“I was there a few weeks ago,” I said. “Place called Banja Luka.”
“You were in Banja Luka?” He made it sound like I’d spent a wild weekend in Paris.
“That’s right.”
“I wish I was in Banja Luka,” he said. “My home is in Omarska. Which is near there.” He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know why I’m here. But I am. Next week we have to go on a training course in France. But I really don’t want to go on a training course in France. I just want to go home, sir.”
“You’ll be back home before you know it,” I said. “With a story to tell. Not to mention a nice pair of boots that you can sell.”
He smiled and opened the gate for me. “There are Ustaše staying here,” he confirmed. “But I think maybe some of them went out. You’d best ask at the house.”
I walked along a short gravel path, between neatly clipped lawns, past a circular fountain, and up a flight of stairs to a portico with four Doric columns, where I knocked loudly on a big mahogany door and then turned to look back at the garden. To the right of the house was a public footpath that led across a small lake. In the big white house opposite, several dozen windows shone with an eye-catching glamor. Somewhere behind the trees I could hear the grass growing quickly and the squirrels breathing loudly and I felt the silence as strongly as if it had boxed my ears. Nature looked respectable enough, but it offended me that a fanatic like the mufti should have been living in such a nice part of Berlin as Zehlendorf. If I had been living across the road from such a beast I’d have held a party every night, with lots of alcohol and half-naked girls, just to annoy him. But now that I’d thought about it, I couldn’t see why a party like that wasn’t a good idea anyway.
Unlike the guard on the gate, the man who answered the door was an Arab. He was wearing a white jalabiyah and a red tarboosh. In his hand was a set of prayer beads and he smelled lightly of cardamom seeds and Turkish cigarettes. His face was badly pitted, and poking out from under his long shirt was a colony of ugly brown toenails that looked as if it should have been kept in the insect house at Berlin Zoo. Behind him I could see a large round hall and a mosaic table with a glazed earthenware Persian-style vase of lilies. On one wall was a large black flag with some Arabic writing in silver-white that might have been designed for the SS by Hugo Boss. Then again, maybe it was supposed to be a picture of a snake pit. With modern art these days, it’s a little hard to tell. On another wall was a portrait of Adolf Hitler, which prompted me to wonder why he hated Jews but not Arabs. After all, some Jews are just Muslims with a better tailor.
“I’m looking for Colonel Dragan,” I explained. “I believe he’s staying here?”
“Yes, he’s staying here,” said the doorman. “But he has gone out, I believe. About twenty minutes ago.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“He did not tell me, sir.”
“Was he on foot? Or in a car?”
“He borrowed a bicycle, sir.”
“A bicycle?”
“And a map of Berlin.”
“What kind of map? Pharus, or Schaffmann?”
“I don’t know. It was just a map.”
“A Pharus goes further south,” I said. “Makes a difference.”
The doorman shrugged. “Shall I inform the colonel who called, sir?”
“Captain Geiger,” I said. “We both served in Croatia.”
I turned to go back down the steps and then stopped. In a back room I could hear a man’s voice searching for the right musical note and never quite finding it. Then again, it might have been some kind of prayer.
“What does it mean?” I asked, pointing over the doorman’s shoulder at the black flag on the wall. “The Arabic writing on your flag. What does it mean? I’m interested.”
The doorman glanced at it for a second. “That’s the Shahada. It says, ‘I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammed is the Messenger of Allah.’”
I nodded. “And how does that translate into ‘Kill all the Jews’?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sure you do. What have you people got against the Jews? I mean, is it in your book to hate them? The way it is in ours?”
“Your book?”
“Hitler’s book. My Struggle. You know?”
“To my knowledge you are the first German who ever asked this question.”
I shrugged. “Well, I’m a very nosy sort of fellow.”
“I knew that just by looking at you, sir.”
I touched my nose and smiled. It didn’t hurt anymore, but I kept forgetting how comical it made me look. But I didn’t feel very comical. If I’d been worried before I was even more worried now. It was just twelve kilometers from Goethestrasse to where Dalia was living on Griebnitzsee. A twenty-minute drive. A bit longer on a bicycle, but probably not much longer. Berlin is a very flat city, and excellent for cyclists. It’s possible to go from the Brandenburg Gate all the way to Potsdam — a distance of almost thirty kilometers — and not encounter a single hill. The fact was, the colonel might already be sitting in the drawing room with his daughter.
“Yes, it’s in our holy Quran to kill all unbelievers, including Jews.”
I nodded. “I just wanted to know. For future reference, you understand.”
I ran back to the car and started her up.
Forty-four
While I drove the car I rehearsed some of the explanations I might give to Dalia for lying to her so egregiously. “I was only obeying orders” wasn’t going to do me any good, that was obvious. It was also obvious that Goebbels was right: if the colonel was already with Dalia, then no amount of special pleading was going to change her opinion, which was that I had deceived her, cruelly. Trying to justify what I had done in the name of her feelings simply wasn’t going to alter things for the better. Perhaps later on I might get a chance to offer an excuse for my behavior, but the nearer I got to the house on Griebnitzsee, the more I realized that if Dragan was there already, then the best thing I could probably do would be to withdraw quietly and leave them to their reunion. It was also becoming clear to me that, while I might have had the best of intentions, it had been very wrong of me to lie to her. Dalia was an adult, after all, not a child; she ought to have been given the opportunity to make up her own mind about what kind of man her father was. Protecting a grown woman from the truth was no kind of solution in a world that was already ruled by lies. That’s the thing about breathing the same air as the minister of Truth; after a while, truth is just another Paschal holy day you can move to suit the calendar. I felt disgusted with myself.
I parked the car on Kaiser-Strasse and walked along to the big creamy house. There was no sign of a bicycle in the garden or leaning by the front door. It looked as if I had succeeded in getting there before Colonel Dragan. Dalia’s bedroom window was open and a net curtain was spilling out of the castellated turret as if a damsel were in there, signaling to her knight with a handkerchief to come and rescue her. Everything looked exactly as it did when I’d left the place a couple of hours earlier. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked up the street to see if I could see an approaching bicyclist but there was no one in sight, not even a gardener.
I went around the back of the house to the kitchen door, which was rarely ever locked. Dalia preferred to leave it open to get a current of cool air through the house. There wasn’t a lot of crime in that part of Berlin and I couldn’t blame her for wanting some fresh air. It was almost thirty degrees and, at the bottom of the garden, I could see several boats moving up and down the river in the sunshine. It was a perfect day. Goebbels was right about that, too. The sky felt so big and blue and the few clouds looked so shapely I half expected to see the edge of a gilt frame over my head. Instead I saw a bicycle lying on the lawn under the lowest leaves of a weeping willow tree.