March 12, 1940
As the waves struck the improvised craft, Paul began to worry. The crossing should have been straightforward, just a few miles across a calm sea, under the cover of night.
Then everything became complicated.
Not that anything had been easy over the past few years, of course. They had escaped Germany across the Austrian border without too many setbacks, and had reached South Africa in early 1935.
It was a time of new beginnings. The smile returned to Alys’s face, and she went back to being the strong, stubborn woman she always used to be. Julian’s terrible fear of the dark began to abate. And Manfred developed a strong friendship with his brother-in-law, especially because Paul let him win at chess.
The search for Hans Reiner’s treasure proved to be more complicated than it might at first have seemed. Paul went back to work in a diamond mine for several months, now accompanied by Manfred-who, thanks to his qualification as an engineer, became Paul’s boss. Alys in turn wasted no time in becoming the unofficial photographer for every social event under the Mandate.
Between them, they managed to save up enough money to buy a small farm in the Orange River basin, the same one from which Hans and Nagel had stolen the diamonds thirty-two years earlier. The property had changed hands several times over the previous three decades, and many said it was cursed. A number of people warned Paul that he’d be throwing away his money if he bought the place.
“I’m not superstitious,” he said. “And I’ve a hunch that my luck might change.”
They were discreet about it. They let several months go by before they started looking for the diamonds. Then one night in the summer of 1936 the four of them set off under the light of a full moon. They knew the adjoining lands perfectly, having walked through them Sunday after Sunday with picnic baskets, pretending to be going on an outing.
Hans’s map was surprisingly precise, as might have been expected from a man who had spent half his life hunched over navigational charts. He had drawn a ravine and the course of a stream, and a rock shaped like an arrowhead at the place where they met. Thirty steps north of the rock, they began to dig. The earth was soft, and it didn’t take them long to find the chest. Manfred whistled in disbelief when they opened it and saw the coarse stones beneath the light of their torches. Julian started playing with them, and Alys danced a lively foxtrot with Paul, with no music other than that of the crickets in the ravine.
Three months later they celebrated their wedding in the town church. Six months after that, Paul showed up at the gemological appraisal office and said that he’d found a couple of stones in the stream on his land. He had taken some of the smaller ones and watched, with his heart in his mouth, as the appraiser examined them against the light, rubbed them on a piece of felt, and smoothed his moustache-all those unnecessary elements of sorcery that experts perform to make themselves seem important.
“They’re quite good quality. If I were you, I’d buy a sieve and start to drain that place, lad. I’ll buy whatever you bring me.”
They continued to “remove” diamonds from the stream for two years. In the spring of 1939, Alys learned that the situation in Europe was turning very ugly.
“The South Africans are on the side of the English. Soon we won’t be welcome in the colonies.”
Paul understood that the time had come to leave. They sold a bigger batch of stones than usual-so many that the appraiser had to call the mine administrator to send him cash-and one night they left without saying good-bye to anyone, bringing only a few personal effects and five horses.
They had made an important decision about what to do with the money. They headed north, to the Waterberg Plateau. That was where the Herero survivors lived, the people whom his father had tried to eradicate and with whom Paul had lived for a long time during his first stay in Africa. When Paul rode back into the village, the medicine man greeted him with a song of welcome.
“Paul Mahaleba has returned, Paul the white hunter,” he said, waving his feathered wand.
Paul went straight over to speak to the chief and handed him a huge pouch containing three quarters of what they had made from the sale of the diamonds.
“This is for the Herero. To return the dignity to your people.”
“You are the one who recovers his dignity through this act, Paul Mahaleba,” the medicine man stated. “But your gift shall be welcome among our people.”
Paul nodded humbly at the wisdom of those words.
They spent several wonderful months in the village, helping as best they could to rebuild it to what it had once been. Until the day Alys heard the terrible news from one of the traders who passed through Windhoek from time to time.
“War has broken out in Europe.”
“We have done enough here,” said Paul pensively, looking at his son. “Now it’s time to think about Julian. He’s fifteen and he needs a normal life, somewhere with a future.”
Which was how they came to begin their long pilgrimage toward the far side of the Atlantic. First to Mauritania by boat, then on to French Morocco, from where they had been forced to escape when the borders were closed to anyone who didn’t have a visa. This was a formality not easy to accomplish for a Jewish woman without papers or a man who was officially dead and who had no other identification but an old card belonging to a vanished SS officer.
After speaking to a number of refugees, Paul decided to attempt the crossing to Portugal from a place on the outskirts of Tangier.
“It won’t be hard. Conditions are good, and it isn’t too far.”
The sea loves to contradict the foolish words of men who are overconfident, and that night a storm blew up. They fought against it for a long time, and Paul even tied his family to the raft so that the waves could not rip them away from the pathetic craft they’d bought for an arm and a leg from a crook in Tangier.
If the Spanish patrol had not appeared just in time, the four of them would undoubtedly have drowned.
Ironically, Paul was more frightened in the hold than during his spectacular attempt to board, when he had hung against the side of the patrol boat for seconds that seemed never-ending. Once on board, they were all afraid that they would be taken to Cadiz, from where they could easily be dispatched back to Germany. Paul cursed himself for not having tried to learn even a few words of Spanish.
His plan had been to get to a beach east of Tarifa, where apparently someone-a contact of the crook who’d sold them the craft-would be waiting for them. This man was to take them across to Portugal in a truck. But they never got the chance to find out if he turned up.
Paul spent many hours in the hold, trying to think of a solution. His fingers brushed against the secret pocket in his shirt where he had hidden a dozen diamonds, the last of Hans Reiner’s treasure. Alys, Manfred, and Julian each carried a similar consignment in their clothes. Perhaps if they bribed the crew with a handful…
Paul was extremely surprised when the Spanish captain took them out of the hold in the middle of the night, gave them a rowboat, and pointed them toward the Portuguese coast.
By the light of the lantern on deck, Paul examined the face of this man, who must have been his age. The same age his father had been when he died, and the same profession. Paul wondered how things would have turned out if his father had not been a murderer, if he himself hadn’t spent the best part of his youth trying to find out who’d killed him.
He rummaged in his clothes and took out the only memento he still had of that time: the fruit of Hans’s wickedness, the emblem of his brother’s treachery.
Perhaps things would have been different for Jurgen if his father had been an honorable man, he thought.
Paul wondered how he might make this Spaniard understand. He put the emblem in his hand and repeated two simple words.
“Betrayal,” he said, touching his own chest with his index finger. “Salvation,” he said, touching the chest of the Spaniard.
Perhaps someday the captain would meet someone who could explain to him what the two words meant.
He jumped onto the little boat, and the four of them began to row. Within a few minutes they could hear the water lapping against the bank, and the boat scraped lightly against the gravel of the riverbed.
They were in Portugal.
He looked around before getting out of the boat, just to make sure that there was no danger, but he could see none.
It’s strange, thought Paul. Since I pulled my eye out I see everything much more clearly.