The little ones, clinging to her skirt, looked up with big eyes. Even they could tell that the woman in immodest clothes and exposed hair did not belong in Neturay Karta, that something out of the ordinary was going on even though the adults were pretending otherwise.
“ Thank you.” Entering the foyer, Itah’s gaze rested on the single photo on the wall. She approached it, squinting at the small letters. “Your son?”
“ Yes,” he said, “that’s my Jerusalem.”
“ A handsome soldier.”
“ That’s nothing,” Sorkeh said. “He was much more handsome in real life. And a brilliant Talmudic scholar. But God had different plans for him. How mysterious His ways are.” She caressed her little daughter’s head.
“ Lemmy is with God now,” Rabbi Gerster said. “Forever young.”
Itah gave him a questioning look.
“ I must hurry to the synagogue for evening prayers,” he said. “You’ll be fine here.”
The two women, surrounded by the young children, went into the dining room to prepare the table for the Friday night dinner.
Heading back downstairs, Rabbi Gerster thought how good a wife Sorkeh was for Benjamin, as she would have been a good wife to Lemmy. If not for Tanya’s irresistible allure, which had drawn Lemmy away, this apartment would have passed to Lemmy, who would have filled it with his own children. How would it feel to have grandchildren, Rabbi Gerster wondered. Wonderful? Joyous? Normal? But it wasn’t meant to be, and time had taken the edge off the pain and anger. He no longer blamed Tanya. She had taken Lemmy as a substitute because she couldn’t have the man she truly loved, and when he did change his mind, it was too late. What if he had agreed immediately to leave his wife and son and this sect of misguided zealots for Tanya? What if he had dropped everything on the day of her reappearance in October 1966 and joined Tanya, the woman he truly loved?
What if?
A hypothetical world of dreams. In reality, by his foolish decision he had doomed his wife and son-practically sent Temimah and Lemmy to their death.
*
The bullet tore off her headscarf and knocked her down, but it didn’t kill her, Tanya knew, because she could still see Herr Horch. He approached her and stooped over, staring down. His next shot would be at point blank to ensure her demise. She managed to speak. “No need…for violence.”
He knelt next to her and pressed a handkerchief to the side of her head. “Sit up,” he said. “It’ll reduce the bleeding.”
She held his arm and sat up slowly, unsure of his intentions. Her decision to come here alone had clearly been a fatal miscalculation. But why would a respectable Swiss banker resort to shooting? It made no sense!
“ It’s just a scrape,” he said. “You’re very lucky. I never miss.”
“ Don’t do…anything foolish.” She closed her eyes to stop the world from spinning. “My colleagues…will come after you. They’re big…on revenge.”
“ I know.”
“ Why did you…shoot me?”
“You don’t recognize me, Tanya?”
He knew her name?
She opened her eyes and examined the man’s face in the yellow light of the park lamp. He had a pleasant, handsome face, short, blonde hair with a few strands of gray, and blue eyes that radiated intelligence. She touched his face, her fingers feeling his wet forehead, the creases by his eyes, the strong jaw, the soft lips.
“ You haven’t changed much,” he said.
“ No!” She withdrew her hand from his face and tried to crawl away. “ No! ”
He smiled, and her remaining doubts went away. It was him!
She was cold. The world was dark and wet around her, not white like the hospital. But she had the same out- of-body feeling. “Am I dead?”
“That’s right. We both died and went to Zurich.” He put his arms around her and pressed her shivering body against his. “Or heaven. Who the hell knows anymore?”
Tanya was paralyzed. Her hands fell beside her body, her face buried in his coat.
He held her. “It’s okay. It’s really me. Your little Lemmy.”
She began to cry.
*
When Rabbi Gerster entered the synagogue, the men were reciting the Song of Songs, a long poem that King Solomon had written three millennia earlier. “ How beautiful you are, my betrothed, how beautiful, your eyes like doves.”
On Friday evenings, the betrothed was the Sabbath, Solomon’s verses recited to welcome the holy day. “ Like a rose among the weeds, my beloved among the women. ”
He found Benjamin by a bookcase along the side wall, perusing a heavy volume. “I brought Itah to your apartment. She needs a place to hide. It’s my fault. I asked her to look into things that were better left undisturbed. Now some people are upset with her.”
Behind them, the men continued reciting. “ Your curls, a thick herd of goats, skipping down the slopes of the Gilead, your teeth, like scrubbed sheep, perfectly aligned, without a blemish. ”
“With my family?” Benjamin closed the book. “Is it safe?”
“For now,” Rabbi Gerster said, “it is safe.”
*
Lemmy helped Tanya to a park bench by the water fountain. The rain had stopped, and she gazed at him through a curtain of tears. “I don’t understand.”
“ It’s simple. I work for Elie.”
“ But why?”
His eyes wandered away. “Why not?”
“You were a kid. Your whole life was ahead of you.”
“I’ve been living my life, a great life, in fact. My mission has given me a meaningful existence-”
“ To work for Elie Weiss is meaningful? ”
He felt her trembling under his arm. “I was eighteen, and he offered me a chance to dedicate my life to our national survival, to fight for something I believed in.”
“Do you still believe it?”
“I do. Elie’s plan is the only way to end anti-Semitism once and for all. Eradicate Jew-hating with true finality.”
Tanya saw the conviction in his eyes, still young and idealistic, the eyes she remembered from so many years ago. Young Lemmy, the boy from Neturay Karta, the avid reader, with his endless questions, with so much passion. “But how?”
“You remember the UN radar at Government House in East Jerusalem?”
“ In sixty-seven? Of course. That radar would have detected our planes as they took off, and the UN would have alerted the Arabs, cost us the element of surprise, probably the whole war.”
Lemmy smiled. “I detonated the installation right under the UN chief’s nose. But they later captured me and handed me over to the Jordanians for execution. Elie saved me, shipped me to Europe, and arranged a substitute corpse to be found on the Golan Heights with my ID tags but otherwise too mutilated for identification. Do you remember the aftermath of the Six Day War? Euphoria and a huge mess. No one knew what was going on.”
“ But what really happened?”
“ I assumed the life of a German boy whose parents died in a fire. Wilhelm Horch had died too, but Elie had the records altered as if Wilhelm had survived. My German was pretty good already, having grown up speaking Yiddish. Elie had an old lawyer in Munich become my guardian and send me to Lyceum Alpin St. Nicholas, a boarding school in the Alps.”
“ It’s not a coincidence that Elie sent you there. Armande Hoffgeitz and Klaus von Koenig studied there together, became friends.”
“ It’s a great school, fancy old buildings, great facilities, and wonderful teachers. I was supposed to be sixteen, so I stayed there for three years, made friends, and during school holidays Elie trained me.”
