He crawled out of his sleeping bag. Took out an aspirin and the water bottle. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He put the pill in his mouth and washed it down. Then he crawled out of the tent to pee. The ground was cold and wet under his bare feet. One more day and I’ll be away from all this, he thought. All this cold, the long nights. He crawled back into the tent, down into the sleeping bag and pulled it up to his chin. The temptation to take a swig from one of the bottles was there all the time, but he would wait. Now that he’d come as far as this he was determined not to take any unnecessary risks.
The rain grew heavier. Everything went as it was destined to go, he told himself. I waited for more than fifty years for that moment to come. I’d almost, but only almost, given up the hope of finding the explanation for what had ruined my life, and how to avenge it. Then the unexpected happened. By some totally incredible coincidence somebody turned up and was able to supply the piece of the jigsaw that enabled me to discover what had happened. A chance meeting that should have been inconceivable.
He decided that as soon as he got back to Buenos Aires he would go to the cemetery where Hollner was buried and put a flower on his grave. If not for him he would never have been able to carry out his mission. There was some kind of mysterious, possibly even divine justice that enabled him to meet Hollner before he died, and find out the answers to the questions he’d been asking for so long. Discovering what happened that day when he was only a child had put him in a state of shock. Never before had he drunk as much as he did for some time after that meeting. But then, when Hollner died, he’d forced himself to sober up and reduce his drinking so that he could go to work again and devise a plan.
And now it was all over.
As the rain pattered on the canvas, he ran through what had happened. First, the meeting with Hollner, whom he’d met by pure chance in La Cabana. That was two years ago. Even then Hollner was showing signs of the stomach cancer that would soon kill him. It was Filip Monteiro, the old waiter with the glass eye, who had asked him if would consider sharing a table one night when the restaurant was very full. He’d been seated at a table with Hollner.
They knew immediately that they were both immigrants from Germany—they had similar accents. He had expected to discover that Hollner was one of the large group of Germans who came to Argentina via the well-organized lifelines that helped Nazis flee the Third Reich, which was supposed to last for a thousand years but now lay in ruins. At first Silberstein hadn’t given his real name. Höllner might easily have been one of those who entered the country on false papers; perhaps he’d landed in Argentina from one of the U-boats that were sailing up and down the coast of Argentina in the spring of 1945. He might also have been assisted by one of the Nazi groups that operated out of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Or he might have come later, when Juan Perón opened his political arms to welcome German immigrants without asking any questions about their past. Silberstein knew that Argentina was full of Nazis who had gone to ground, war criminals who lived in constant fear of being arrested. People who had never renounced their beliefs and still had a bust of Hitler in a prominent position at home. But Höllner was not one of those. He’d referred to the war as the catastrophe it was. His father had been a high-ranking Nazi, but Höllner himself was one of the many German immigrants who had come to Argentina in search of a future they thought they could never find in the ruins of Europe.
They had shared a table at La Cabana. Silberstein could still remember that they’d ordered the same meal—a meat stew the chefs at La Cabana made better than anybody else. Afterwards they’d walked home together since they lived in the same neighborhood, Silberstein in Avenida Corrientes and Hollner a few blocks further on. They arranged to meet again. Höllner explained that he was a widower whose children had returned to Europe. Until recently he had been running a printing business, but now he’d sold it. Silberstein invited him to visit the workshop where he restored old furniture. Höllner accepted the invitation, and then it became the norm for him to visit Silberstein in the mornings. He seemed never to tire of watching Silberstein painstakingly reupholster an old chair brought in by some member of the Argentinean upper classes. They would occasionally go out to the courtyard for coffee and a smoke.
They had compared their lives, as old people do. And it was while they were doing so that Höllner asked in passing if Silberstein happened to be related to a certain Herr Jacob Silberstein from Berlin, who had escaped being deported with his fellow Jews in the 1930s and then avoided all other forms of persecution during the war because he was the only person who could give Hermann Goering a satisfactory massage to ease his back pain. Feeling that history had caught up with him in one stroke, Silberstein told him that the masseur Jacob Silberstein was his uncle. And that it was thanks to the special privileges enjoyed by Jacob that his brother Lukas, Silberstein’s father, had also evaded deportation. Hollner explained that he himself had met Jacob Silberstein because his own father had also been massaged by him.