Mr. Mani (19 page)

—No, Grandmother. Because by the early summer of ‘42 I had finally managed to persuade Schmelling to take the palace of Minos under our constabulary wing and even to maintain a small guard post there for whatever high police officials, aboveboard or undercover, wished to run their hands over the new map of Germany and delight in how big it had become by visiting us from the far ends of the Reich. Meanwhile, promoted by Schmelling to Feldwebel, I was appointed to be our guests' escort, and the first thing I did with them, Grandmother, was take them to the top of this hill to tell them the fabled story of our air drop and of the magnificent battles that followed. Then, when I had won their confidence and enthusiasm, I would convince them to come along with me to Knossos for a look at its ancient Labyrinth, which I tried getting them to see not just as an ancient ruin repainted to suit the whims of a fanatical British archaeologist but as a possible goal, a holy grail for all Europe, for the European of the future who will be free of fear and guilt ... and there, by the entrance to the antiquities, not far from the statue of Sir Arthur Evans, I sometimes found my citizen, my canceled ex-Jew, standing in his little shop with his child next to him as usual, busy with his herbal jars and medicinal bottles and souvenirs for the tourists, little figurines of the Minotaur and miniature earthenware urns and tiny bull-horn V's, and since he still had his father's concession to the site, I went and bought half-price tickets from him for my party of guests, or sometimes from his delicate young wife if he himself was inside the ruins guiding some group of Greek tourists, who, back in ‘42 or ‘43, were still coming from Athens and Salonika to vacation on this island and even giving us Germans a friendly smile, as if we were tourists like them and the rifles slung over our shoulders were for hunting in the mountains. And so now I no longer had to keep a nightly eye on him, because I had him in my sights every day, my ex-Jew who had become, or so I tried convincing myself, an ordinary human being, pure unadulterated
homo sapiens,
at home in an ancient, blissful civilization that, free of the self-invented contamination of Jewry, had lived without guilt or fear, safely ensconced in its unfortified temple that had no protective walls, its marble steps cascading down to reddish halls in which youths and maidens walked happily behind the quiet bull. Sometimes, Grandmother, I would run into him by the huge urns where his father was bound and died, and the sight of him standing there and smiling peacefully back at me gave me no end of faith that a man could remake his own self by himself, and I must say, Grandmother, that if you're right and he was only playing a part, he played it to the hilt, he couldn't have looked more natural pulling that little boy after him, because he took him everywhere to keep him out of the way of my officers—who, in the gleaming leather boots they all wore, both those in black uniforms and those in civilian clothes, listened to me lecture on the ancient civilization that knew neither guilt nor fear while smiling mysteriously to themselves ... ach, those gorillas with diplomas, those supermurderers, those geniuses of destruction—the scum, the scandal of Germandom!...

—Yes, yes...

—You know, you know very well, Grandmother...

—Yes ... you know ... you know ... we all know, even those of us who think that we don't...

—Yes!

—Yes, yes, yes! Don't be so innocent!

—All right, I've calmed down.

—All right.

—I've calmed down.

—Fine, I beg your pardon...

—Soon ... one more minute ... here, we're already at our last station. We have finally arrived, Grandmother, at the old Turkish guard post that has been standing here since the last century. Come see why they put it here, the vista you have of the sea ... of the sea and nothing but the sea. Yes, the Turks sat up here a hundred years ago, on the lookout for pirates ... here, have a seat, Grandmother ... please, sit down ... I'm sorry I shouted at you...

—Who am I to be blaming anyone? After all, I'm part of it myself, even if, when I first arrived on this island, I was inspired by the belief in a new way, national and individual—because my canceled Mani was just an allegory, part of a much bigger philosophy, which, by the autumn of 1943, I knew would have to be put to the test...

—I'm getting there...

—Italy fell, and the same Italians who had been semi-allies now became semi-prisoners who had to be disarmed and guarded. We suddenly felt such isolation ... and the more it grew, Grandmother, the more enemies we made, which meant we had to corral them and count them twice a day, morning and evening, to make sure we had caught them all ... except that we didn't really believe that ourselves, which made us look for still more enemies, whom we found immediately, although since we didn't believe that they were all there were either, we tortured them to lead us to more enemies, and so on and so forth ... And thus we were kept busy all day long, guarding and counting and hunting and searching and interrogating, which led to still more hunts and searches, so that by the time the midnight shift came on we discovered that our isolation had grown even greater and that by now we were the prisoners of our prisoners. It was at that point that we called for help. And so early last spring two experts came from Athens and at once scolded Schmelling for accumulating too many prisoners, which would never have happened if he had killed more of them and locked up less, which was why their first command was to round up all the Jews and ship them off to wherever Jews were shipped. You can imagine my shock, I who had naively thought that if the one Jew I found had been canceled all of Jewry had been canceled too, at being handed a list of still more Jews—who, it turned out, had been living all along in and around Heraklion, although some had already managed to escape...

—No, Grandmother, his name was not on the list, not because anyone higher up had accepted his cancellation, but because no one knew of his existence. His father was not a native, having been born in Jerusalem and banished to Crete by the British at the end of the last war, and since all those years he had kept his distance from other Jews, he was now beyond the pale of any non-Jewish informers. Of course, had I wanted, I could have canceled that distance and returned the Manis to the fold in no more time than it takes to write a name on a list, but precisely this, I realized, was the great test, not only for him, but for me, Grandmother, because I had to decide on the spot, all by myself, if his cancellation was real or even conceivable, not only for himself but for anyone anywhere, or if we both had simply been playing with words for three years. And without thinking twice I decided ... well, what do you think? What? Guess what I decided, Grandmother!

—Right you are! A most accurate guess, although I didn't do it for the reasons you think I did, that is, out of sheer innocent stupidity, but on the contrary, after profound meditation, and especially, in loyalty
to you,
Grandmother, and in the spirit of our conversations on those winter evenings back in ‘39, when I was studying for my history and literature finals and you knew that the war was on its way. You asked me then to pray to the God you no longer believed in that the havoc and destruction wreaked by Germany should lead to a better future—which was why, accompanied by a soldier I took along to guard my clarity of mind, I went straight to Mani Junior, because I knew that many of the names on the list had already made themselves scarce. And it was a good thing that I got there when I did, because the mule was already tethered behind the house, loaded with sacks that no doubt contained flour and sugar and spices, which meant that he too had heard the rumors about the list in my possession and was preparing to take off. He was caught in the act, pale and bewildered, and so I said to him, “Mr. Citizen Mani, I've come to tell you that you needn't worry or run away, because you've canceled yourself and now you're null and void and nothing but a man, a pure
homo sapiens
living in the ruins of the ancient civilization of Knossos, which wouldn't have known a Jew if it saw one, because the Jews hadn't invented themselves yet. And now,” I said to him, “is the ultimate test to find out if you believe in me as I have believed in you...”

—Aha ... it's about time you paid me a compliment. So you do admit it, you admit that you see my point...

—Thank you, Grandmother, thank you.

—I'm listening, of course I am...

—Well, he listened to me very carefully, even though, after three years of occupation, his German was no better than before, a bloodless excuse for a language, and exchanged looks and whispers with his wife, who, three years after the night on which I saw her for the first time, still seemed the same age as me. She gave him a wise, thoughtful nod, and he went over and unloaded the mule, which I killed at once with a single bullet to relieve him of the need for any second thoughts. Then I said good-bye to them both and rode off to ferret out of their holes all the other Jews who either couldn't or didn't want to cancel themselves...

—By then there weren't many of them left ... we had gotten off to a late start ... by deportation day, the entire island had yielded only two hundred seventy of them...

—I'm almost done ... in a minute, Grandmother, I'll be done ... why, you're as eager to get to the end as a small child...

—Of course I had my doubts. Let me say once more that I've never been naive. In fact, the following night, which was the night of May 20, the third anniversary of my jump, I returned. I found a free moment amid the bedlam of registering all the prisoners, jumped on my trusty old cycle, which was old and scarred by now, and raced off to see him, even though this meant taking my life in my hands on the roads between the villages, because a special east wind had carried the smell of German blood from the steppes of Russia, and like a subtle spice it had put some backbone in the Cretans and a new impudence in their eyes. But that didn't stop me, because I had to know if he had stayed behind and trusted me as I had trusted him, if he really believed his own words about canceling his superfluous non-essence. When I got there I almost jumped for joy, because there was light behind the lowered curtains. And yet when I knocked on the door and entered the house, which I had gotten to know every detail of over the years, I could tell at once from the restless motion of his hands as he rose to greet me that something had happened, or was missing, and at once the thought crossed my mind that the woman and child had been spirited off to the mountains, which made me so mad that I pointed my schmeisser at his stomach, intending to kill him with a single long burst. But just then he let out a bitter cry in the shadows, and, grabbing hold of the barrel of the schmeisser to deflect it, he blurted out the plea, the explanation, the rebuke, that it was precisely the mutual trust and understanding between us that had made him send the child away with its mother, since he could not possibly demand of his son, who was too young to cancel himself, what he was able to demand of his own self, so that for the time being the boy had to remain an uncanceled Jewish child...

—I knew you would say that.

—I knew you would say that ... I give up...

—But it was just the opposite ... just the opposite, Grandmother ... listen ... if he himself had stayed behind, that could only mean that he had faith and confidence in what he had done ... that much is undeniable ... we had both passed the test, he had passed mine and I had passed his...

—I saluted him again and returned to Knossos, which was completely dark by then. I looked up at the sky full of stars and thought of that night three years ago, back in ‘41, after I had come floating down from the sky like Daedalus in Gustav Koch's myth, and then I stepped into the little guard post near Mani's store not far from the bust of Sir Arthur Evans and telephoned Schmelling, who was very upset about the disappointing number of Jews rounded up so far. “It can't be,” he kept telling me, “there must be more of them, there has to be, you simply haven't looked hard enough.” and so I said, “I've found all the Jews I can, but is it all right with you if I arrest a citizen who helped a Jewish mother and her child escape to the mountains,” and he said, “Of course, of course, bring him in,” and so I went back to the house, wondering if Mani Junior still was there or had taken to his heels too, and there he was behind the curtains, which were drawn because of the blackout, faithful less to his promise to me, Grandmother, than to the insidious idea that had gripped him in a vise, which is why I startled him so by coming back to tell him that he was under arrest for helping Jews escape, for that and nothing else. He began protesting and putting up such a fight that I had to fire at the walls to calm him down, after which I handcuffed him, sat him in the sidecar of my cycle, and sped back along the empty roads to reunite him with his imprisoned brethren whom he thought he had renounced ... But now look, Grandmother, look over there to the west, how quick and subtle the sunset is...

—Exactly. That's the surprise I promised you ... you see, you needn't have worried...

—Well, then, don't. In the end he was thrown into that dry winery with all the other Jews who had been brought from all over the island—and since there weren't enough of them to suit the experts from Athens, our addlebrained Schmelling decided to add four hundred Greek prisoners, and since that still proved too little, he also threw in three hundred of our ex-Italian friends, who were now simply so many detained nuisances. On the sixth of June there were whispered rumors about a big enemy landing in France, and so we moved as quickly as we could and loaded all the deportees that same day on a small ship that was commandeered in Heraklion harbor. We clamped a curfew on the city to keep people away from the pier, but even then, when the deportees were marched from the prison, the rooftops and terraces were so lined with onlookers that we were ordered to fire in the air. And I, Grandmother, the birth-and-identity specialist, seeing how worried everyone was that the ship might be waylaid on its way to Greece, suggested to Schmelling and his officers that we change its name and give it a new identity. I even found an appropriate one in the books you sent me,
Danae,
which was the name of the daughter of Acrisius, King of Argos. Old Koch would have been proud of me! And indeed, the sailors painted over the old name, and that evening the ship set sail for Santorini. It didn't get far, however, before a British bomber flying innocently overhead noticed an unfamiliar vessel and sank it not far from the point where our sun is about to disappear...