David's Revenge Read online

  According to the observations of this educationalist, the Armenians—if somewhat dirty—are the most capable of learning among the peoples of Transcaucasia, and the Georgians the most stupid. “Taken as a whole”, the latter may be physically “among the most beautiful nations on earth… but you will search in vain among the men and women here for that higher beauty where the heart, the spirit and the mind are reflected in the eye. Such supreme beauty is to be found only among peoples on a more elevated cultural level.”

  Herr von Bodenstedt makes it abundantly clear in subsequent passages that he himself occupies that higher cultural level (I haven’t been able to find out whether he was a pop-eyed hunchback, although I strongly suspect as much). Of course he did not allow the magnificent clothing of the natives to deceive him; it stands “in no relation at all to their cramped, dirty and often disgusting dwellings”.

  We learn that the men of Georgia, instead of devoting themselves to serious conversation, pass the time by throwing their black sheepskin caps into the air and catching them on their heads again. Even worse, “drinking ultimately remains the favourite and principal pastime of the Georgians”.

  The women of Georgia, clad in the dazzling white chadra, are extremely pleasing to the eye, but only from a distance, and at the most until their thirtieth year; thereafter they inevitably become repellent hags, and you are advised to avoid the sight of them.

  I suspect that my colleague Bodenstedt either had no success with the ladies in Tbilisi, or was doctoring his memoirs for the sake of his dear ones at home. I don’t trust his indignant condemnation of the oriental woman in general for seeking “her whole happiness merely in a primitive sensual frenzy or in glittering show”, nor his claim that her passion “knows no bounds but those that are imposed upon her by force”. And I wonder why he doesn’t reveal any experiences of his own in the bathhouses of Tbilisi, but quotes Alexander Pushkin, who was surprised but delighted when the bathhouse master, a “Tartar with no nose”, admitted him to a vaulted room full of steam where more than fifty women, naked or half-naked, were amusing themselves without any inhibitions.

  Herr von Bodenstedt describes other pleasures, for instance his visits to the German colony in Tbilisi, where Frau Salzmann served him her excellent Swabian omelette. And he gives an account of his sufferings: the night when he stumbled home along dark and unpaved alleys echoing with the howling of dogs, the winter morning when thick snow had fallen and the sky was so overcast that from his bedroom window the unfortunate man could see only the outline of Narikala Fortress, “the high mountain fort of Tbilisi, looking as sinister as if to veil over, with its cloak of snow, all the bloody memories left there by past centuries”.

  Keen as he was on culture, this idiot wrote those words in a century when the educated nations of Europe fought twenty-one bloody wars with each other. Performing a mental somersault, he attributed “the sad cultural condition” of the Caucasian peoples to the fact that murder and violence still flourished among them, which he found hard to understand, since after all, “the tree of Christianity took root among them more than a millennium and a half ago”.

  Chapter 9

  Perhaps I’ve become a little too heated over poor Friedrich von Bodenstedt and his like-minded contemporaries. I have remembered an incident on our journey which Karl-Heinz Dautzenbacher immediately made into a standing joke, calling it “the chicken of Ejmiadzin”, adopting it into his repertoire of humorous anecdotes and citing it on every possible occasion with ever-increasing relish.

  On our way to see the Catholicos of the Armenian Church we had stopped at the cave monastery of Geghard, at a height of seventeen hundred metres. The monastery, founded by two of the commanders of Queen Tamar’s army, is one of the great sights of the Christian faith. It was laid waste by the Mongols under Tamerlane and later abandoned by the monks, but at the time of our visit the monastery had been restored and its churches in the rock were “back in working order”, to use the Soviet expression for the practice of holding divine service.

  We spent a little while enjoying the clear air and the view of the deeply fissured ravines; we looked at the porch of the main church, with its relief of a lion killing an ox, and then approached a chapel where Mass was being celebrated. Treading carefully, we had reached the entrance when out of the dim light we heard a loud, desperate cry suddenly rising in a shrill descant. It sounded like a human being in mortal terror.

  The worshippers had unpacked a chicken from one of their baskets. They overcame its alarmed resistance, held it down on a stone step and chopped its head off before our eyes. Then they drew the sign of the cross on their foreheads with the creature’s blood as it spurted out over the stone. The liturgy began at once.

  Afterwards we asked the Catholicos, who received us in a magnificently panelled hall flooding with light, how such a heathen custom could be reconciled with the Christian faith. His Holiness, a dignified old man who spoke seven languages, replied in German, “Well—officially the Church isn’t in favour of it. But as it’s an old Armenian tradition, we have to do all we can to preserve it.”

  On the fight back to Moscow, we were served a cold supper by an Aeroflot stewardess who cast dark glances at us. Dautzenbacher heaved himself up from his seat, held a chicken thigh aloft, and looked around, grinning. “I knew it! The chicken of Ejmiadzin!” When, after landing on an airfield to the east of the capital, we were driving through the twilit birch woods, he tried cracking his joke again, swaying as he walked along the aisle of the bus, making a face as if in pain, and holding his stomach. “The chicken of Ejmiadzin! Ugh! Hasn’t anyone got a shot of vodka?”

  It was the only time I saw Dr Bender lose her composure. She hissed at Dautzenbacher, “Stop that, please! It’s disgusting!”

  I had to agree. It was disgusting. And perhaps I ought to revise my opinion of Bodenstedt’s observations a little. Very well, it was not Georgians but Armenians who put that chicken to death so barbarously for the sake of Jesus Christ, but I’m not sure whether Georgian customs too aren’t marked by such barbarity, even today.

  I have read in Allen’s History of the Georgian People that some of the injuries that one man may inflict on another affect his private life so profoundly that the pain felt, when it is a man’s honour and not his material property that suffers, can be appeased only by the shedding of blood.

  In the opinion of another historian, Allen’s work of 1932 was already outmoded. But in a new encyclopedia I have also read that blood vengeance, as retribution not only for killing a member of a clan but also for injured honour, is a custom that has survived in some places until very recently. The encyclopedia specifically mentions Corsica, Montenegro, Albania and the Caucasus as examples.

  Chapter 10

  Thanks to Tassilo Huber, with whom I studied for a few terms and who sits on the city council today as a member of the Green Party, I have reluctantly made the acquaintance of a secret agent, a man who works for the local branch of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the authority charged with internal security in Germany.

  It was a little awkward for me to confide in Tass, as we used to call him (partly because of his pro-Soviet contributions to discussion), but after a sleepless night I persuaded myself that it would be wrong of me to let my unpleasant experience with Ralf’s friends rest at that. And one thing I knew about Tass, from the local paper, was his strong opposition to the far right. At a council meeting open to the public, he once even called Herr Schumann a dangerous rogue, and Schumann successfully sued him.

  Tass didn’t seem to think it very serious when I called at his office and told him about my son’s friendship with Herr Schumann. He asked, “Why don’t you smack the lad around the ears?” but immediately dismissed the idea sympathetically when I embarked on an answer. Stroking his beard, he told me what he knew about Herr Schumann. It wasn’t much. Herr Schumann carefully avoided committing any offence that would be grounds for legal proceedings. His pamphlets and speeches
always stayed in the grey area where a call for patriotic violence can still masquerade as legitimate freedom of speech.

  Gero Schumann, that industrious young man, had also put his name as co-author to a historical treatise, a leaflet denouncing the Armenian massacres at the hands of the Turks and asking why, unlike the so-called Holocaust, this instance of genocide had been hushed up for decades. After Tass had also told me that, according to a credible rumour, Herr Schumann had slapped a secretary about and could keep her from going to the police only by paying a large sum in compensation, he took the latest collection of accounts of far-right violence from a stack of papers and began reading aloud to me from a study of “the onset of the new barbarism”.

  I’d had enough. I said that unfortunately I had to leave for home.

  Tass pressed the book into my hand, shrugged regretfully and said, “Ah well, this may not be very much use to you, but perhaps I can come up with some rather more concrete information. I’ll see what can be done.”

  Two hours later my phone rang. It was a man whose name, he explained in a slow drawl, was Hochgeschurz, and Tassilo Huber had told him I was interested in anything I could find out about the lawyer Schumann. The man paused for a moment, during which I could hear him breathing, and then said he might be able to help me with one or two pieces of information.

  I asked Herr Hochgeschurz who he was. He said that he had been working on right-wing radicalism for some time, comparing notes with Tassilo on that subject now and then, and he was also a personal friend of Tassilo’s.

  I fixed a meeting with Herr Hochgeschurz in the Town Hall beer cellar, which he suggested as a good place. As soon as I had rung off I dialled Tass’s number, but I couldn’t reach him either in his office or at home. When I tried his home number again in the evening a woman answered, obviously his wife or girlfriend, who told me that Tass was at a meeting of the Green Party committee and probably wouldn’t be home until late.

  I was able to leave school after the fourth lesson today, so I arrived at the beer cellar to meet Hochgeschurz a little early. However, Herr Hochgeschurz was already waiting. When I gave my name, the barman pointed to a niche where a stocky man of about fifty was sitting with a beer. He rose, offered me a plump hand, nodded and smiled.

  Once we were both sitting down, Herr Hochgeschurz pushed a menu my way, picked up a second copy and studied the dishes available. I was still wondering whether or not to order any of the plain, fatty fare on offer when Hochgeschurz, looking at me over the top of his menu, asked, “Are you related to Dr Kestner, the lawyer?”

  “Yes, she’s my wife.” I glanced enquiringly at Hochgeschurz.

  He returned my glance, and smiled. “I know her from a couple of trials.” After a pause, during which he breathed audibly through his broad nose and returned to his study of the menu, he added, “I’m from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.”

  For a moment I was in a state of total consternation. Then I felt angry. I had been completely taken in by my helpful friend Tass, that prominent defender of citizens’ rights who spoke so tirelessly against the omnipotence of the state. Under his aggressively Green cover, he was keeping a profitable connection going with Internal Security. Now and then Herr Hochgeschurz let him into some little secret that could be politically exploited, and Councillor Huber reciprocated by drawing the snoop’s attention to people from whom something might be extracted.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t know what Herr Huber has told you, but he obviously entirely mistook my meaning.” I put the menu down on the table. “I have no intention whatsoever of letting myself be roped in by Internal Security!”

  “Come, come, whatever makes you think that was the idea? There’s no question of any such thing!” Herr Hochgeschurz shook his head, rubbed his nose, and then leaned forwards. “If you think I wanted to get you to denounce your son, you’re very wide of the mark. And I’ll tell you why.”

  He looked around the dimly lit beer cellar before folding his hands on the table and continuing. “Of course we’re aware who your son is. We’ve known his name ever since he started handing out some of Herr Schumann’s pamphlets in the street. In some respects we may even known more about your son than his own parents do. I hope that won’t upset you; it’s what we’re there for. But for that very reason I can reassure you.” He smiled. “We’re not worried about your son. We’re worried about Herr Schumann.”

  The waiter came over to our table. Herr Hochgeschurz ordered eight small Nuremberg sausages with sauerkraut and another beer. I stayed where I was, I even ordered a “Bürgermeister” omelette and a half-litre of wine. I wasn’t feeling good about this, but I hoped to get a few hints that might make Ralf’s prospects look not quite so dark. Herr Hochgeschurz didn’t disappoint me.

  Gero Schumann’s hangers-on, said the agent, were from sound, respectable backgrounds. A few students, a couple of schoolboys like Ralf, a candidate for an inspector’s post, two bank trainees. No women. Some of them had once been in a brawl in a bar with a group of Young Socialists, and had put the Reds to fight. But there were no notoriously violent offenders among the regular visitors to Herr Schumann’s summer house. The ideological and historical seminars he held there were probably too intellectually pretentious for that, the atmosphere and his grandmother’s tenants too high-class.

  Outside the summer house, however, Herr Schumann by no means avoided mixing with disreputable characters. On the pretext of wanting to reintegrate disadvantaged young people into society, he maintained regular contacts with skinheads and similar hooligans. He spent a good deal of money on this, as he did on his cultural seminars; he had once actually recruited a university professor to speak at one of them, and on another occasion a retired army brigadier. Herr Schumann, all things considered, was unpredictable, not least because of his intelligence and his great gifts as a demagogue. That was what made him dangerous.

  Herr Hochgeschurz smiled. “On the other hand, I see your son as something of an innocent. He probably just finds it exciting to go to that summer house and hear people say that the history of the world doesn’t work at all the way he’s being taught at school. Of course in your place I wouldn’t leave him entirely to the influence of Herr Schumann. But you shouldn’t rush things. I don’t have to teach you anything, you’re a trained teacher yourself. However, I’ve had experience of similar cases. If you put him under pressure, you’ll probably just achieve the opposite of what you want.”

  Herr Hochgeschurz refrained from asking any questions about Ralf’s conduct in the privacy of our home. Instead, he brought the conversation round to Julia again, praising her talents as a defence lawyer, although professionally speaking, he said, of course he couldn’t agree with the lenient sentences she got for some of her clients. He ordered a third beer and a second shot of spirits. When the waiter came to tot everything up and asked if it was to go on the same bill, Herr Hochgeschurz hesitated for a moment, as if the question had surprised him. I said I was paying, and drove home feeling greatly relieved.

  Chapter 11

  In ordinary everyday life we’re unaware of failing to look beyond our own horizons. We go about our business, dealing with whatever arises, and that gives us enough to do. The messages and images that reach us from far away lack depth; they’re two-dimensional, like a newspaper page or a postcard, they don’t really engage our attention. Only very seldom do they, just now and then, convey a physical sense of those distant places.

  I don’t know how it may be with other people, but at moments like those I have always felt mingled fascination and alarm. For instance, such a moment occurred when, many years ago, I was allowed to unpack a parcel that one of my mother’s brothers—he had emigrated to South America on a coffin ship—had sent us from Buenaventura. Probably in order to give the family a good impression of his new country, he had chosen a small sculpture of some Inca god or king, I forget exactly what it was meant to be, but it was an attractive piece of craftsmanship.

  I held
the porous, dark-green stone in my hand, smelled it, and shuddered. That symbol of all that was distant and strange lost its aura once my mother had put it away on a shelf in the glass-fronted bookcase.

  This morning at seven thirty, just as I was about to leave the house, the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, gave my name, and instead of an answer heard a vague rushing sound, then a crackling, then two distant voices both talking at once in a language I couldn’t understand, and then back came the rushing again. I felt my hand beginning to sweat on the receiver, and hung up.

  Julia has told me that half an hour later there was another, similar call. She waited for a while, said, “Hello?” a couple of times, but no one replied.

  I left it to Julia to make what she could of the incident, and she didn’t refrain from doing so. Perhaps, she suggested, it had been my friend from Tbilisi? It looked as if his travel plans had fallen through, Julia said, and perhaps he was ringing to say that his visit to us was off.

  Yes, perhaps. Or perhaps it had been Matassi, calling to find out if her husband had arrived all right, and to ask what his plans were.

  Chapter 12

  It would be useful to be a legal expert. In a recent new edition of a work on blood vengeance and atonement, first published a hundred years ago but obviously still recognized as authoritative, I come upon the unnerving notion that blood vengeance “is to be regarded not as barbaric, but as something higher”, i.e. the original form of justice. Where the state does not act, according to this theory, personal revenge is justified, for example by virtue of “the right of a husband to administer punishment”. Another legal scholar, unaffected by either doubts or fears, has analysed in cold blood the significance of that idea in bringing about peaceful settlement of disputes.