The computers were switched off, but still, for a day or two, scepticism lingered. The supposition was absurd. Too easy. Frankly childish.
Yet, as they had learned already, Helga and her kind eschewed almost as a matter of philosophy any systematic method of communication. Comrades should speak to each other from one revolutionary heart to another, in looped allusions beyond the grasp of pigs.
Put it to the test, they said.
There were half a dozen Freiburgs at least, but their first thought was the little town of Freiburg in Mesterbein's native Switzerland, where French and German were spoken side by side, and where the bourgeoisie, even among the Swiss themselves, is famed for its stolidity. With no further delay, Kurtz dispatched a pair of very soft-footed researchers with orders to ferret out any conceivable target attractive to anti-Jewish attack, with a special eye to business houses with Israeli defence contracts; to check, as best they could without official help, all rooms 251, whether in hospitals, hotels, or office buildings; and the names of all patients scheduled for appendectomies on the twenty-fourth of the month; or for operations of any sort at 1800 hours on that day.
From the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem Kurtz obtained an up-to-date list of prominent Jews known to be resident in the town, together with their places of worship and association. Was there a Jewish hospital? If not, a hospital that catered to Orthodox Jewish needs? And so on.
Yet Kurtz was arguing against his ‘own convictions, as they all were. Such targets lacked all the dramatic effect that had distinguished their predecessors; they would épater nobody; they made no point that anyone could think of.
Till one afternoon in the middle of all this--almost as if their energies, applied at one spot, had forced the truth into the open at another--Rossino, the murderous Italian, took a plane from Vienna to Basel, where he rented a motorbike. Crossing the border into Germany, he drove forty minutes to the ancient cathedral city of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, once the capital of the state of Baden. There, having first enjoyed a lavish luncheon, he presented himself to the university's Rektorat and enquired courteously about a course of lectures on humanist subjects that was available, on a limited basis, to members of the general public. And more covertly, where room 251 was situated on the university's diagram of its premises.
It was a dart of light through the fog. Rachel was right; Kurtz was right; God was just, and so was Misha Gavron. The market forces had found their natural solution.
Only Gadi Becker did not share the general elation.
Where was he?
There were times when others seemed to know the answer better than he himself. One day he was pacing about the house in Disraeli Street, focussing his restless stare on the cipher machines, which, far too rarely for his taste, reported sightings of his agent, Charlie. The same night--or, more accurately, on the early morning of the next day--he was pressing the doorbell of Kurtz's house, waking Elli and the dogs, and demanding reassurances that there would be no strike against Tayeh or whomever until Charlie was laid off; he had heard rumours, he said: "Misha Gavron is not famous for his patience," he said drily.
If anyone came back from the field--the boy known as Dimitri, for instance, or his companion Raoul, exfiltrated by rubber boat--Becker insisted on being present at his debriefing, and firing questions at him regarding her condition.
After a few days of this, Kurtz got sick of the sight of him--"haunting me like my own bad conscience"--and threatened openly to forbid him the house, until wiser counsels got the better of him. "An agent-runner without his agent is a conductor without an orchestra," he explained to Elli profoundly, while he wrestled to quell his own anger, "More appropriate is to humour him, help him to pass the time."
Secretly, with no one's connivance but Elli's, Kurtz rang Frankie, telling her that her former husband was in town, and giving her the number to reach him; for Kurtz, with Churchillian magnanimity, expected everyone to have a marriage like his own.
Frankie duly phoned; Becker listened to her voice for a time--if indeed it was he who answered--and softly replaced the receiver on its cradle without replying, which enraged her.
Kurtz's ploy had some effect, however, for the next day Becker set out on what was later regarded as a kind of journey of self-appraisal regarding the basic assumptions of his life. Hiring a car, he drove first to Tel Aviv, where, having transacted some pessimistic business with his bank, manager, he visited the old cemetery where his father was buried. He put flowers on the grave, cleaned meticulously around it with a trowel that he borrowed, and said Kaddish aloud, though neither he nor his father had ever had much time for religion. From Tel Aviv he headed south-east to Hebron or, as Michel would have called it, El Khalil. He visited the mosque of Abraham, which since the war of ‘67 doubles uneasily as a synagogue; he chatted to the reservist soldiers, in their sloppy bush hats and shirts unbuttoned to the belly, who lounged at the entrance and patrolled the battlements.
Becker, they told each other when he had gone--except that they used his Hebrew name--the legendary Gadi himself--the man who fought the battle for the Golan from behind the Syrian lines--what the hell was he doing in this Arab hell hole, looking so uneasy?
Under their admiring gaze, he wandered through the ancient covered market, apparently unheeding of the explosive quiet and of the smouldering dark glances of the occupied. And sometimes, seemingly with other thoughts in mind, he paused and spoke to a shopkeeper in Arabic, asking after a spice or the price of a pair of shoes, while small boys gathered round to listen to him, and once, for a dare, to touch his hand. Returning to his car, he nodded farewell to the troops and headed into the small roads that thread themselves among the rich red grape terraces, until he came by stages to the hilltop Arab villages on the eastern side, with their squat stone houses and Eiffel Tower aerials on the roofs. A light snow lay on the upper slopes; stacks of dark cloud gave the earth a cruel and unappeasing glow. Across the valley, a huge new Israeli settlement stood like the emissary of some conquering planet.
And in one of the villages, Becker got out and took the air. It was where Michel's family had lived until ‘67 when his father had seen fit to flee. ‘
"So did he go visit his own tomb as well?" Kurtz demanded sourly when he heard all this, "First his father's, now his own--did he?"
A moment's puzzlement preceded the general laughter as they recalled the Islamic belief that Joseph son of Isaac had also been buried at Hebron, which every Jew knows to be untrue.