Needle in a Haystack (5 page)

He’s sitting on the sofa when she returns from her shower. She looks even more like Marisa than she did before, more everyday. He passes her the
mate
.

She nods her head. Perro gets up from his seat. From the sofa, Eva can see him preparing some food. She can’t understand what’s going on. After a while, Lascano comes back with two steaming plates of spaghetti in a tomato sauce and places them one across from the other on the wobbly coffee table. He goes back into the
kitchen, comes out with a bottle of wine, two glasses and cutlery, and leaves them all in a muddle on the table. He sits down, starts eating and signals for Eva to do the same. She dives in. The basic, simple food tastes delicious. Eva lingers over the flavours, feeling the nourishment bringing her strength back, and her body yearns for more. A sip of wine immediately puts colour in her cheeks. A sense of warmth and well-being awakens in her, until now but a distant memory, hidden between the folds of a desolate present. She wonders,
How have I ended up here?
Lascano makes the most of her being so distracted to stare at her. He feels like he’s reliving the first time he cooked for Marisa. The only thing missing is for her to say:

And for him to answer:

Normally, witty replies came to him hours or even days after the event, but not on that occasion, laughter springing forth as if a magic spell had been cast upon both of them. Lascano smiles sadly to himself, a gesture that doesn’t escape Eva’s attention, although she doesn’t understand it, nor feel the need to. There’s something happening here. She doesn’t know what it is, but she likes it, finds it comforting, it makes her feel at home. She doesn’t know why, but this man fills her with a sense of security. Very suddenly, Lascano gets to his feet and goes into the bedroom, then comes back again with a blanket which he throws next to her on the sofa.

He goes back into his room and closes the door. Eva remains still for a few moments. She hears some
movement in the bedroom. Then silence. Empty plates. She stands up. She picks up the dishes, goes into the kitchen, washes them; she has to do something. In the distance, machine guns rattle.

In his bed, Lascano begins to doze. Marisa smiles at him. He turns over. He slips his hand under his body, slowly, until it reaches his sleeping sex. He wakes it up, knowing, like a humming bird flying backwards, where to find Marisa, open and defenceless and selfless and needy and warm and hospitable and familiar, and inhabits her body as if it were a house, and he lets desire take control of him and his heart sinks and he cries, and in the distance machine guns rattle.

In Once, the Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires, after the shops have pulled down their shutters, the pavements overflow with left-over fabrics, rolls of cardboard and other unwanted material thrown out by the shop-keepers. Men, women and children dig through the waste, fishing out anything useful or anything that can be sold to the recycling plant for a few coins per kilo. Such enterprising families manage to survive by sifting through other people’s rubbish. Thus the police in the Seventh district receive their bribes not as protection money but for turning a blind eye to this practice.

Rich Jewish families have begun a slow but irreversible exodus: they keep their businesses in Once but prefer to live in Barrio Norte or Belgrano, districts of greater social prestige. The elderly are left behind, in once luxurious buildings of the Golden Age, the founders of the fortunes that now pay for huge flats overlooking Libertador Avenue, holidays in Punta del Este, imported cars and private education at supposed British schools. The younger generation never loses sleep worrying about how to scrimp and save; indeed they revel in flaunting their wealth. Children of affluence, who never experienced the privations of the war, the miseries of
the
pogroms
, the phantasmagoria of the concentration camps, they are busy acting grand. They think good living means spending more. There are quite a few exceptions. Elías Biterman is one of them.

This is one of those moments of dead time in Biterman’s life. He tries to avoid these empty hours. They are the flanks used by the occupying forces of his memory to attack the haven that is his life in the present. His mind wanders back to when he was very young, crowded together with hundreds of fellow Jews in a caged train, watched over by SS soldiers with machine guns. The train crossed the countryside without stopping at stations, Polish Catholics greeting the passing convoy with chants about Zyklon B and crematorium ovens. They were headed for a concentration camp near Oswiecim
,
christened Auschwitz by the Nazis. When he read the sign above the gate,
Arbeit macht frei,
and saw the state of the prisoners, he knew he would have to escape as soon as possible, while he still had the strength and the will to try.

His father, Shlomo, a survivor of the Ukrainian
pogroms
, had been alert to what was going on in Germany in the Forties. By lining the pockets of an official at the embassy, he managed to obtain Argentine passports for him and his wife.

Years earlier, during the depression, Shlomo had rescued Heinz Schultz from poverty. Shlomo gave him food, work and board without asking for much in return, until Schultz was tempted by the most patriotic of callings: a position as a guard at Auschwitz. Before leaving a Germany adorned with the ubiquitous swastika, Shlomo got in touch with Heinz and gave him a bundle of
Reichsmarks
and the promise of more if he facilitated Elías’s escape.

Schultz shared the money with his colleagues and one night Elías was pulled out of the stalag barrack where he was kept . The rest of the prisoners, accustomed to people being taken away and never coming back, lamented his ill luck and shamefully rejoiced in their own relief. Elías was hidden in the false floor of a provisions truck and taken to a nearby wood. There, the driver took his photo alongside a smiling Schultz. When Elías saw his captors’ hands move towards their holsters, he didn’t hesitate. He punched Schultz on the nose with all his might and set off running into the forest, into the night, weaving between the trees as they lit up with the flash of gunshot. Not all the bullets missed: one passed through his shoulder and entered his lung. But he was young then, strong and determined. He carried on running and running until he collapsed in a clearing.

Using the photo to get the rest of the reward money, Schultz assured Shlomo that Elías was hiding in a safe place waiting to leave the country. Biterman senior doubled the prize on condition that Schultz passed on a weighty sum to Elías so that he could buy a passport from Vignes, the Consul at the Argentine embassy.

Hopeful he’d done enough for his son and not daring to stay any longer for fear of being denounced, Shlomo and his wife began their arduous pilgrimage to Buenos Aires. Three years later, tired of the persecutions and penuries, he died, leaving his wife four months pregnant.

Naturally, Schultz kept all the extra money and, furthermore, used what he’d been told to extort the embassy official. With his small fortune, Schultz opened a factory making saucepans and kitchen utensils. His contacts provided slave labour from the concentration
camps and soon his factory was supplying the front line. Sick of the sweet smell of burnt flesh that billowed from the chimneys of the crematorium, he bought a medical certificate and was discharged from active service. He became rich, but the stench remained stuck up his nose, until the 28 May 1969, when he put the barrel of his Walther PPK between his teeth and pulled the trigger. His children inherited the business and became, with the passing of time, prosperous industrialists, extremely concerned with the quality of their products, which they exported all over the world.

Elías, on the other hand, was rescued by a group of bandits with a den in the heart of the forest. They were natural enemies of the established order, no matter the order. They instinctively took the fugitive to be one of their own. His rescue and recovery were not simply a matter of loyalty to some unwritten code, but also they reasoned that a burly, determined lad like Elías would prove a useful addition to the gang. Politics didn’t interest them in the slightest, they simply felt an animal aversion to uniforms, whatever the colour. This band of highwaymen usually ambushed isolated Nazi patrols, plundering them for arms and supplies. Their attacks were quick and clinical, sparing no enemy lives nor resulting in casualties of their own. On one of their raids they were surprised by an SS squadron, which had been on their trail. They were decimated. Elías was one of the few survivors. Fleeing through the night, he came upon a village in the early hours and found what would prove to be his safe conduct: a wheelbarrow. With this perfect disguise, he set off along the country pathways. He walked armed with a Luger, stolen from one of the SS. If he sensed that all was lost, he would use it on
himself. He decided under no circumstances would he go back to the concentration camp. Whenever he came across soldiers or patrols, he was taken for a villager going about his daily business and treated with casual indifference. When it proved necessary, he stood to attention, raised his right hand and offered the usual
Heil Hitler!
Always pushing his barrow, he headed south. He crossed Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria. In Trieste, he abandoned his prop and slipped aboard a boat as a stowaway. He was discovered in Dakar and thrown onto the quay without further ado.

In total, it took him five years to reach Buenos Aires, find his mother, learn of his father’s fate and that he had a brother, Horacio. The long years of solitude, living in a state of constant danger, turned Elías into a shy and silent being, one concerned solely with never becoming destitute again. His past is an interminable collection of horrors that deserve only to be cast into oblivion; the future is uncertain and needs securing; the present is a battleground on which to establish your terms of retirement. Thrifty to the point of ridiculousness, everything seems expensive to Elías. When he has to buy a new pair of shoes, he calculates the value of each shoe separately and always, through sheer persistence, obtains substantial discounts on every transaction he makes, though he won’t give an inch when people try to negotiate with him. He managed to multiply a hundred times the modest sum of money his mother gave him, thus providing her, his brother and himself with a decent subsistence, one in which they lacked for nothing but in which nothing was ever left over. Until the day of Sara’s death, the only time in his life that Elías ever cried, she was very proud of her eldest, recognizing in him
the integrity, vision and discipline of her late husband. Women were otherwise an empty chapter in Biterman’s life story. Having had no contact with any, he had never acquired the necessary skills for seduction or courtship. As a young man, he appeased his sexual cravings with occasional and hurried visits to cheap prostitutes. His erotic spark soon burned out, a fact that pleased him as it allowed him to spend all his time on what he considered truly important. The opportunity to cut another cost was always a source of great happiness for him.

Elías hears his brother arrive. His face at the door brings him back to the present. Horacio is Elías’s exact opposite. When out and about, going from one place to the next, Horacio’s route is determined by any attractive woman who crosses his path. He’ll follow her for blocks on end chatting her up, until she agrees to go for a coffee or he gives in, tempted by another. With a particular kind of logic, he tries to pick up every woman he meets, a matter of stacking the odds in his favour:
if I throw myself at twenty, thirty or forty women a day, by the law of averages, one or two will succumb to my advances.
Thus his daily routine is dedicated to chasing skirt, and his life is full of women problems. From his mother he inherited his blaze of orange hair. He has an easy smile, dreamy eyes and a dignified demeanour, and he has cultivated a taste for the sort of fine, well-cut clothing that he wears with elegance. But Horacio is a dandy without a penny to his name. His income is like the slow drip of a tap, his expenditure a fireman’s hose. Although he doesn’t dare try to cheat Elías, he has no scruples when it comes to stealing. He swindles all his female conquests with stories of the need to buy furniture for when they’re married, or whatever ruse will make them give him a few pesos.
His preferred hunting ground is the grandstand at the Palermo racecourse, where he gets to rub shoulders with members of the Jockey Club while awaiting the miracle of the forty-to-one horse, which always seems to pull up in the final stretch. There he can admire the blond, beautiful and distant women of Buenos Aires high society, in whom he can only ever inspire a fleeting interest. It was at the racecourse that he met Amancio Pérez Lastra, a jet-set version of himself. With so much in common, they couldn’t help but become immediate friends. Horacio would desperately like to bridge the social divide which, deep down, he knows separates them. So, although it irritates him, he’s tolerant of Amancio’s habitual remark:
you’re my only Jewish friend
.

In a further attempt to ingratiate himself, Horacio thought to introduce Amancio to Elías, so providing his friend with a lending source for the funds he needs with such increasing urgency. Horacio also speculates that his brother might pay a commission for his bringing in a new client. He feels he deserves a lot more out of life, and a lot more out of Elías than the meagre salary he receives in exchange for his position as the errand boy that Elías doesn’t need. This role was conceded on the insistence of their mother, the only person in the world ever capable of making her eldest spend a penny on something superfluous.

…So? So nothing. What do you mean nothing? Exactly that, nothing, nil, zero. You’re not going to give me anything for the client I’m bringing you? Firstly, I already pay you for doing practically nothing, and secondly, the client hasn’t even shown up yet, and you already want a commission. Are you trying to say that I’m of no use to you? I get about as much use out of you as you do out of the money I pay you. Which is not enough. It’s
hardly my fault that it’s not enough. Nothing is ever enough for you. You’ve too many vices. Yeah, well that’s my problem. I couldn’t agree more. And if I decided to leave, where else would you find someone you could trust? Look, when I shave in the morning, I’m on my guard, because I don’t even trust my own shadow. I’ve a firm hand on the tiller, and I won’t ever let go. And in this world, the tiller means one thing:
guelt
. But Elías… Take your sob story to the temple. So you’re not going to give me anything at all for this? First let’s take a look at the fish, then we’ll decide how to cook it. The guy has some land you can take as guarantee on anything you lend him. Leave that side of things to me, I know a bit more about it than you. Fine, but don’t forget afterwards. I never forget anything. I particularly never forget how much you already owe me.