And as the two of them were looking at one another, the German was looking at pictures hung in our house, landscapes by the painter Shot, a small photo of my son, the heavy drapes, the old, simple furniture, and then Renate sat down. She sat on the front of the chair, her legs held tightly together, I wanted to tell her: No one will throw you out of here, but I didn't know what Hasha Masha had given away in her rare smile. The German was busy with some thought, as if he was and wasn't here at one and the same time, he smoked his cigarette, measured the face of my wife, his face became hard, maybe that was a challenge, maybe a measuring, I said in Hebrew: They're terrific and they want to meet our neighbor, but my wife wasn't listening to me at all, she hadn't even noticed my rare drunkenness, the German exhaled smoke from the cigarette and a cloud of smoke suddenly filled the room and Hasha Masha said to Renate in German I never knew she could speak, Come with me to the kitchen, I made cookies and cheesecake and there's also tea and coffee. For years she hadn't made anything for guests, the fact that she had clearly expected them to come perplexed me even more than her German, Renate almost skipped from the chair and the two women, who, despite the difference in their height, in a strange way looked like one another, were about to go to the kitchen but at that very moment Renate stared at the closed album, stopped a second, trembled, and Hasha Masha, who was attentive to her, came to the table, put a finger on the album and then on Renate's pale face, and then the two of them quickly took off for the kitchen, we were left alone in the room, the album was illuminated by the beam that always fell on Hasha Masha's head, shadows on the walls, my head was now light and elusive.
The German's hand began moving toward the album. He waited. A gigantic hand expecting, not asking but waiting, a hand hanging in the air, I said, Yes, look! He went to the table, stubbed out the cigarette in his hand and meanwhile I searched for an ashtray in the house where only Noga had smoked, and by the time I brought the ashtray the Shimonis had given us for our anniversary, that gigantic ugly seashell, the writer was already leafing through the album. He didn't pay any attention to the ashtray, just caught it in his big hand, without looking, crushed the stubbed-out cigarette with one spark still flashing in it, and looked at the photos with solemn slowness, page after page, and didn't say a thing, didn't ask, I wanted to say, Here's Menahem at six, here he is on a tour to the Carmel, but he didn't ask. I thought to myself, they and Hasha Masha know something, they know something about Menahem, about some life, and I don't.
Maybe because he was a German a forgotten picture from Romain Rolland's novel about Beethoven rose in the back of my mind. I recalled Beethoven's friend's description of the deaf genius listening intensely to music with his face impassive, as if, wrote Romain Rolland, the strength of the experience was too enormous to express in a look. I tried to understand what had been bothering me since the beginning of our conversation in the Shimonis' house, the sequence of accidents, the almost offensive circularity of Marar, Ebenezer Schneerson, Boaz, and somebody named Secret Charity and something that had now dissolved with the wine I had drunk and made me pleasantly dizzy, no, not the surprising link, not just that surprising closeness between Boaz and Ebenezer or the link of my investigation and the German's investigation, but something else I still didn't catch, maybe some fate I am to witness in the future no less than in the past, I said to him: Here is Menahem my son when he finished school, for example, the grammar school he attended, on his left is Amihud Giladi, the son of the owners of Ebenezer's house, before he moved here. He looked at me in amazement. His face was impassive, he was silent and in fact hinted to me that there was no need to detail those pictures and that the fact of Menahem's graduation from grammar school had nothing to do with what he was seeing now, as if Menahem's not-being had nothing to do with events when he was here, and whereas I knew I wasn't able to behave properly in such circumstances, that something theatrical and indulgent exulted in me at moments when I should behave in a precise and restrained way, I started telling the German who stood over the table and looked at the pictures in an unemotional silence, a story so characteristic of me, disgusting even myself but I couldn't change now of all times, before the photos of Menahem while his wife and my wife were developing a strange intimacy, I told him: A woman lived here on the street who recently opened a new shop, Salon de Pre she called the shop, once she was caught in the forest with a group of escapees from the ghetto, and Nazi soldiers-I said Nazis, not Germans! — caught them, the commander, she told me, was dressed very splendidly, wore riding pants, aluminum tags on his collar, a splendid silk hat on his head and in his hand he held a pistol and he shot, one after another the children dropped, and when he came to her and aimed the pistol at her son, on his finger pressing the trigger she saw a gold wedding ring, the soldiers were gathering wood for a bonfire and she stared at the finger, her child was pushed into her dress and with a vital flash of a besieged mother (my words, not hers) she said to him: Someday my children will take revenge on your children! And the officer's hand began shaking. At that moment maybe he understood, she told me, that there's a connection between his children and those children he shot as if they were an ecological nuisance, and he couldn't shoot that child. Throughout the war, he helped the woman. He'd show up from distant places, warn her, and take off. She wrote a letter to the court in Nuremberg and told the story. They wanted to know his name. She didn't know. They sent her pictures for identification and she couldn't identify him. I looked at him, he closed the album and looked at me, and then he said something strange, he said: Mr. Henkin, I didn't save any children! I felt embarrassed and I quickly moved the album to its place. Meanwhile the voices of our wives were heard again, I heard their whispering, and didn't understand them, they returned to the room with trays between them, for a second they looked at the closed album, as if they sensed it had been closed a minute or two before, I looked at the writer's face and it was impenetrable, a mouth mute now, I felt remote, I recalled the memorial day we had held recently for a commander when one of the government ministers said: We're in deep depression, this is a hard time, and from the grave of our loved one a beam of light bursts out to us and I stood there and something in me was revolted but I was also moved. Maybe both deceived and pained, a beam of light bursting out of death! In the ashtray the spark of smoke that burst from the stubbed-out cigarette could still be seen, my wife wanted to say something, the tray in her hand, I said: I'd have to say, he wrote a poem, I felt my legs buckle.
He didn't write any poem, said my wife in a soft voice, but Obadiah be lieves, she added in a voice that maybe for the first time in years didn't have an echo of the contempt she felt for me. Obadiah believes that through eternity the past can be improved. I preserve the album, added my wife and said to the writer, so that Henkin won't succeed in taking new pictures of Menahem.
And then she said to me in Hebrew: They're mourning just as much as we are, Henkin, but they don't have a committee of dead outings and foreign relations, look at them, see how much they miss a son!
It's not our son they miss, I said in Hebrew, and she smiled warmly at Renate, who stood a bit embarrassed in a corner, the tray in her hand. No, not the son of your committee, Obadiah Henkin, their son!