The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  So many times had he imagined those last dreadful moments in a wooded area not far from Belsen, two men, opposites in every respect, one his grandfather, sick, but perhaps not dying, and the other Laura’s father, strong and healthy – and still strong and healthy in his eighties according to Raphe’s mother. A crime had been committed yet no one had paid. The courts had failed, and with the increasing passage of time, soon they would stop bothering. Which left only rough justice.

  As Laura chatted on about her work, he wanted to grab her by the arms tight enough to hurt, grab and shake and squeeze her to the bone. He wanted to tell her the truth, make her listen, make her understand who her father really was. Now that would be a form of rough justice.

  More than sixty years ago and another era, two men in a wood, one on the side of the barbarians and the other among the persecuted, and, despite his mother’s account, Raphe still tormented by the possibilities. Was his grandfather forced to lie in his weakness as Laura’s father came towards him? Might there have been a stick, or a gun, or perhaps a knife? Or did the brute rely only on his bare beefy fists. Did Martin Lewin in a sweat of fear and helplessness watch his own death drawing closer? Did he with his last breath beg to be spared?

  Raphe had spent a good many nights lying in his own sweat gnawing at the unfairness of it all. As he lectured his students, or worked at his keyboard, even on occasions when he was with a woman, he was aware of the weight of his grandfather’s suffering, a leaden cladding as snug and heavy as custom-made armour. He felt the torment so intensely, he couldn’t help but wonder if there was something specific to him, some nugget of madness or idiocy that had him choking the present in the long reach of the past. Even his mother had handled the knowledge better. What you can’t change, she used to say, you have to accommodate. You have to move on.And while Raphe had tried, his grandfather refused to be left behind.

  All so different from Laura Lewin. No extra identities had attached to her, no suits of ancestral demands were weighing her down. And again he was struck by the unfairness of it all. He felt wronged, personally wronged, like when he was a boy and someone stole his new football, or later at college when a fellow student pinched his ideas and received a higher grade. But this was no football or college essay, this was a life. His grandfather had been wronged; his mother deprived of her parents had been wronged; and he, Raphe, the only one now remaining, had been wronged. Someone ought to pay.

  Yet as he sat in the small café across from Laura Lewin, the woman he had charged as responsible, the woman who was talking about work he found admirable, sat with her here rather than viewing her in the glare of his private and unrestrained imaginings, he found it impossible to make his sense of wrong coalesce in her. For years he had lived with an imagined woman, a prototype Laura Lewin already guilty by virtue of who she was. In his mind she had existed only as the daughter of Henry Lewin, and his only interest in her had been as the grandson of Martin Lewin. But now the flesh-and-blood version was invigorating quite a different set of interests. She was so vibrant, so funny, so engaged, and her work had a real effect in the world. She was the sort of wide-screen, irresistible woman who had always appealed to him. And young in a way that he, almost exactly the same age, was not.

  As she talked, it was as if she wrapped him in her voice. He was surprised to see the café had filled, including a pair of squealing children at the very next table. He wondered how it was possible to experience a description of work as an act of intimacy, particularly when uttered by someone he wanted to find abhorrent. It was not that the words she used were so unusual, rather she selected them with special care, like a painter choosing colours. Earlier she had described her friend Nell as ‘the wellspring’ of her life, and the religious brother as ‘a performer in his own tragedy’. Now she was talking about travel, how much she enjoyed it.‘Boredom,’ she said, ‘is the most barren of soils. And complacency,’she paused a moment, ‘complacency is like a top of the range coffin.’

  She asked him about some of the volcanoes he’d seen. As she listened she was smiling at him across the table, which felt more like a smiling into him.

  ‘With your love of volcanoes,’ she said at last, ‘I expect you wouldn’t do a good complacency.’

  And while he managed to smile back, more for her turn of phrase than anything else, he wished he could be as certain as she.

  He had let his coffee go cold and Laura went to order some more. As she waited at the counter to place their order, she was thinking how less sure of himself he was than the man who had appeared in her office all those months ago, less brash too. And unlike that other time, far more interested in her, or at least making a good pretence of it. Not that she cared: any interest, even feigned, was welcome these days. Nell was working flat out on a grant proposal and hardly ever home, and when they did spend time together, she was so critical of Laura and the life they shared, there was scant pleasure in it. In fact, the scene in the car last night had been typical of recent times. Laura would screen topics for discussion and rehearse her opinions beforehand; she’d cut interesting snippets from the paper and make a note of gossip, but none of her attempts improved the situation. She would scour the entertainment guides for activities to appeal to Nell: a new multimedia exhibition, moonlight cinema, fish and chips down on the wharf, a series of avant-garde short films. But few were taken up, and those that were often provided a new source of criticism rather than the pleasure for which they were intended.

  So this time with Raphe was a welcome respite. She ordered their coffee and on returning to the table asked about his background. She listened as he talked of his mother’s experience as part of the Kindertransport .He spoke so movingly about the little girl sent away by the parents she was never to see again, the hurt and loss of the child, and the hopes which had helped make the loss bearable. He seemed to feel so much of what his mother had suffered it did not surprise Laura he’d not had children of his own. And through it all she was aware of an intense empathy with him. He had loved his mother deeply although not always easily.

  ‘Sometimes I was too much the centre of her world,’ he said. And laughed,‘Of course I would have forgiven her anything.’

  Laura could have used exactly the same words in relation to Etti.

  She encouraged Raphe to talk about his mother, such a different experience from her own and yet somehow illuminating it. And when he digressed to speak about his grandfather, a man with whom he clearly felt a strong bond, Laura was quick to steer him back.

  They talked until the sky darkened and the owners of the café were stacking tables around them, a strange, fervid time, during which both were driven to greater confession by that hothouse intimacy which often happens when strangers meet. They were in this together, this life, these mothers, these sunderings, or so it seemed to Laura, who felt a closeness to Raphe she did not feel with many of her old friends. And, she realised, a fresh closeness with her mother as well.

  Raphe had not treated his mother with the same kid gloves Laura had used with Etti. He’d never seen the necessity for it, he said. ‘After all my mother had suffered, I was sure she’d be able to manage anything I might dish up.’

  And of course he was right. But it had never before appeared to Laura to be that simple.

  When they finally left the café, Laura insisted on driving him to his hotel, a way of thanking him for a special afternoon. They walked in step to her car, close but not touching. He must feel it too, she was thinking. This connection, he must feel it too.

  The house was quiet and still when Laura arrived home. There was a note from Nell on the bench: with the grant proposal due to be submitted soon, she and Cyndee had decided to have a work dinner. Laura was quite pleased, she needed some time alone. She gathered up Wystan and stood at the glass, stroking the cat and staring through her reflection to the darkness beyond. A long time passed before she put the sleeping animal on the couch and went to the filing cabinet for her mother’s transcript. Raphe’s account o
f his own mother had aroused a longing for hers. The transcript and – it was hardly a decision after all this time – the tape as well. She was ready to listen to it, ready to hear her mother’s voice. Even if she were never to see Raphe again, she’d be grateful to him for guiding her to this moment.

  But it’s not there. The transcript’s not there. She knows the exact file. The file’s empty. The transcript’s not there. She checks either side of the file, it’s not there. She checks every file in the drawer, it’s not there. Then every drawer and back again to the first one where it should be, where it has been ever since that afternoon years ago when Nell read it aloud to her. It’s not anywhere.

  She searches the cabinet a second time and a third, then the drawers of her desk and after that her bookcases. She excavates her mother’s box of treasures from beneath the stairs: everything in its place but no transcript. She slips the audio cassette in her pocket and returns to the filing cabinet for yet another fruitless search.

  So many times of clawing the same ground before conceding that no matter how closely she looks, the transcript is simply not there and disbelief won’t make it suddenly appear. She starts on the rest of the house – the linen cupboard with its neat stacks of towels and sheets, then the broom cupboard and after that the liquor cabinet, then the kitchen cupboards and drawers. It’s like losing her mother all over again. She searches behind chairs and couches, among the sheet music on top of the piano, through the rest of the bookcases. It’s the only transcript. Daniel didn’t want a copy, Daniel didn’t even want to read it. One copy in all the world, although, and she pats her pocket, the tape still exists, she forgot in her panic the original exists, so she could transcribe it herself. But it’s not the same. She wants her mother’s transcription, the one her mother read and approved. She searches the bathroom, the laundry, she searches handbags and suitcases, she even looks under the living-room rug.

  She’s faint with desperation when finally she finds it, in Nell’s study of all places. Lying there on her desk. Etti’s story on Nell’s desk. She grabs it, clasps it to her chest, and with the relief plunging through her, she slumps to the floor. It is unbelievable that Nell would have gone to Laura’s filing cabinet, riffled through until she found the transcript and then taken it without asking. What could she be thinking? Nell who has been so cool these past couple of months and so critical of Laura, what could she be thinking of?

  And suddenly it occurs to her, the only possible explanation: Nell must be wanting to make amends. They’ve been going through such a rough patch, round and round, and when one has wanted to make peace the other has been too hurt to respond. So difficult to know how to stop the cycle. But Nell has finally done it. She’s been critical about everything concerning Laura, but particularly what she sees as Laura’s overreaction to the political situation, so what better way to try and understand than a return to those experiences of Etti’s which helped shaped Laura in the first place? What other explanation could there be? It’s Nell’s way of showing she’s sorry for her recent behaviour, Nell’s way of reaching out to Laura in the most elemental way, Nell’s way of showing she understands.

  The transcript is safe and Nell as committed as ever. It’s the only possible explanation. Laura wipes her eyes and clears her throat, and with the transcript tight in her hand and the tape tucked deep in her pocket goes into the lounge. She slips the cassette into the tape deck, curls up on the couch with the cat, and with the transcript in front of her, finally – again – listens to her mother’s voice.

  ‘Who in your family do you most resemble?’ Raphe asks Laura as she drives the rugged contortions of the Great Ocean Road around the southern coast of Victoria.

  A week has passed since their first coffee. In the interim they have met for drinks and dinner as well as some local sightseeing. Raphe has not met Nell, neither it seems has Laura much over the same period, but he knows who she is and her relationship with Laura.Times are tough, he said a few days ago, when good-looking women who could have any man opt for a female partner instead. Laura’s response was sharp: lack of success with men did not turn women into lesbians.

  Raphe decides that despite their vulnerabilities, family relationships are a safer topic.‘So who in your family do you most resemble?’ he asks again.

  Her answer surprises him, and she is quick to add,‘But not to such an extent the lines were blurred between my father and me. And,’ she says with a smile, ‘don’t think for a moment my father made me a lesbian.’ She goes on to explain that identification with Etti was impossible. ‘My mother guarded her identity so fiercely. She could never let us forget she’d been shaped by hardship not only worse than anything my brother and I had ever experienced, but worse than we could even imagine.’

  Towards her mother, Laura says, she always felt an overwhelming love mixed with an overwhelming responsibility. Although, and she keeps this to herself, so much has changed since listening to the tape, and changed so absolutely and with such positive effects that Laura cannot help but wonder how different the past few years might have been had she found the courage to listen to it earlier.

  It was an alchemical experience, three hours of spellbinding intensity, with Etti speaking directly to her in a voice so much quieter and calmer than her old puff and bluster. Finally, it seemed, Etti had no need to prove anything about her past, the very fact the Holocaust Museum had commissioned the tape meant she was believed. In those three hours so many of the burdens passed to Laura while Etti was still alive were diffused. She even dared think that rather than the less than perfect daughter she had long judged herself to be, she had probably been as good a daughter as was possible to such a long-suffering mother. As to why the tape had a far more profound effect than Nell’s reading of the transcript, she could not with absolute certainty say, except it was her mother’s own voice in the conversation she never managed to have with her daughter.

  Laura told no one about listening to the tape. It was a private experience, a revelatory experience; indeed, if moments of epiphany could stretch to several hours, it was one such moment. She replaced the transcript exactly where she found it on Nell’s desk, and a couple of days later it reappeared in her filing cabinet. Now with Raphe sitting next to her in the car, she realises she would be more inclined to tell him about listening to her mother’s tape than Nell. She glances across at him and smiles: he has entered her life at exactly the right time.

  His own face is solemn as he meets her gaze.‘So you identified with your father then?’

  She nods.‘By keeping his losses to himself, my father harnessed me to none of the same burdens as my mother.’

  I bet he didn’t, Raphe is thinking. He has prepared himself carefully for today. No falling for her charms, no failing in his responsibilities towards his grandfather. For it is incomprehensible that Laura, a highly intelligent woman fully aware of life’s complexities, could not know the truth about her father. If Phil, Raphe’s own all-American father had been a Nazi and a murderer, Raphe is sure he would know. Either Henry Lewin played his stolen identity to perfection or, far more likely, Laura was in cahoots with him and deserves to share the blame.

  At the beginning of this visit Raphe had resolved to approach the topic of Henry Lewin with restraint, not wanting to arouse Laura’s suspicions. But now he casts his caution aside, he simply can’t wait any longer, and soon he is conducting the complete survivor’s questionnaire. He asks about Henry’s background, his family history and early social circumstances, his movements during the war, how he ended up in Australia, who of his family survived, what searches he did and what reparations he received.

  Laura’s answers are neat and sure and lacking detail; her father didn’t talk about these things, she explains. And when Raphe persists, she stresses there is no more information to give.

  ‘You’re just like Nell,’ Laura says, surprised and saddened by his sudden brusqueness.‘She’s convinced my quiet, reserved father was neither so quiet nor reserved, just hiding
something.’

  ‘And what do you think? Was your father hiding something?’

  Hiding is such a sweetly innocent word, Raphe is thinking.

  Two simple syllables to cover a multitude of sins. He holds his gaze hard ahead, sketching in his mind’s eye a clearing, not in a German wood, but here on this jagged Australian coast, a pocket hidden from the road, with the steep cliffs rising on one side and the steep drop to the ocean on the other, and he and Laura standing together in the blustering wind. And coinciding with a heavier gust, a gentle shove, and at long last blessed justice for a crime committed more than half a century before. Not trusting himself, yet knowing that within the courageous confines of his imagination he wouldn’t hesitate in that nonchalant, calamitous nudge, he keeps his gaze away from her and his hands locked painfully together.

  ‘Was your father hiding something?’ he asks again.

  The road is narrow and treacherous. A metre to the left and the car will bounce down the brutal cliffs to the ocean below, a metre to the right and it will be in the path of oncoming traffic, yet Laura twists her gaze from the road and looks at him, clearly deliberating whether to speak or not. And suddenly he is afraid of what she may know and equally afraid of what she may not know. Wishes he had not asked the question, wishes his mother had not bequeathed him this terrible knowledge, wishes history had left him alone to mosey on through life without these wrestlings with revenge and justice. And now he’s met Laura Lewin who makes such an unacceptable enemy, there’s forgiveness to grapple with as well. Forgiveness after all these years, as if he doesn’t have enough to lug through his days. I’m not my grandfather, he wants to shout. I’m not my grandfather. Yet against the hum and whoosh of the car on the curling road he feels the beat of his grandfather’s blood in his veins.