight on the balls of his feet, he walked to the stairs. Slowly he went up, keeping to the outside of the steps where they were less likely to creak, up the staircase and along the carpeted hall to the guest bedroom.

  The door was open. Sarah stood by the bed, her back to the door. She was supporting Cohn in a sitting position. She had removed the adhesive tape from his mouth, untied the electrical wire from his wrists and ankles, but she was having trouble rousing him from his drugged sleep. His eyelids, thick and puffy, drooped like heavy curtains.