Thy joys when shall I see?
Saul Ephraim, finding her hired car parked one day near the Hebrew University, drew up his own battered vehicle beside it and sounded his horn till she appeared from among the thick-leaved bushes where she had been standing, some yards off the road, to get a better view. Saul said, ‘If you stand there long enough you’ll get shot. It’s practically on the border.’
‘Has anyone been shot standing there?’
‘Maybe not exactly on that spot, but shooting incidents occur from time to time. Someone gets shot, then we retaliate, and someone else gets shot, maybe two, three. Keep away from the border.’
She had asked Saul Ephraim to look in after dinner on the night of Michael’s arrival, hoping to arrange a small guided tour of the country-side during Michael’s visit. Her memory now played on Michael’s arrival as she lay on the camp-bed, yielding her present excitement to a passive in-gathering of past facts as did the stars their bright pointedness to the first blue light of dawn.
‘I’ve given up my job.’
Michael said, ‘Tired of it?’
She had explained or tried to explain the very involved and subtle affair of Ricky, and how it had crept on her, become intolerable, Ricky’s personality … Ricky’s incredible letter finally … finally … She gestured the inarticulate end of her sentences — ‘It’s difficult, Michael, to explain; Ricky’s been a good friend, but it’s just —’
Michael took the words out of her hands.
‘She was too possessive,’ he said, as if there were no subtle, unique, inexplicable quality about the relationship. And of course, when he said it, she knew this was the ultimate definition and felt relieved. Michael resembled Harry in his habit of making obvious rational comments about difficulties he did not feel were worth the trouble of analysing. Harry, who would give years to a problem of archaeology, would dismiss most personal complications with a brief, banal, but altogether reassuring phrase or two; Barbara never failed to feel consoled by his common sense, so very like Michael’s now, when she was beset by some interior burden that didn’t really matter: ‘She was too possessive.’ Barbara laughed.
‘Well, I’ve left the job. I’m not even giving a term’s notice; just not going back.’
‘Are you still thinking of getting married?’
‘I hope … the Church … this annulment … the documents … Harry’s in Rome … the …’ The jagged edges of the celluloid Taj Mahal, seen from the side, took shape in the pale first light over the Potter’s Field and looked like the half-profile of a face she had never seen before; all around her, conical, circular and angular bulges began to appear; she distinguished the field-glasses that she had seen by the light of the paraffin lamp an hour ago. It would soon be bright morning. Michael had said, ‘You really must stop messing the poor fellow about, you know, Barbara. If you want to marry him, marry him. He’s free and you’re free to be married according to the laws of the land.’
‘You know that to me marriage is a sacrament. If I marry outside the Church I’ll have to remain outside the Church. That’s going to be difficult for me. Year after year — it will be difficult.’
‘Yes but what else are you going to do?’
‘He’s gone to Rome … annulment … questions … his marriage; it’s just possible that it could be found invalid … his wife’s married again, she’s quite cooperative about everything. It’s a legal question, you know, like any other legal question.’ Michael quite saw that. He was never obtuse about the legal formations of the Catholic Church.
Someone shuffled in the house below, and she knew it was five in the morning. She was to be ready by ten. Suzi Ramdez would arrive at ten. Barbara thought she might sleep now, but it didn’t matter if she missed a night’s sleep, it was worth it. She had taken her last look at Jerusalem from the other side of the Mandelbaum Gate that afternoon of Michael’s arrival when, before returning to the hotel to meet him, she had gone to the top of Mount Zion where David’s Tomb was preserved, and had seen, in the Abbey of the Dormition the reputed room of the Last Supper and the crypt where by tradition the Blessed Virgin lay before her death or, as some said, her falling asleep before her assumption into heaven, whatever that taking up might be, to wherever heaven was. It was from this site of the Dormition in Israel that Barbara had seen Old Jerusalem, distant yet not far, where she now lay waiting in the early morning for her new guide on the pilgrimage.
‘I wouldn’t go to Jordan if I were you,’ Michael said. ‘All things considered, I wouldn’t go.’ Saul Ephraim had joined them with his Israel-born wife, who spoke only Hebrew. Saul said, ‘They’re bound to know by now that you’ve got Jewish relations. The Arabs have their messengers, you know.’ He looked round, and Barbara caught sight of an Arab porter, far away in the entrance hail. Their own party was now sitting in the open, under the leafy trellis, and one could see through to the adjoining room, and through again to the hall. The Arab porter was talking to someone, a familiar outline; it was Freddy Hamilton’s Arabic teacher, the blue-eyed young man called Abdul. Saul said, ‘They could make a lot of trouble for you. There is a definite danger from police officials, they are armed, they act in hot blood and explain afterwards. People who come here do not realize that. Particularly, you have come from England first to Israel, then you go to Jordan. The normal route is from Jordan to Israel. They suspect Israeli spies. Why didn’t you go to Jordan first?’
‘Oh, personal reasons, you know.’
It was through Harry Clegg that she had come to know Saul Ephraim, his former colleague. Saul looked at his wife and said something evidently witty in Hebrew, for she laughed. Saul explained, ‘I’m telling her that your fiancé’s over in Jordan, and that’s why you came here first.’
Michael had turned thoughtful since Saul had urged the probable danger of her appearance in Jordan, and lawyer that he was, he protested. ‘But look here, you know, there are internal laws and international laws. Even if Barbara was a full Jew she couldn’t be touched if she possessed a British passport. It’s the Israelis they’re against, it’s a political matter, not a religious or racial one. The Arab States don’t recognize Israel, they claim that the Jews in Israel are usurpers of their territory. The worst that could happen to Barbara, by law, is deportation as a spy, and only then on the combined evidence of her Jewish blood and her entrance into the country via Israel — that might create reasonable grounds for suspicion. But otherwise she couldn’t be touched. Not legally.’
‘Not legally,’ said Saul, spreading his fingers in irony; he explained the argument to his wife, who replied vivaciously. ‘She says,’ said Saul, ‘that they carried off a couple of men from the kibbutz she worked on before we were married. They raided and captured the men. One was a Britisher. They didn’t do it legally, of course.’
There was talk, talk, talk. It became an academic subject, absorbing them for over an hour. Barbara said, ‘It’s difficult to separate the apocryphal from the true in this part of the world. It always has been.’
‘Anyway, all things considered, don’t go,’ Michael said.
‘And you say Harry’s in Rome. So what’s the point?’ said Saul. ‘Yes, what’s the point? But I’m on a pilgrimage. The other Christian shrines are over there —’ On, on, on. ‘But we have Nazareth. We have a Christian shrine up on Mount Zion,’ Saul said, and repeated this to his wife, who showed interest. Barbara said, ‘It’s the crypt of the Dormition,’ and explained to Michael the legend of the Virgin’s Falling Asleep. ‘Some say she actually died, some say she only fell asleep. The Church has left it open. I was up there today, in fact …’ She had been to pray at the crypt of the Failing Asleep. The noises of the first light over the Potter’s Field had halted now, pausing for the authentic dawn. The shuffling in the house had stopped. The recumbent statue of the Virgin at the crypt was an unusual representation. The two suitcases, one small, one large, stood beside a much larger, open box with her clothes spilling out of them; then she perceived they were not h
er clothes, but those vestments bulging from the hamper that she had noted by the light of the oil lamp.
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—four—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.’
T
he 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.