The Japanese Lover(38)
At the end of the war, after surviving Auschwitz, Jean Valjean succeeded in landing clandestinely in Palestine, where waves of Jewish refugees were arriving despite the best efforts of the British, who controlled the region and tried to stop the influx to avoid conflict with the Arabs. The war had turned him into a lone wolf who never dropped his guard. He made do with casual affairs until a female colleague in Mossad, a painstaking and daring agent, announced that he was going to be a father. Her name was Anat Rakosi; she had emigrated with her father from Hungary, the only survivors of a big family. Her relationship with Samuel was above all a friendship, devoid of romance or any thought of the future, which suited them and which they would not have changed were it not for the unexpected pregnancy. Anat had been sure she was sterile because of the hunger, beatings, rapes, and the pseudomedical experiments she had suffered. When she found that the swelling in her belly was not a tumor but a baby, she thought it must be God’s joke. She said nothing to her lover until the sixth month.
“My goodness! I thought you were finally putting on a bit of weight,” was his only commentary, but he could not hide his enthusiasm.
“The first thing we have to do is to find out who you are, so that this baby knows where it’s coming from. The name Valjean is too melodramatic,” she told him.
Year after year, Jean Valjean had been postponing the decision to discover his identity, but Anat set to work at once, with the same tenacity that had enabled her to uncover for Mossad the hiding places of those Nazi criminals who had escaped the Nuremberg trials. She started at Auschwitz, Samuel’s last destination before the armistice, and followed the thread of the story step by step. With her pregnant belly swaying to and fro, she traveled to France to speak to one of the few members of the Jewish resistance still in the country. He helped her locate the fighters who had rescued the pilot from the British plane, although this wasn’t easy because after the war it seemed as though every Frenchman was a resistance hero. Anat ended up in London searching through the RAF archives, where she found several photographs of young men who looked like her lover. There was nothing else she could cling to. She called him on the phone and read out the five names.
“Do any of them sound familiar?” she asked him.
“Mendel! I’m sure of it! My surname is Mendel,” he replied, scarcely able to contain the sob choking him.
“My son is four now, and he’s called Baruj, like our father, Baruj Mendel,” Samuel told Alma, who was sitting beside him on the backseat of the car.
“Did you marry Anat?”
“No. We’re trying to live together, but it’s not easy.”
“You’ve known about me for four years. Why did you only come and find me now?” Alma asked reproachfully.
“Why would I have? The brother you knew died in that plane. There’s nothing left of the boy who enlisted as a pilot in England. I know the story because Anat insists on repeating it, but I don’t feel it’s mine. It’s empty, it has no meaning. The truth is, I don’t remember you, but I’m sure you are my sister, because Anat doesn’t make mistakes about that kind of thing.”
“Well, I remember having a brother who had fun with me and played the piano, but you’re nothing like him.”
“We haven’t seen each other in years, and as I said, I’m not the same.”
“Why did you decide to come now?”
“I’m not here because of you. I’m on a mission, but I can’t tell you anything about that. I made the most of my journey by coming to see you in Boston, because Anat thinks Baruj needs an aunt. Anat’s father died a couple of months ago. There’s no one left in her family or mine apart from you. I’m not trying to force anything on you, Alma. I just want you to know I’m alive and that you have a nephew. Anat sent you this,” he said.
He gave her a color photo of the boy and his parents. Anat was sitting down with her son on her lap. She was a very slender, pale-looking woman wearing round glasses. Samuel was sitting next to them, arms folded across his chest. The boy had strong features and his father’s dark, curly hair. On the back of the photo, Samuel had written a Tel Aviv address.
“Come and visit us, Alma. That way you’ll get to know Baruj,” he said as he waved good-bye, after recovering her dress from the laundry and accompanying her back to her dorm.
THE SWORD OF THE FUKUDAS
On his deathbed, his lungs eaten away with cancer, and gasping for breath like a fish out of water, Takao Fukuda was still clinging to life. He could barely speak and was so weak that his attempts to communicate through writing proved useless, as his swollen, trembling hands could not form the delicate Japanese characters. He refused to eat, and whenever his family or the nurses weren’t looking, he pulled out the drip that was feeding him. He soon fell into a heavy doze, but Ichimei, who took turns with his mother and sister to be with him in the hospital, knew he was conscious and troubled. He would plump up the pillows so that he was half sitting up, dry off the perspiration, rub his scaly skin with lotion, put slivers of ice on his tongue, and talk to him about plants and gardens. In one of these intimate moments he saw his father’s lips moving, repeatedly articulating what sounded like the name of a brand of cigarettes, but the idea that in circumstances like these he might still want to smoke was so ridiculous Ichimei dismissed it. He spent the evening trying to decipher what his father was trying to say.