Mr. Mani (11 page)

Indeed, it proved to be an unusual and memorable visit, not only because of the lovely presents that the grandfather brought, but even more so, because of the warmth he displayed toward Hagar and her mother and the interest he took in their surroundings. Upon hearing, for example, that the grave of Ben-Gurion was in the kibbutz of Sdeh Boker some, twenty kilometers away, he insisted on seeing it and was accompanied by Ya'el.

Their trip there and back took longer than expected, and when they returned to the kibbutz that evening Hagar noticed a new glow in her mother's face. As soon as Mr. Mani drove off, she demanded to know what had happened. Although taken aback, Ya'el was forced to admit that she found Roni's grandfather quite attractive, even if he did come from an unfamiliar world.

Two weeks later Mr. Mani arrived again, dressed in black as was his custom with a thin red tie. This time he asked Ya'el to take a trip to Mitzpeh Ramon, because he wished to see the famous canyon there.

Their excursion, which was even longer than the previous one, brought them closer together. On their way back indeed, although she tried making light of it, Ya'el mustered the courage to ask the judge whether there had been any thought of suicide in his mind at the time of Hagar's visit to Jerusalem in December 1982. While he did not seem surprised by the question, which he in fact appeared to have anticipated, Mr. Mani answered it vaguely, almost as if it concerned someone else. In practically the same breath he mentioned that Hagar's behavior during those three days had seemed rather odd to him, although perhaps it had to do with her being in Jerusalem by herself for the first time. Once back in the kibbutz, he hurried to set out for Jerusalem and would not even stay for a cup of coffee.

Nevertheless, Mr. Mani maintained his ties with the Shilohs, and after his son Efrayim went to London for his doctorate, he regularly began coming in his place. Once every few weeks he would appear, a genteel man always dressed in dark clothes. After taking his grandson for a walk on the bare, tawny hills around the kibbutz, he would sit with the two women on their front lawn and tell them about his family or some court case while the toddler ran in and out among them. These conversations never touched on politics or social issues, about which he either had no clear opinions or preferred to keep the ones he had to himself, even though he was always curious to hear those of others. And yet as friendly and “judicially attentive” as he was, Ya'el soon realized that she must be patient and not expect any quick “romantic” developments. Fortunately, he did not mind the arid landscape. On the contrary, he often went hiking in it with her and seemed to relish the desert views.

When Hagar and her mother found out that Mr. Mani was driving to the kibbutz via the West Bank, along the road from Jerusalem to Hebron, they sought to talk him out of it. Mr. Mani, however, insisted that there was no need to take the long way to Beersheba, since the route through Hebron was perfectly safe and the villagers along it were peaceful. Once, at some gas station, he related, they had even tried selling him a horse.

Nevertheless, in the early autumn of 1987, a large rock was thrown at the judge's car as he drove through Dir-el-Mana, a village some twenty kilometers south of Hebron. That evening he confessed to Ya'el that it would be wiser to stop coming via Hebron, even though he felt drawn to that route.

Heraklion, Crete
4 to 7
P.M
Tuesday, August 1, 1944

EGON BRUNER
Twenty-two years old. Born in 1922 on an estate near Flansburg, in the north German district of Schleswig-Holstein, to Werner Sauchon and Mariette Bruner.

Admiral Werner Sauchon (b. 1861) was one of the most highly lauded German officers in the First World War, in which he served with special distinction in the great Baltic Sea battles of 1914. In 1916 he and his wife Andrea lost their only son Egon on the Western Front, in the trenches of Verdun. At first they considered adopting an infant born to a family relation of theirs, but to their great disappointment, the child died soon after birth. Despairing of any other solution, they decided jointly, after much debate, that an orphaned young servant girl named Mariette Bruner, whose parents had worked on the Sauchon estate for many years, should secretly bear the admiral a child. It was agreed that the offspring would maintain ties with its mother and bear her name as her child out-of-wedlock, but that it would be raised by the Sauchons as a “candidate for adoption”—which, should it “prove worthy,” would be recognized as their heir at the age of twenty-one.

When Egon was a year old, his mother Mariette left the estate and moved to Hamburg, where she eventually married Werner Raiman, the director of a proletarian theater, by whom she had a second child. Egon grew up on his father's estate and was encouraged to call his father and his father's wife “Grandfather” and “Grandmother,” or more affectionately, “Opapa” and “Oma.” He studied both with private tutors who were brought to the house and at a nearby village school. For the most part, his schooling was supervised by his “grandmother” Andrea, who devoted herself to making it as close as possible to the excellent education received by her beloved son killed in World War I. Egon was a slim, rather nearsighted, blond boy of average height who showed a clear preference for the liberal arts. When he was young, he was sent to Hamburg during school vacations to stay with his mother and stepfather, but after the death of Admiral Sauchon in 1935, when Werner Raiman ran afoul of the Nazi police in Hamburg and the Raimans moved to a village in Bavaria, Egon's contact with his mother was greatly reduced.

In 1940, at the age of eighteen, Egon was called up by the Wehrmacht and inducted into the navy at the request of his grandmother, who wished him to carry on the family tradition. Because of his poor eyesight, he was sent to a medic's course at a naval base in Hamburg. After completing the course in early 1941, however, he was not posted to a naval vessel, because starting in March of that year, plans for the impending invasion of Russia led to a redeployment of forces in which many sailors and naval officers, who had been relatively inactive, were transferred to the infantry. In April 1941, once again on his grandmother's intervention, Egon was posted as a medic with the 7th Alpine Division based near Nürnberg, and in May he was attached to the 3rd Brigade, then being augmented in preparation for action in the Balkans. On May 16 he flew with the brigade to Athens, from where he was parachuted into Crete with the special task force of General Student in the second wave of the German airborne invasion that took place on Tuesday afternoon, the twentieth of May. Although Egon's unit suffered extremely high casualties and was evacuated to Germany several weeks after Crete's conquest, Egon remained behind on the island with its occupation garrison. In the laconic postcards he wrote to his grandmother, he promised to explain the circumstances of this development when he came home on leave, but his first furlough, which was scheduled for April 1942, was postponed because he ceded his place to a comrade who wished to get married in Germany. A second leave, in January 1943, was canceled in the wake of the disaster in Stalingrad, and Egon did not set out for home until April 1944, when he flew in a military transport plane to Salonika and joined a northbound convoy there. After the latter was attacked by Greek partisans and forced to return to its base, however, he decided to forego the journey to Germany and returned to Crete on a Greek ship. His infrequent letters did not reach his grandmother either, because, from 1942 on, Crete was lumped by the military censors together with the Eastern front and much mail from there was never delivered. Egon himself, on the other hand, received all his grandmother's letters and even an occasional letter from his mother. He was also sent the copies of Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey
that he requested, as well as a history of ancient Greece, which arrived via navy general staff headquarters. In late July 1944 he was informed that his grandmother Andrea was planning to visit him—and indeed, she arrived on the first of August in a light aircraft that flew directly from Athens and landed at Heraklion Airport early that afternoon.

 

ANDREA SAUCHON
Born in 1870 in Lübeck, the daughter of a Protestant minister named Kurtmaier. She graduated nursing school in Hamburg in 1894 and went to work in a military hospital, where she met the naval officer Werner Sauchon, who dropped by frequently to visit some sailors of his who had been wounded in a naval exercise. They were married in 1896 and took up residence in the officers' barracks of the imperial navy, and toward the end of that year their only son Egon was born. Once Werner had risen through the ranks, the Sauchons moved to the family estate in Holstein, where Egon was raised. With the outbreak of the world war, Egon was called to the colors and sent to the Western Front after a short period of basic training. He was only twenty when he was killed. His death affected Andrea more severely than it did her husband, who was involved in fighting the war, in which he served with great merit and won the highest decorations. However, when Werner Sauchon retired from active service after the German defeat and the Versailles Peace Treaty, he too began to feel the enormity of his loss. Before long the bereaved parents started looking for a surrogate son, which they found in Egon Bruner, who was conceived in 1921 in mutual agreement and trust. To spare his beloved wife the slightest embarrassment, the admiral insisted that the boy bear his mother's name until the age of twenty-one. Although Andrea was over fifty when the second Egon was born, she devoted herself to him like a young mother while making sure he kept in touch with Mariette, who left the estate amicably a year after her son's birth. Andrea herself was quite content to be called “Grandmother” by the boy.

The Sauchons regarded the Nazi rise to power with a mixture of curiosity and mild sympathy, believing that the situation in Germany could not fail to improve if law and order were imposed. After her husband's death in 1935, Egon's upbringing became Andrea's sole responsibility. She kept in close contact with his unit when he was inducted into the navy in 1940 and received regular reports on his progress from the base commander. When she heard that sailors were being transferred to the infantry in advance of the planned invasion of Russia, she used her influence to arrange for Egon's posting to a crack paratroop unit. As a result, however, Andrea, whose connections in the infantry were not as good as those in the navy, lost contact with her grandson for a long period. And yet as distressed as she was by this, she was thrilled to hear that Egon had taken part in the daring conquest of Crete in May 1941. His participation in this battle, she felt, in some way made up for the first Egon's death at Verdun and she could hardly wait for her adopted hero to come home. But Egon did not return to Germany with the 7th Paratrooper Division and remained with the occupation force in Crete, from where his postcards, starting with the winter of 1942, were almost secretively brief. And yet although this made her long to see him even more, she was forced to conclude, after vainly waiting for him three times, that he looked forward to their meeting less than she did. Nevertheless, she wrote to him more than ever and sent him the Greek history and the Homer that he had asked for. It seemed most odd to her that he had stayed in Crete with a rear-line unit instead of moving on with his old brigade, which was now fighting in the East. In the summer of 1944, after numerous German setbacks and the Allied invasion of Normandy had stricken her with the fear that she might never see him again, she used all her connections in the high command to have him recalled to Germany for the coming last stand on its soil. However, although she succeeded in having a transfer request issued by a ranking commander in the Berlin theater, the order vanished in bureaucratic channels on its way to Crete. Now too, though, Andrea Sauchon refused to give up. Taking the initiative again, she organized a group of war widows and wives of high naval officers who had fought with her husband and petitioned the general staff to allow them to visit Athens and its historical sites before these were “returned to the enemy.” Her stubbornness, her resourcefulness, and above all, the renown of the name Sauchon, crowned her efforts with success and the elderly women set out across Europe for Greece, where they successfully toured Athens and its environs. A photograph of them standing among the columns of the Acropolis even appeared on the front page of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
Andrea's real destination, however, was not Athens but Crete, where she intended to deliver Egon's transfer order personally. And so, when her traveling companions returned to Germany, she remained in the Greek capital and persuaded its military governor to fly her to Heraklion in a light craft. Twenty-four hours before her take-off, a wireless message arrived on the island announcing the distinguished old lady's arrival. Naturally, she was greatly excited by the prospect of seeing her “grandson” again after their three years' separation. He, for his part, knew nothing about the signed order in her pocket.

Her half of the conversation is missing.

***

—And even though I know you're tired, because how could you not be, dearest Grandmother, no, not even if you had steel in your veins, and I'm sure that you do—why, if anyone doubted it, this astounding journey of yours across Europe is proof enough!—yes, even though I know you're tired, I'm afraid I have to insist. And so before answering all the details of all the questions you've brought with you from so far away, some of which you've asked already and some of which you haven't yet, I must insist, dearest Grandmother, that you come with me right now, just as you are, in your marvelous traveling outfit and your boots. Don't think I wasn't thrilled to see them the minute you stepped off the plane, your hiking boots from the Schistan Forest! How clever of you it was to wear them. There's the wife of a military man for you! O most wonderful Grandmother, what a big hug I'd give you if only everyone weren't looking, because we don't want to do anything improper. Please, then, let me insist, before we do anything else, on taking you just as you are, in the same high spirits with which we started off this fabulous, this most incredible, this absolutely fateful meeting between us, here in this place and at this time, yes, fateful is the word, to the top of that hill right above us...