Jacob's Oath (26 page)

“Jacob, forgive me.” He felt Sarah’s body heaving and heard her gulping as she tried
to stop more sobs.

It had never occurred to him. Not for a moment. In all their lovemaking they hadn’t
taken any precautions. He had thought a baby would be a blessing, the fertile earth
replenishing itself. They hadn’t mentioned it, but he had thought she must be thinking
the same. Now he understood why she hadn’t talked about being careful.

What a cruel, final blow. Jacob hugged Sarah and thought: So. They won after all.

My line will finish here, just like they wanted. It’ll just take a bit longer.

When I die, it’s over for the Kleins. He killed Maxie. And now, without even knowing
it, he killed me, too. Oh, you rat, I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands.

“Sarah, how do you know? Maybe the doctor is wrong. How can he know? Please don’t
cry. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t. We have each other, we’ll always
have each other. You are everything to me. Anyway, we’ll adopt. We can adopt a baby.
There must be so many orphans, we can adopt one. Or two. Five. Ten! Sarah. Sarai.
Saraleh. As many as you like, please don’t cry.”

TWENTY-THREE

Heidelberg,
June 4, 1945

Two men slid tin trays of pastries and bread from the back of their van and carried
them into the hotel lobby. On the van’s side was the legend
Backerei Eichl
. That’s another way, Jacob thought, watching from the café down the road. Poison
the bread. Kill them all. I could get a job in the bakery, I did cooking at school,
get some poison from somewhere and inject it into the rolls. Or I could poison the
water supply. Kill the whole town. He sniggered. No, not really. Although it wasn’t
a bad idea.

He had followed Hans three more times, once back to the police station, once when
it seemed like he’d taken an aimless stroll alone, and the third to the beer garden.
But the times were random. Nothing on which to base a plan. What about taking a room
in the hotel, then? Extremely risky, first because the Rat might spot him, and second
because he’d leave a trail.

And he didn’t want to get caught. Not now. Not since Sarah. She said she was feeling
so much better now that she had told him. It was too much to carry alone. He’d joked,
it didn’t matter that she couldn’t have babies because anyway he couldn’t get it up.
A fine couple they were. She had laughed. Yes, they could adopt. “No secrets,” she
had said. “No more secrets, we tell each other everything, right?” Jacob had nodded
and smiled and held her. “Right. No secrets.”

And here he was, with the biggest secret of them all. He was going to kill a man.
Or rather, a rat.

But how to do it without getting caught? That made it much, much harder. Jacob was
something of a fixture by now, the only Jew in town, apart from Sarah, who was less
well known. And if Hans Seeler is murdered and the police work out that he was an
SS guard at Bergen-Belsen, and they know that Jacob was a prisoner there, well, they’d
soon be knocking at his door.

Every day there seemed to be more people in town. German refugees streamed in and
with their identity cards had the right to a room. Buildings had two to three times
the number of people they were built for. Families shared rooms. Punches were thrown
as refugees who had been given spare bedrooms were thrown out when the boys came home
from the war.

The street was getting crowded and Jacob was no longer the café’s sole client. He
liked it in the morning when the sun fell onto his side of the street and warmed him
in the chilly morning and there was soft music in the background. At eleven o’clock
Jacob leaned back in his chair with his legs stretched out and his shirt open to the
third button. The sun was soft on his face. Two hours earlier he had already reached
his goal of fifteen dollars for the day. Now he was spending a couple. He had a plate
of cookies with his coffee. Apricot jam. Every day Karl-Friedrich gave him some of
his wife’s latest batch, one to taste, five to buy.

It was all looking pretty damn good. He had lodged a complaint about the Bergers.
The Americans had told him that there was no mechanism to return the property of Jews
to its rightful owners. Yet. Surely it would come. And when there was a law, Jacob,
the first Jew back in town, would be the first to get his home back. They had promised.

All was going so well, in fact, that impure thoughts had entered his mind. Such as,
what if he didn’t kill the Rat after all?

Don’t be mad. But he forced himself to think it through. He was in love. He was making
money. Babies? They’d adopt. He had something he thought he had lost: a future. The
country would have to rebuild, from scratch. There would be endless opportunities
for a new business, maybe something to do with construction, Germany would be rebuilding
for decades. He could get a business license quickly and get a head start on everyone.
Import raw materials. He could be rich within a few years, very few. Then leave Germany.
Go live somewhere else. As soon as he could afford it.

Did he really want to throw it all away by murdering one lousy camp guard, when there
were tens of thousands of the bastards who nobody cared about? His anger said: Kill.
Revenge. His love for Sarah said: No. Move on. It was the past versus the future.
Love versus hate. He shook his head to banish the thoughts.

Okay. So I kill Hans Seeler. And I ruin my life. And Sarah’s. Is that really what
Maxie would have wanted?

Oh, yes. That’s what Maxie would have wanted. Not the ruining-my-life bit. The killing-the-Rat
bit.

So it was simple. Kill the Rat. Don’t get caught.

But how?

There he is.
Hans was dressed warmly, a coat, a scarf, and a hat, and he walked with confidence,
determination, as if he had a purpose. He turned left and it soon became clear he
wasn’t going to the police station. He went there so often, though, he must have friends
there. All the more reason to be careful. His direction was taking Hans toward the
beer garden. Jacob hurried along a different route and got there first.

The only free table was by the wall, beneath the fresco that had so fascinated him
last time. It was a wall-sized painting of a German peasant dressed in green Lederhosen,
green jacket, and green hat, wearing long flippers on his feet, hanging on to a naked
damsel by the crotch. His gnarled face looked out at the viewer as one huge hand grabbed
her between the legs. They seemed to be in a rowboat sinking in a raging sea while
a full-maned lion looked on. As Jacob looked up he wondered, yet again, what on earth
it all meant. Her left breast swung to the side and appeared to knock his hat off.
Her right arm was raised above her head so that her right breast rose pertly, and
the other hand gripped the oar. She, too, looked at the viewer, as did the lion.

Altogether very strange, Jacob thought; all German allegories were the same—rude,
violent, and pointless. He looked down again to see that the people at the next table
had left, a waiter was clearing up, and a waitress was leading three men to it. Jacob’s
skin crawled, his pulse raced. Hans and his two friends. He looked down but it was
too late to hide. They were walking straight to him. Hans was thanking the waitress.
He was smiling. He said she should join them if she had time. She laughed and said
she couldn’t drink while working. Later then, possibly? She laughed gaily and took
their orders. Three beers and three schnapps.

Jacob tried to calm himself, but his heart was pounding. He moved his hand from the
table to his lap. It was trembling. He was supping with the devil.

The beer garden was noisy, alive with chatter and laughter and accordion music that
seemed to bounce off the wall, yet Jacob could hear their every word. They were so
close he might as well have been sitting with them.

He should leave, not risk being recognized, but he was stuck to the chair.

Hans had removed his hat. He looked exactly the same, apart from the stupid mustache.
Slowly Jacob dropped his hand from his face. He couldn’t hide it forever, it would
draw attention. Anyway, he looked completely different, or so he hoped. He was clean-shaven
and his hair reached his ears. In Bergen-Belsen he had been a different person, miserable
and cowed. Unshaven, cropped hair, runny red eyes, bruises or welts or open sores,
scratching endlessly, hunched over to avoid drawing attention. Dressed in rags.

He sat up straight as if he didn’t have a care in the world, adjusted the collar of
his shirt, and smoothed his woolen jacket. He drank from his beer and when he caught
the eye of the waitress ordered a plate of sausage and sauerkraut.

Hans called one of them Kristoff. They were talking about women. Kristoff was eyeing
up the waitress, smirking in approval as she brought another round of schnapps. As
she walked away they all followed her with their eyes. “Nice haunch,” the third man
said. They moved on to the war. Kristoff was clearly an old pal whom Hans hadn’t seen
since he was shipped off to the east. The music became louder and a man with a foghorn
voice sat nearby, making it harder for Jacob to make out what they were saying. He
could understand about every third word. The other man had been some kind of infantry
soldier. Lucky to be alive. Sixty percent of his draft had been killed and seventy
percent of the survivors wounded. He didn’t have a scratch. They drank to that and
ordered more schnapps and beer.

Jacob sat half turned to them, so they could see only his profile. He ordered a second
beer. Hans was talking, drawing on the table with his finger. He moved an empty schnapps
glass and then moved two more. He pointed from one to the other and shook his head.
Jacob strained to hear. He moved his head closer, stretching from the shoulder. The
bastard was telling some war story. Something about tanks and the British. They advanced.
We fell back. An ambush. Who ambushed who? Jacob couldn’t quite hear. All three burst
into laughter and toasted Hans, who made a joking modest shrug and drew his thumb
across his throat.

Oh, yes. Hans, the Wehrmacht war hero. Lying through his teeth. Funny. The whole nation
had joined the Nazi party and now you couldn’t find a Nazi if you had a thousand dollars
to give away. An SS guard? No such thing.

Jacob felt his anger growing. At first he’d reacted with terror at being so close
to the Rat. He’d looked away, hidden his face, hunched his shoulders, had the shakes.
But as he listened to his lies, saw him laugh, drink, pound one friend on the shoulder
as he told a joke, throw his head back and survey the garden, lick his lips and leer
at the waitress, Jacob was filled with contempt and fury.

He thought, I could hit him right now with a jar of beer. He looked away. He was so
tempted to stand up and scream at him that he had to bend over and pretend to tie
his shoe, to calm down. Calm down, he told himself. This is not the time or the place.

The three men put their heads together and looked around as they spoke. Hans was doing
the talking, quieter now. There was an unexpected lull in the noise level while the
man with the booming voice chewed his sausage. Jacob made out the words “police station,”
and “papers,” and “train,” and as he leaned toward them and strained to hear what
Hans was saying he turned his head toward him to hear better with both ears, not just
the one, and now he heard quite clearly. Hans said, “In ten days we’ll be ready, I’ll
be gone.”

Gone? Where? Ten days? The Rat is leaving in ten days? Now Jacob’s whole body was
turned toward the three men, he was looking at the floor, straining to hear what the
man called Kristoff was saying; something about meeting other people, a boat, did
he say Hamburg?

Ten days? Jacob raised his eyes and saw the Rat staring right at him. Their eyes met.
The Rat’s eyes were small and hard and they narrowed and Jacob could see and almost
hear the wheels creaking in his mind. Jacob looked away but the Rat was so intense
Jacob felt himself drawn back. His heart slammed against his ribs like a hammer and
he felt the heat on his skin.

The Rat was looking in his eyes, straining to remember.

Jacob shifted and looked away again. He had been so dirty, unshaven, he must look
quite different now. And then he froze. He remembered. The last time the Rat had looked
into his eyes he had looked just the same as now. A bit thinner, that was all, less
hair. On the metal table in the Human Laundry. Shaven, like now. Clean, like now.
Slowly his eyes turned back toward Hans, he couldn’t help himself.

And their eyes met. The Rat slowly nodded. His thin lips turned down in the faintest
show of scorn. Jacob was transfixed, he couldn’t take his eyes from the Rat’s and
he felt himself break out in a sweat. He smelled his own fear. He felt his heart would
explode. The Rat stared at him until his two friends followed his stare and looked
at Jacob too. The third man said, “What is it, Hans?”

Hans’s eyes flickered to him and back to Jacob, whose lips were trembling. He felt
tears coming, tears of pure terror. He felt his nose quiver, he could hardly breathe.

Hans Seeler turned back toward his two friends. From far away Jacob heard him say,
“It’s nothing. It’s nobody.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Heidelberg,
June 4, 1945

Sarah knew something was wrong as soon as Jacob came through the door, closed it with
great care, and took too long to take off his jacket. He tried to smile and went to
wash his hands.

Sarah said, “You won’t believe it, look on the table.”

“What?” Jacob said over his shoulder as he rubbed his hands under the water. They
were still shaking.

“Look.”

“I said what. What is it?”

“Cherries. Fresh cherries. I’d forgotten how delicious they are.”

Jacob held one up to admire and pulled the dark red fruit from its stem. He separated
the pulp from the pip and crushed it slowly in his mouth, savoring the rich fresh
taste, like sweet meat. He spat the pit onto a plate.