Leaving was the most unexpected madness of all. It was worse than end of term; worse than dumping the gang at Piraeus harbour. Fidel and Bubi clutched her to their breasts, their tears mixing with her own. One of the Algerian girls gave her a wooden Christ-child as a pendant.
Professor Minkel lived on the saddle that joins Mount Scopus to French Hill, on the eighth floor of a new tower close to the Hebrew University, one of a great cluster on the skyline which have caused pain to Jerusalem's luckless conservationists. Every apartment looked down on the Old City, but the trouble was, the Old City looked up at every apartment too. Like its neighbours, it was a fortress as well as a skyscraper, and the positioning of its windows was determined by the most favourable arcs of fire if an attack were to be riposted. Kurtz made three wrong tries before he found the place. He lost himself first in a shopping centre built in concrete five feet deep, then again in a British cemetery devoted to the fallen of the First World War. "A Free Gift from the People of Palestine," read the engraving. He explored other buildings, mostly the gifts of millionaires from America, and came finally upon this tower of hewn stone. The name signs had been vandalised and so he pressed a bell at random and unearthed an old Pole from Galicia who spoke only Yiddish. The Pole knew which building all right--this one as you see me!--he knew Dr. Minkel and admired him for his stand; he himself had attended the venerated Krakow University. But he also had a lot of questions on his own account, which Kurtz was obliged to answer as best he could; like where did Kurtz come from originally? Well, my heaven, did he know so-and-so? And what was Kurtz's business here, a grown man, eleven in the morning when Dr. Minkel should be instructing future fine philosophers of our people?
The lift engineers were on strike, so Kurtz was obliged to take the staircase, but nothing could have dampened his good spirits. For one thing, his niece had just announced her engagement to a young boy in his own service--though not before time. For another, Elli's Bible conference had passed off happily; she had given a coffee party at the end of it and, to her great contentment, he had managed to be present. But best of all, the Freiburg breakthrough had been followed by several reassuring pointers, of which the most satisfactory was obtained but yesterday, by one of Shimon Litvak's listeners, testing a newfangled directional microphone on a rooftop in Beirut: Freiburg, Freiburg, three times in five pages, a real delight. Sometimes luck treated you that way, Kurtz reflected as he climbed. And luck, as Napoleon and everybody in Jerusalem knew, was what made good generals.
Reaching a small landing, he paused to collect his breath a little, and his thoughts. The staircase was lit like an air-raid shelter, with wire cages over the light-bulbs, but today it was the sounds of his own childhood in the ghettos that Kurtz heard bouncing up and down the gloomy well. I was right not to bring Shimon, he thought. Sometimes Shimon puts a chilly note on things; a surface lightness would improve him.
The door of number 18D had a steel-plated eye hole and locks all down one side of it, and Mrs. Minkel undid them one by one like boot buttons, calling "Just one moment, please," while she got lower and lower. He stepped inside and waited while she patiently replaced them. She was tall and fine-looking, with blue eyes very bright, and grey hair pinned in an academic bun.
"You are Mr. Spielberg from the Ministry of the Interior," she informed him with a certain guardedness as she gave him her hand. "Hansi is expecting you. Welcome. Please."
She opened the door to a tiny study and there her Hansi sat, as weathered and patrician as a Buddenbrook. His desk was too small for him, and had been so for many years; his books and papers lay stacked about him on the floor with an order that could not have been haphazard. The desk stood askew to a window bay, and the bay was half a hexagon, with thin smoked windows like arrow slits, and a bench seat built in. Rising carefully, Minkel picked his way with unworldly dignity across the room until he had reached the one small island that was not claimed by his erudition. His welcome was uneasy and as they sat themselves in the window bay, Mrs. Minkel drew up a stool and sat herself firmly between them, as if intent upon seeing fair play.
An awkward silence followed. Kurtz pulled the regretful smile of a man obliged by his duty. "Mrs. Minkel, I fear there are a couple of things on the security side which my office insists I am to discuss with your husband alone in the first instance," he said. And waited again, still smiling, until the Professor suggested she make a coffee, how did Mr. Spielberg like it?
With a warning glance at her husband from the doorway,
Mrs. Minkel reluctantly withdrew. In reality there could have been little difference between the two men's ages; yet Kurtz was careful to speak up to Minkel because that was what the Professor was accustomed to.
"Professor, I understand that our mutual friend, Ruthie Zadir, spoke to you only yesterday," Kurtz began, with a bedside respectfulness. He could understand this very well, for he had stood over Ruthie while she made the call, and listened to both sides of the conversation in order to get the feel of this man.
"Ruth was one of my best students," the Professor observed, with an air of loss.
"She is surely one of ours too," said Kurtz, more expansively. "Professor, are you aware, please, of the nature of the work in which Ruthie is now engaged?"
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.