Mr. Mani (17 page)

—I mean, Grandmother ... that they were Jews ... some sort of Jews...

—Because it all added up.

—That's so. But still...

—That's so. I had never seen a Jew in my life ... you had never even wanted to discuss them with me ... but still, none of us can help thinking about them all the time...

—Well, part of the time, anyway.

—I don't know. The thought began to obsess me. I actually felt indignant...

—At the thought that I might have been tricked out of fighting by Jews...

—No, none of them wore hats.

—No, no, they didn't even have those little braids behind their ears. Don't you think I'm familiar with all those photographs from the encyclopedia too? Anything like that would have put me on guard ... No, Grandmother, these were ordinary people, that was the whole point. They were perfectly ordinary. But if you've finished drinking your tea, let's head on for the next station ... we don't want to get caught by the dark...

—No, Grandmother, I'm not skipping any of it, and neither are you. You'll never have another chance to be in such a wonderful place. In the darkness that is about to descend in Germany, on all of us, this sweet light flowing to the sea will always be a precious memory, and you'll at least be able to comfort yourself with the thought that for more than three whole years it was ours...

—No, it's not far, I promise ... one or two hundred meters, that's all, and it's an easy, pleasant climb. It's crucial not to miss the view east.

—Yes, for the sake of my story, only for it. If you had come a few months ago, I wouldn't have bothered to bring you up here. I would have given you some goggles, put you in the sidecar of my motorcycle, and crisscrossed the island with you, making sure to show you every inlet and mountain, every monastery and temple. But you put off coming here too long, and now this island is slipping through our fingers. Soon we'll have only the flag flying from the military government building to call our own ... and so please, Grandmother, hold onto the loop on my belt and let me pull you gently upward...

—Easy does it...

—In a minute ... I promise you...

—Everything. I won't keep a thing from you.

—True

—No. It's important. Listen. I began to put two and two together ... all kinds of things that you felt too, or else why would my story have made you think of Jewish ideas and scholars...

—Exactly. It was the same with me. In the middle of one night I woke up from my sleep and said, but they must have been Jews ... which depressed me terribly...

—Maybe depressed isn't the right word. Maybe upset or disappointed would be better. I couldn't believe it ... here too? Even on a wonderful, special island like this, between the sun and the sea, among all the prehistoric antiquities? Did they have to get here before us too? And just how did they get here anyway?

—Because, Grandmother, it was elementary logic that if two Greeks rose early on the first day of the fighting to load a mule with bags of sugar and flour and spices and canned goods, they were doing it to prepare a hideout. And why would two Greeks prepare a hideout unless they were Jews who knew, not only that we would win the battle, but exactly what they could expect once it was won...

—What they could not expect, Grandmother, was tender loving care.

—Yes, rumors of the clean sweep that had begun in Eastern Europe had reached us here too. And then I thought, Grandmother, of how terrified they were when they first saw me, and of how quickly they chose to collaborate, and of how oddly eager the father was to offer himself as a hostage, and of how he stood there in that urn enthusiastically lecturing me about his fearless, guiltless ancient culture, getting history and prehistory all mixed up with each other ... to say nothing of his confession that he wasn't born in Crete but in some small, barbaric town in Asia whose name he didn't want to reveal ... and maybe, Grandmother, it was that secret, which he insisted on keeping to himself, that killed him in the end...

—In a minute ... I'll get to that too ... there are still more surprises for you...

—Well, Grandmother, the thought kept tormenting me that it was Jews who had gotten me into trouble, and that if anyone ever found out about it, I'd be in even worse trouble. And so I made up my mind that I wouldn't leave this island without finding out the truth and doing something about it if necessary ... and it was just then that Major Bruno Schmelling and his police force arrived in late November to bring our amateur army up to snuff—the first step toward which was moving the prison from that ridiculous museum to a larger, more private building that had lots of cellar space, such as that winery down there, no, there, more to your right, at the far end of that square...

—Yes ... the budding with the little windows...

—Exactly. Until a few years ago it was a large, active winery, but with Schmelling's arrival it became the central prison. Not, Grandmother, that it ever stopped pressing, fermenting, and distilling ... it just doesn't use grapes any more. Anyway, as I was on my way from the museum to the winery in a long line of prisoners, totally alone and forsaken, I was suddenly discovered, a fighting paratrooper, by a true German soldier—who, as soon as he heard that I had never had a trial and was serving an unfathomable sentence, took me aside and began questioning me. It didn't take him long to realize whom he was dealing with and to free me at once for restoration to my element, that is, to the Sixth Army on the Eastern Front—which, now that the weather had turned cold, was using up soldiers as a hungry fire burns wood. At which point I—and once again I plead guilty, Grandmother—hastened to ask for special consideration as an orphan and to be allowed to stay where I was...

—No, as a war orphan. I explained to him that my platoon had been wiped out, that the 3rd Brigade was demolished, and that Oberst Thomas Stanzler was dead, and I implored him to have me transferred to a normal, living unit instead of sending me on a wild-ghost chase to the East—which could be most simply and least time-consumingly done, I suggested, if I were attached to his own police force. After all, on such a wonderful island the police must be wonderful too...

—Yes, Grandmother. Joining the police was my own idea.

—But why a betrayal? That's going a bit far, Grandmother!

—But how was I dishonoring our good name? How can you say such a thing? To say nothing of the fact that no one here even knew I was connected to that name...

—Don't the police fight too, in their fashion?

—To be honest, it's not quite the same ... but still ... in their fashion...

—But it
is
combat ... in a minute you'll understand...

—Schmelling may not have had the authority to attach me to him, but he didn't hesitate to use the authority that he didn't have, with the full confidence of an officer in the secret service who has temporarily come in from the cold and will soon go back out to it...

—I really don't know. Maybe he took a liking to me, Grandmother, or maybe it was the very weirdness of my story. Perhaps he thought that my propensity for abstract thinking could be useful to the police, if only to raise their cultural level. But in fact, Grandmother, he was probably only doing what any sensible officer would have done, which was, spotting a certified medic with his equipment intact, to grab him immediately. My stretcher and knapsack were located in the warehouse of the museum with my name, serial number, and date and reason for imprisonment neatly written on them ... and in that same knapsack, dearest Grandmother, which I had never thought to see again, I discovered, besides some rather moldy battle rations from the month of May, the forgotten passbook that I had filched from Father Mani's overcoat before he gave up his ghostly ghost. And believe me, Grandmother, although I have subsequently checked no end of passbooks and birth certificates on this island and become such a great expert on them that Schmelling jokingly calls me his “birth-and-identity sergeant,” no document has ever given me the pleasure that I got from that one, because I saw at once, Grandmother, what a brilliant hunch I had had.

—No, his kind of passbook didn't say if you were or weren't a Jew, but it did state the date and place of birth, which is how I discovered the name of that barbaric little city in Asia that our Mr. Mani was born in...

—Guess.

—Oh, come on, Grandmother, it's not that hard...

—But it's a name you know well. In fact, before you joined the death-of-God crowd, you even used to sing it now and then...

—How stubborn you can be, Grandmother ... suddenly you don't know or remember anything...

—Baghdad? Why on earth Baghdad? Since when did you ever sing hymns to Baghdad?

—No...

—It's so obvious, Grandmother ... guess again!

—But what else could it be but Jerusalem, Grandmother! What else could it be?

—Of course I knew that. It didn't mean he had to be a Jew. He could have been an Arab or a Greek or a Turk or an Englishman or anyone else born in Jerusalem. But I also knew that these weren't our real enemies, that at most they were obstacles in our way, whereas the Jews were the underlying reason for the whole enterprise, the bull's-eye flickering behind every target in this war. And so, Grandmother, how could I have sat quietly a minute longer when I was already contaminated by my contact with them? If there were any Manis still left on the island, I had to find out who they were, because how could we possibly purify ourselves in the ancient womb of our ancestors, as old Gustav Koch desired, with a lot of beastly Jews running around and demanding with their typical insolence to be our partners here too, to share our most primeval myths...

—
I
am? I am, Grandmother?

—Maybe it's you who are...

—Yes, you back home in the fatherland. You're the really crazy ones, drunk on your army that went galloping off to Moscow... No, there was nothing crazy about me ... all I wanted, all I still want, is the salvation of Germany...

—I'll walk slower. Just hold on tight.

—No, Grandmother, there's no turning back now. That would be depressingly defeatist ... and it's such a nice path ... the air is so invigorating ... we've already come most of the way, and best of all, we have some spectacular views still ahead of us...

—Jerusalem?

—From here?

—No ... we can't see that far, ha ha ... that's a good one...

—No. Even though between Crete and Palestine there's only a smooth stretch of sea that the ancients crossed without difficulty, it's still too far from here to see Jerusalem, not even with eyes as sharp as yours ... No, my dear grandmother Andrea, my sights are more modest, and more faithful to my slowly unfolding tale—all I want to point out to you in this panorama of pinkening light is what was once the house of the Manis, which is the same house that I arrived at a few days after my release from prison, riding free and easy on an army motorcycle like the one you once refused to let me buy with my savings, despite all my tears and pleas to you...

—Too young? Still? Well, perhaps ... but it's odd how my youth seems to have evaporated all at once. Most likely, without noticing, we stuffed it into our kitbags in boot camp along with our civilian shirts, and it simply faded away there. You won't find any youngsters here, only soldiers, whose helmets and battle gear make them all look the same age in life and in death. But here, take a look down there ... farther east, Grandmother, farther east, down in those vineyards ... even if you don't see it, take my word for it, their house is hidden in there, along the road from Knossos to Ios. It was the first house that I entered, Grandmother, as a conquering soldier in the Year of our Lord 1941. Since then, Grandmother, I've entered many houses uninvited, turned closets and beds upside down, broken into drawers, made sieves out of mattresses with my bayonet, and learned that if I want to keep my sanity, I mustn't be too polite, which means that as soon as I kick in the door I blame whoever is on its other side and march firmly, with no may-I's or apologies, into rooms that enrage me by the very presence of closets, drawers, pantries, and even walls, as if a conquered house were expected to be a single, undivided space that you could charge through at the drop of a hat. But that winter evening, which was caressed by a thin, fragrant rain, I was still a novice, Grandmother, and so I stepped gently up to the door, even wiping the mud off my boots, and murmured “Excuse me” to the young woman who let me in without even recognizing me, not just because it was dark in the house, or because I had exchanged my paratrooper's uniform for a police outfit, or because I was wearing glasses instead of a helmet, but because on that night back in May, apparently, she hadn't realized that I was a human being with a soul and mind of my own and had simply taken me for a military dragon that lunged at her from the depths of the Labyrinth and left her husband's father stone dead. But her husband, Mr. Mani Junior, who hurried into the room when he heard my voice, still dragging his little boy after him like a big kangaroo whose pouch was ripped, recognized me at once, Grandmother, and all that terrible anxiety flowed back into him, as if he saw the ghost of his father spread-eagled on my back with its passbook in its hand. And for a moment, Grandmother, I was on the verge of shooting him just like I shot the flock of goats, because I was still innocent enough to believe, back in 1941, that fear was a sure sign of guilt. But although I still didn't know then that there is a fear that is pure, guiltless, and utterly sin-free, I controlled myself and turned to him without anger or threats, I just looked him straight in the eye and said very slowly in the simplest, easiest German I could think of, “So you are a Jew, sir...”

—Yes, Grandmother, without any of those cat-and-mouse tricks from the detective stories. Because not only didn't we share a common language in which to beat around the bush, I had decided in any case that direct shock tactics were the best way of showing him and his wife that I knew everything, even if I didn't yet know what to do about it. And then, Grandmother, Citizen Mani squared his shoulders, threw a desperate glance at his wife to see if she understood what was happening, looked brightly back at me, and said (I'll never know, Grandmother, if he thought it up on the spur of the moment, or if it was something he had prepared well in advance, perhaps on the morning he came across his father lying dead by those big urns, and had now finally found the occasion for), these were his very words, Grandmother, which came out in a kind of stammer: “I was Jewish, but I am not anymore ... I've canceled it...”