The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  My mother made me promise not to mention Het Achterhuis to my father and to keep the book hidden from him lest it remind him of the wartime suffering he endured and witnessed in Amsterdam, and of the Jewish girls of his daughters’ ages who, like Anne Frank, were mass murdered in the Holocaust. It was a book he couldn’t stand the sight of, she said, because it made him imagine what being helpless to save his own daughters from the Nazis, what being separated from them forever upon arrival at a concentration camp, would have been like. He knew Jewish fathers who had survived the camps but whose children had not—men like Otto Frank, who were heartbroken, haunted by guilt, conscience-stricken—fathers whose sons and daughters were failed by the Resistance, of which, she reminded me, my father was a member. That was how he thought of it, she said: he and his comrades had failed them. For no matter how many you saved, it was the ones you didn’t save that you remembered and imagined. She said he was too modest and too haunted by the horrors of the war to talk about it or stand to be publicly acknowledged for his heroism.

  I didn’t keep my promise to my mother to be discreet with Het Achterhuis. I took to reading it in front of my father, the story of two Jewish families and an unmarried Jewish dentist who lived for years in hiding under the very noses of the Nazis, in defiance of them, held together and sustained by the most powerful of bonds, those of family, a shared past, a common origin and purpose, until they were secretly betrayed, possibly by a fellow Jew, the moral being—according to my mother—that unless everyone pulls together, they will be destroyed. “I want you to be proud of your father,” she said, “even if he never knows how proud you are.”

  I read Het Achterhuis for hours on end right in front of my father and he didn’t seem to notice. I read and wore to pieces so many copies that I wound up wearing Band-Aids on my fingertips because of paper cuts.

  Anne Frank had seen an autograph album in a store window and thought it would make a good diary because it had a clasp and it was bigger than most diaries, so it would take a long time to fill up all the pages. Yet she sometimes went for days without writing in it. I could never do that. Her first diary was covered in red and white plaid cloth and had a lock that she opened with a key. My first diary was a black date book that I stole from a stationery store.

  WADE

  In my world, no one was from anywhere but Newfoundland. Certainly no one was from South Africa. I assumed that everything about her was South African. No one did yoga or was, as she had confided one night, a vegetarian. If I had any image of a vegetarian, it was that of a pasty-faced, skinny, slump-shouldered university professor with an unkempt beard who wore knee-high rubber boots, disapproved of pleasure and tried to turn his students into communists.

  Where I came from, no one’s father was a university professor or had been a member of the Dutch Resistance. No one had been to Switzerland, let alone claimed to have been bored by it. No one who had a TV set was unsure if it worked. There was no such place where the lone television channel broadcast four hours a day, offering only endlessly repeated episodes of The Brady Bunch and The World at War and government-censored newscasts.

  No one who looked like her claimed to have three better-looking sisters.

  * * *

  —

  We met several more times at the picnic table by the parking lot, which was unlit but for a single street lamp swarmed by moths and mosquitoes.

  “I have a bit of a reputation,” she said one night. “I’m kind of a loner.”

  “So am I.”

  “I’m sure you think you are. Still, I’m much, much better than I used to be.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Just kidding.”

  She leaned slightly toward me across the table. “I think you should ask me out,” she said. “You don’t have to, but I think you should.” It sounded as if she was offering advice that, if I followed it, would have no effect on her but would be good for me. “I’m not…entirely normal, as I’m sure you can tell,” she continued before I could respond, “but I think that you should ask me out.”

  I did ask her out, not because she advised me to, but because of how I felt every time she smiled when she set eyes on me after we had been apart. Never in my life had the sight of me made anyone seem so happy.

  We went to the cinema to see Hair. While we were standing in line, she said, “You save my spot. I’ll be right back.” I thought she was going to the bathroom, but she came back with two dipped-in-chocolate soft ice cream cones and gave me one. “Better to eat them fast,” she said after swallowing a great gulp. “We’re not allowed to take them inside.” During the movie, she took hold of my hand. The ice cream and the hand-holding seemed part of a routine. Was this what a white woman from South Africa customarily did on dates? I liked posing that silly question to myself about almost everything she did. After the movie, we went back to her father’s car, a rusting white Malibu Classic in which she had driven us to the movies. It had a hole in the floor through which you could see the road as it went whizzing by.

  “You may kiss me now,” she said before she started up the car. I did. She declared that I was a very good kisser. “You don’t just pucker up and press like most guys do. So we’re going to my house but we’re not going to bed. I’m unseducible. Don’t even bother to try.”

  She drove across town, up a steep hill, then pulled into the driveway of a somewhat dilapidated two-storey house. “Welcome to 44 Freshwater Road,” she said.

  When we were inside, she left the lights off but lit the coal fireplace. Standing with her back to the flames so that I could barely make her out, she took off her clothes, lay down on the rug and held out her arms to me.

  “I didn’t come prepared,” I said.

  “I did.”

  * * *

  —

  “That was my first time,” she said, stretching out with her arms above her head. “Don’t be fooled. I was scared to death.”

  “It didn’t feel like it was your first time.”

  “Well, that’s thanks to my sister Gloria, who gave me a certain gadget that starts with d and ends with o. She said that it was important that my first time wouldn’t seem like my first time to the boy I was with. I believed her. I wanted to be cool. Gloria said that, although a man would think it was great to take your virginity, he wouldn’t want you after that because he would compare you to other girls who, having had experience, were better in bed.” She laughed. “My mother is just the opposite—she says no man will want you for his wife if he finds out that you aren’t a virgin. She says that it’s okay to sleep with someone once you’re engaged to them, but men will reject you if you let them sleep with you before that.”

  “Neither of my parents has ever mentioned sex to me. I guess they’re pretty old-fashioned.”

  “Well, don’t mistake mine for being progressive. My mother made me promise to tell her if I lost my virginity before I got engaged, so I guess I’ll have to do that when she gets back from Switzerland. I think she thought the prospect of having to confess something so embarrassing to her would keep me chaste.”

  “You’re going to tell your mother?”

  She threw back her head and laughed as if the joke was on her.

  From The Arelliad, by Rachel van Hout

  FIRELIGHT (1983)

  I must try not to think in rhyme

  lest I be rhyming all the time,

  declaiming out loud, in my head,

  as Dad did on the Ballad Bed.

  To rhyme in dreams and memories,

  in reveries and diaries

  until I lose my mind in rhyme—

  that punishment would fit my crime.

  “If you choose love, kiss life goodbye,”

  My Shadow She told me today.

  “You won’t have love for very long,

  so, clearly, choosing love is wrong.


  Better to be a survivor

  than to be a short-lived lover

  that your Wade will not remember;

  this novelist that you adore

  may not be long for 44.

  Few things are what you think they are.

  Let’s not forget, that’s why you’re here

  and why you see what isn’t there.”

  I know he’s there, I’ve tasted him,

  I’ve felt his hands upon my skin—

  I know he’s there, I took him in—

  the smell of summer in his hair

  last night when he first touched me where

  I’ve never touched myself before.

  There was no yellow sky last night;

  the fireplace, the firelight,

  the flames that warmed the wooden floor—

  of those, at least, I can be sure,

  of those, at least, if nothing more.

  I’ve been fooling Wade. I don’t think he notices the changes in me from day to day—the smudge of blue ink on my hand that is getting bigger and darker. No amount of scrubbing can wash that ink away. (I may end up like Macbeth’s wife, who bore the blame but not the knife. She had no luck with Duncan’s blood. What isn’t there will drive you mad much faster than what is.) Even if he saw it, Wade wouldn’t know it was proof that I’ve been where I shouldn’t be, writing almost constantly in Arellian, as I have been for the past four years.

  Arellia. Every time I go there, it’s like returning home. I’ll never lose the language that I’ve spoken since the night that I invented it. Arellian. I know the words for everything, the things I see that aren’t there, the yellow sky that was overcast the winter night a teenage girl was killed. The only light was the lighthouse light that came and went, out of sync with the muffled blare of the foghorn at Cape Spear.

  How real love seems to be in books, where it happens all the time. I’ve never been in love before. Is it too soon to call this love—I slept with him; what does that prove? Some days, I spend more time in Arellia than I spend in what people like to call the Here and Now. If he knew, Wade would make a quick escape. Doc told me I could trust my heart, if not my mind. Large-hearted me, I fooled Doc well. And if I add a broken heart to a broken mind?

  No matter what my Shadow She

  predicts is in the cards for me,

  another break, something the rhymes

  have been withholding all this time,

  the fate that once was hers is mine—

  How can I deny that something new has begun at last?

  WADE

  We took to sleeping in her parents’ bed, the only full-sized one in the house. “If they only knew,” she said one night.

  “Won’t your neighbours notice that I’m sleeping over?”

  Rachel shrugged. “I told Mom and Dad about you on the phone. I said that you might sleep over sometimes, but that we wouldn’t sleep together. They either believed me or pretended to.”

  “They don’t care what the neighbours think?”

  “Not as long as the neighbours say nothing to them about it. Which they won’t, because they never speak to the neighbours other than to say hello.”

  “If your parents can’t wait to get out of here and go travelling, why did your family move to Newfoundland in the first place?” I asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t because we heard good things about it, because we’d never heard of it at all until Dad told us we were moving here. It was more of a beggars can’t be choosers kind of thing. No offence. Actually, it was more of a man who’s a failure in a country with a perfect climate reckons his chances of prospering might be better in a country where, because of the climate, no one with a grain of sense would want to live kind of thing. Again, no offence. Not even to Dad, who I don’t really think of as a failure. It’s just that he says whatever’s on his mind without thinking of the consequences. It doesn’t matter who he’s talking to.”

  She told me that her father graduated in commerce from the University of Amsterdam and then became a chartered accountant, only to have to retire from accounting in his early thirties because of fast-failing eyesight. He moved to South Africa in the hope that a friend in Cape Town, whom he had known when they were children in Amsterdam, could help him get a job with South African Airways—the company his friend worked for. When he was turned down by South African Airways, he applied for the job of lecturer in accounting at the University of Cape Town. Chartered accountants who were willing to forego the private sector in favour of teaching at any level, let alone that of a lecturer without tenure and benefits, were rare. He got the job and, in a few years, rose to assistant professor, but it became apparent over the next decade that, without an advanced academic degree, he would never again be promoted. He completed a master’s at the University of Cape Town but, by this time, had managed to alienate most of his colleagues by repeatedly telling his department head that they were incompetent as teachers and accountants. Given that the tenure committee consisted largely of his colleagues, he was told that he wouldn’t get tenure at the University of Cape Town if he had a fistful of advanced degrees.

  At age forty-three, he decided to uproot his entire South African–born family to start all over again elsewhere in what was known as the White Commonwealth at some university where he could be both a teacher and a student until he earned his Ph.D., soon after which, he believed or hoped, he would be named a full professor. He applied for non-tenured jobs at every university in Australia and New Zealand but failed to get so much as an interview. He worked his way down the list of possible institutions until there were none left but those of Canada, every one of which, except a fledgling university in Newfoundland, ignored his letters. Memorial University, which had been founded just six years before, sent him an encouraging reply. He was hired after answering in writing a series of examination-type questions that were sent to him. The university, MUN as it was called, agreed to pay all the expenses of moving him and his family to St. John’s.

  In South Africa they had lived as well-to-do people did in Newfoundland. They had servants, a maid and a gardener. South Africans leaving the country for any length of time were allowed to take only a small amount of money with them, so Rachel’s parents sold everything they had, combined the proceeds with their life savings and spent almost every cent on furniture and furnishings far more expensive than they had hitherto been able to afford, the result being that they were house poor before they even got their first glimpse of Newfoundland. Having had a maid and other black servants all her life, Rachel’s mother was as disinclined to keep house as she was inept at it, and her father had lost whatever home repair skills he might once have had in Amsterdam.

  By the time I first saw it, the furniture still outshone the house to the point of looking absurdly incongruous. In the very expensive buffet, there was very expensive but ill-maintained china—twelve pieces of everything, all white with a gold trim that was chipped in many places or dulled to near-invisibility. It had arrived at the house fourteen years earlier, packed in large wooden crates, every piece of it intact. The six of them broke up the crates and burned them in the fireplace, which they huddled around for warmth, though it was August—the house was drafty and an August night in Newfoundland was cooler than a winter night in Cape Town—and it was a week before they could afford to fill the coal bin.

  Now they had never-burnished silverware, a dining table so long and wide it took up nearly all the space in the dining room, making it difficult to squeeze between the chairs and the wall. The green velvet sofas and armchairs in the front room were pocked with burns from cigarettes and marijuana joints, the never-tended-to damage caused, Rachel said, by four precocious girls who, when their parents travelled, were left to fend for themselves and pretty much ran riot, turning the van Hout house into the neighbourhood’s most popular party space.

 
; There was a dusty, top-of-the-line Steinway piano that none of them ever learned to play. It stood on hardwood that sagged beneath its legs, splintered hardwood with treacherous up-jutting nails, blackened with dirt where one strip met the other. The walls had not been repainted since the van Houts moved in. The curtain rods drooped, so that the bottoms of the curtains lay crumpled on the floor. But 44 was a summer paradise to me.

  * * *

  —

  I lived on the top floor of a five-storey building, in an apartment that had long ago been written off by the owners, who didn’t know that the superintendent rented it out on the sly at half price. It had been a one-bedroom apartment, but the walls of the bedroom were gone, no sign of them remaining but a square black stain on the parquet floor. The super had furnished the apartment with a folding card table, an ancient box spring and mattress, and a sofa whose rear legs were missing, so that it tilted backwards like a recliner. In the bathroom there was another square-shaped stain on the wall above the sink where there must once have been a medicine cabinet and mirror. In the kitchenette, there was a two-burner stove and a half-sized fridge with a freezer that was fully crammed with frost. If I tried to thaw it, the super said, the Freon would escape.

  But the place suited me. It needed no maintenance and was devoid of all diversions. I didn’t have a TV or phone because I was saving for a grubstake that would allow me to quit my job and write my novel. I’d never had a room of my own, one to read in undisturbed by others. On those nights when I didn’t see Rachel, I sat at the card table, side on to the window that overlooked the parking lot, the window from which, when I looked up from my book, I watched the slantwise driven rain by the light of a distant street lamp. Rachel called the place my garret, a touch of irony in her voice, I thought, as if she was teasing me, the writer who had yet to write a word. She sometimes spent the night. Given the state of the van Hout house, she was unfazed by the state of mine.