He ordered breakfast, but in spite of his hunger, he was unable to eat, and he fell asleep on the wide bed. He lacked the strength to dream, not even of the affront of Ayub’s hands pawing Sara’s body. It was dusk when he awakened, the time the fashionable Zona Rosa comes alive with young Lotharios roving the streets, the horns of convertibles blasting the Marseillaise. He got out of bed to close the window, and drank a cup of cold coffee. He stared indifferently at the furnishings typical of such hotels, modern, low-slung furniture, Mexican fabrics of solid and audacious colors — lots of orange, lots of indigo blue — drapes of rough native cloth. Listlessly, he flicked on the television; nothing but stupid soap operas, unctuous voices resounding in vacuous decors.
He switched off the television and turned to the stereo, a small set much the worse for wear that played only 45’s. In the bookcase he found a few records in worn jackets, and flipped through them without interest. Sinatra, “Strangers in the Night”; Nat “King” Cole, “Our Love Is Here to Stay”; Gilbert Bécaud, “Et Maintenant”; Peggy Lee, several mariachi groups, Armando Manzanero, and Satchmo, the great Louis Armstrong, the ballad of “Mack the Knife,” the song of his twentieth birthday and the Versalles nightclub and Sara in his arms, the bitter and witty ballad of a criminal of Victorian London who asked: Is it worse to found a bank or rob one, “Mack the Knife,” the song of youth and Sara Klein and Felix Maldonado’s love for each other, a song jolted out of the Berlin of the thirties, bridging the horror of those crimes and contemporary ones, the persecution of the child and the murder of the woman, a succession of murderers, Mack the Knife, Himmler the Butcher, Jack the Ripper. This was the only new album. Felix was sure Sara had bought it to play in the room. Meaning for him to hear it, too. He removed the record from its still shiny envelope, pristine in contrast to the worn, ripped, dull jackets of the other records. It bore the sticker of the shop where Sara had bought it, Dalis, Calle de Amberes, Mexico City, D.F. He switched on the stereo and placed the huge mouth of the disk over the beige plastic spindle. The record dropped noiselessly and began to spin; the needle was inserted without pain. Felix awaited Satchmo’s trumpet. Instead, he heard the voice of Sara Klein.
21
“FELIX. I must be brief. I have only five minutes on each side. I loved you when I was young. We thought we would spend our lives together. But I was afraid. You overidealized me. You couldn’t share my sorrow. Bernstein could. He took advantage of our mutual suffering. He convinced me that it was my duty to go to Israel and involve myself in building a homeland for my people. He said it was the only way to respond to the Holocaust. Death and destruction we would counter with life and creation. He was right. I’ve never known such happy, clear-eyed people as the men and women and children who were turning a desert into a prosperous and free land with new roads and schools and cities. I was offered a professorship at the university, but I wanted a humbler job where I would know the very roots of our experience. I became an elementary-school teacher. Sometimes I thought of you, but even as I did, I put the thought aside. I couldn’t allow affection to stand in the way of duty. Only now I realize that as I stopped thinking about you I also stopped thinking about anything else. I buried myself in my work, and I forgot you. The price was forgetting — rather, ceasing to see, which is the same thing — anything that didn’t have a direct bearing on my work.
“Bernstein came over for two months every year. He never mentioned you. I never asked. Everything was clear-cut and defined. My life in Mexico was behind me. Israel was the present. The Arabs threatened us on every side. They were our enemies, they wanted to crush us, just as the Nazis had. All my conversations with Bernstein turned on this, the Arab menace, our survival. Our hope was our conviction. We had to survive this time, or we would disappear from the face of the earth forever. I say ‘we’ because we are talking about an entire culture. Valéry said that civilizations are mortal. That isn’t true. Power passes, not civilizations. My work as a schoolteacher kept my hopes alive. Even if power changed hands, our civilization would be saved, because I was teaching children to know and love it: both the Israeli and the Palestinian children in my class. I tried to teach them that we should live in peace in our new state, respecting one another’s particular cultures to form one common culture.
“Of course, I knew of the existence of the detention camps. But I found a justification for them. We didn’t kill our prisoners from the Six Days’ War, we detained them, and then exchanged them. And the Palestinian prisoners were terrorists, guilty of the murder of innocent persons. And there I closed my file. I had known too much of what happened to us in Europe to be submissive. It was a simple matter of self-defense. Sanity and morality reigned, Felix. What a marvelous way to expiate the guilt of the Holocaust! We were purging ourselves of the sins of others through our own efforts. We had found a place where we could be masters, and not slaves. But more important for me was believing that we’d found a place where we could be masters without slaves.
“The change in me came very slowly, almost imperceptibly. Bernstein was very clumsy in attempting to insinuate his affection. He knew what I believed in. I had left you to follow him. But I had followed him to fulfill a duty he himself had pointed out to me. It was no easy job for him to take your place, to offer himself in your place, to dilute my sense of duty by adding to it a love different from the one I’d sacrificed, your love, Felix. Then he tried to confuse my sense of duty with his desire. He began to boast about what he’d been and all he’d done, from his youthful participation in the secret Jewish army during the British Mandate to his participation in the Irgun; and following that, his fund-raising work outside Israel. It was Bernstein who made me think about the fact that Israel had used violence to establish itself in Palestine. I could accept that necessity, but I was shocked by the boastful tone of his arguments and the pathetic intent behind them; he hoped to possess me by causing me to confuse duty with the heroic personality he was creating for himself. The worst of this ambiguous situation was that it kept us from seeing the obvious counterargument. Neither of us expressed the point of view that perhaps the Palestinians, hoping to reclaim a homeland, had as much right to terror as the Israelis, and that our revolutionary and terrorist organizations — the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang — necessarily evoked their historic counterparts, the PLO, the Fedayeen, the Black September group.
“Bernstein’s sexual desires stood between that terrible truth and my awareness. I was living in a vacuum, and one vacuum contained another: your absence. Then came the Yom Kippur War, and my world and its reasons for being shattered into little pieces. Not abruptly; with me, everything happens gradually. One night Bernstein was particularly aggressive sexually; I was cold and distant, and at first he was embarrassed, but then he redoubled his political arguments. He ranted like a madman about the territories occupied in ’73 and how we must never abandon them, not one inch. He spoke of Gush Emunim, and of the town he’d helped build and finance to ensure that we would be irrevocably established in the occupied territories and would erase the last trace of Arab culture. I realized he thought about these lands as he would like to think about me, his occupied territory, and that to him Gush Emunim was tantamount to his virility. Finally I dared speak up to him and say it wasn’t territory we needed, because we already had something more than territory, we had the example of our labor and our dignity, and that was all the self-defense and all the propaganda we needed. But all Bernstein could talk about was security; the territories were indispensable to our security. I recalled Hitler’s first speeches. First the Rhineland, then Austria, then the Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor. Finally, the world. A world, Europe or the Middle East, vital space, the security of frontiers, the superior destiny of one people. Surely you can understand this, you, a Mexican?