Free Little White Lies by Lesley Lokko Page A

fiddled with the radio headset, turning the dials until he found a station playing the sort of classical music he favoured. The strands of Mahler drifted over him and he felt immediately calmer. Venezuela was a young country, rich in raw materials and with a newly elected president who seemed pro-market, pro-reform and, crucially, pro-European. It also had a sizeable and affluent Jewish community. Oddly enough, it was Dirk Schofeld who’d made the first approach. He had associates in the Dutch Antilles and through them he’d managed to secure an invitation to dine with the influential Hausmann family at their Altamira home. Lionel was no fool. The first round of introductions was certainly important but after that it was anyone’s guess which way the wind would blow. The name Harburg was still a force to be reckoned with – but so too were Rothschild and Warburg and Lehman and Loeb and there were no longer any guarantees that any one of them wouldn’t be on the lookout for the same business opportunities as the Harburgs. Indeed, times had changed.
    He lifted the window cover and looked out. The ground lay under a thin blanket of fog. Caracas would be sweltering, so they’d been told. The tropics. He’d never been to the tropics, he thought to himself as he felt the engines revving up below them. His trips abroad had always been across the Atlantic, to New York and Washington, or to Europe, and to Israel, of course, with Sara (
Baruch HaShem
) and to visit Bettina. He’d found it mostly hot and baffling.
    There was a loud ‘ping’ above his head. They were ready for take-off. He felt the familiar rumbling shudder that was both sound and feeling that seemed to go on for ever. They taxied slowly out to the runway; there was a few minutes’ wait whilst Dirk drained the last of his bottle of wine, pausing to mop his sweating face. There was a pause as they lined up down the long length of the runway, then a tremendous burst of energy as the plane began to race towards the horizon. He felt his whole body being pressed backwards into the seat as though some giant hand had come down on him, then the breaking free, the moment of flight, a bumpy, upward thrust as the plane lifted itself into the air. He remained with his face pressed against the window – no matter he’d seen it all countless times before. A few bumps and dips then the aircraft steadied itself and ploughed on blindly through the fog. It was a miracle, a modern miracle.
    The fog thinned and lifted, wispy clouds zooming in and out of focus until suddenly they were properly free, sailing onwards into the vast, iridescent blue. A tremendous feeling of wholeness came over him, a renewed sense of his own power and energy and strength. The faint anxiety – not yet sadness, not quite depression – that had been with him all week lifted and he felt himself freed of his own dark moods. As they soared above the clouds he felt as though he could reach out and touch them, just as he might reach out and touch the future he couldn’t yet see.
London–New York–Miami–Caracas
. The journey before him was all the proof he needed. The flight from Germany, their twenty-odd years in England, the horror of the death camps and the loss of so many members of their extended family . . . the immense pain of it all was suddenly lifted from his shoulders. He felt alive again, thrillingly alive.

11
    EMBETH
    At dinner that evening, sitting opposite him and in front of her mother’s disapproving glare, she found herself unable to drag her eyes away. He had an energy that burned so that she felt the heat of it, even yards away. It burned through his shirt, spilled out into his eyes and was there in the quick, restless way his hands moved as he talked. He was full of plans. Ideas. Opportunities. Her father was similarly captivated. She wondered how old he was. Forty? Fifty? It was hard to tell. She didn’t think he was married. He wore no ring and spoke of no wife or children