The Return of the Dancing Master (18 page)

The Man from Buenos Aires October-November 1999

W
hen Aron Silberstein woke up he didn't know who he was. There was a belt of fog between dream and reality that he had to find his way through to discover if he really was Aron Silberstein, or if at that moment he was Fernando Hereira. In his dreams his two names often switched. Every time he woke up, he experienced a moment of great confusion. This morning was no exception when he opened his eyes and saw light seeping through the canvas. He slid his arm out of his sleeping bag and looked at his watch. It was 9:03. He listened. All quiet. The night before he'd turned off the main road after passing through a town called Falköping. Then he'd driven through a little hamlet with a name something like Gudhem and found a farm road leading into the forest, and there he'd been able to pitch his tent.

And that was where he had just woken up, feeling that he had to force his way out of his dreams. It was raining, a thin drizzle with occasional drops pecking against the canvas. He put his arm back into his sleeping bag to keep warm. Every morning he was overcome by the same yearning for warmth. Sweden was a cold country in the autumn. He'd learned that during his long stay.

Soon it would all be over. He would drive to Malmö. He'd return his rented car, get rid of the tent, and spend a night in a hotel. Early the next day he would make his way to Copenhagen and in the afternoon board a plane that would take him home to Buenos Aires by way of Frankfurt and Sao Paulo.

He settled down in the sleeping bag and closed his eyes. He didn't need to get up yet. His mouth was dry and he had a headache. I overdid
it last night, he thought. I drank too much, more than I needed to, in order to get to sleep.

He was tempted to open his backpack and take out one of the bottles inside it, but he couldn't risk being stopped by the police. Before leaving Argentina he'd been to the Swedish Embassy in Buenos Aires to find out about the traffic laws in Sweden. He had discovered that there was zero tolerance when it came to alcohol. That had surprised him since he'd read in a newspaper article some time ago that Swedes were heavy drinkers and were often drunk in public. He resisted the temptation to drink this morning. At least he wouldn't smell of alcohol if the police were to stop him.

Light trickled in through the canvas. He thought about the dream he'd had during the night. In it he was Aron Silberstein again. He was a child and his father Lukas was still with him. His father was a dancing master and he received his pupils at home in their Berlin apartment. It was during that last horrific year—he knew because in the dream his father had shaved off his mustache. He'd done that a couple of months before the catastrophe. They were sitting in the only room that didn't have broken windows. Just the two of them, Aron and his father: the rest of the family had disappeared. And they waited. They said nothing, just waited, nothing else. Even now, after fifty-four years, it seemed to him that his childhood was one long, drawn-out wait. Waiting and terror. All the awful things that happened outside in the streets, when the sirens sounded and they scurried down into the shelter, had never affected him. What would come to dominate his life was the waiting.

He crawled out of his sleeping bag. Took out an aspirin and the water bottle. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He put the pill in his mouth and washed it down. Then he crawled out of the tent to pee. The ground was cold and wet under his bare feet. One more day and I'll be away from all this, he thought. All this cold, the long nights. He crawled back into the tent, down into the sleeping bag and pulled it up to his chin. The temptation to take a swig from one of the bottles was there all the time, but he would wait. Now that he'd come as far as this he was determined not to take any unnecessary risks.

The rain grew heavier. Everything went as it was destined to go, he told himself. I waited for more than fifty years for that moment to come. I'd almost, but only almost, given up the hope of finding the explanation for what had ruined my life, and how to avenge it. Then the unexpected happened. By some totally incredible coincidence somebody turned up and was able to supply the piece of the jigsaw that
enabled me to discover what had happened. A chance meeting that should have been inconceivable.

He decided that as soon as he got back to Buenos Aires he would go to the cemetery where Hollner was buried and put a flower on his grave. If not for him he would never have been able to carry out his mission. There was some kind of mysterious, possibly even divine justice that enabled him to meet Hollner before he died, and find out the answers to the questions he'd been asking for so long. Discovering what happened that day when he was only a child had put him in a state of shock. Never before had he drunk as much as he did for some time after that meeting. But then, when Hollner died, he'd forced himself to sober up and reduce his drinking so that he could go to work again and devise a plan.

And now it was all over.

 

 

As the rain pattered on the canvas, he ran through what had happened. First, the meeting with Hollner, whom he'd met by pure chance in La Cabana. That was two years ago. Even then Hollner was showing signs of the stomach cancer that would soon kill him. It was Filip Monteiro, the old waiter with the glass eye, who had asked him if would consider sharing a table one night when the restaurant was very full. He'd been seated at a table with Hollner.

They knew immediately that they were both immigrants from Germany—they had similar accents. He had expected to discover that Hollner was one of the large group of Germans who came to Argentina via the well-organized lifelines that helped Nazis flee the Third Reich, which was supposed to last for a thousand years but now lay in ruins. At first Silberstein hadn't given his real name. Höllner might easily have been one of those who entered the country on false papers; perhaps he'd landed in Argentina from one of the U-boats that were sailing up and down the coast of Argentina in the spring of 1945. He might also have been assisted by one of the Nazi groups that operated out of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Or he might have come later, when Juan Perón opened his political arms to welcome German immigrants without asking any questions about their past. Silberstein knew that Argentina was full of Nazis who had gone to ground, war criminals who lived in constant fear of being arrested. People who had never renounced their beliefs and still had a bust of Hitler in a prominent position at home. But Höllner was not one of those. He'd referred to
the war as the catastrophe it was. His father had been a high-ranking Nazi, but Höllner himself was one of the many German immigrants who had come to Argentina in search of a future they thought they could never find in the ruins of Europe.

They had shared a table at La Cabana. Silberstein could still remember that they'd ordered the same meal—a meat stew the chefs at La Cabana made better than anybody else. Afterwards they'd walked home together since they lived in the same neighborhood, Silberstein in Avenida Corrientes and Hollner a few blocks further on. They arranged to meet again. Höllner explained that he was a widower whose children had returned to Europe. Until recently he had been running a printing business, but now he'd sold it. Silberstein invited him to visit the workshop where he restored old furniture. Höllner accepted the invitation, and then it became the norm for him to visit Silberstein in the mornings. He seemed never to tire of watching Silberstein painstakingly reupholster an old chair brought in by some member of the Argentinean upper classes. They would occasionally go out to the courtyard for coffee and a smoke.

 

 

They had compared their lives, as old people do. And it was while they were doing so that Höllner asked in passing if Silberstein happened to be related to a certain Herr Jacob Silberstein from Berlin, who had escaped being deported with his fellow Jews in the 1930s and then avoided all other forms of persecution during the war because he was the only person who could give Hermann Goering a satisfactory massage to ease his back pain. Feeling that history had caught up with him in one stroke, Silberstein told him that the masseur Jacob Silberstein was his uncle. And that it was thanks to the special privileges enjoyed by Jacob that his brother Lukas, Silberstein's father, had also evaded deportation. Hollner explained that he himself had met Jacob Silberstein because his own father had also been massaged by him.

 

 

Silberstein had immediately closed his workshop and posted a notice on the door stating that he wouldn't be back until the following day. Then he'd accompanied Hollner to his home, not far from the harbor in a badly maintained block of apartments. Höllner had a small apartment overlooking the rear courtyard. Silberstein could remember the strong scent of lavender and all the awful watercolors of the Pampas
painted by Höllner's wife. They had talked long into the night about the amazing coincidences, how their paths had crossed in Berlin so many years ago. Höllner was three years younger than Silberstein. He was only nine in 1945, and his memories were fuzzy. But he remembered the man who was fetched by car once a week to give his father a massage. He even remembered thinking that there was something remarkable about it, something remarkable and also a little dangerous, in that a Jew (whose name he didn't know at that time) was still there in Berlin. And, moreover, a man being protected by no less a person than the terrifying Reichsmarschall Goering. But when he recounted what he remembered about Jacob Silberstein's appearance and his gait, Silberstein knew that there could have been no misunderstanding: Hollner was talking about his uncle.

The key reference was to an ear, his left ear, that Jacob Silberstein had disfigured as a child, cutting himself on a shattered window pane. Silberstein broke into a sweat when Hollner described the ear he remembered so vividly. There was no doubt at all, and Silberstein was so touched that he felt obliged to embrace Hollner.

 

 

Now, lying in his tent, he remembered all that as if it had happened only yesterday. Silberstein checked his watch. 10:15. He changed identity again in his thoughts. Now he was Fernando Hereira. He had landed in Sweden as Hereira. He was an Argentinean citizen on vacation in Sweden. Nothing else. Least of all Aron Silberstein, who arrived in Buenos Aires one spring day in 1953 and had never been back to Europe since. Not until now, when he finally had an opportunity to do what he'd been longing to do all those years.

He dressed, broke camp, and drove back to the main road. He stopped for lunch outside Varberg. His headache had cleared up by now. Two more hours and he'd be in Malmö. The car rental company was next to the train station. That was where he'd gotten the car forty days earlier, and that was where he would return it. No doubt he'd be able to find a hotel nearby. Before then he would have to get rid of the tent and the sleeping bag. He'd dumped the camping stove, saucepans, and plates in a dumpster at a rest stop in Dalarna. He'd thrown all the cutlery into a river he'd driven over. He would keep a lookout for a suitable place to offload the rest of his stuff before he got to Malmö.

He found what he was looking for a few kilometers north of Helsingborg: a dump behind a gas station where he'd stopped to fill up for
the last time. He buried the tent and the sleeping bag under the cardboard boxes and plastic bottles that already filled the dump. Then he took out a plastic bag lying at the top of his backpack. It contained a bloodstained shirt. Although he'd been wearing coveralls that he'd burned while still up there in the forest, Molin had managed to cover his shirt in blood. How it had happened was still a mystery. Just as big a mystery as why he hadn't burned the shirt when he'd disposed of the coveralls.

Deep down, though, he knew the answer. He'd kept the shirt so that he could look at it and convince himself that what had happened was real, not simply a dream. Now he didn't need it any longer. The time for remembering was in the past. He dug the plastic bag as deep into the dump as he could. As he did so, his mind turned again to Hollner, the pale man that he'd met at La Cabana. Had it not been for him, he wouldn't be here now, shedding the last physical traces of a journey to Sweden during which he'd taken a person's life, and sent a final horrific greeting to the equally horrific past by means of some blood-soaked footprints he'd left behind on a wooden floor.

From now on the only traces would be inside his head.

He returned to his car and sat at the wheel without starting the engine. A question was nagging away at the back of his mind. It had been there ever since the night he'd attacked Molin's house. A question regarding an unexpected discovery he'd made about himself. He had felt frightened on the way to Sweden. He'd spent the whole of the long flight wondering how he would manage to complete the mission he'd set himself. A mission comprising a single task: killing a man. So far in his life he had never been anywhere even close to harming another human being. He hated violence, he was scared stiff of being assaulted himself. But there he was, on his way to another continent to kill a man in cold blood. A man he'd met six or seven times before, when he was twelve years old.

As it turned out, it was not at all difficult.

That was what he couldn't understand. It frightened him, and forced him to think back to all that had happened over fifty years ago, the starting point that led to the deed he had now performed. Why had it been so easy? It should have been the hardest thing there is, killing another human being. The thought depressed him. He'd been convinced that it would be difficult. All the time he'd worried that when the moment came, he would hesitate, and afterwards be overcome by remorse; but his conscience had remained at peace.