The Mandelbaum Gate (28 page)

Saul
had said, ‘For a stage of the pilgrimage you might go to the Eichmann trial.’

‘I
haven’t been,’ she said.

‘I
know, That’s what I’m saying.’

‘I don’t
see that she wants to go there,’ Michael said. ‘I think the whole thing’s a
mistake, myself.’

They
turned out for a walk in the teeming streets that were only now cooling down,
and Saul argued fiercely about the necessity of the Eichmann trial. Michael
said, in the end, that since it was on, Barbara should go, should come with him
for an hour or two tomorrow.

‘Why?’

‘Why?
Because it’s got to do with you.’

‘And a
subject for a Christian pilgrim,’ Saul said.

She had
thought of the trial as something apart from her purpose; it was political and
temporary. In the same way she had placed the
kibbutzim
of the country
in the category of sociology, and had resisted attempts to be shown over one of
them. She had seen over a model kibbutz in Surrey.

She
said, ‘Look, I’ve got a tidy mind. Everything’s a subject for a Christian
pilgrimage if you widen the scope enough. I only want to cover a specific
ground without unnecessary diversions. I can follow the Eichmann trial in the
papers.’

Sharp-witted
Saul said, ‘You can follow the history of the Jews in the Bible without
visiting the historical spots. This trial is part of the history of the Jews’;
and Michael was saying, ‘You should come.

‘I
don’t want any advice. Thanks all the same.’

‘Quite
right,’ said Michael. ‘Only take my advice about not going into Jordan. You
might cause us a lot of worry.’

‘All
right.’

But in
the end she did the opposite on both counts. ‘All right.’ She heard her own
voice again in that dawn and retrospect at the Potter’s Field, in that attic
where to the left of her camp-bed she now noticed, at eye-level, a shining
rifle laid parallel to herself; it rested on a dark, oblong object; it had a
small clump of dry furze, broom or withered flowers protruding from the barrel;
she had not seen this thing in her first survey of the room by lamplight in
the earlier darkness, and was most of all mystified by the fuzzy plant stuck
into the gun’s gleaming barrel. She shifted her head slightly and saw two
unequal slivers of light along the recognizable arms of the horse-hair
arm-chair from which the stuffing escaped at the ends, no rifle at all, no
clump of shrivelled flowers, only the two arms of the old chair at the perspective
of eye-level, one protruding slightly about and to the left of the other, and
both catching the morning light to resemble the barrel and butt of a gun. ‘All
right,’ she had said to Michael and Saul, conceding their point that she might
cause her friends a lot of worry by going into Jordan from Israel, however
lawfully. She re-called, now, her sense of uneasy reprieve. She planned in her
mind to return to England with Michael in two days’ time. Tomorrow, she had
thought, while he’s at the Eichmann trial or conferring with the lawyers, I can
go and pray at Nazareth, at Capharnaum, Galilee, or perhaps only to Mount Zion
again, the Tomb of David and the place of the Dormition of Our Lady. But next
day she went to the Eichmann trial instead; the next day for no reason at all,
for some reason she could not remember, it was something Michael said
abstractedly at breakfast when he was in a hurry and ready for the day’s
business, it was some clear thing she would never now remember, probably some
word of Michael’s, innocently reinforcing some decision she had already made,
overnight, in sleep.

Lying
on the camp-bed she wondered whether to try to sleep or whether she had better
make an effort to stay awake. She was too interested to sleep. Michael got her
a public ticket for the trial, a ticket for visitors or maybe the Press; her
handbag was searched and her person examined for the bulges of a possible
revolver, camera, or tape-recorder by a policewoman in a small sentry box. She
was allowed to pass through to the gallery, to the Press seats as it might be;
and there she had listened by earphone to the translations of Eichmann’s
defence, as in a familiar, recurrent but always incomprehensible dream. The
prisoner in his bullet-proof glass enclosure was already an implanted image in
the public mind; he had been photographed and filmed from every angle, as had
the three judges, the defending and prosecuting counsel, and the public. Saul
Ephraim had said, ‘It isn’t the most interesting part of the trial,’ meaning
that the impassioned evidence from survivors of the death-camps was over; after
that, it had been generally agreed that court proceedings had entered a boring
phase; Eichmann was being examined day by day by his own counsel, in a
long-drawn routine, document by patient document. Many journalists had gone
home. Barbara was not prepared to be taken by the certainty, immediately
irresistible, that this dull phase was in reality the desperate heart of the
trial. Minute by minute throughout the hours the prisoner discoursed on the
massacre without mentioning the word, covering all aspects of every question
addressed to him with the meticulous undiscriminating reflex of a computing
machine Barbara turned the switch of her earphones to other simultaneous
translations — French, Italian, then back to English. What was he talking
about? The effect was the same in any language, and the terrible paradox
remained, and the actual discourse was a dead mechanical tick, while its
subject, the massacre, was living. She thought, it all feels like a familiar
dream, and presently located the sensation as one that the anti-novelists
induce. Or it is like, she thought, one of the new irrational films which
people can’t understand the point of, but continue to see; one can neither cope
with them nor leave them alone. At school she usually took the novels and plays
of the new French writers with the sixth form. She thought, repetition,
boredom, despair, going nowhere for nothing, all of which conditions are
enclosed in a tight, unbreakable statement of the times at hand. She had
changed her mind, without awareness, at that moment, of any disruption in the
logic of personal decisions, but merely allowing herself to recognize, in
passing, that she would inevitably complete her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in Jordan.
This mental fact was the only one that seemed able to throw light on the
ritualistic lines which the man in the glass box was repeating, or to give
meaning to her mesmerized presence on the scene.

Bureau
IV—B—4. Four—B—four

I was not in charge of the operation
itself, only with transportation …

Müller needed Himmler’s consent.

I was not in a position to make any
suggestions, only to obey orders.

And technical transport problems.

Strictly with time-tables and technical
transport problems.

I was concerned strictly with time-tables
and technical transport problems.

Bureau
IV—B—4.
Four—B—f
our
—IV—B—4.

High on
the tribunal platform the three judges sat attentive to what was said, their
faces distinct from each other, but each bearing the recognizable scars of the
western intellectual. The large black-robed counsel for the defence stood
facing them, every now and then raising both arms as if bestowing a benediction
upon the signs and tokens of his proper business in life, those carefully
numbered documents on a lectern before him, but in reality simply jerking his
arms free of the overlapping sleeves of his gown. Women reporters in casual
dress and sandals, some of advanced age, came and went, the new-comers halting
with their identification cards before the armed guards at each doorway. The
Israeli citizens were mostly men, shirt-sleeved, arms folded. Sometimes
derision, short and spontaneous, pelted forth from the public seats, intruding
upon one of Eichmann’s monologues. The presiding judge would then look alertly
across the hall — but the people were already silent and the lips in the
glass-bound dock continued to move.

This
had been a stage in the trial where individual and small groups of victims were
being dealt with, in one sense easier to grasp than the hundreds of thousands
of dead that had so far formed the daily theme of the trial, and in the same
sense, more horrifying. A little later, in the recess, she heard a man say, ‘Thirty
children yesterday, today a Mr Wilner.’

The
counsel for the defence consulted his document and drew his client’s attention
to specific names, Misters this and that and their sons, locked in reality. And
his client, a character from the pages of a long anti-roman, went on repeating
his lines which were punctuated only by the refrain, Bureau IV—B—4. Barbara
felt she was caught in a conspiracy to prevent her brain from functioning.

At first glance the impression is created that in fact
from the order of the documents as they are clipped together here, Bureau IV—B—4
…

The man
was plainly not testifying for himself, but for his prewritten destiny. He was
not answering for himself or his own life at all, but for an imperative deity
named Bureau IV—B—4, of whom he was the High Priest.

A
searchlight from the city of Jerusalem in Israel, 1961: the voice of the
presiding judge was uttering a question:

You mean, that the remark that the man is dead, in
spite of all the tonics administered to the man, was also part of the
information received by you from the General Government?

The
witness, having sprung to attention, gave formal ear to this speech from an
alien cult concerning a man being dead. He then sat down and patiently
expounded, once more, the complex theology in which not his own actions, nor
even Hitler’s, were the theme of his defence, but the honour of the Supreme
Being, the system, and its least tributary, Bureau IV—B—4.

According to office routine, a question was addressed
by Bureau IV—B—4 to the Government General area and after a reply was received
from there. After a reply was received. Reply was received. Here, Bureau IV—B—4
of Head Office of Reich Security. Here IV—B—4 for the first time enters the
correspondence after the matter was channelled through the department, and it
informs the Foreign Ministry, referring to that letter of the Foreign Ministry
from the 16th of June 1942. that the above-mentioned Jew of Argentinian
nationality died on the 12th April of that year in spite of aid and all the
matters listed there. Listed there, All the matters.

And here is once again one of these cases where Bureau
IV—B—4 only served as a kind of through station, transit station.

This must have been written in the report received
from the Government General area, because. Because otherwise….

Presently,
a slight hesitation occurred in the court proceedings, a pause. The counsel for
the defence looked courteously towards the tribunal, as if waiting for one of
the judges to say something, while they, in turn, were under the impression
that he was about to speak. The presiding judge then leaned forward and accompanied
a sign for the lawyer to proceed with a brief remark in German. ‘What are we
waiting for?’ duly said the English translator’s voice in the earphones.

— What are we waiting for?

— We’re waiting for Godot.

The
lawyer proceeded: ‘I come now to the matter of the Jewess Cozzi —’

It was
a highly religious trial.

To get through by
telephone that night to Harry Clegg’s hotel in Rome, she had kept Michael
waiting for three-quarters of an hour; they were to go out to dine at a
restaurant. When she had finally made her telephone call she found him sitting
in the courtyard with Saul Ephraim, a white-haired wiry woman who turned out to
be a reporter from an Israeli newspaper, and a young rabbi who was learned in
the archaeology of the Dead Sea, and who had met Harry Clegg several times.
When he had introduced Barbara, Michael said to her:

‘You
won’t be going to Jordan?’

‘Yes,
of course, it’s all settled.’

‘What
did he think of the idea?’

‘Well,
he knows I want to go, and he sees the point.’

The
lady-reporter, whom Saul had brought to interview Michael, said she did not see
the point, that a Jew should go to an enemy country in a time of war, ‘and we
have war conditions right now. ‘She had come to Palestine in 1936, she said,
and did not know of any time when there was not a state of war with the Arabs.
The young rabbi said he understood she was a Catholic with a British passport;
there would be no difficulty for her in Jordan. Saul and Michael had obviously
spoken generally about her position, while she had been upstairs getting
through to Harry in Rome The young rabbi said, if she was going on a
pilgrimage, she was going on a pilgrimage.

Which
was exactly what she had said to Harry a few moments before when eventually she
had got through to the Regina Carlton Hotel in Rome and he had been brought to
the telephone. He said he was in the middle of dining with a priest.

‘What
priest?’

‘How do
I know what priest? They all look the same.’