Nevertheless, Mr. Mani maintained his ties with the Shilohs, and after his son Efrayim went to London for his doctorate, he regularly began coming in his place. Once every few weeks he would appear, a genteel man always dressed in dark clothes. After taking his grandson for a walk on the bare, tawny hills around the kibbutz, he would sit with the two women on their front lawn and tell them about his family or some court case while the toddler ran in and out among them. These conversations never touched on politics or social issues, about which he either had no clear opinions or preferred to keep the ones he had to himself, even though he was always curious to hear those of others. And yet as friendly and “judicially attentive” as he was, Ya’el soon realized that she must be patient and not expect any quick “romantic” developments. Fortunately, he did not mind the arid landscape. On the contrary, he often went hiking in it with her and seemed to relish the desert views.
When Hagar and her mother found out that Mr. Mani was driving to the kibbutz via the West Bank, along the road from Jerusalem to Hebron, they sought to talk him out of it. Mr. Mani, however, insisted that there was no need to take the long way to Beersheba, since the route through Hebron was perfectly safe and the villagers along it were peaceful. Once, at some gas station, he related, they had even tried selling him a horse.
Nevertheless, in the early autumn of 1987, a large rock was thrown at the judge’s car as he drove through Dir-el-Mana, a village some twenty kilometers south of Hebron. That evening he confessed to Ya’el that it would be wiser to stop coming via Hebron, even though he felt drawn to that route.
SECOND CONVERSATION
Heraklion, Crete
The Conversation Partners
EGON BRUNER Twenty-two years old. Born in 1922 on an estate near Flansburg, in the north German district of Schleswig-Holstein, to Werner Sauchon and Mariette Bruner.
Admiral Werner Sauchon (b. 1861) was one of the most highly lauded German officers in the First World War, in which he served with special distinction in the great Baltic Sea battles of 1914. In 1916 he and his wife Andrea lost their only son Egon on the Western Front, in the trenches of Verdun. At first they considered adopting an infant born to a family relation of theirs, but to their great disappointment, the child died soon after birth. Despairing of any other solution, they decided jointly, after much debate, that an orphaned young servant girl named Mariette Bruner, whose parents had worked on the Sauchon estate for many years, should secretly bear the admiral a child. It was agreed that the offspring would maintain ties with its mother and bear her name as her child out-of-wedlock, but that it would be raised by the Sauchons as a “candidate for adoption”—which, should it “prove worthy,” would be recognized as their heir at the age of twenty-one.
When Egon was a year old, his mother Mariette left the estate and moved to Hamburg, where she eventually married Werner Raiman, the director of a proletarian theater, by whom she had a second child. Egon grew up on his father’s estate and was encouraged to call his father and his father’s wife “Grandfather” and “Grandmother,” or more affectionately, “Opapa” and “Oma.” He studied both with private tutors who were brought to the house and at a nearby village school. For the most part, his schooling was supervised by his “grandmother” Andrea, who devoted herself to making it as close as possible to the excellent education received by her beloved son killed in World War I. Egon was a slim, rather nearsighted, blond boy of average height who showed a clear preference for the liberal arts. When he was young, he was sent to Hamburg during school vacations to stay with his mother and stepfather, but after the death of Admiral Sauchon in 1935, when Werner Raiman ran afoul of the Nazi police in Hamburg and the Raimans moved to a village in Bavaria, Egon’s contact with his mother was greatly reduced.
In 1940, at the age of eighteen, Egon was called up by the Wehrmacht and inducted into the navy at the request of his grandmother, who wished him to carry on the family tradition. Because of his poor eyesight, he was sent to a medic’s course at a naval base in Hamburg. After completing the course in early 1941, however, he was not posted to a naval vessel, because starting in March of that year, plans for the impending invasion of Russia led to a redeployment of forces in which many sailors and naval officers, who had been relatively inactive, were transferred to the infantry. In April 1941, once again on his grandmother’s intervention, Egon was posted as a medic with the 7th Alpine Division based near Nürnberg, and in May he was attached to the 3rd Brigade, then being augmented in preparation for action in the Balkans. On May 16 he flew with the brigade to Athens, from where he was parachuted into Crete with the special task force of General Student in the second wave of the German airborne invasion that took place on Tuesday afternoon, the twentieth of May. Although Egon’s unit suffered extremely high casualties and was evacuated to Germany several weeks after Crete’s conquest, Egon remained behind on the island with its occupation garrison. In the laconic postcards he wrote to his grandmother, he promised to explain the circumstances of this development when he came home on leave, but his first furlough, which was scheduled for April 1942, was postponed because he ceded his place to a comrade who wished to get married in Germany. A second leave, in January 1943, was canceled in the wake of the disaster in Stalingrad, and Egon did not set out for home until April 1944, when he flew in a military transport plane to Salonika and joined a northbound convoy there. After the latter was attacked by Greek partisans and forced to return to its base, however, he decided to forego the journey to Germany and returned to Crete on a Greek ship. His infrequent letters did not reach his grandmother either, because, from 1942 on, Crete was lumped by the military censors together with the Eastern front and much mail from there was never delivered. Egon himself, on the other hand, received all his grandmother’s letters and even an occasional letter from his mother. He was also sent the copies of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey that he requested, as well as a history of ancient Greece, which arrived via navy general staff headquarters. In late July 1944 he was informed that his grandmother Andrea was planning to visit him — and indeed, she arrived on the first of August in a light aircraft that flew directly from Athens and landed at Heraklion Airport early that afternoon.
ANDREA SAUCHON Born in 1870 in Lübeck, the daughter of a Protestant minister named Kurtmaier. She graduated nursing school in Hamburg in 1894 and went to work in a military hospital, where she met the naval officer Werner Sauchon, who dropped by frequently to visit some sailors of his who had been wounded in a naval exercise. They were married in 1896 and took up residence in the officers’ barracks of the imperial navy, and toward the end of that year their only son Egon was born. Once Werner had risen through the ranks, the Sauchons moved to the family estate in Holstein, where Egon was raised. With the outbreak of the world war, Egon was called to the colors and sent to the Western Front after a short period of basic training. He was only twenty when he was killed. His death affected Andrea more severely than it did her husband, who was involved in fighting the war, in which he served with great merit and won the highest decorations. However, when Werner Sauchon retired from active service after the German defeat and the Versailles Peace Treaty, he too began to feel the enormity of his loss. Before long the bereaved parents started looking for a surrogate son, which they found in Egon Bruner, who was conceived in 1921 in mutual agreement and trust. To spare his beloved wife the slightest embarrassment, the admiral insisted that the boy bear his mother’s name until the age of twenty-one. Although Andrea was over fifty when the second Egon was born, she devoted herself to him like a young mother while making sure he kept in touch with Mariette, who left the estate amicably a year after her son’s birth. Andrea herself was quite content to be called “Grandmother” by the boy.