I’m going to finish with something Rachel wrote, I think about it all the time: “Here I am, faced with a question as old as time: are we answerable for the crimes of our fathers, of our brothers, of our children? Our tragedy is that we form a direct line, there is no way out without breaking the chain and vanishing completely.” There’s one more thing. I’ve made a resolution: someone needs to put a stop to the imam from Block 17 before it’s too late.
RACHEL’S DIARY, TUESDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 1994
Face pressed to the window, I stare out at the carpet of clouds. Everything is white, the clouds and the sky, motionless, flickering fit to blow a fuse. I close my eyes. My thoughts are waiting for me, dark and murky, ready to drag me under. I feel exhausted. I open my eyes and look around. The plane drones gently, it is packed with passengers glowing with health, the light is mild, the temperature milder still. The passengers bury themselves in their newspapers, whisper to each other or doze. They are Germans, for the most part. This is their regular commute. When I was checking in at Roissy, I noticed most of them didn’t have any luggage, just a roll-on Samsonite, a briefcase, a couple of magazines tucked under their arm. This is routine to them, they could do the trip blindfolded. They’re freshly scrubbed, well-groomed, long-suffering as Buddhist monks. They’re tired, but they never let it show. It’s a matter of habit and considerable self-discipline. There is something terrifying about the deathly daily commute that passes for life in Paris. Somehow on a plane it’s even more depressing. Airports are the anthills of the third millennium, high-surveillance hubs with their business hotels like glass prisons, the hidden loudspeakers spouting counter-fatwas born in the bellies of all-powerful computers. When they arrive, there are the buses, the metros, the trains, the lines of taxis waiting to shuttle them onwards until at last everyone disappears into their hermetically sealed homes. Anonymity is daunting, definitive, spanning the planet and the movements of capital. These people arrive in Paris every morning, attend their business affairs, then take a plane back the same night or the next day, and by the time they land there another flight is waiting for them. They come and go and all they need to pack is a toothbrush. I’m just like this when I travel on business — a robot, all I need is an oil change and a socket to plug in my electric razor. I arrive, do what I have to, go back to the hotel, pick up my things and head back to the airport. Now and then we let our hair down. With the Italians, the Spaniards and the Greeks, it happens all the time, it doesn’t matter whether business goes well or badly. Mediterraneans like to party, we can be crude, rude, tell each other anything — that’s how we relax. The Germans, the Austrians, the Swiss and the English are different, work is their religion and their hobby. We might take time off for a coffee break occasionally, talk about the weather. The most thrilling places to me are the former dictatorships still riddled with red tape, violence and corruption. I love the film-noir feel of these places, they still cling to the best of socialism, the conspiracy, the cloak and dagger politics, but have adopted the choicest parts of capitalism, its killer instinct. All these hopeless people who shuffle along, and the others who are constantly chasing some insistent rumour that will not let them rest until they’re dead. The murkiness, the mystery, the frenzy, the misery. And the joy when — by the purest fluke — you stumble on some nameless civil servant, some nondescript hanger-on who, with a magician’s flourish, makes one phone call and breaks the impasse in a public finance contract someone has just sworn would never be resolved. That’s when parties start, the endless round of formal ceremonies, not to commemorate a successful conclusion to an honest negotiation or the miraculous release of a bank transfer — that would be tasteless — no, to celebrate the friendship between our two great countries, the entente cordial between their great leaders. By the time you get home, you have lots of stories to tell your friends, and you can exaggerate as much as you like without the fear of overdoing it: a spy here, a hit man there, an assassination attempt in a hotel lobby, the minister who strangles his secretary in the middle of negotiations for leaving out a zero in a memo, the minister who pisses on lobbyists who are not from the same tribe as he is, the leader who gasses a rebel village then flies around in his Sunday best apologizing and proclaiming a new world order. You hear a lot more than you ever see. In these countries of constant mourning, rumor and gossip are the lifeblood of every day, every minute. I’ve never quite understood how our bosses manage to make any money out of these power-mad lunatics desperate to keep every penny to themselves, but then again, we sell pumping systems, something people can’t live without, and even if we’re motivated purely by greed, it will never be as big as their appetite. We’ve got pumps in all colours, to suit all tastes, horizontal and vertical, manual and remote, tiny pumps the size of a marble and vast installations you’d need to build a hangar to hide. We’re the market leader, we have something to tempt even the most difficult customers.
I miss Ophélie, even if she is the most difficult woman in the world. I want so much to be home, to go back to our boring suburban routine, anything for a quiet life. But she’s probably lying on the sofa over at her mother’s place right now, crying and ranting about me and about men in general, but especially Algerian and German men since we’re born stupid and cruel. I know how eloquent she can be on the subject, though not as eloquent as my mother-in-law. By now, the two of them will have flayed our relationship to the bone. God himself could not save us now. Ophélie and I don’t talk anymore, she sits in her corner sulking and I sit in mine thinking. We’re past the stage where some grand gesture could bring us back together more passionate than ever; and although we have both stopped digging, coldly, inexorably, the hole we are in just keeps getting bigger. The war is almost at an end, the silence of this phony ceasefire simply heralds the breakup. It’s probably for the best. I’ll never be a normal man, a dutiful husband again. I’ve left her the bedroom and the living room, now I sleep in a corner of the mezzanine and I spend my evenings in the garage. I’ve set up our camping stuff and a bookcase out there. Everything is in that bookcase, all thirty volumes of it, the extermination of the world and the glacial silence that followed. I don’t know why I haven’t told Ophélie about this. Shame, maybe, the fact that I don’t understand it myself, fear of the consequences. There is a difference between saying to yourself, “I am the son of a war criminal,” and hearing someone else say, “You’re the son of a war criminal, a man guilty of genocide!” Besides, we’ll only end up talking about me, about us, about our insignificant domestic problems, and I don’t want to talk about what we need to do to “sort things out” when in my head I’m trying to sort out something that is beyond me, beyond us, something that will always be beyond us. Ophélie has always been pretty good at substituting one problem for another, with no regard for the nature or gravity of the original problem. She flits from subject to subject like a butterfly and, in the end, everything always comes back to her. But right now I’m trying to come to terms with the Holocaust, something that would try the patience of God himself, and behind it all is the figure of my father.
While I was thinking about my work and my personal problems, the plane had landed and was now taxiing along the runway towards the terminal of Hamburg airport. I’ve been through this airport so often that I hardly notice it. It’s just another glass and steel box with flickering fluorescent lights. In the crowd, no one notices me, I’m just another passenger, just another German. If they do notice me it’s only because, like all Frenchmen abroad, I draw attention to myself. That’s how we are, we complain whenever things don’t go our way in foreign countries. Today, however, I felt tense, I felt scared, I shuffled forward in a daze. People jostled me, gave me strange looks, talked behind my back in German, in English, in Japanese, some of them frankly sneering, which should give you some idea of the state I was in. Until now, I’ve only ever travelled for work — where everything is pre-planned, every minute timetabled, I am met at every airport — or with Ophélie, who anticipates every problem before it happens. I am lost, searching for myself, I am travelling back through time, peering through shadows, exploring the greatest atrocity the world has ever known and trying to work out why I am carrying the weight of it on my shoulders. In fact, it is because I already know that what I am doing is so painful. It would be impossible for me to grasp the enormity of this tragedy and emerge unscathed. I am terribly afraid I will come face-to-face with my father in some place where no man can stand and still be a man. My very humanity is at stake.