‘My father-in-law, peace upon him, wanted me to make a name as a scholar, but any name I might have made would not have been my own. I hardly know who I am. Chaim-Yossef Spielman furnished me with false papers, as he often did for his travel clients. I got married as Katzenberg. That is the name my children know, and the one that went on my passport when I eventually made a journey to the Holy Land. I wanted to see my only cousin, Chaye-Rivke Har-Even, but in the end I dared not risk exposing my real identity. So Spielman visited her on my behalf while on a pilgrimage to Safed. He reported that she seemed to be a militantly secular Zionist, who served milk and meat together at her table and scorned our sacred faith. We would have had nothing in common, she and I – not even a name, which both of us had changed to suit our post-traumatic circumstances.

‘And that’s about all there is to say. I have lived here forty years, raised a family, earned a little respect, maybe some affection. My eldest daughter is married to Spielman’s son, who is a rabbi in a seminary in New Jersey. The rest of my children, thank God, follow the same path, down to the youngest who studies here in our yeshiva. That’s the whole story. I am what I have become, not what anybody else has ever wanted me to be.’

He opens his palms on the table-top, a gesture of transparency, of relief and resignation. How much do I believe? Most of it, I suppose, but the question of belief does not bother me much, any more than it does his fellow-rabbis. What a man feels in his heart of hearts is inscrutable to the human eye, therefore immaterial. What counts is his conduct, what he does with his life. Account has been duly rendered. Now it is time to calculate penalties and the methods of repayment. A plan of action is forming in my mind. I purse my lips and allow a haze of tension to cloud the cabin. I stare him in the eye, challenging him to flinch. Dovidl refuses the childish dare. A long minute of silence elapses. He releases a sigh in instalments, ay-ay-ay-ay-ay. I feel an urge to sneeze, and rustle about in my pocket for a handkerchief.

He rises suddenly, announcing that he must step outside for a call of nature. He slams the door of the camper-van and strides away in his billowing black coat, halting with his feet apart at the edge of the cliff, two hundred feet above the wintry sea. His back towards me, he looks up at the scudding sky and bends slightly at the knee, as men do when they are about to let go.

Chapter 9

9

Payback Time