Pursuit (43 page)

“Movies?”

“Ben, listen. Please. He's become totally involved. He told me all about it, about how it's not just pointing a camera and you take a picture, but how it's writing and planning and balancing—whatever he meant by that—and knowing about sets and locations and lenses and angles and lights and shadows—”

“Deborah—”

“And he said there's research, too, because if a film doesn't have authenticity, the people can tell in a second. And he said there's a lot to the business angle, too, the question of financing, which he says is sometimes the hardest part of a project. He went out and got a job with a company named Zion Films—”

“Deborah!”

“—they're a small company making documentaries, but that's what he wants to make,” Deborah went on quickly, not looking at Ben, “and he got a job in the research department, which is starting at the bottom, but they're planning a film that will take him to Munich, there's a library there for research—”

“Deborah!” Ben put his hand over her mouth and then removed it when she finally stopped talking. He looked at her, smiling, and then became serious. “You're obviously in favor.”

Deborah nodded slowly.

“I wasn't, at first. But Herzl wants it, he wants it very much. And he's a man, now. It's hard to believe, but he's a man. And he sounds very sure of himself. He—he's a bit nervous about telling you.”

“Am I such an ogre?”

“You're no ogre at all—no, Ben! You have to get some rest; you have a long trip tomorrow—”

“I'll rest on the plane,” Ben said, and drew her close. “How many times have you made love to an ogre?”

Ben Grossman was in the bedroom, packing for his trip, when Herzl came in. He was carefully folding clothing into a suitcase when Herzl cleared his throat.

“Dad—”

Grossman carefully considered the arrangement of his clothing in the suitcase; proper packing for a trip required proper planning, as everything did.

“Yes?”

“Dad, I'd like to talk to you for a minute—”

“Of course—” The suits beneath, folded with tissue paper between, that way they wrinkled less. The shirts on top, spread out for balance, the socks and the underwear and the handkerchiefs along the edge, filling in the irregular spaces. The general tucked them in and stood back, contemplating the result.

“Dad—” Herzl took a deep breath. “I want to quit school—”

“So?” The neckties now, folded over the little bar on the divider. A smart gadget; he wondered who had thought of it.

“Dad, did you hear me? I said I want to drop out of the university.
I
want to learn how to make films—”

Benjamin Grossman finally looked up from his task. “I know. You went out and got a job with Zion Films. Your mother told me. Did you think she wouldn't? We talked about it half the night.”

“I—” Herzl didn't know what to say. “What do you think?”

“Me? More important, what do
you
think?”

“I think it's what I want to do. I mean, I know it's what I want to do. I know I don't want to be a doctor; I've known that for a long time. But I didn't know what else I wanted to be. Now I know.”

Benjamin Grossman shoved his suitcase out of the way and sat down on the bed, looking up at his son.

“If you know what you want to do, you're lucky. And do it.” He shrugged. “Look at me. I graduated an engineer; now I'm a soldier. Actually, I'm only a soldier when there's a war on; in between I'm a combination peddler and bargain hunter.” He tilted his head toward his suitcase. “Now I'm off to trade electronic equipment from Israel for meat from Argentina. Who knows what a person is going to do in this life? If you find something you like, then do it. I wanted you to become a doctor. Why? I have no idea. I've tried to raise you—your mother and I, we've tried to raise you—to make your own decisions. You've made one. If it works out, fine. If it doesn't work out, you'll try something else.” He considered his son curiously. “Your mother said your job was in research. What kind of research?”

“For a new documentary they're planning. In the film business, research is important, but it's also about the bottom of the ladder, next to the man who carries the equipment on his back, but I'd have taken the job if it meant painting sets. Eventually I want to work in all the departments. I want to learn it all.”

“And I'm sure you will. Your mother said something about a trip?”

“To Munich. There's a library there, a historical research library.”

“It sounds interesting. You'll like Munich, I think.” Grossman smiled. “The traveling Grossmans,” he said and came to his feet, putting his arm around his son's shoulders. “Just one thing—”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Whatever you do, do it well,” Grossman said seriously. “Plan it well, plan it fully, and do it well. Look at me; anything I have is because of planning—” He paused a moment and then smiled, a smile Herzl did not understand. “Oddly enough,” he went on slowly, his smile fading, “it's the truth.…”

And it was the truth. And Benjamin Grossman never felt happier than at that moment, in realizing it.

BOOK III

Prologue

Germany …

A beautiful country, from the clean efficient factories in the north widely spaced around such cities rebuilt from the war as Dusseldorf with its famed exhibition hall and its
Konigsallee
all chrome and glass surrounding the lovely canal; and Koln with its impressive cathedral and its pleasant parks and fine restaurants and newly cobbled squares; all along the lovely Rhine with its neatly painted barges plowing their way downstream to Amsterdam and the Waddensee, past the Lorelei and the citadel-topped rocky crags and the quaint chalet-type houses at riverside; Heidelberg with its towering castle ruins on one side and its Philosopher's Walk halfway up the hill on the other and the wide gleaming Neckar in between and the little shops and tiny bierstubes scattered about the University; and Munich with its wide avenues and stately buildings and the Englandischer Garten and the Bogenhausen with the swift Isar cutting through between; and to the south of the country, along the Austrian border, the wooded mountain slopes abundant with pine and beech and spruce; and all throughout the country the lakes and streams scattered about, sewing the rich land together with glistening blue threads.

A truly beautiful country …

And a people who are united though they deny it. They are united despite the wide variety of country and city, of sectional interests, of political differences, of diverse scenery or regional accent or intellectual level or financial achievement; united by a past they cannot escape. It is a unity beyond the work ethic for which they are so justly famous; it is the unity of guilt. It is a feeling of guilt so strong as to demonstrate itself at times in terror; a guilt so violently denied as to prove the truth of its existence. But it is not, as many believe, the guilt for the excesses of the Third Reich. It is the guilt of having lost a war and a winnable war at that.

Few Jews can enter Germany without feeling uncomfortable by the national aura of blameless guilt; they are the destroyed victor embarrassed before the guilt of the rich and powerful vanquished. But the lovely flowers in the beautiful gardens cannot overcome the stench of the death camps thirty years after; the newly laid mortar cannot hide the crumbling souls who still stare out with frightened eyes through the electrified fences that were torn down so long ago.

It is a great burden not feeling guilty in Germany.

Chapter 1

The Institute and Library for Cultural Research was financed by Jews, manned and operated by Jews, but was open to any scholar of any religion interested in researching the holocaust. The institute was located in the Burgunder Strasse, in a row of three-story buildings that had once been private homes, and Herzl, ringing the doorbell and looking about him as he waited, had to admit that since his arrival in Munich the German people with whom he had come in contact had been extremely polite to him in every way. At the Riem Airport he had been ushered through customs without the slightest problem; the taxi driver had been informative, pointing out the various interesting sights on the way to the hotel; the room clerk at the Haus Bavaria in the Gollierstrasse had been both polite and helpful, having a room cleaned for him so he could check in before the normal hour. But Herzl still felt very strange. Accustomed to being surrounded by Jews, it was strange to be in a country where they were conspicuous by their absence. In a way he would have preferred to have been treated badly, so as to permit him to exercise his prejudices; then he smiled. If you are going to do proper research, he told himself sternly but with a smile, try not to make your mind up about things until you know something about them. Although he doubted his research on the subject of Zion Films' project—or his innate feeling of strangeness to be in Germany—would alter his opinion very much.

The door was opened at last; a short, stocky gray-haired woman stood there looking at him with the suspicion reserved for door-to-door salesmen or other interlopers.

“Yes?”

“I'm—” He suddenly remembered and brought out his letter of introduction, handing it over.

She put on a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that appeared magically in her hand—for a moment it looked as if they had been secreted in the beehive of her towering bun of hair—and studied it carefully. At last she nodded.

“Ah, yes. Mr. Grossman. We had a letter saying you would be coming.” She ushered him into the hall, gave him back his letter, and pointed. “Up the stairs to the second floor, the door right before you. Miss Kleiman will be happy to help you.”

“Thank you.” He nodded and mounted the steps, pleased to be started on his mission at last. It was the first step in a process that would eventually result in a finished documentary on the screen, and he was involved. It was a good feeling. He took a breath and opened the door before him.

The room was large, running the length of the building, and was lined with bookshelves to the high ceiling, leaving almost no room for the narrow table set in the center. In one comer, half hidden behind file cabinets, was a small desk covered with magazines, books, and newspaper clippings; a girl Herzl judged to be his own age, or slightly less, was sitting there, studying a manuscript. She looked up as he closed the door behind him.

“Yes?”

Herzl patiently handed over his letter of introduction, wondering how many more guardians of the gate he would have to pass before he could get his hands on some of the books that seemed to bulge the walls of the room. The girl nodded, indicating a chair; Herzl sat down. She handed him back his letter of introduction.

“You come here to research the holocaust.” It was a statement, not a question.

“In a way; and then again, not in a way—” Herzl was about to try and put it as accurately as possible, when the girl interrupted him, speaking in English.

“You are speaking English?”

For a moment Herzl wondered if his German was so bad as not to be understandable; then he understood. “You mean, do I speak English? Yes. Why?”

“We speak, then, English. I am forced to improve. You are saying?”

“I said, in a way it is about the holocaust, but in a larger sense it is not. You see, Zion Films does documentaries. We're planning one now on the so-called monsters of the concentration camps. We are
not
—I want you to be clear on that—we are
not
planning a film about the camps and their horrors. That's been done many times. What we are planning is a film covering people like Koch and his wife, and Dr. Mengele, and Eichmann, and von Schraeder, and Kramer, and Sergeant Moll, who was at Auschwitz what von Schraeder was at Maidanek—people like that. In the film we want to study their motives, to try and understand what brought them to the point where they could perform the hideous acts they did, without being bothered by them in the least. We want to select some of these people and trace their background, see where they came from, what type home they were raised in, what influence their environment had on them, or their schooling, or their religious upbringing, or their jobs if they had any before they went into the SS. In short, we want to see what made them what they ended up being. They certainly weren't born monsters.”

“I am wondering.” Miss Kleiman looked around the room, her face sober. “Here in the institute is one of the few libraries in the world dedicated to just the one subject—the holocaust. In London is another, the Wiener. When you are living with these books and the films and photographs we are having downstairs, then you are wondering.” Herzl was intrigued by her constant use of the present tense. She went on. “Are you reading the testimony of the war-crimes trials in Nuremberg?”

“Am I reading it? Oh, you mean have I read it.” Herzl shook his head. “I've read most of it, but that's not what we want. We don't want the testimony of people who were in the concentration camps. They are too prejudiced.”

Miss Kleiman drew in her breath with a hiss. “Prejudiced?”

“I didn't mean it the way it sounded,” Herzl said patiently. “What I mean is that the survivors of the camps cannot picture these men as human beings. But they once were human beings, who changed. We want to know why; that's the whole purpose of the film. My father was in three camps, and many of our close friends, as well. I didn't even ask him or them about this. That isn't what we're looking for. We don't want this to be an emotional film. We want this to be—well, a sort of study in psychology. Or psychiatry, possibly.”

Miss Kleiman was looking at him strangely.

“Not to be an emotional film. Well, possibly you are being able to do it …” She came to her feet; Herzl noted that she was tall and extremely well built. Get your mind back on your job, he told himself sternly, and brought his eyes to her face, which merely confirmed his previous estimate that it was very pretty. “All right,” Miss Kleiman said. “I am showing you the files and how they work. You are filling out a separate slip for every books and I am getting them for you. The films and the photographs collections are downstairs in the cellar. Incidentally, how many languages you are speaking?”