St. Urbain's Horseman (32 page)

After lunch Hod began to knock back one snifter of brandy after another. “One day,” he said to Jake, “I met a Spaniard in Beersheba. A rich man. He told me that in Madrid he was an anti-semite. He said he didn't believe these Jews would ever build a country so he thought he'd go and see for himself. Well, I've seen the country, he said, and it's marvelous. But you're not Jews here, you're different. The Jews in Spain would only fight for their families and their businesses. You're different here, he said.”

“If you run into him again,” Jake replied tightly, “tell him some of the Jews in Canada not only fought for their country and this one, they also fought for Spain. Like my cousin.”

On the long drive back to Tel Aviv, Jake feigned sleep. Finally, Elan dropped him outside the Garden Hotel.

“You're the fastidious one, aren't you, Hersh? You wonder why we have vulgar hotels and would finance exploitation films to be made by second-rate people. It's because we need the currency. We need it to survive.”

“Yes,” Jake said feebly, “I'm sure you're right,” and retiring to his bungalow, he combed through the thriller yet again and decided that with the help of a decent script, the right cast, it would be a good film, he would make it meaningful, and he wasn't taking it on merely because he was no longer a boy, as time and pride dictated he had to direct a film now.

Jake wakened resolved, even cheerful. Then Elan telephoned. “Your cousin,” he said, “went by the name of Yosef Ben Baruch here. He was a proper son-of-a-bitch, which shouldn't surprise me. His wife is on the kibbutz of Gesher Haaziv.”

Immediately after lunch, Jake hired a taxi and bounced across the coastal plain, through Haifa, and into the Upper Galilee to Gesher Haaziv, a kibbutz lodged in the hills hard by the Lebanese border, untroubled at the time except for smugglers bound for Acre with pork or hashish. He discovered Chava in the dining hall, a burly lady with frizzy black hair, lachrymose black eyes, and hairy legs. A two-gallon tin of pickles hooked under her broad arm, she shuffled from table to table, depositing exactly six pickles in each center plate for the evening's feast. The Passover
seder
.

“I'm your husband's cousin. I'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind.”

“Is he dead?”

“Not that I know of. But why do you say that?”

“Because I never hear from his family. I thought when he died there might be papers maybe. Something for our son.”

Zev was ten years old.

“Why would you need money on a kibbutz?”

“It's no life any more. I want to leave for the boy's sake.”

“Are you from … America?”

“Before Theresienstadt, I don't know where from,” she said, drifting off to another table with her pickles.

“The family sent money. They asked me to give it to you.”

“How much?”

Jake scratched his head. He cogitated. “A thousand dollars.”

“A thousand dollars?” She shrugged. “But they're so rich.”

“And a hundred dollars a month to help with support for the boy.”

“Would they give more?”

“No.”

“You try. You talk to them. I'll give you pictures of Zev to take back.”

They strolled to her cabin, which comprised three rooms, including a bedroom for Zev. On Gesher Haaziv, the children were no longer brought up communally but lived with their parents. “We had hoped this generation would be different. They would be saved the curse of a Yiddish momma, but it didn't work. Parents kept slipping off to the children's house with candies for their own. If one of them caught cold, the mother was immediately there. Jews,” she said plaintively.

There was a photograph of the Horseman on the mantelpiece, circa 1948. Cousin Joey was in uniform, astride a white stallion.

“He won the horse from the
mukhtar
's son. After a fight.”

Had she known him at the time, he asked.

“No, but I was familiar with the stories. He was one of those mixed up with Deir Yassin, a disaster for us. Some say he was even a ring leader, but who knows, he wouldn't talk about it.”

In April 1948, units of Etzel and the Stern Gang mounted an unprovoked attack on the quiescent Arab village of Deir Yassin, on the western fringe of Jerusalem. It was a calculated act of terrorism, meant to serve as a lesson. The Jewish Agency repudiated the massacre, but the Arabs were able to use it to justify their own atrocities.

“He turned up again in the third convoy into Jerusalem, the one that took such a battering at Bab el Wad. Some of the burned-out chassis have been left by the roadside, a reminder.”

“I've seen them.”

“It was the last convoy to get through. They brought chickens, eggs, and matzohs for Passover, but there was no hope of getting out of Jerusalem again. Yosef joined a unit fighting in the Old City. More trouble. This time with Neturei Karta. The orthodox from the orthodox, you know. They still don't recognize the state, it's an intrusion, they're waiting for the Messiah. One of their graybeards came to him, and said it was too much for the women and children, the shelling was awful. He wished to arrange a special truce with the Arabs to exclude their quarter from the fighting. Yosef said if the old bastard raised a white flag, he would shoot him. Just like that. There were maybe eight hundred orthodox women and children sheltering in the Yohanan ben Zakkai synagogue, with the Arabs just across the street. When the rabbis tottered out, carrying a white sheet between two poles, somebody shot from the Jewish lines, wounding one of them.”

The Horseman, who drank prodigiously, was disliked on Gesher Haaziv. He would disappear for three days at a time, sometimes even a week, on a bender in Acre, where he was thick with the Arabs in the marketplace. Afterwards, there was no doubt that he was involved with the hashish smugglers.

“What do you mean, afterwards?”

After the Kastner business, she meant.

Early in April 1944, Dr. Rudolph Kastner, a leader of the Hungarian Jewish community, established contact with
Hauptsturmführer
Wislicency of the
Sondereinsatzkommando
Eichmann and, under conditions unimaginably chilling and gruesome, negotiated to purchase the freedom of some 1,700 Jews for 1,600,000 dollars. Those ransomed had to be selected from 750,000 who were consequently not warned that they were bound for the ovens and so had no opportunity to resist or flee to the woods. Among the 1,700
saved were Kastner's relatives. Jews of substance and social importance were in preponderance.

After the war, Kastner settled in Israel. Years later an obsessed man took to the street corners of Jerusalem, brandishing a broadside that claimed Kastner was in fact a collaborator and his machinations had meant 750,000 Jews went unknowingly to their doom. And the Horseman, drunk in the dining hall of Gesher Haaziv, taunted the men, asking them what are you going to do about it, as if it was their affair. As if, like everyone else in the country, they were not torn by the accusations and the trial that ensued. Some taking Kastner to epitomize all that was corrupt in the
Judenräte
of Europe, others arguing that in an appalling time he saved as many as he could, and still others saying we can no longer comprehend what moved men to action then and it was time for silence.

Kastner won a Pyrrhic victory in the libel trial held in 1953, his name not so much cleared as clouded, and the Horseman, rising the next morning, ostensibly to drive a truck to the turkey farm, did not stop there. The truck was discovered abandoned in Acre and the Horseman was not seen in Gesher Haaziv again.

Kastner was completely cleared in another trial, held in 1957, but one night a few months later he was shot dead in the street by a Hungarian Jew.

“Now one minute,” Jake said. “You mean you have not seen or heard from him in all these years?”

“He comes to Israel from time to time, but never here. He left us for a year even before fifty-three, you know. He was in France for all of fifty-one.”

At Maison-Lafite, where, being a foreigner, he was not allowed a license as a horse trainer, and so worked illegally, as it were, his papers classifying him as a gentleman's jockey.

“Did he ever talk to you about the family? About Montreal?”

“When he was drunk. He said they were responsible for his father's death and his, almost.”

“He said that?”

She nodded.

“Were those his exact words? They were responsible for his death, almost?”

“It was so long ago. He was drunk. We were quarreling. Listen, people quarrel. Yosef would not allow me to apply for my German reparations money. Oh, he was a purist, that one! Such a purist! About some things …”

“What do you mean, some things?”

“Oh, taking money from the Germans, who did they rob it from in the first place if not us, this was not right, but collecting from his women …” she broke off, laughing dryly, sunken in bitterness.

“Why would women give him money?”

“Women. Husbands, fathers. Nobody has reason to be afraid any more. I burned every single letter. He hated your family, you know, and he was also a liar.”

“What letters did you burn?”

“Who are you snooping for, you have to know everything?”

“Nobody.”

“I have nothing against the Hershes and I'm very, very grateful for their help, if only it were more.”

“Yes, I understand. But did he say anything else? Please, it's frightfully important to me.”

“He was fond of saying that if the Hershes had been in the Old City, in forty-eight, they would have been the first to wave the white flag.”

“That's hardly fair.”

“Did I say it was fair? Fair. How old are you?”

“Thirty-three.”

“Tell me something you know in this life that's fair. Come. Go ahead.”

“Do you ever hear from him?”

“Postcards. Mostly on Zev's birthdays.”

She went on to say how when he was on one of his benders, more often than not he was washed up at the Kibbutz of the Survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, near Haifa, where they knew how to drink, and there was a museum and archives on the holocaust. Then Chava opened a dressing drawer, digging out a file. Among the postcards, Jake discovered yellowing newspaper and magazine photographs. Rosy-cheeked
gemütlich
Frau Goering going about her shopping on the Theatinerstrasse. The austere Von Papen family, the eldest boy named Adolph, posing on a leather chesterfield. “Sepp” Dietrich looking severe. There were also well-worn pages from a journal, describing the activities of Josef Mengele, philosophy student and chief doctor at Auschwitz, who lived quietly in Munich until 1951, when he fled over the Reschenpass-Merano route to Italy, with the help of ODESSA, and from there to Spain, then Buenos Aires, and when the Perón regime collapsed in 1955, to Paraguay.

DECLARATION.
I, the undersigned, Dr. Nyiskizli Miklos, former prisoner of the KZ. Number 8450, declare that this work was drawn up by me in strict accordance with reality, and without the slightest exaggeration, in my capacity as eyewitness and involuntary participant in the work at Auschwitz
.

As chief physician of the Auschwitz crematoriums I drafted numerous affidavits of dissection and forensic medicine findings which I signed with my tattoo number. I sent these documents by mail, countersigned by my superior, Dr. Mengele, to the Berlin-Dahlem address of the Institut für rassenbiologische anthropologische Forschungen …

As Chava droned on, complaining about the cost of finding even a modest apartment in Tel-Aviv, he read:

Dr. Mengele – the medical selector – makes a sign. They line up again in two groups. The column on the left includes the aged, the crippled, the feeble, and women and children under fourteen. The column on the right is made up of able-bodied men and women …

Chava brewed tea. She poured it.

Everybody is inside. A hoarse command rings out: S.S. and Sonderkommando leave the room. They obey and count off. The doors swing shut and without the lights are switched off. At that very instant the sound of a car is heard. It is a de luxe model furnished by the international Red Cross. An S.S. officer and a S.D.G. (Sanitätsdienstgefreiter) hold four green sheet-iron canisters. He advances across the grass, where, every thirty yards, short concrete pipes jut out above the ground. Having donned his gas mask …

“Look,” Chava said, “here it is. A postcard that came only six weeks ago.”

From Munich.

“He's a big singer, didn't you know?” She laughed for the first time. “Jesse Hope, Western Music & Folk Songs.”

H
ORSEMAN, HORSEMAN
.

Unable to sleep, thrashing in bed, Jake saw him, in his mind's eye, cantering on a magnificent Pleven stallion. Galloping, thundering. Yosef Ben Baruch. Son of Baruch the longshoreman, slot-machine peddler, backwoods strongman, sailor of the China Seas, prospector and whisky runner. Baruch who dared to hurl curses at the
zeyda
. “Jews, I'm here. Jews, it's Baruch, your brother's home.” Who bred Joey in a miner's shack in Yellowknife. Joey, who demanded in the dining hall of Gesher Haaziv as he had once asked on St. Urbain, What are you going to do about it?

Jake contacted Elan early the next morning. “I'm leaving today,” he said.

“But I have things laid out for you. I thought you were staying at least for another week.”

“I've decided not to do the film.”

“What?”

“It's a long story and you wouldn't understand anyway.”

Instead of flying directly to London, Jake caught a plane to Rome, and continued on to Munich from there. Nancy, to his astonishment, was more relieved than upset. When he phoned her from the airport, she said, “I never thought you'd go through with it. Something better will come along, don't worry.”