Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker Page B

Mischa is not impressed. On the contrary, everything has gone just as he hoped. No help in sight, that’s the kind of phrase Mischa has been waiting for — soon you’ll all know the real situation. It does make sense to speak of the future, Mischa isn’t an idiot after all, of course he knows where we are, of course he knows that one can’t get married until — and that’s the real issue — until the Russians arrive.
    Mischa to me: “So I simply told them (that was his word: simply) that the Russians were twelve miles from Bezanika. You see, it wasn’t just a piece of news: now it was also an argument. I had imagined they would be thrilled — you don’t hear that kind of news every day. But Rosa didn’t throw her arms around my neck, far from it; she looked at her father almost in alarm, and he looked at me. For a long time he didn’t say a word, just looked at me, so that I began to get nervous. My first thought was, Maybe they need time to grasp it, judging by the way the old man was looking at me, but then I realized it wasn’t time they needed but certainty. After all, the same thing had happened to me: I too had thought that Jacob was just trying to divert my attention from the carload of potatoes, and I went on thinking this till he told me the whole truth, how he had found out. News like that without a source simply isn’t worth anything, it’s no more than a rumor. So I was about to open my mouth and dispel their doubts, but then I decided to wait. Let them ask, I thought: if you have to squeeze something out of another person, you can absorb it better than if he tells it to you on his own and all in one piece. And that’s exactly the way it happened.”
    So, an endless silence, the needle paused in the middle of a stitch, Rosa’s hot breath, Frankfurter’s eyes, and Mischa standing there in the spotlight, the audience hanging on his lips.
    “Do you know what you’re saying?” says Frankfurter. “That’s not something to joke about.”
    “You don’t need to tell me that,” says Mischa. “I heard it from Heym.”
    “From Jacob Heym?”
    “Yes.”
    “And he? Where did he hear it?”
    Mischa smiles weakly, pretends to be embarrassed, shrugs his shoulders unhappily, which they won’t accept. Somewhere there was a promise. That he is not going to keep it is another matter, but the promise was made, and he would like at least to be forced to break it, he would like to have done his utmost: in my place you wouldn’t have acted any differently.
    “Where did he hear it?”
    “I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone,” says Mischa, actually quite prepared to do so, but obviously not prepared enough, at least not obviously enough for Felix Frankfurter. This is not the time to note nuances in a voice; Frankfurter takes two or three quick steps and gives Mischa a slap, a cross between a stage slap and a genuine one, but more likely genuine, for it contains indignation: we’re not talking here to pass the time.
    Naturally Mischa is a bit shocked — that much force wasn’t really necessary — but he can’t be offended now. The force, after all, had to assume some form or other. He can’t sit down with a stony face, arms crossed on his chest, waiting for an apology. He could wait a long time for that. He can, and he does, remove all doubts: the moment has arrived, his plan worked — no one is going to ask now why he took so long.
    “Jacob Heym has a radio.”
    Another short silence, a few glances exchanged, the shirt — still too big — floats unnoticed to the floor. It’s all right to believe one’s own son-in-law. At last Rosa throws her arms around his neck; he’s waited long enough for that. Over her shoulder he sees her father sitting down exhausted and covering his deeply furrowed face with his hands. There will be no discussion; there is nothing to say. Rosa pulls his ear to her mouth and whispers. He doesn’t understand, the old man still has his hands in front of his face,