Minkel was not really used to answering questions outside his subject, and he required a moment's puzzled thought before replying.
"I feel I should say something," he said, with awkward resolution.
Kurtz smiled hospitably.
"If your visit here concerns the political leaning- sympathies-of present or former students under my charge, I regret that I am unable to collaborate with you. These are not criteria which I can accept as legitimate. We have had this discussion before. I am sorry." He seemed suddenly embarrassed, both by his thoughts and by his Hebrew. "I stand for something here. When we stand for something, we must speak out, but most important is to act. That is what I stand for."
Kurtz, who had read Minkel's file, knew exactly what he stood for. He was a disciple of Martin Buber, and a member of a largely forgotten idealistic group that between the wars of '67 and '73 had championed a real peace with the Palestinians. The rightists called him a traitor; sometimes, when they remembered him these days, so did the leftists. He was an oracle on Jewish philosophy, on early Christianity, on the humanist movements in his native Germany, and on about thirty other subjects as well; he had written a three-volume tome on the theory and practice of Zionism, with an index as long as a telephone directory.
"Professor," said Kurtz, "I am well aware of your posture in these matters and it is surely no intention of mine to seek to interfere in any way with your fine moral stand." He paused, allowing time for his assurance to sink in. "May I take it, by the way, that your forthcoming lecture at the University of Freiburg also touches upon this same issue of individual rights? The Arabs-their basic liberties-isn't that your subject on the twenty-fourth?"
The Professor could not go along with this. He did not deal in careless definitions.
"My subject on that occasion is different. It concerns the self-realisation of Judaism, not by conquest, but by the exemplification of Jewish culture and morality."
"So how does that argument run exactly?" Kurtz asked benignly.
Minkel's wife returned with a tray of homemade cakes. "Is he asking you to inform again?" she demanded. "If he's asking, tell him no. Then when you've said no, say no again, until he hears. What do you think he'll do? Beat you with a rubber truncheon?"
"Mrs. Minkel, I surely am asking your husband no such thing," said Kurtz, quite unperturbed.
With a look of patent disbelief, Mrs. Minkel once more withdrew.
But Minkel barely paused. If he had noticed the interruption at all, he ignored it. Kurtz had asked a question; Minkel, who renounced all barriers to knowledge as unacceptable, proposed to answer it.
"I will tell you exactly how the arguments run, Mr. Spielberg," he replied solemnly. "As long as we have a small Jewish state, we may advance democratically, as Jews, towards our Jewish self-realisation. But once we have a larger state, incorporating many Arabs, we have to choose." With his old mottled hands, he showed Kurtz the choice. "On this side, democracy without Jewish self-realisation. On that side, Jewish self-realisation without democracy."
"And the solution, therefore, Professor?" Kurtz enquired.
Minkel's hands flew in the air in a dismissive gesture of academic impatience. He seemed to have forgotten that Kurtz was not his pupil.
"Simple! Move out of the Gaza and the West Bank before we lose our values! What other solution is there?"
"And how do the Palestinians themselves respond to this proposal, Professor?"
A sadness replaced the Professor's earlier assurance. "They call me a cynic," he said.
"They do?"
"According to them, I want both the Jewish state and world sympathy, so they say I am subversive of their cause." The door opened again, and Mrs. Minkel entered with the coffee pot and cups. "But I am not subversive," the Professor said hopelessly-though he got no further, owing to his wife.
"Subversive?" Mrs. Minkel echoed, slamming down the crockery and colouring purple. "You are calling Hansi subversive? Because we speak our hearts about what is happening to this country?"
Kurtz would not have been able to stop her if he had tried, but in the event he made no effort to. He was content to let her run her course.
"In the Golan, the beatings and the torture? On the West Bank, how they treat them, worse than the S.S. In the Lebanon, in Gaza? Here in Jerusalem, even, slapping the Arab kids around because they are Arabs! And we should be subversive because we dare to talk about oppression, merely because no one is oppressing us-Jews from Germany, subversive in Israel?"
"Aber, Liebchen - " the Professor said, with an embarrassed fluster.
But Mrs. Minkel was clearly a lady who was used to making her point. "We couldn't stop the Nazis, now we can't stop ourselves. We get our own country, what do we do? Forty years later, we invent a new lost tribe. Idiocy! And if we don't say it, the world will. The world says it already. Read the newspapers, Mr. Spielberg!" As if warding off a blow, Kurtz had lifted his forearm until it was between her face and his. But she had not nearly finished. "That Ruthie," she said, with a sneer. "A good brain, studies three years under Hansi here. And what does she do? She joins the apparatus."
Lowering his hand, Kurtz revealed that he was smiling. Not in derision, not in anger, but with the confused pride of a man who truly loved the astonishing diversity of his people. He was calling "Please," he was appealing to the Professor, but Mrs. Minkel still had a wealth to say.
Finally, however, she stopped, and when she had done so, Kurtz asked her whether she too would not sit down and listen to what he had come to talk about. So she perched herself on the stool once more, waiting to be appeased.
Kurtz picked his words very carefully, very kindly. What he had to say was about as secret as a secret could be, he said. Not even Ruthie Zadir-a fine officer, handling many secrets every day-not even Ruthie was aware of it, he said: which was not true, but never mind. He had come not about the Professor's pupils, he said, and least of all to accuse him of being subversive or to quarrel with his fine ideals. He had come solely about the Professor's forthcoming address in Freiburg, which had caught the attention of certain extremely negative elements. Finally he came clean.
"So here's the sad fact," he said, and drew a long breath. "If some of those Palestinians, whose rights you have both been so bravely defending, have their way, you will make no speech at all on the twenty-fourth of this month in Freiburg. In fact, Professor, you will never make a speech again." He paused, but his audience showed no sign of interrupting. "According to information now available to us, it is evident that one of their less academic groups has singled you out as a dangerous moderate, capable of watering the pure wine of their cause. Just as you described to me, sir, but worse. A protagonist of the Bantustan solution for Palestinians. As a false light, leading the weak-brained into one more fatal concession to the Zionist jackboot."
But it took far, far more than the mere threat of death to persuade the Professor to accept an untested version of events.
"Excuse me," he said sharply. "That is the very description of myself which appeared in the Palestinian press after my speech at Beer Sheva."
"Professor, that is precisely where we got it from," said Kurtz.
twenty-four
She flew into Zurich in early evening. Storm flares lined the runway and blazed before her like the path of her own purpose. Her mind, as she had desperately prepared it, was an assembly of her old frustrations, matured and turned upon the rotten world. Now she knew there was not a shred of good in it; now she had seen the agony that was the price of Western affluence. She was who she had always been: an angry reject, getting her own back; with the difference that the Kalashnikov had replaced her useless tantrums. The flares sped past her window like burning wreckage. The plane touched down. But her ticket said Amsterdam, and theoretically she had still to land. Single girls returning from the Middle East are suspect, Tayeh had said, at her final briefing in Beirut. Our first task is to give you a more respectable provenance. Fatmeh, who had come to see her off, was more specific: Khalil has ordered that you acquire a fresh identity when you arrive.