Ruth1

Ben Johnstone organised everything. We were stuck in Heathrow and there was some sort of strike. He was sending out the same small team to Hebron, and Petru, as a translator. We were travelling baggage class, as Cameron called it. Ben was travelling later, when he could get away. We hoped to get in and out, interview the old woman, and perhaps meet him, travelling business class, going in the other direction over the Med.

Cameron was already half pissed when we met him at the bar. There was nothing else to do but drink, but if there was something else, he wouldn’t have been doing that anyway. He bought us all a drink, and before we had finished it bought us another. Petru asked for tap water.

‘I don’t think they sell that son,’ said Cameron and plonked a half pint of lager and a packet of cheese and onion down in front of him.

Petru had four half –undrunk-pints in front of him and three packets of assorted crisps before Cameron allowed me to buy a drink, or a round, as they called it in Glasgow.

‘I’ll need to go and check the flight times,’ said Pat Kane.
‘You’re just as well phoning them,’ said Cameron, patting his pockets and then reaching behind him and pulling a mobile phone out of his jacket pocket. ‘They’ll treat you like shite off their shoes whether you turn up at the check in desk. In fact you’re better getting Petru to phone them. Get him to speak in French and broken English and that way we’ll find out more.’

Petru nodded, as if that was a good idea. He looked drunk enough, on his two gulpfuls of lager, to put down the thick book, that looked like an Aramaic Dictionary, he was reading, probably because it was, and said earnestly: ‘I will go to the check in desk.’ He stood up unsteadily.

‘No,’ said Pat putting on his best Terry Wogan smile, putting his hand briefly on his shoulder, enough to reassure him. ‘I’ll see to it.’

That was it. There was no contest. Petru may have been able to speak every language since the fall of the Tower of Babel, but when it came to blarney there was only one winner. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Pat had came back and told us we’d been moved up to Club Class, were flying to Tel Aviv and back with a stewardess sitting in our laps, and he was giving the captain a bit of a break, and was flying the plane himself.

‘I don’t see the point,’ said Cameron, taking a swig of his JackDaniels and a mouthful of lager, before swallowing, ‘flying all that way to interview an old woman, who is almost dead, to ask her about something that happened 60 years ago. He flung back another dash of Jack. ‘Which is fair enough,’ he said, looking at me, ‘but which is, in fact, a lot of complete and utter guff. A fairy story.’

‘Religion is very important,’ said Petru gnomically.

‘I suppose,’ said Cameron, holding three fingers up to the barman to indicate three drinks, ‘if you’re going to fight about something, you might as well fight about religion.’

‘What do you think old timer?’ asked Cameron, suddenly cutting across the tinny swell of the Jukebox; the stale smell of clothing worn too long and dipped in cigarette smoke; and the babble of background voices, panning in on me.

I’d been so used to being behind the boom that I didn’t know what to think. ‘One job’s much like another,’ I said, ‘and if we weren’t doing this, we’d be doing something else. It doesn’t really matter to me. It’s not as if I can say I’m working from home on Fridays like Ben.’

That would usually have got Cameron started on one of his rants about how useless Ben was, and how he was the only person in the company who could say that he was working from home, when he couldn’t be arsed coming in.

But Cameron just nodded, and swilled around the amber in his glass, as if the answer was there. ‘You know what’s going to happen don’t you. It’s going to be one of these freak shows. We’re going to out the old woman. And everybody else is going to descend on her like a plague of locusts and hound her to death. Then we’ll have an epidemic of pictures that bleed and shed tears. Carrots and potatoes that look like Jesus, or Mary. Talking fish. Communion hosts that turn into heart tissue.’ He took a deep breath and a quick nip. ‘Then you’ll get the real crazies, the ones that said that the same thing happened to them. That it’s still happening. And we’ll need to go and interview those stupid cunts as well.’

‘Yes,’ said Petru, defying logic by drinking more and looking, not more drunk, but more sober, ‘it’s insane.’

‘We’ve got a flight to catch,’ said Pat appearing at my shoulder.

There was a sense of urgency, which was usually missing in our work. We did the whole take in three days: there and back. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Donald Post had arranged a police escort, ticker tape and for all the traffic lights to be at green.

***
The lighting on film we brought back was a poorer quality, but Cameron caught the old woman and her Sabra granddaughter as if they were in the same frame, of the same reel. Ben wouldn’t even need to use a jump shot. Just splice the two parts together.

‘I want to talk,’ said the old woman, sitting up straighter. ‘I’ve been silent too long.’ Cameron focussed in on her face, and she nodded, and just in frame her granddaughter’s head almost imperceptibly; a slight movement of her coal-black hair, gave consent.

‘Men,’ the old woman clacked, in a foreign tongue, with a dismissive shake of her head, and tight lips, so that it was almost as if her granddaughter did not need to translate.

‘They caught me in a street sweep. My Star of David marking me out like the Sun. There was no need for papers. They had those barking dogs with frothing mouths and pointy teeth and just swept us along at bayonet point. Anybody that did not move fast enough, the old, the young, were beaten with clubs. They seemed to enjoy that. It was not all Germans you see. Some of them were my countrymen, policemen, with their uniforms, militia, with caps and boots and youths that had neither, and simply wore an armband with a Nazi insignia. I was sixteen, able to stay ahead of the pack, frantically looking for a place to escape to. There is a craziness that hangs in the air like dust. You look at buildings, for the tiniest gaps, and walls as if you could run up them. But there was nothing only blows and the noise and chaos of the ghetto magnified one thousand fold. I flinched when a hand caught my flapping coat and ran quicker. When it happened again I let myself be caught. It was a relief, like getting caught by a wave and drowning. I just hoped it would be quick.

‘It was a boy I knew. Well, I did not know his name, but I knew his face. Aurek, his father, had managed a grocer shop in the same street in which my aunt had once stayed. The boy had the same large frame and, even then, he was going bald, which he tried to disguise by wearing a cloth cap pulled over his ears. He delivered groceries. His father did not trust bikes, or did not want to buy one, so he had a giant cloth contraption, over his shoulders, like a donkey’s feedbag. Like his father he had grown a moustache, to cover his thin lips. Even then in Gdansk there were Judenfresser But I couldn’t have been more delighted to see him than if it were my own brother.

“Thankyou, Thankyou, then his name came to me, like a gift from God, Thankyou Armandek.” He had pinned me to the side of a doorway. He had tried the metal gate, but it was firmly closed. His armband and the club in his hand were the only thing that protected me from the rag-tag army that swept by us.
‘ “Gold, or diamonds,” he spat into my face.

‘I realized immediately the mistake that I had made. Because I had a warm coat, and made an effort with my hair, he thought I was rich. I tried to make my voice sound natural. “Armandek, I have no diamonds. Look. Look,” I said “My shoes have got holes in them.” I leaned on him, smelling the rank smell of a farm animal and cherry brandy, smiling, as if these kinds of mistakes are often made, and held my best shoes up for him to inspect.

‘Armandek looked at his comrades up ahead, and looked at me. one hand tracing a clumsy path through my clothing. He found a bread crust in one of my pockets and stuffed it into his big mouth, then spitting it out. I took in a deep breath in as his paw settled on my bosom. But he took little notice squeezing one then the other as if they were barnacles attached to harbour wall. I did not feel the first blow.

‘I covered my head as best I could as blow after blow rained down on me. I could feel the blood in my fingers and running through my scalp. I felt my ribs gave way as the booted me sideways then tried to catch my face with his heavy boot. “Please, Please, Armandek let me live,” I shouted. “Anything, I will do anything. Just let me live”.

‘The sounds of the barking dogs was a street away, but other German soldiers in their greatcoats were silently following behind, stepping lightly from one street to another, to see who emerged once the throng had passed. One quickly closed the gap between us, his finger covering the trigger of his automatic weapon, his grey- blue eyes flickering briefly on Armandek’s armband, and my dishevelled state.

‘ “Papers,” he said to Armandek.

‘Armadek did not understand. He stood like a dumb beast looking at the soldier. The first German was joined by another, sweeping from one side of the road to the other.’

‘ “Shoot them both,” he said.

‘ “Your papers Armandek. He wants to see your papers.”

‘I was not good at science, but I knew some German from the gymnasium and the Volksempfanger, people’s radio. “Please don’t shoot us. I’ll do anything if you don’t shoot us.”

‘Armandek scrambled to get his papers out of his pocket, clicking his heels together as he presented them to the younger soldier. But he barely glanced at them, shoving him aside and kicking his backside as he scrambled away.

‘Their focus was on me. I knew I was little more than a distraction: an amusement. I wiped blood from my face. “You speak very good German,” said the older of the two.

‘ “Thankyou,” I said, speaking carefully to the older officer.

‘ “Papers,” he barked out suddenly, cracking my attempt at composure.

‘ “I have none,” I said.

‘The click of the safety catch made me flinch. The older man laughed, and I dared to breath once more. “She could be pretty,” he said to his colleague.

‘She’s a Jew,’ he spat out.

‘The older man used his gun to nudge my coat with the Star of David aside, and flicked at it with the barrel so that I knew he wanted me to take it off. It crumpled to my feet, like a corpse. He openly looked at my breasts, as if they were a separate part of me, his hand travelling the vast distance between us, brushing the outside of his hand against the nylon material, and taking a deep breath, closing the distance between us. “Your blouse please Fraulein,” he whispered in my ear, like a Herr Doktor asking me to undress and leave my clothes lying on a chair. I shivered looking at my toes, as he nuzzled my neck; an earthen smell, like some well-fed animal, waiting to take the first bite.

‘With the click of his colleague’s automatic weapon my cold hands fumbled to undo the first button of my blouse. “She’s got no papers Herr Baldung. She could be Polish. And she could be pretty,” he said, as my blouse joined my coat on the ground.’