The Testament (21 page)

We parted at dawn. From the Old City, opening up, came an unexpected sound, as of a tent canvas being brutally ripped apart—then a long silence followed by other sounds: doors slamming, shutters squeaking. A mule driver and his recalcitrant mule. A water carrier. Aromas of baked goods and of vegetables. The man sidling along the wall—is he a watchman returning home, a criminal? A mother’s strident cry: “Ahmad, are you coming?” And a child answering, “Coming, coming.”

I left Jerusalem intending to return, but had to change my plans. Instead, I went to Jaffa, to a noisy, crowded café where “Wolfe’s lost cousin” was supposed to single me out. I tried hard not to look like a tourist, but I probably did anyway.

Surprise: the “cousin” was a girl. A
sabra
of Oriental background, she was quiet, simply dressed, with a round face, flat nose, brown hair and black eyes.

“Ahuva,” she said, introducing herself. “Call me Ahuva.”

We swallowed strong, bitter coffee and went out to take a turn around the market, an ideal place to shake off any inspector with the absurd idea of tailing me.

“I’ve an envelope for you,” I said.

“Not here.”

As in a cheap novel, she led me to a shady hotel—even shadier than the one in Paris. I rented a room there for several hours. The obsequious porter handed me the key with a knowing leer. Once in the room, we drew the curtains. I double-locked the door.

“Now,” said Ahuva, “show me what you have for me, comrade.” She squinted while talking, as if to make herself look more severe. “Well, comrade?”

I handed her the envelope containing the money. She slipped it inside her blouse. “Count it,” I said.

“I trust you.”

“Count it, I tell you.”

She pulled the envelope out of her blouse, opened it and counted. Mission accomplished. We could say goodbye, but Ahuva advised against it.

“That fellow downstairs,” she said. “What’ll he think of you? And of me? We’d better be careful and remain up here at least an hour, to … to make believe.”

Was that an invitation?

“Let’s talk,” she said.

I started questioning her about the situation, the future, the Party, relations with the Zionists, the Arabs. Less educated than Inge, she expressed herself more primitively but better. She burned with a somber, mysterious flame which I found irresistible. Had she made one gesture, I would have forgotten Sheina and Paris; I would have stayed in Palestine. I was ready to break with Europe, ready to fling myself into a new adventure, a new love. But there was no gesture, no word of encouragement. She undoubtedly had a boyfriend. Or else I was not her type. She answered my questions, asked her own, like a good comrade-in-arms; nothing more.

At the end of an hour, or two, or three, I knew the essentials about her. Her thirst for brotherhood, her ideal of justice had led her to a kibbutz. Then, under the influence of a friend, a greater desire for a vaster brotherhood, a loftier ideal of a more universal justice, she had left. A Party member, she maintained the liaison between certain of its Jewish and Arab sections. What did she think of the tensions agitating the country? She was not entirely pessimistic.

“The English are sowing hatred, but the soil is arid: it doesn’t take. At the opportune moment, Jews and Arabs,
led by the Party, will unite in a common front against them.”

“You don’t see any Jewish bloodshed ahead, Ahuva?”

“No bloodshed—neither Jewish nor Arab: for me, Jewish and Arab blood are the same.”

Nobody could have foreseen that ten weeks later, during the bloody riots in Hebron, she herself would be attacked, raped and murdered by a band of Arab marauders who knew nothing of the Communist ideal of human brotherhood.

But that I was to learn years later. In Soviet Russia, I met a Jewish comrade from Palestine and asked for news of Ahuva.

“Ahuva? Don’t know. Maybe she goes under another name. Describe her to me.”

I did, and he cried out, “Of course—you’re talking about Tziona! Didn’t you know that …?”

I didn’t know. There were many things I didn’t know. But one thing I did know, and wrote about to my father: From my trip to the Holy Land, I brought back a spark taken from its flame, a star from its sky, a teardrop from its memory.

I did not say all the prayers I should have, and certainly not every day, but in spite of everything, my father would have been pleased with his messenger.

There was one cloud, however. I forgot it a moment ago; but I must face it. Now I can speak of it without fear. Here, in this enclosure that serves you as temple and altar, Citizen Magistrate, I am no longer afraid. Here, the victim lays claim to his own truth. What I speak of has to do with old, old, forgotten events; ancient history. It has to do, if I many remind you, with your predecessors and mine.

Where were you at the time? What were you doing?
Western newspapers everywhere were waging a campaign against the spectacular trials (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin) unfolding in the Soviet Union. They were shouting about the judicial scandal, the mockery of justice, the gross, indecent lies … as they are doing now in connection with my case.

At Pinsker’s request—amusing, isn’t it?—I put the press in its place. I published article after article proclaiming my faith in Soviet justice. I ridiculed the indignation of the
Pariser Haint
, I pilloried and denounced its moralizing sermons: “So, you take up the defense of your opponents? Their fate suddenly preoccupies you, you shed bitter tears for men whom, only yesterday, you cursed and consigned to damnation. Shame on you, gentlemen—your hypocrisy is matched only by your blindness!” It was a brawl to end all brawls. I shouted as hard as our enemies. Being a novice at such things, I was convinced of the guilt of the accused—especially since they admitted it themselves. The great heroes of the Revolution would not behave like traitors if they had not been traitors. Torture? Humbug. They had stood up to the Okhrana, resisted the Siberian prisons and defied the Tsar’s torturers; they would have done as much now if they were innocent.

Paul did not share my conviction. I can tell you now, now that he’s no longer alive. Having lived in the Soviet Union, he was better informed about the secret, hidden life there. In his day-to-day relations with us, his collaborators, he masked his worries and his perplexity. But sometimes they came through. I would find him slumped at his desk, staring into space, looking distraught. The helplessness of this giant, usually so full of good humor, became unbearable; I would withdraw, closing the door behind me.

He was not fooled, Paul Hamburger.

One evening I surprised him in his room. I had dropped in just like that, without telephoning, thinking that if he
was busy, he’d tell me. He was alone, a bottle of cognac in front of him on the table.

“I’m down in the dumps,” he says without looking at me. I don’t respond; I don’t know what he wants to hear me say.

“I am in a monstrous depression,” he repeats. “And you?”

“Not yet.”

I sit down.

“I feel like getting drunk,” says Paul. “And you?”

“Not yet.”

With his fingers he caresses the bottle, turning it round and round without opening it.

“It’s funny,” he says wearily. “I feel like getting drunk, but I don’t feel like drinking.”

“With me it’s the opposite. I feel like drinking but not like getting drunk.”

As a rule, he is too generous not to laugh at my jokes, even if they don’t deserve it. This time he just shrugs his shoulders.

“I don’t understand,” he says after a long silence. “You—do you understand?”

“Understand what?” I say, knowing perfectly well what.

He gives me a fixed, stern look, and insists on an answer.

“Yes or no—answer: Do you understand?”

“I think I do. The Soviet Union is not paradise. There are some good people there and some rats. The good people deserve respect—the traitors, punishment.”

“So you think the accused are all guilty, is that it? Rats, traitors and morons?”

He has raised his voice; I begin to feel nervous, but I recite my lesson: “Why shouldn’t they be? They’ve confessed.”

Paul studies me with a kind of horror mixed with condescension I had never seen in him before.

“There’s a big difference between you and me. You’re
too young to understand. There’s this difference of age between us, which is expressed by another difference no less essential than the first:
I know.
”

“You know what?”

He makes a gesture as if to pour himself a glass of cognac, but doesn’t. “It’s a game, Paltiel. A cruel and terrible game, but a game nevertheless.”

“So what? One more reason for you not to get upset. Is the game cruel? Well, one day it’ll be over.…”

“Not for the accused, Paltiel. And I know the accused. And the accusers too, I know them all, for heaven’s sake.”

He gets up, paces about the room, sits down again, seizes the bottle and says, “The worst of it is that either the one
or
the other have betrayed the Revolution. Either way, it’s horrible and hopeless.”

I am hypnotized by the bottle Paul is turning in his hands. He looks at it, but doesn’t see it; he sees something else, something my eyes cannot grasp.

That evening he speaks to me more frankly, more openly than ever before. Sheina must be getting impatient—I told her I would be away for just an hour—but I can’t help it; she will
feel
, she will
know
it was urgent for me to come here, to remain here. After all, I cannot abandon a friend who needs to unburden himself, offer himself. As a rule Paul is guarded about his private life. We, his colleagues, know no more about him than on the first day we met him. Where does he come from? What is his background? Is he married? What makes him sad or happy? All I know is that he is highly placed in the apparatus; that he performs some more or less public functions and others that are entirely secret. What kind of man is he in private life? Where is his Achilles’ heel? For the first time, he is opening up. And I shrink back on my chair, make myself tiny, afraid he’ll stop if he sees I am there in the flesh in front of him.

Wolfe, Petya, Paul: the evolution of a given name, the
flowering of a destiny. That is what I learn. It takes my breath away. So Paul and I are linked by the same origins. Wolfe: a Jewish child from eastern Galicia, educated in poverty, his conscience inflamed by rebellion. Fervent, dangerous friendships in Vienna, where a chance meeting catapults him into the stormy world of conspiracy. Finished, the past with its Sabbath songs; finished, the warm household where a widower surrounded by six hungry children glorified the heavens and God’s grace. Finished, the Hasidic kingdom where masters and disciples invented reasons to hope, to believe, to beg for faith by singing.… Long live the Revolution, long live the World Revolution!

Then came special courses, illegal trips, intelligence training, familiarization with the closed system of the Komintern, and then of the Military Intelligence abroad, the Fourth Department. Now called Petya, Wolfe made his way into the nerve center of the Party, the one connected to the outside world. The Revolution was young and pure. Like Petya. The most ambitious dreams seemed possible and necessary. No more hatred among nations, no more oppression, no more ruling class, no more profit, no more hunger, no more shame: life was an offering of friendship, a thrilling call to solidarity. Petya took up with Tartars and Uzbeks, fell in love with a White Russian then left her for a Spaniard. This universe in flux where Jews and non-Jews embraced one another, where all cultures are equal, where all religious beliefs are mocked, this universe made him proud and strong. Gratefully he accepted his first mission to the West: Paul, messenger of the Revolution, went to Germany invested with unlimited powers. His was the right to destroy everything in order to rebuild everything, to abolish everything, to make a clean slate; he considered himself authorized, indeed commanded, to dethrone kings and gods, and in their place, to elevate mankind, a frightened and hungry mankind.

Wolfe, Petya, Paul: the history of a legend in three phases, the history of an ideal in three movements.…

As he talks, the rhythm of his speech gains in intensity. He describes his village and its artisans, his father’s helplessness in the face of helmeted, booted gendarmes demanding bribes; he recalls the last time he observed the Day of Atonement or attended a Seder; he flares up as he relives his encounters with the Just Men of the Revolution. Usually so lucid, so restrained, he expresses himself now like a drunkard. He becomes intoxicated in front of me; he is getting drunk without drinking.

I feel closer to him than ever before.

“The powerful, cleansing breath of the World Revolution, you felt that in those years,” says Paul. “It was the dawn. The birth of a movement whose breadth equaled its depth. We made it a point of honor to throw all the capitalist games—and everything there is a game—into the garbage can. Rank, titles, distinctions—we didn’t give a damn about them. You could visit anyone without having to announce yourself. Trotsky, for instance: I saw him at the War Commissariat without even going through his secretary. He was still our hero then—not yet a traitor. He transfixed me with his piercing, friendly eyes: ‘Well, comrade, tell me, have you read a good novel lately?’ I was flabbergasted: A novel? Me? In those times? The world was on fire, the masses in upheaval, and Trotsky expected me to talk about literature! Oh, how proud I was. There, I thought, was the real Communist humanity, a simple Communist meets one of the armed prophets, one of the chief actors of the Revolution, and what do they talk about? A novel I have not read, for the simple reason that I never could allow myself to read any novel. I told him that. He asked me how I spent my time. Courses in theory, political training, practical work, languages, propaganda.… He did not hide his dissatisfaction: ‘I’ll have to pass a word to the people in charge,’ he said, shaking his
head. ‘We began our career with reading; on this point there’s no reason for you to be different.’ Whereupon he launched into an astounding analysis of the revolutionary dynamics in literature, quoting novels and plays, with some parentheses for music and the arts. It was the finest lecture I’ve ever been lucky enough to attend. And all that while he was at the head of the Red Army.…”