by Steve Toltz
After the U.S. troops entered Shanghai with the bad news of the Holocaust, many in the Jewish community left China for all corners of the globe, but my great-grandparents decided to stay, having established themselves as owners of a successful multilingual cabaret and kosher butcher shop. This perfectly suited my young grandmother, who was already in love with my grandfather, an actor in their theater. Then, in 1956, when she was just seventeen, my grandmother got pregnant, forcing her and my grandfather’s families to rush through the wedding preparations as you had to do in the Old World when you didn’t want people to do the math. The week following her wedding, the family decided to return to Poland, to raise the coming child, the cluster of cells that would become my father, in their homeland.
They weren’t welcomed back with open arms, to say the least. Who knows whether it was guilt or fear of retribution or simply the unwelcome surprise of a family ringing the doorbell and saying, “You’re in my house,” but they had been home less than ten minutes when, in front of my grandmother, her parents were beaten to death with an iron pipe. My grandmother ran but her husband remained, and he was shot for praying in Hebrew over their bodies, though he had yet to say “Amen,” so the message wasn’t transmitted. (“Amen” is like the Send button on an e-mail.)
Suddenly a widow and an orphan, she fled Poland for the second time in her young life, this time on a boat bound for Australia, and after two months of staring at the daunting circumference of the horizon, she went into labor just as someone shouted, “There it is!” Everyone ran to the side of the boat and leaned over the rail. Steep cliffs crowned with clusters of green trees lined the coast. Australia! The younger passengers let out cries of joy. The older passengers knew that the key to happiness lay in keeping your expectations low. They booed.
***
“Are you with me so far?” Dad asked, interrupting himself. “These are the building blocks of your identity. Polish. Jewish. Persecuted. Refugee. These are just some of the vegetables with which we make a Jasper broth. You got it?”
I nodded. I got it. Dad continued.
***
Though she could still hardly speak a word of English, my grandmother hooked up with my grandfather number two after only six months. It’s debatable whether this should be a source of pride or a source of shame, but he was a man who could trace his family back to the last boatload of English-born convicts dumped on Australian soil. While it’s true that some criminals were sent down for petty crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread, my father’s ancestor had not been one of them- or that is, he might have been, but he also raped three women, and if after raping those women he swiped a loaf of bread on his way home, it is not known.
Their courtship was fast. Apparently unperturbed by acquiring a child not of his own making, within a month, armed with a Polish dictionary and a book on English grammar, he asked my grandmother to marry him. “I’m just a battler, which means it’ll be us against the world, and the world will probably win hands down every time, but we’ll never give up fighting, no matter what, how does that sound?” She didn’t answer. “Come on. Just say, ‘I do,’ ” he pleaded. “It comes from the verb ‘to do.’ That’s all you need for now. Then we’ll move you on to ‘I did.’ ”
My grandmother considered her situation. She didn’t have anybody to help look after her baby if she went out to work, and she didn’t want her child to grow up fatherless and poor. She thought, “Do I have the necessary ruthlessness to marry a man I don’t really love for my son’s welfare? Yes, I do.” Then, looking at his hapless face, she thought, “I could do worse,” one of the most ostensibly benign though chilling phrases in any language.
He was unemployed when they married, and when she moved into his apartment, my grandmother was dismayed to discover it was filled with a terrifying potpourri of macho toys: rifles, replica pistols, model war planes, weights and dumbbells. When immersed in bodybuilding, kung fu training, or cleaning his gun, he whistled amiably. In the quiet moments when the frustration of unemployment settled in and he was absorbed with anger and depression, he whistled darkly.
Then he found a job with the New South Wales Prison Services near a small town being settled four hours away. He wasn’t going to work in the jail- he was going to help build it.
Because a prison was soon to loom on the town’s outskirts, an unkind publication in Sydney dubbed the settlement (in which my father was to grow up) the least desirable place to live in New South Wales.
The road entered town on a descent, and as my grandparents drove in, they saw the foundations of the penitentiary on top of a hill. Set amid huge, mute trees, that half-built prison looked to my grandmother to be half demolished, and the thought struck her as an unpleasant omen. It strikes me as one too, considering that my grandfather moved to this town to build a prison and I am now writing from one. The past is truly an inoperable tumor that spreads to the present.
They moved into a boxy, weatherboard house, and the following day, while my grandmother explored the town, inadvertently frightening the residents with her aura of the survivor, my grandfather began his new job. I’m not exactly sure what role he had, but apparently for the next several months he spoke incessantly of locked doors, cold halls, cell measurements, and grilled windows. As the building neared completion, he became obsessed with everything to do with prisons, even checking out books from the newly established local library on their construction and history. At the same time, my grandmother put as much energy into learning English, and this was the beginning of a new catastrophe. As her understanding of the English language grew, she began to understand her husband.
His jokes turned out to be stupid and racist. Moreover, some of them weren’t even jokes but long pointless stories that ended with my grandfather saying things like “And then I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ ” She realized he bitched endlessly about his lot in life, and when he wasn’t being nasty, he was merely banal; when not paranoid, he was boring. Soon his conversation made his handsome face grow ugly; his expression took on a cruel quality; his mouth, half open, became an expression of his stupidity. From then on every day was worsened by the new language barrier that had grown up between them- the barrier of speaking the same language.
***
Dad put the photographs back in the box with a dark expression, as if he had wanted a trip down memory lane but when he got there he remembered it was his least favorite street.
“OK, that’s your grandparents. All you have to know about grandparents is that they were young once too. You have to know they didn’t mean to be the embodiment of decay or even want especially to hold on to their ideas until their final day. You have to know they didn’t want to run out of days. You have to know they are dead and that the dead have bad dreams. They dream of us.”
He stared at me for a while, waiting for me to say something. Now, of course, I know that everything he told me was merely an introduction. I didn’t understand back then that after a good, cleansing monologue, Dad wanted nothing more than for me to prod him into another one. I just pointed to the swings and asked him to push me.
“You know what?” he said. “Maybe I’ll throw you back into the ring for another round.”
He was returning me to school. Maybe he knew it was there I would learn the second part to that story, that I would inevitably discover another, crucial ingredient to my own distinctive identity soup.
***
A month into my new school I was still trying to adjust to being among other children again, and I decided I’d never comprehend why Dad went from ordering me to despise these people to ordering me to blend in with them.
I had made only one friend, but I was trying to accumulate more, because to survive you needed no fewer than two, in case one was away sick. One day at lunchtime I was standing behind the canteen watching two boys fight over a black water pistol.
One of the boys said, “You can be the cop. I wanna be Terry Dean.”
The other boy said, “No, you’re the cop. I
’m Terry Dean.”
I wanted to play too. I said, “Maybe I should be Terry Dean. It’s my name anyway.” They looked at me in that snide, superior way eight-year-olds look at you. “I’m Jasper Dean,” I added.
“Are you related?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then piss off.”
That hurt.
I said, “Well, I’ll be the cop then.”
That grabbed their attention. Everyone knows that in games of cops and robbers, the robber is always the default hero while the cops are fodder. You can never have too much fodder.
We played all lunchtime and at the sound of the bell I betrayed my ignorance by asking, “Who’s Terry Dean?”- a question that made my playmates sick.
“Shit! You don’t even know who he is!”
“He’s the baddest man in the whole world.”
“He was a bank robber.”
“And a killer!” the other one said, before they ran off without saying goodbye, in the same way as when you go to a nightclub with friends and they get lucky.
That afternoon I went home to find Dad hitting the edge of a cabinet with a banana so it made a hard knocking sound.
“I froze a banana,” he said listlessly. “Take a bite…if you dare.”
“Am I related to the famous bank robber Terry Dean?” I asked. The banana dropped like a chunk of cement. Dad sucked his lips into his mouth, and from somewhere inside, a small, hollow voice I strained to hear said, “He was your uncle.”
“My what? My uncle? I have an uncle?” I asked, incredulous. “And he’s a famous bank robber?”
“Was. He’s dead,” Dad said, before adding, “He was my brother.”
That was the first time I heard of him. Terry Dean, cop killer, bank robber, hero to the nation, pride of the battler- he was my uncle, my father’s brother, and he was to cast an oblong shadow over both our lives, a shadow that for a long time prevented either of us from getting a decent tan.
If you’re Australian, you will at least have heard of Terry Dean. If you aren’t, you won’t have, because while Australia is an eventful place, what goes on there is about as topical in world newspapers as “Bee Dies in New Guinea After Stinging Tree by Mistake.” It’s not our fault. We’re too far away. That’s what a famous Australian historian once called the “tyranny of distance.” What he meant was, Australia is like a lonely old woman dead in her apartment; if every living soul in the land suddenly had a massive coronary at the exact same time and if the Simpson Desert died of thirst and the rainforests drowned and the barrier reef bled to death, days might pass and only the smell drifting across the ocean to our Pacific neighbors would compel someone to call the police. Otherwise we’d have to wait until the Northern Hemisphere commented on the uncollected mail.
Dad wouldn’t talk to me about his brother. Every time I asked him for details he’d sigh long and deep, as though this were another setback he didn’t need, so I embarked on my own research.
First I asked my classmates, but I received answers that differed from each other so wildly, I just had to discount them all. Then I examined the measly collection of family photographs that I had seen only fleetingly before, the ones that lay in the green shoebox stuffed into the hall closet. This time I noticed that three of the photographs had been butchered to remove someone’s head. The operation could hardly be described as seamless. I could still see the neck and shoulders in two photos, and a third was just two pieces clumsily stuck together with uneven strips of brown packing tape. I concluded that my father had tried to erase any image of his brother so he might forget him. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable. Fortunately, Dad couldn’t erase the newspaper articles I found in the state library that described Terry’s escapades, his killing spree, his manhunt, his capture, and his death. I made photocopies and pasted them to the walls of my bedroom, and at night I fantasized that I was my uncle, the fiercest criminal ever to hide a body in the soil and wait for it to grow.
In a bid to boost my popularity, I told everyone at school about my connection to Terry Dean, doing everything to broadcast it short of hiring a publicist. It was big news for a while, and one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made. At first, in the faces of my peers, I inspired awe. But then kids of all ages came out of the woodwork wanting to fight me. Some wanted to make reputations for beating the nephew of Terry Dean. Others were eager to wipe the proud smile off my face; pride must have magnified my features unappealingly. I talked my way out of a number of scuffles, but one day before school my assailants tricked me by flouting the regulation time code for beatings: it always happens after school, never in the morning, before an eight-year-old has had his coffee. Anyway, there were four of them, four bruisers grim-faced and fist-ready. I didn’t stand a chance. I was cornered. This was it: my first fight.
A crowd had gathered around to watch. They chanted in their best Lord of the Flies manner. I searched the faces for allies. No luck. They all wanted to see me go down screaming. I didn’t take it personally. It was just my turn, that’s all. I tell you, it’s indescribable the joy children get from watching a fight. It’s a blinding Christmas orgasm for a child. And this is human nature undiluted by age and experience! This is mankind fresh out of the box! Whoever says it’s life that makes monsters out of people should check out the raw nature of children, a lot of pups who haven’t yet had their dose of failure, regret, disappointment, and betrayal but still behave like savage dogs. I have nothing against children, I just wouldn’t trust one not to giggle if I accidentally stepped on a land mine.
My enemies closed in. The fight was seconds away from starting, and probably as many seconds away from finishing. I had nowhere to go. They came closer. I made a colossal decision: I would not put up a fight. I would not take it like a man. I would not take it like a battler. Look, I know people like reading about those outclassed in strength who make up for it in spirit, like my uncle Terry. Respected are those who go down fighting, right? But those noble creatures still get a hell of a clobbering, and I didn’t want a clobbering of any kind. Also, I remembered something Dad had taught me in one of our kitchen-table classes. He said, “Listen, Jasper. Pride is the first thing you need to do away with in life. It’s there to make you feel good about yourself. It’s like putting a suit on a shriveled carrot and taking it out to the theater and pretending it’s someone important. The first step in self-liberation is to be free of self-respect. I understand why it’s useful for some. When people have nothing, they can still have their pride. That’s why the poor were given the myth of nobility, because the cupboards were bare. Are you listening to me? This is important, Jasper. I don’t want you to have anything to do with nobility, pride, or self-respect. They’re tools to help you bronze your own head.”
I sat on the ground with my legs crossed. I didn’t even straighten my back. I slouched. They had to bend down to punch me in the jaw. One of them got on his knees to do it. They took turns. They tried to get me to my feet; I let my body go limp. One of them had to hold me up, but I had become slippery and slid greasily through their fingers back onto the ground. I was still taking a beating, and my head was stunned by strong fists pounding at it, but the pummeling was sloppy, confused. Eventually my plan worked: they gave up. They asked what was wrong with me. They asked me why I wouldn’t fight back. Maybe the truth was I was too busy fighting back tears to be fighting back people, but I didn’t say anything. They spat at me and then left me to contemplate the color of my own blood. Against the white of my shirt, it was a luminous red.
When I got home, I found Dad standing by my bed, staring witheringly at the newspaper clippings on the walls.
“Jesus. What happened to you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“No, I want to see what happens to blood when you
leave it overnight.”
“Sometimes it turns black.”
“I want to see that.”
I was just about to rip down the pictures of Uncle Terry when Dad said, “I wish you’d take these down,” so of course I kept them right where they were. Then Dad said, “This isn’t who he was. They’ve turned him into a hero.”
Suddenly I found myself loving my degenerate uncle again, so I said, “He is a hero.”
“A boy’s father is his hero, Jasper.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Dad turned and snorted at the headlines.
“You can’t know what a hero is, Jasper. You’ve grown up in a time when that word has been debased, stripped of all meaning. We’re fast becoming the first nation whose populace consists solely of heroes who do nothing but celebrate each other. Of course we’ve always made heroes of excellent sportsmen and -women- if you perform well for your country as a long-distance runner, you’re heroic as well as fast- but now all you need to do is be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like that poor bastard covered by an avalanche. The dictionary would label him a survivor, but Australia is keen to call him a hero, because what does the dictionary know? And now everyone returning from an armed conflict is called a hero too. In the old days you had to commit specific acts of valor during war; now you just need to turn up. These days when a war is on, heroism seems to mean ‘attendance.’ ”
“What’s this got to do with Uncle Terry?”
“Well, he falls into the final category of heroism. He was a murderer, but his victims were well chosen.”
“I don’t get it.”
