“Would her death have been avoided if I hadn’t attended the dinner?”
Bernstein looked up suddenly and stared at Felix with the eyes of an ailing basilisk. “Did you see her before she died?”
“No. But she spoke to me.”
Bernstein rested his weight on the arms of the chair that surrounded him like a throne. “When?”
“Four days after her death.”
“Don’t play games with me, Felix,” said Bernstein, modulating his infinite repertory of tones. “We both loved her. But she loved you more.”
“I never touched her.”
“You’re a man who should never touch what doesn’t concern you. There is suffering that has nothing to do with you. Be thankful for that.”
“I’m still waiting for the whiskey you offered me.”
Bernstein struggled laboriously to his feet, and Felix added: “There is something that does concern me. What happened at the Palace the morning of the prizes?”
“What! Hasn’t anyone told you? But it’s the joke of the breakfast circuit. Where have you been the last week?”
“In a hospital with my face bandaged.”
“You see? Bad company,” said Bernstein, measuring the whiskey with squinting, myopic eyes. “Just as the President reached you, you fainted. You blacked out,” he added, and dropped one, two, three cubes of ice into the glass. “No big deal. A little scene. An incident. You were carried unconscious through the crowd. The President didn’t flick an eyelash; he continued greeting people. The ceremony went ahead normally.”
Bernstein suppressed a trembling, roguish smile. “There was no dearth of jokes. A minor official of the MED fainted just at the sight of the President. What emotion! There’s been nothing like it since Moctezuma.”
“You say you wounded yourself cleaning a pistol?”
Bernstein solemnly offered Felix the glass. “Someone shot me that evening when I was alone at my home. A bad shot.”
“Maybe he didn’t mean to kill you.”
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps? It wouldn’t be easy to miss someone your size.”
Bernstein did not reply. He prepared his own drink and raised it as if to propose a toast. “May the devil,” he said, “cut off all noses that find themselves in others’ business.”
He turned away from Felix, a sweat-stain continent on his back. “In your room at the Hilton, you had a dossier on all my activities.”
“Was it you who rifled my files?”
“What difference does it make?” replied Bernstein, his back still to Felix. “I know you know everything about me. But many people have that information. It’s no secret. You can parrot it till doomsday and nothing will happen.”
Recite like a good pupil?” Felix smiled. “But it is important. Leopoldo Bernstein, born 13 November 1915 in Krakow with all the handicaps: Polish, Jew, the son of militant socialist workers; emigrated to Russia with his parents following the October Revolution; given a fellowship by the Soviet government to study economics in Prague, and charged with establishing relations with Czech universities and officials in the Beneš government on the eve of the war; fails in carrying out his charge; instead of seducing, allows himself to be seduced by Zionist circles in Prague; following Munich, and before the imminent conflict, takes refuge in Mexico; author of a pamphlet against the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact; his parents disappear and die in Stalinist camps; the Soviet Union declares him a deserter; a professor in the School of Economics at the University of Mexico, requests leave and travels for the first time to Israel; fights in the Haganah, the secret Jewish army, but finds it too temperate and joins the terrorist Irgun; participates in multiple acts of murder and reprisal bombings of civilian sites; returns to Mexico and obtains his citizenship in ’52; from that time, he is responsible for raising funds in the Jewish communities of Latin America, and following the war of ’73, he helps found Gush Emunim, with the aim of preventing the return of the occupied territories…”
“Publish it in the newspapers if you want,” interrupted Bernstein, again installed in his rattan throne.
“Shall I also publish the fact that out of jealousy you ordered a Palestinian teacher jailed and tortured, ordered his mother to be tortured, her sexual parts destroyed, ordered the teacher, stripped of his will, sent back to Sara, all out of revenge?”
“I don’t know how Sara spoke to you following her death, but I see she did,” said Bernstein, with celluloid eyes.
“Who killed Sara?”
“I don’t know. But as you seem to know, she, too, moved in bad company.”
“The Israeli Embassy refused responsibility for her body.”
“She’d gone over to the enemy. That was no reason to kill her, but, simply stated, we were no longer responsible for her.”
“But the other side had even less motive to kill her.”
“Can you be sure? The internal conflicts of the Palestinians are no tennis game. If you ingratiate yourself with one group, you immediately alienate another.”
“You should know. The Jewish terrorists of the forties also had their disagreements.”
Bernstein shrugged. “Sara was very prone to leaving messages. And you to swallowing them.”
“Isn’t what I’ve said true?” Felix asked tranquilly.
“In context, yes. Outside it, no. The boy was a terrorist.”
“As you were in the Irgun. And with the same motives.”
Bernstein laboriously crossed fat legs. “Do you remember your classes in law? Palestine, ever since it was taken from us, has been a no-man’s-land, res nullius, through which all armies and all peoples have passed. Everyone has claimed it, Romans, Crusaders, Muslims, European imperialists, but only we have the original right to it. We have waited two thousand years. Ours is the real claim to Palestine. Our patience.”
“At the price of the sorrow of the people who’ve been living there for centuries, with the right or without it? You suffer from the sickness of a lost Paradise.”
Bernstein again shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “Do you want to return the island of Manhattan to the Algonquins? Shall we throw ourselves into what the French call an eternal Café du Commerce debate?”
“Why not? I listened to Sara’s reasons. I can listen to yours.”
“I fear I may bore you, my dear Felix. A Jew is as ancient as his religion, a Mexican as young as his history. That’s why you constantly renew your history, each time imitating a new model that quickly becomes obsolete. Then you repeat the whole process, losing everything. In the end, you do maintain the illusion of perpetual youth … We have persisted for two thousand years. Our only error has been always to wait for the enemy that hated us to leave us in peace, peace in Berlin and Warsaw and Kiev. For the first time, we have decided to win our peace, instead of waiting for it to be conceded to us. Is it only in suffering that people who, like you, have nothing to lose respect us?”
“You might choose less fragile enemies.”
“Who? The Arabs, a thousand times better armed and more powerful than we?”
“You might have demanded a fatherland in the very places where you suffered, instead of imposing one upon other peoples.”
“Ah, Sara taught you well. Bah! No one loves the Palestinians, the Arabs least of all. They’re the albatross around their necks. They use them as an arm of propaganda and negotiation, but in their own countries they impound them in concentration camps. So much for the farce of Arab socialism.” Bernstein narrowed his eyes and leaned forward over his gross belly. “You must understand, Felix. The only intimate ties the Palestinians have are to us Jews. To no one else. They must live with us or be the pariahs of the Arab world. With us, they have what they have never had: work, good salaries, schools, tractors, refrigerators, television, radios. I hate to think what it would be with the Arabs…”