— If you’re tired again, we can sit for a while on this bench. It’s here for the faithful. Would you like to pray a little?
— But you’re here all alone… no one will see you… and it’s the same Virgin as the one in the Lutheran church near our estate, even if she is so tiny…
— If you don’t want to, you don’t have to, it doesn’t matter. If you’d like, I even possess the vested authority to commandeer that little doll with her baby and make you a present of them, so that you can have them as a souvenir of this hike and this wonderful view, and even of me too perhaps, because who knows…
— What I’m saying, Grandmother, is who knows if I’ll ever come home again…
— What?
— Go on!
— What makes you so sure?
— But how? Who?
— That’s ridiculous. I’m being transferred to Germany? Who even knows that I’m on this godforsaken island?
— But what do you think? Tell me this minute…
— I want the truth, Grandmother. Was it your doing? The truth, Grandmother… have you been meddling again?
— But what can you know about it when you don’t even understand what happened? I have to stay here… I have to find them… ach, damn you, why did you have to go rushing off again, Grandmother, without even asking me first…
— I’m sorry… I’m sorry…
— The two of them… the woman and the child…
— Playing games with Jews? Games? On the contrary, you’ll see in a minute… just the opposite…
— But it’s not for them, it’s for us, Grandmother… for Germany… the Jews here, and everywhere, are simply guinea pigs on whom we can perform an experiment that we’re still afraid to perform on ourselves. They even like being experimented on, they’re so used to changing shapes and jumping from test tube to test tube. Just look at all I’ve learned these past three years, at what an expert I’ve become… even if you don’t agree with my train of thought, you can’t accuse me, Grandmother, of superficiality. Don’t you remember how many exams I flunked in school because I refused to give superficial answers to superficial questions? Surely you don’t think that just because the idea pleased me, I let myself be innocently carried away by it, or excused myself from the necessity of checking and double-checking it to see if young Mr. Mani’s astonishing confession rang true, if it was at all plausible! I was so beside myself, Grandmother, so on fire with new questions, that that same night, when my shift at the prison was over, I climbed onto my motorcycle instead of into bed and went racing off at the crack of dawn to that house outside of Knossos, where I knocked loudly on the door. This time I didn’t wait to be let in. I climbed through a window, went right to the back room, which happened to be their bedroom, shone my flashlight on the pile of blankets under which those canceled Jews were lying, and shook them out of the last of their sleep for another interrogation, shivering from cold, the woman all soft and wild-haired in a flannel nightgown embroidered in red, and the man in the same overcoat that had been worn by his father. I could see from his calm look that he wasn’t surprised by my appearance, as if he had realized that one night was not enough to digest his confession but only to throw it back up at him…
— I thought I would search their house, Grandmother, for something Jewish that they took out at night, something that might refute his declaration, although in fact, I had no idea what anything Jewish might look like or how to go about finding it, because I was still so naive, Grandmother, that back then, in the winter of ‘41, I didn’t know what was already clear to me by the spring of ‘42, that is, that there’s nothing Jewish that a Jew can’t do without…
— I mean that a Jew’s identity, Grandmother, can exist purely in his own mind, which is why there is reason to believe it can be canceled there too…
— But that’s precisely the point… that’s the point, O wisest and most perspicacious Grandmother, that I keep trying to get across to you, so that you’ll understand how difficult, how profound, how almost absurd is the war that the Führer has declared on them…
— No. I never said a word to Major Schmelling.
— Because I knew, Grandmother, that it was too subtle for him. Who is this Schmelling, after all? An elderly police officer of the old school who knows about Jews from the newspapers and hysterical speeches and slogans on the walls, which is why he takes them so literally, so that he thinks the world is like the Berlin Zoo, in which you can go from cage to cage comparing the animals until you find the Super-Ape… No, I wouldn’t want to confuse him with an idea that I myself haven’t finished working out yet…
— Have I gotten to the point? Not yet… not yet… especially since young Mani himself only sank to the bottom of the sea some eight weeks ago… although on the other hand…
— I’m getting there… in a minute… in a minute you’ll understand…
— Of course, Grandmother. After all, I could simply have told myself, as you keep telling me, “He’s just putting one over on you, this beastly Jew, he’s just trying to dodge his fate.” But I knew that was the easy way out, the answer you give when all you have patience for is blasting away with your schmeisser, and that, perhaps because I was helped to arrive on this island by a gentle push from above, I should first tune in to my surroundings, not for the sake of Mani Junior, but for our own sake, for the sake of Germany and the Germans, to see if one couldn’t return to the starting point and become simply human again, a new man who can cancel the scab of history that sticks to us like ugly dandruff and put the dark, moldy rooms full of worm-eaten books, the faded oil paintings, the grotesque sculptures, behind him for the sunlit aperture, Grandmother, that you see spread out before you in all its glory, chorusing away in the crickets that won’t, I’m afraid, let us hear ourselves think unless we get up and move on… Come, Grandmother, let’s go…
— No, there’s not much more… I promise… I beg you…
— No, we still have time before dark… and we’re not far from the top now… Even if this story of mine only irritates you, the fantastic view that you’re about to see, with its radiant expanse of air and water, will reward you for all your aggravation…
— Exactly… exactly… you see, you do understand me, Grandmother…
— Thank you, Grandmother, thank you…
— I know…
— Of course you’ll have the right of reply…
— I promise you… for as long as you like… I’ll listen to you all evening…
— Yes, exactly. That’s what I told myself too, “Even if he’s trying to put one over on you, you’ll make him stick to his word,” and so my first order of business was making sure he didn’t take to the mountains, which meant that every day or two, Grandmother, I paid him a surprise visit just to check that he was still canceling away…
— At first just house visits, Grandmother, because we’re still talking about the winter and spring of ‘42 when I was at the bottom of the ladder, an ordinary guard working the night shift in that big, dry winery that Schmelling turned into a prison. As soon as my shift was over, with the first light of dawn, while my brain was still on fire with the screams of tortured suspects, I would climb on my cycle and speed off from Heraklion to Knossos along roads still silenced by the curfew, which in those days was dutifully honored by the inhabitants, to pay a call on my own private, secret suspects, who began leaving the door open for me once they realized I wasn’t going to leave them alone, so that I could step right into their bedroom without bothering them, two heaps of blankets that my flashlight played over as it looked for something Jewish whose name, shape, or nature I hadn’t the foggiest notion of. In those days I still believed that, if only it existed, it was bound to emerge from the bedclothes at night and cancel the cancellation