The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [79]
“When wiH they execute your son?” Leo asked cruelly and then felt ashamed.
“In a few weeks,” the professor said. He had lost the cigarette and his hands were tugging at each other in nervous spasms. “This was my last visit.” He sat and waited for pity, hoping that Leo would not question him.
Leo was silent. They were in the open country, the smell of fresh grass and growing trees untainted by dust The jeep was moving very slowly, Leo turned his head toward the old man. He spoke slowly. “He was convicted by a German court, your son, for killing a fellow German, not for his crimes as a camp guard. That is ironic. You will never be able to think in your heart that the damn Jews killed him. That hatred can never be your consolation. What a pity.”
The professor bowed his head and watched his hands. “I never thought such things,” he said. “Truly, I am an educated man.”
“Your son deserves to die,” Leo said. “He is a monster. If ever a man deserved to have his life taken away, that monster does. Do you know the things he did? An evil creature, the world will be better without him. I say that with a clear conscience. Do you know the things he did?” The hate in his voice and in his heart made him stop the jeep on the side of the road and turn for an answer.
But the professor did not answer. He had buried his head in his arms as if to hide as much of himself as he could. His whole body was shaking. There was no sound coming from the old man, but his small body was weaving backward and forward, continuously, aimlessly, as if severed from the motor of his brain.
Leo waited for it to end, and as pity and compassion began to wash away the hate, he thought no no and called to his mind the image of his own father, the tall emaciated figure, head shaven, walking down the gravel path, and Leo in his own uniform walking to meet him, not knowing him, and his father suddenly stopping and saying, “What are you doing here?” and Leo at that time remembering, and remembering now, how in an even earlier time he had been caught by his father in the Tiergarten when he was supposed to have been in school and his father saying in the selfsame tone, “Was machst du fuer?” Only now here along the gravel path with its white-painted stones, the barbed wire ringing the horizon all around them, now the father saying these words was weeping, stooping down to his son, the red stripe of the political prisoner across his breast, the boy with the green diagonal denoting his race. And Leo in the jeep, remembering tins, only now knowing what his father must have suffered at that time ten years ago, felt only contempt for this old man before him paying for his father's grief with his own. This man, well educated, knowing right from wrong, who out of fear, cowardice, impotence, did not come to the help of his father. Slept warm in his bed, ate well, and earned it all with a helpless shrug, an easy resignation. Leo looked away from the professor and across the road and down into a green valley growing black with the falling night. He knew he could never remain in Germany, that he could never live with these people, could not even hate them, they who had kept his youth behind barbed wire, burned a number into his arm that he would carry to his grave, killed his father, made his toother flee into the night thousands of miles away, robbing her mind erf the co-ordination necessary to live so that finally a time had me when she had died because she could not sleep, literally could not sleep. And now in this land, and with this people, he lived in peace and did not rage with fire and sword. Slept with their daughters, gave chocolate bars to their children, gave them cigarettes, drove them around the countryside. With his contempt for himself Leo drove out the last pity he felt for the old man. He put the jeep in motion, making it go at top speed, wanting to get back to Bremen. The professor had wiped his face with a handkerchief and sat passively, bracing