Herr Jakob did not look surprised. “That is sad, and dangerous, but perhaps not impossible to understand in a woman who had known the passion and danger of revolution, and exchanged it for the tranquillity of domestic life.”
“Domestic life should be enough.” Frau Jakob spoke for the first time. “To give of yourself is sufficient for the deepest happiness. There are always those who need. There is the community . . . and of course, no matter what age they are, your children always need you, even if they pretend otherwise.” The sadness was only momentary in her face, the memory of her daughter who was beyond her help.
“Elissa had no children,” Monk explained.
“And she was not one of us,” Herr Jakob added gently. “Perhaps in England they do not have a community like ours.” He turned to Monk. “But I agree with you. I cannot imagine Kristian meaning to harm her.”
The nature of the killing sprang sharply to Monk’s mind. Elissa’s death, at least, could have been accidental, a man who had not realized his own strength. But Sarah Mackeson’s had been a deliberate act of murder. Quickly, he explained it to them, seeing the revulsion and the grief in their faces. He heard Ferdi’s sharply indrawn breath, but did not look at him.
Frau Jakob glanced at her husband.
He shook his head. “Even so,” he said grimly, “I cannot believe it. Not the second woman.”
“What?” Monk demanded, fear biting inside him. “What is it?”
Frau Jakob looked to her husband, and he to her.
“For God’s sake, his life could depend on it!” Monk said with rising panic, knowing he was failing and seeing his last chance slip away. “What do you know?” Was it the betrayal? Had it, after all, not been the secret Father Geissner had believed?
“I cannot see if it will help, and perhaps it will make things worse,” Herr Jakob said at last, his eyes filled with a sorrow that seemed too harsh and too deep for what Monk had told him, even the murder of a woman he might have admired, and the possibility that a man he had most certainly regarded highly could have been responsible.
“I need to know it anyway,” Monk said in the heavy silence. “Tell me.”
Beside him, Ferdi gulped. Herr Jakob sighed. “The history of our race is full of seeking, of homecoming, and of expulsion,” he said, looking not at Monk but at some point in the white linen tablecloth, and some vast arena of the world in his vision. “Again and again we find ourselves strangers in a land that fears us, and in the end hates us. We are permanent exiles. In Egypt, in Babylon, and across the world.”
Monk held his patience with difficulty. It was the passion of feeling that stilled his interruption rather than any regard for the words.
“We have been strangers in Europe for more than a thousand years,” Jakob went on. “And still we are strangers today, hated by many, even behind their smiling faces and their courtesy. We have lost some of our people to the fear, the exclusion, the unspoken dislike.”
Frau Jakob leaned forward a little as if to interrupt.
“I know,” he said, looking at her and shaking his head a little. “Herr Monk does not want a lesson in our history, but it is necessary to understand.” He turned to Monk. “You see, many families have changed their names, their way of life, even abandoned the knowledge of our fathers and embraced the Catholic faith, sometimes in order to survive, at other times simply to be accepted, to give their children a better chance.”
In spite of himself, Monk understood that, even if he did not admire it.
Jakob saw that in his eyes, and nodded. “The Baruch family was one such.”
“Baruch?” Monk repeated, not knowing what he meant.
“Almost three generations ago,” Jakob said.
Suddenly, Monk had a terrible premonition what Jakob was going to say.
Jakob saw it in his eyes. “Yes,” he said softly. “They changed their name to Beck, and became Roman Catholic.”
Monk was stunned. It was almost too difficult to believe, and yet not for an instant could he doubt it. It was monstrous, farcical, and it all made a hideous sense. It was a denial of identity, of birthright, of the faith that had endured for thousands of years, given up not for a change of conviction but for survival, to accommodate their persecutors and become one of them.
And yet had he been in the same circumstances, with a wife and children to protect, honesty told him he could not swear he would have acted differently. For oneself . . . perhaps . . . but for the parent who had grown old and frightened, desperately vulnerable, for the child who trusted you and for whom you had to make the decisions, with life or death as a result . . . that was different.
One question beat in his brain above all others. “Did Kristian know?” he demanded.
“No,” Jakob said with a rueful smile. “Elissa knew. Hanna was the one who told her. She had a friend whose grandfather was a rabbi, and interested in all the old records. I think she wanted Elissa to know that it was she who was the one who did not belong, not Hanna. But no one told Kristian. Elissa protected him more than once. She was a remarkable woman. I am very sorry indeed to hear that she is dead . . . still more that it was the result of murder, not accident. But I do not believe that Kristian would do such a thing.”
Monk took a deep breath. Hanna’s family did not know of the betrayal. His throat was suddenly tight with relief and his next words were hoarse. “Not even if she told him this now, without warning, perhaps to heighten the obligation to her?”
Jakob’s face darkened. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I think not. But people do strange things when they are deeply distressed, out of the character we know, even that they know of themselves. I hope not.”
Monk stayed a little longer, enjoying the comfort and the strange, alien certainty of the room with its millennia-old rituals and memories of history which was to him only faint, from old Bible stories. It was like a step outside the daily world into another reality. He envied Herr Jakob his belief, dearly as it had been bought. Then, at
