had changed during that period when the two of them were being hounded. Stalin had died. The Americans hadn't dropped their bomb on Korea or China, as they were preparing to do. We'd had time to catch up with them in the home stretch, as it were. Atomic war was becoming a double-edged sword. In a word, the Third World War hadn't taken place. Thanks to the silence of that woman who used to chop vegetables on a little wooden board while chatting with her son…"
The masses of water crashing against the cargo ship now seemed more rhythmical, as if resigned to the logic of the resistance offered them by this ludicrous vessel. I heard the counsellor get up and in the sudden flare of a match his face seemed to me aged, deeply etched. His voice had the slightly disappointed tone of someone who had been getting ready to spring a surprise but has missed the right moment to announce it: "Well, that's it. We're on the Red Sea. We won't be tossed about quite so much now." Perhaps it was slight irritation at having to break off his story to announce the news. He resumed it again but brought it to a swift conclusion.
"On account of our duels at chess Ethel nicknamed me 'Shakhmatov' or 'Shakh' for short. She knew Russian. There are only two or three people left who know this nickname… Goodnight!"
In the years that followed he occasionally spoke of the Rosenbergs again. One day he told me why, at the moment of their arrest, he was sure they would confess. "Because if I'd had those two children, that's what I would have done," he said.
With the passage of time, I also came to realize how his storytelling had allowed me to forget my fear, that egotistical and humiliating fear of losing one's life just when things are promising to turn out well.
Last of all, that night taught me Shakh's nickname, which was known to very few people. You were one of them.
2
Everything expressed by their voices, their bodies and, no doubt, their thoughts that night seemed to me tinged with theatrical exaggeration. Their excessively enthusiastic judgments in front of this statue, before that picture. Their smiles, contorted with too much happiness. And, behind these rapt expressions, the all-too-evident lack of attention to what they were being shown. And the overly urbane and almost gleeful hypocrisy with which they kept promising to meet for lunch one day. And the glances of the men, eyeing the women's figures quite blatantly, then immediately affecting icy indifference and poise.
At first I told myself that in an art gallery such an exaggeration of sentiments, either felt or simulated, must stem from the physical, and hence sensual, warmth of the works exhibited. A mistaken supposition, for the pictures 'were all bloodlessly and coldly geometric and the sculptures-cubes superimposed on one another and truncated cylinders-looked hollow despite the weight of their bronze.
I then attributed these excessive reactions to the schizophrenia of this city cut in two, divided like two hemispheres of a brain, each with its own very personal vision of the world, its own customs and foibles. Berlin, where the streets ran headlong into the Wall, then reappeared on the other side, both similar and unrecognizable. In the western hemisphere of this war-disordered brain people felt themselves to be charged with a special mission, none more so, I thought, as I made my way slowly through the crowd of them, than the guests at the very first exhibition in this new art center. In their eyes these great, brightly lit rooms were becoming an outpost of the Western World, confronting the alarming boundlessness of the barbaric lands that began beyond the Wall. Each of their gestures was projected onto the screen of the darkness that stretched away toward the east. Every word, every smile produced a reaction out there in that unpredictable blackness. Each truncated cylinder hurled defiance from its pedestal at the realistic paintings
The masses of water crashing against the cargo ship now seemed more rhythmical, as if resigned to the logic of the resistance offered them by this ludicrous vessel. I heard the counsellor get up and in the sudden flare of a match his face seemed to me aged, deeply etched. His voice had the slightly disappointed tone of someone who had been getting ready to spring a surprise but has missed the right moment to announce it: "Well, that's it. We're on the Red Sea. We won't be tossed about quite so much now." Perhaps it was slight irritation at having to break off his story to announce the news. He resumed it again but brought it to a swift conclusion.
"On account of our duels at chess Ethel nicknamed me 'Shakhmatov' or 'Shakh' for short. She knew Russian. There are only two or three people left who know this nickname… Goodnight!"
In the years that followed he occasionally spoke of the Rosenbergs again. One day he told me why, at the moment of their arrest, he was sure they would confess. "Because if I'd had those two children, that's what I would have done," he said.
With the passage of time, I also came to realize how his storytelling had allowed me to forget my fear, that egotistical and humiliating fear of losing one's life just when things are promising to turn out well.
Last of all, that night taught me Shakh's nickname, which was known to very few people. You were one of them.
2
Everything expressed by their voices, their bodies and, no doubt, their thoughts that night seemed to me tinged with theatrical exaggeration. Their excessively enthusiastic judgments in front of this statue, before that picture. Their smiles, contorted with too much happiness. And, behind these rapt expressions, the all-too-evident lack of attention to what they were being shown. And the overly urbane and almost gleeful hypocrisy with which they kept promising to meet for lunch one day. And the glances of the men, eyeing the women's figures quite blatantly, then immediately affecting icy indifference and poise.
At first I told myself that in an art gallery such an exaggeration of sentiments, either felt or simulated, must stem from the physical, and hence sensual, warmth of the works exhibited. A mistaken supposition, for the pictures 'were all bloodlessly and coldly geometric and the sculptures-cubes superimposed on one another and truncated cylinders-looked hollow despite the weight of their bronze.
I then attributed these excessive reactions to the schizophrenia of this city cut in two, divided like two hemispheres of a brain, each with its own very personal vision of the world, its own customs and foibles. Berlin, where the streets ran headlong into the Wall, then reappeared on the other side, both similar and unrecognizable. In the western hemisphere of this war-disordered brain people felt themselves to be charged with a special mission, none more so, I thought, as I made my way slowly through the crowd of them, than the guests at the very first exhibition in this new art center. In their eyes these great, brightly lit rooms were becoming an outpost of the Western World, confronting the alarming boundlessness of the barbaric lands that began beyond the Wall. Each of their gestures was projected onto the screen of the darkness that stretched away toward the east. Every word, every smile produced a reaction out there in that unpredictable blackness. Each truncated cylinder hurled defiance from its pedestal at the realistic paintings
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