The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  that poetry was all I wrote—

  reams upon reams of it until

  I couldn’t hide that I was ill.

  My father modestly compares himself to Homer, Milton and Shakespeare—my only inspiration, beyond him, is Anne Frank, in part because I like her book, in part because Dad hates it. “It isn’t worth a second look,” he said one day when, after months of pretending not to notice what I was reading, he grabbed it from my hands and slammed it shut.

  There are many ways into Arellia but only one way out. I went there first at age thirteen. The sky was yellow, everything else sepia-tinted, the vegetation wilted like flowers left on graves too long. There were no animals or birds, which didn’t strike me as strange.

  Everything made perfect sense while I was in there. It seemed that it was always fall, my favourite season of the year. The leaves were forever falling and yet the trees were never bare. There were no clouds, no sun, no daytime moon, no wind or snow, not even rain. Fall did not give way to winter, the fatal season of the four. There was no night, just never-ending yellow light. There was no way to measure time; nothing could end, nothing begin.

  A gentle wind, a warm, beguiling breeze, blew from the west.

  Arellia was good for me—at least at first, when I had it all to myself, which wasn’t for long.

  * * *

  —

  I invented the language of that yellow world so that I wouldn’t have to keep these diaries from prying eyes, or hide out while I was writing them. At night I lay awake and spoke Arellian out loud as if to people gathered around my bed who spoke the language as fluently as I did, though every one of them was me. Once, my mother heard me through the door and came in. I shouted at her in Arellian: “How dare you barge into my room?” She ran off but soon came back with Dad. “There must be something wrong with her,” he said before he slammed the door.

  I read Anne’s book ten thousand times, then translated it into Arellian until my wrist was blue with ink. My secret version of her book—I hid it well, behind the back of the mirror on my dresser, held together in a binder. When I looked in the mirror, I thought of it as a portal to Arellia, a world unlike the one I wished would not be there each day when I woke up.

  Arellia. Writing about it doesn’t mean that I am in it.

  But then again, I could be wrong—

  I reconsider all night long,

  I change my mind, then change it back:

  it’s forward thinking that I lack.

  I’m drifting off into the past;

  I wonder if the light will last.

  I won’t last long if this lasts long,

  but then again, I could be wrong.

  Has it been too long already?

  How long since my hand was steady?

  Gsv hszpvh. That’s Arellian for “the shakes.” The thing is, I’m supposed to write. My thesis supervisor says she needs fifty pages. I’ve written more than ten times that. I haven’t seen her in a while. I think she thinks I’m writing hard. That’s what she calls it, “writing hard,” writing prose about Anne’s influence on those who wrote great books about the war, the kind of book she’s hoping for from me. What would she say if she knew that my book will never be?

  I emerge from the page that I plunge into every day, the pen still in my hand. I’ve spent the last three months in bed, working on The Arelliad, which, like Anne’s diary, has a beginning but will never end, only be abandoned. When I’m done for the night, I put my notebook atop the shelf in my closet, signed Izxsvo ezm slfg, which is Arellian for “Rachel van Hout.” Not that I ever remember getting out of bed and putting it there. The book that seems to write itself appears in the closet each morning. I spend the day poring over weird words that I wrote the night before. Zivoorzm. That’s Arellian for “Arellian.” I won’t remember writing these words. But the handwriting will be mine, and no one else can write or read Arellian, a fact it would be folly to forget. I read the pages carefully. They read—I can’t say exactly—like dreams that I transcribed, then coded in Arellian. I follow each of the instalments with no idea where they lead, though it’s often to Het Achterhuis, the Secret Annex.

  * * *

  —

  There she is, the other Anne, not the Bard of Amsterdam but the one who calls herself an also-Anne, a girl I met one winter night, stranded on a city street because she missed her bus. I call her now the Shadow She, the one whom I betrayed. But now she is not alone, for Anne Frank is with her. They speak of me, but soundlessly. The first time I saw the Shadow She in Arellia, I was too terrified to move or say a word, for I could think of no reason for her being there except revenge. Although she has done me no harm, the sight of her still startles me.

  I would avoid them if I could, but they follow me. They somehow move about without making a sound, scuffing silently through the leaves, walking behind me, hand in hand, the two of them looking at the ground. I stop and turn and try to speak to them, but no words come. I wave but they seem unaware of anything but one another. When they are almost upon me, they stop too, and resume their scrutiny of the ground. I ask if they have sisters and say that I am one of four. They look up at me but nothing more. They don’t reply. They never do, like I’m an intruder in their world who’ll go away if she’s ignored.

  Anne Frank is taller, her face familiar from photographs. The other Anne has the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen. I saw them once through a glaze of wind-bidden tears in the winter of the year that girls went missing everywhere. The two Annes begin to walk away. “If you leave,” I say, “beware of Claws von Snout.” They release each other’s hand and stare at me accusingly, then wander off, taking different paths into the yellow wood. I wonder if I will ever see them again. An eerie silent twilight falls. The sky turns overcast, and I think that darkness is about to come to Arellia for the first time. Then the yellow light returns, but something about Arellia, for which I cannot find the words, has changed.

  Already I can smell his lust.

  The wind comes up and one great gust

  bares the forest of its leaves.

  I see the girls among the trees.

  I scream, they seem oblivious.

  As always when the light withdraws,

  I hear him sharpening his claws.

  I see the signs I didn’t heed.

  I am afraid, I am afraid.

  There’s no way to undo the past—

  this winter night may be my last.

  Arellia is now a room lit by a banker’s lamp and there is no one on the Ballad Bed but Claws von Snout and me.

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  RACHEL (1979)

  My youngest, once the best times two—

  I had the highest hopes for you.

  You got the highest grades in school;

  you used to be so beautiful.

  I thought you would turn out to be

  a literary prodigy,

  as good as Isak Dinesen,

  had you become a baroness

  with houses in the wilderness

  of Africa, adventurous,

  a woman ahead of her time,

  a woman with the sort of life

  not bound by being someone’s wife—

  the continent of Africa

  the setting of your famous books—

  a girl with such a mind, such looks.

  But you have thrown it all away

  to while away your time all day

  in bed in the back of beyond,

  a minnow in the smallest pond,

  a disappointing parody

  of literary prodigy,

  an imitator of Anne Frank.

  The writer of the famous prank

  would not have had the slightest chance

  but for a fluke
of circumstance,

  a mere girl who was deified

  because of when and how she died.

  I wish you worshipped anyone

  but her. Instead, you write like mad

  in this notepad and that notepad.

  You scatter them around your bed;

  you sleep with one beneath your head.

  Beneath the pillow that you hold,

  the tale continues to unfold

  inside your head unceasingly,

  a strange relentless mystery

  that you have chosen as your mode:

  the diarist who writes in code—

  Arellian, I think it’s called.

  No doctor, yet, has disenthralled

  you from the grip of Anne Frank’s book.

  It’s like a drug on which you’re hooked—

  the more you take, the more you need,

  the opposite of Bethany.

  You write yourself into a state

  that I can’t bear to contemplate,

  producing reams of gibberish,

  becoming sick and feverish.

  Throughout the night you hoard your books

  atop the shelf where no one looks—

  or so you think, for I creep in

  when I know that you are sleeping.

  I know because I slip a pill

  into your food and wait until

  that little pill has knocked you out

  so I can sit and read about—

  I cannot puzzle out one word,

  though on some nights I think I’ve heard

  you speak Arellian out loud.

  It sounds much stranger than it looks,

  the strangest of the strangest books.

  My daughter writes the livelong day

  though she has nothing much to say

  and she has nothing else to do

  but imitate a teenage Jew,

  the diarist of Amsterdam

  whose diary is such a sham,

  passed off as hers, I smell a rat—

  no adolescent writes like that!

  A girl with nothing more to do

  than wish she wasn’t born a Jew

  at such a time in such a place

  becomes the writer of her race?

  It’s no great thing to write a book—

  for proof, you only have to look

  at the many masterpieces

  tossed off by pubescent nieces.

  Some things about Anne Frank are true:

  she lived and died, she was a Jew

  who might have borne the Holocaust

  if not for being double-crossed

  by someone who has not been named,

  a man anonymously shamed.

  Anne, the girl whose scam succeeded—

  for Anne Frank, no proof was needed:

  the Holocaust-redeeming story

  of a girl who longed for glory

  and wrote, while hiding like a thief,

  a book that would outlast her life.

  Forgiveness in the face of hate,

  a brave defiance of her fate,

  a prayer for universal love

  unanswered by the sky above,

  a wisdom-dripping document

  of innocent bewilderment,

  a paradox of many kinds—

  the work, no doubt, of many minds.

  Perhaps there is no need to say

  that books like hers, still read today,

  will almost always be believed

  by those who need to be deceived.

  I’ve been a writer all my life

  (a better one than My, my Wife),

  more an author than a father,

  as good, I think, as many others,

  as good as Anne, rank amateur.

  RACHEL

  When I broke down for the second time, the moment of my absolute burnout came when I fell to the floor and had some kind of seizure. It happened at home in the kitchen, not in any public place, much to my parents’ relief and my own. I wound up in a psychiatric hospital in Montreal, far enough from home, my parents hoped, that word of my breakdown wouldn’t make its way back to Newfoundland. I had what I was told was a psychotic break, ten days that I didn’t remember much of, though I did remember repeatedly claiming that my name was Anne but refusing to say what my last name was. A doctor or nurse who terrified me one day might seem quite nice the next. I assigned to some of them the names of the people in Het Achterhuis. They tried to persuade me to tell them what I was writing in my diary.

  “You spoke in what you said was Arellian,” an old, white-haired doctor named Hackett said. “You told me that Arellian was the language spoken in the kingdom of Arellia, the place you thought you were living in when you were psychotic.”

  I laughed at the notion. It seemed like such a juvenile, grandiose delusion.

  “You do realize that it’s just a code,” he said, “not the first I’ve seen, and unlikely to be the last. Other patients of mine have made up languages. A good code-breaker could decipher yours in no time.”

  “Then send it to your pals at the CIA,” I said, extending my diary to him.

  He laughed. “There’s no key to your illness,” he said. “That book is not a key to a cure. It’s just a symptom. It’s not intriguing to anyone but you. We don’t know the cause of what you have, but we do know how to help you. All we need is your co-operation.” I said I would co-operate.

  “You’re not really writing a diary, are you?” Dr. Hackett said. “You said, when you were admitted, that you were writing seventy pages a day. No one’s diary entries are that long.”

  “Mine are,” I said. I appeared to be defiant, but I was terrified that he would soon declare me to be a hopeless case. I was almost as afraid of being committed for the rest of my life as I was of having a psychotic break that would never end, living out my days in a place that didn’t exist, mind-confined forever.

  “I think you’ve created an imaginary place that you can retreat to and be safe. I think Arellia is a simpler, safer world where nothing ever goes wrong. Is it something like that?”

  I nodded and tried to look found out.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ve seen this sort of thing many times.”

  I nodded again and tried to look relieved.

  In spite of what he said, which seemed meant to rid me of the notion that I was in any way exceptional, he and the others kept asking me about Arellia as if they were worried that I might retreat into it for good. So, except when answering their questions, I made no further mention of Arellia or Arellian. I followed their instructions and took the medications I was given. But I continued to write and read.

  From The Arelliad

  THE HOSPITAL (1979)

  I’ll say this for the other me—

  she has a better memory.

  I don’t know her but she knows me—

  a strange autobiography.

  There are no mirrors in the room. You get seven years bad luck for breaking one, unless you use the broken glass…my guess is that I wouldn’t, but you never know. Only in the window can I see my reflection, which means I have to wait until after dark to brush my hair. I look out through the criss-crossed wire on the window. A girl is out there, peering in. She looks nothing like me, nothing like Anne Frank, more like the other girl named Anne, the also-Anne, my Shadow She.

  The doctors ask me simple questions that I think are meant to fool me. “What day is this?” “What’s your name?” I told one that my name was Dr. Hackett, which was his name, written on the pocket of his coat. He smiled. “You know what my name is,” I said. “It’s the one I’ve had since I was born
.”

  “Since you were christened, you mean.”

  That wasn’t what I meant, but I nodded. He doesn’t like it when I disagree with him.

  Raindrops run down the windowpane. She must be soaked, but every time I look, she’s there—the same face and the same brown hair. She was seventeen when we met, as old as she would ever be. It was the winter of the year that girls went missing everywhere. I hear the foghorn. Its message is Beware, beware, though, on some nights, the muffled blare seems to say, Come near, come near.

  I’m rhyming now. I have to catch myself or else I’ll sink deeper into the page and join the other wrecks on the ocean floor. Dad said that rhymes are a cinch to memorize. At times, his rhymes take up my entire mind. I’m almost able to forget the worst things that have happened.

  Von Snout appears on many nights—

  his eyes are full of firelight

  that flickers when the sun goes out:

  such are the eyes of Claws von Snout.

  They move about among the trees—

  he’s out there now, he’s watching me.

  My wired window keeps me safe, but I can smell his spite. He may decide to settle for the girl who looks in from out there, just as he did once before. Because of her, he let me go—the night, the snow, the girl, the ghost. I turn away, and there is no one at the window when I look out again.

  Doc mentions the bookcase that the Franks’ minders used to hide the entrance to the Secret Annex. “It’s like something from a children’s book. Do you have to open it or can you walk straight through?”

  “I’m eighteen, not twelve.”

  “I’ve offended you.”

  “No.”

  He keeps asking, “What’s your name?” I say it in Arellian. He smiles but I can tell he’s mad at me. He has to go; it’s getting late. He guarantees I’ll sleep tonight. The stronger sleeping pills will work. I know they won’t but don’t say so.

  The drops run down the windowpane. I’ll close the curtains but I won’t sleep, knowing that von Snout and the other girl are out there in the rain, the soaking-wet girl, her face pressed to the glass, who thinks von Snout will leave her be as long as I’m nearby. If the wind comes up, the rain will drum like fingers on the window.