‘Why? Why does he say it was a conspiracy?’ asked Trave, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.
‘Because Ethan wrote the letter from West Germany and not from England, and so Jacob says that Ethan must have discovered something there that led to his death. Jacob may well be right. After the trial in London a stranger came here to this building and told me to warn Jacob to stay away from the past. Jacob wasn’t here, fortunately, or there might have been violence, and after the man’s visit we moved.’
‘What did the man look like?’
‘Not tall; thin; small, cold, watchful eyes. He kept on his hat and had the collar of his raincoat turned up around his ears so I couldn’t see much of his face. He came in the evening, and it was getting dark outside my apartment, so I doubt I’d recognize him again. But I know what kind of person he was. I’ve seen men like him before when the Germans were here, people who worked for the security police. He spoke in Dutch, almost like a native. But not quite,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Languages are my speciality — they’re how I made my living once upon a time, and they’re also the one thing Jacob seems to have inherited from me. I don’t think the man who came here was Belgian by birth — German maybe.’
‘Did he give a name?’
‘No, of course not. People like that don’t have names,’ said the old lady, giving a hollow laugh. ‘He didn’t stay long — just long enough to make his meaning clear. And I was frightened — I don’t mind admitting that, and so I told Jacob. I wish I hadn’t now. The man’s visit just made him more determined to find out who killed Ethan. And by then he’d become convinced that Titus Osman was behind it all, which made me angry…’
‘Why? Why Osman?’ interrupted Trave, leaning forward in his chair.
‘I don’t know. It’s difficult to understand when someone’s so wrong-headed. I suppose it’s because Ethan went to stay with Titus to find out more about his parents and ended up dying in Titus’s house, and because he went straight back there after posting the letter to Jacob, but I think most of all it’s because Titus arranged for Jacob’s parents to escape from Belgium and they ended up getting caught. That’s the root of the trouble, you see — Jacob blames Titus for his parents’ deaths, and so he blames him for everything else as well. It was awful at Ethan’s funeral. Titus came to pay his respects, as was right and proper, and Jacob practically accused him of being a murderer in front of all the guests. Titus was very good about it, very kind and understanding, but it didn’t change what Jacob had done. He had shamed me, shamed our family, and after that it was never the same between us. But now, now I wish he would just come back.’
The old lady’s voice caught, and she took a small white handkerchief from the sleeve of her black cardigan and dabbed her eyes.
‘Why are you so sure Jacob is wrong about Titus?’ asked Trave. He felt a little ashamed of persisting with his questions when the old lady was so visibly distressed, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop their conversation just when it had become so interesting to him.
‘Because I wouldn’t be here speaking to you if it wasn’t for Titus,’ Aliza said quietly, recovering her composure. ‘He saved my life and the lives of my grandchildren, and for that he deserves our gratitude, not slander. He arranged everything: the false papers to get us into France and the guides who cut the wire and took us through the woods into Switzerland in the early morning with diamonds hidden in the heels of our shoes. Without the diamonds the Swiss would never have let us stay. At the border you had no chance — they handed you over to the Germans without a second’s thought, but in Zurich it was different. We paid money, and they put us in a labour camp. It was hard, but at least we were safe, and my son and his wife could have been there with us if Avi hadn’t been so stubborn, so pig-headed about staying in Belgium. It was Avi’s fault what happened, not Titus’s. He waited nearly a year, until the winter of 1943, and by then it was much harder to get out. Switzerland had become impossible, and so Titus tried to send them through Vichy and across the Pyrenees to Spain, but the borders were tighter and they were stopped, sent back
…’
‘Why did your son wait?’ asked Trave. ‘He must have known how dangerous it was here.’
‘He thought he would be safe because he and Golda were Belgian citizens, and for the first year after the deportations began in 1942 the Germans had a strict policy of only taking foreign Jews. It was easier for them that way. Almost all the Jews in this country were refugees, and exempting Belgian citizens kept the local population guilt-free. And the Germans were clever that way. They did everything gradually so as not to make us panic. They came in in May 1940, but it was two years before they made us wear the yellow stars. Registration was the key. Once we’d registered they knew where to find us when they were ready. They made a camp at Mechelen. Do you know where I mean?’
Trave shook his head.
‘It’s a pretty town — twenty kilometres from here on the road to Brussels. There are good rail connections into Germany and from Germany to Poland. And Mechelen’s where they told the Jews to report for deportation to labour camps in the east, except it wasn’t a labour camp they went to. You know where they went, don’t you, Inspector?’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Trave, bowing his head, experiencing that same sense of empty despair that he always felt when he thought of the Holocaust.
‘Many Jews suspected too, I think,’ said Aliza. ‘They went into hiding, and when only a few thousand answered the work orders, the Germans began the round-ups, the razzias — beating down people’s doors, dragging them from their beds in the middle of the night.’
‘And yet your son stayed?’
‘Yes, for more than a year. Like a fool he believed he was safe even while the Shoah was occurring all around him. And he didn’t want to leave his home, his business — everything that he’d worked so hard to achieve.’
‘But surely he wasn’t able to carry on his business?’
‘He used gentiles to run it as a front. And that worked for a while. Until the Germans changed their minds and went after the Belgian Jews too. And then Avi and Golda went into hiding, sewed diamonds into their clothes, and got caught at the border. They were on one of the last convoys that went from Mechelen to Auschwitz, and they didn’t come back. Almost no one came back.’
Auschwitz: the dread name that Aliza had hitherto avoided using fell like a stone into their conversation, reducing them both to silence. Outside the sun had set, and the fire’s blaze had died down so that Trave could hardly make out the expression on the face of the old lady. She seemed far away, lost in places where he could not follow.
‘How do you bear it?’ he asked her. ‘This terrible suffering — how do you go on?’
‘Because I must,’ she said simply. ‘It is my fate, the fate of my people. I have a choice — to live or to die. I cannot choose to live and die.’
Trave shook his head, thinking of his own life — the death of his son, the loss of his wife, all the murdered men and women whose deaths he’d been called on to investigate, but it was all as nothing compared with what had happened in the war. Auschwitz was beyond measure — it stripped the world of meaning.
‘It’s not easy,’ said Aliza, looking at Trave as if she understood what he was thinking. ‘My life has been hard, but there’s been good as well as bad amid all the wandering. My name, Aliza, means “merry and joyful” in Hebrew. I think my parents called me that because they were so pleased to have me. My mother had had difficulties before — several miscarriages. Many times during my life I have thought of changing my name, but I never have because it is who I am, who my poor parents intended me to be, who I must try to be despite all the suffering.’
‘You said you wandered,’ said Trave. ‘So you are not from here?’
‘Antwerp? No. I came here from Poland after the first war, fleeing from pogroms, dreaming of America, but I ended up staying like so many others. I got work at the bourse, the diamond exchange, as an interpreter. I met my late husband there and we had Avi. And Antwerp became my home. I could have gone to Israel after the war, but I had to come back. They say that Antwerp is now the last shtetl in Europe
…’
‘Shtetl?’ repeated Trave, not understanding.
‘It means “little town” in Yiddish. Like one of your villages in England where everyone knows each other and everything is familiar and yet life is always fresh and new and colourful.’
Trave nodded, remembering the vivid bustle of the Jewish Quarter earlier in the afternoon.
‘But perhaps I was wrong,’ said Aliza meditatively. ‘Perhaps I was selfish. Maybe in Israel the boys would have looked forward rather than back. Every day in Switzerland they waited for their parents to come, and then in
