If they could see me, I’d warn them that the Nazis will find them soon unless their minders find another place for them to hide. Anne looks as if she senses me when I stand beside her as she writes. She looks up from time to time and smiles as if she knows I share her sense of humour. She seems to sink into the page like me, bears down on her pen as she slowly carves the words, her lips a thin straight line. She sees more than the others see, goes where none of them can go, knows things they will never understand.
She’s gone for good, it seems, but then she surfaces and writes again, this time in Arellian. R drhs r pmvd dsvm dv’oo yv uivv. “I wish I knew when we’ll be free.” She doesn’t know that they will never be. I was wrong. She doesn’t know the things I know. I’m standing on the shore of their stream of time, watching them as they go by. I know all too well where this current carries them, having seen them lose the fight against it a thousand times before.
I wander once again into what might have been. What if they had never been betrayed, the eight of them never caught? Her diary is never published. She goes on keeping it forever in the heaven of what might have been. Or what if the war had lasted far longer than it did? She grows to womanhood in this place, unable to escape, stays on in the secret house in despair of ever being free again.
For a while she fell for Peter van Pels, who did not even have a room shared with others, just a space beneath the stairwell between the first and second floors. It wasn’t meant to be for them. For two long years, he was the only boy in her life. Her sister, Margot, three years older, thought Peter hopelessly immature, but what if two years of confinement had become ten and the Frank sisters had become romantic rivals, vying for him?
Anne couldn’t stand him at first but eventually decided that his capacity to annoy was less than that of other boys who had annoyed her all the time. One of her greatest fears was that she would die without ever having been in love, or having had the chance to overlook the imperfections of a man long enough to sleep with him.
What might have become of the crush she had on him? They are stranded together forever; it comes down to him and her in that strange, hermetic place, the last two Jews on earth, nothing changing but their ages until their minders stop coming to the bookcase. She panics when she thinks of their confinement going on until they starve to death or simply give up to get it over with.
What if word comes of a settlement, a truce that rests on the abandonment of all Jews to the master race? The war is called a draw but no allowances are made for Jews; better to sacrifice the Jews than destroy the human race. She wonders:
Is this how minds go back and forth
when people weigh the cost of truth,
the ones that could have helped the Jews
but told themselves they had to choose
to save their own—why take the chance?
Besides, there was no evidence.
The talk of concentration camps
might just be talk, for all they knew—
why risk it all to save a few?
I sink deeper into the page, into the yellow wood. Arellia is overcast. Night comes on and, with it, a great storm of snow and wind that blows so hard it shakes the ground.
The snow stops, but the wind gets worse, the cold west wind that blew the night the Shadow She fell into His hands because of me.
I hide behind the only shelter I can find, an old rock wall that someone built, the remnants of a monument in honour of someone who perished here so long ago their names have faded from the stones and nothing but the dates remain.
Now comes the quickening of time that happens in Arellia. I’ll fly off into outer space if I let go. Arellia spins the world into winter. My face has never been so cold—I should have worn some warmer clothes. I have to find my way but I don’t know which way to go, or how I got to where I am, or even where I came here from. At least, because of the wind, I know which way is west, I think, just as the wind dies down, and once again I spin about.
I stop at last and there she is, the same black coat, the same green eyes. They never found her clothes or books that winter morning. There is not a sound but for the foghorn in the lighthouse on the Cape, the other Cape, not the one they call Good Hope.
“I’d be alive if not for you
and many others would be too;
you could have stayed, you knew, you knew.”
I tell myself the words are mine—
I’ve written them a thousand times:
no one accuses me but me,
but I accuse me endlessly.
She’s standing there, I should explain; she looks at me with such disdain.
“What do you want?” I manage to say. I’ve never asked her that before, though I know the answer. “I wish you’d never given me that book,” I say. “I didn’t ask you for it. You planted in my mind a word that colours all the other words. Soon, there’ll be nothing in my mind but that one word, nothing in the pages of my diary but your name written over and over in reverse.”
Zmmu. Anne.
When I reversed the alphabet, I turned the whole world inside out.
* * *
—
Again the horrible vertigo, the spins that come when you lie down and close your eyes after having had too much to drink. By the time the world winds down, I am just able to get my balance and make my way to bed. I think about the things she said to me, the things her green eyes seemed to see when I forgot that she was me. Soon, I am clinging to a corner of the mattress, my knees drawn up to my chest, tears dripping onto the sheets. It hasn’t been this bad in years.
Wade must be pretending he doesn’t hear the rocking of the kitchen chair when I write at night. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
THE RECKONING (1966)
Rounding up collaborators,
they dismissed the Nazi waiter.
He hadn’t really been a traitor,
for pouring drinks and serving food
was “misdemeanour turpitude.”
He’d served no cause except his own
and might as well be left alone.
They laughed at this fool’s insistence
that he’d served with the Resistance.
“You worked with a cell so secret
only you knew it existed.
Can you provide us with some proof
of this cell we know nothing of?”
“I can’t prove anything,” Hans said.
“The men who brought me in are dead.
I left notes in public places,
never saw my comrades’ faces.
The record of events is lost
and I am left to pay the cost.
I’ll never try to clear my name
by condescending to your game.
I need but say, ‘Yes, you are right,
I played the fool night after night
so that I didn’t have to choose
between the Germans and the Jews.
No matter which side won the war,
they’d know the uniform I wore
was just a costume, nothing more.
I did not want to starve to death
or slave away to my last breath.
If I could make it to the end,
the winning side would be my friend.
What some did to survive the war
and never had to answer for
makes my crime a misdemeanour:
the prostitutes and other whores
who gave themselves away and more;
the men who offered up their wives
(or anyone to save their lives)
to sate the lust of brutal men
who made them watch till they were don
e;
wives with children who were crying
stole from others who were dying.
We all did what we had to do—
we could not all be heroes, too.
At least my family survived—
if not for me they would have died.’
I could make this false confession.
It seems such a small concession:
admit that I was ordinary,
just another functionary
who wasn’t charged with anything,
that I was just some nothing
who took no credit, bore no blame,
who never earned himself a name,
just a nickname, one of the pack
who was too gutless to fight back,
who, put to the ultimate test,
turned out to be like all the rest,
just the sort that you’d expect
to find a way to save his neck.”
Anne Frank returns—I said she would,
but my good name is gone for good.
Eight years since the Liberation,
branded by my reputation,
I was still the Nazi waiter,
still regarded as a traitor,
but I was just a busboy now,
the only job they would allow
the man who waited on the kind
who murdered just to pass the time.
I heard about a certain book,
decided I would take a look.
The book was called Het Achterhuis,
something like The Secret Annex.
The strangest thing I’d ever read—
the writer of the book was dead,
the father of the writer said
in the prologue he had written
to introduce a girl named Anne
who died when she was just fifteen.
The book was—I was so amazed—
about the Jews I thought I’d saved,
the ones I’d heard of from young Klaus,
the very street, the very house.
Things had not gone as expected.
Perhaps my note was intercepted,
perhaps some comrade had been caught—
perhaps, perhaps, it mattered not.
Two years eight Jews had stayed alive,
but only Otto Frank survived.
Among the dead was the author,
Anne Frank, Otto’s teenage daughter.
I felt I was vindicated
by this proof for which I’d waited.
I knew the house, I knew the street—
it wasn’t far from Elandsstraat,
my childhood home till I was eight.
That little bridge on Prinsengracht,
not far from where the Jews were caught—
my friends and I had played on it!
To think a girl, a Jew, hid where
we skylarked in the open air,
a girl for whom I’d done my part
but now was gone—it broke my heart.
Yet by her book I was redeemed,
my name was saved—or so it seemed.
The famous book, Het Achterhuis,
the famous girl, the famous house—
but then it struck me all at once:
in spite of all the “evidence,”
my name was nowhere in the book;
I couldn’t tell them where to look
for proof that the Nazi waiter
was a cunning infiltrator,
the unknown hero of the war
who would have saved Anne Frank but for
the negligence of lesser men
whom I had never met, but then
none of us had met each other—
all of us were undercover.
Had the Franks made a getaway
or found another hideaway
because my warning was relayed
and reached them long before the raid,
Het Achterhuis, the famous book,
would not have earned a second look.
Many Jews, secretly confined,
left something similar behind—
diaries, journals, things they penned
to pass the time until war’s end,
commemorations of a war
spent hiding out while waiting for
the midnight knock upon the door.
Such things had to be recorded
in case the Nazis were rewarded
with success, every Jew located,
every Jew exterminated.
The Nazis lost, but Anne Frank died;
the whole world read, the whole world cried.
Her book had put a human face
on the entire Jewish race—
the millions of Jews who were lost
in what they called the Holocaust,
the ones who suffered just like her,
her father, mother and sister,
four more souls whom few remember,
the ones for whom help came too late,
the ones who would not stoop to hate.
Anne Frank became a household name—
she longed for freedom and for fame,
saw neither one before she died
a death that I will not describe.
Her fame grew as the years went by,
as did her book’s, and that was why
I could not help but wonder why,
though heaven had ensured her fame,
it had not thought to clear my name.
The Nazi waiter I would be—
at least I would be locally.
The man who almost saved Anne Frank
was mocked by men of lesser rank.
The time had come for me to bear
my burden somewhere far from there.
That’s how your father, Hans van Hout,
came to found the Land of Hout.
WADE
Myra and I were in the kitchen at Liesbeek Road—she had retrieved me from the living room, where I’d been sitting with Rachel and her father. She stood with her back to the kitchen counter, arms folded, pressing to her breasts a bulky-looking manila envelope, which she soon held out to me, smiling as if she were giving back to me something she had borrowed long ago.
“My oeuvre,” Myra said. “As you know, I’m a published writer. Everything I’ve published is in there. Magazine pieces. Seven of them. I haven’t torn them out, which is why the envelope is so heavy. I wonder, Wade, if you would mind reading them and giving me your opinion as a fellow writer. I know you plan to be a different kind of writer than I am, but I believe that, in some ways, all writers are alike, don’t you?”
“I’ve never met a writer,” I said. “But I’m sure you’re right.”
“Oh, please don’t say you’re sure until you really are. One of the pieces was published in Fair Lady, which is the leading magazine for women in South Africa. Another was published in Living and Loving, another South African women’s magazine—intended for young women of the kind I fear you think of as old-fashioned. Women very much unlike my daughters.” She laughed in a way that seemed lighthearted, as if she was fondly amused by the newfangled notions of her daughters, but there was no mirth in those dark eyes of hers. “But I shouldn’t be saying anything that might influence you. Will you read them?”
“Of course. I’d be glad to,” I lied.
As we drove home, I told Rachel what her mother had asked me to do.
“Good luck,” she said. “I’ve read everything she’s published. You’re on your own.”
The short story that appeared in Fair Lady was called “Laughter and the Darkening Sky.” I read that first and discovered that Myra had taken Henry James’s Turn of the Screw and boiled it down to a tale of the ghosts of two children who had drowned. The ghosts left wet footprints wherever they went in the house in which they’d once lived. The debt to Henry James was unacknowledged. Another story, called “The Dress,” was about a woman who, after being jilted in romance, wore the same dress for the rest of her life. The debt to Dickens’s Miss Havisham, from Great Expectations, was also unacknowledged.
Two more short stories also borrowed heavily from famous sources. “Your mother is a shameless plagiarist,” I shouted to Rachel, who soon appeared in the doorway. “All but one of her stories is a rip-off of a famous short story or plot line from a novel.”
“I know,” Rachel said. “As I told you, I’ve read her stories. But you’re still on your own.”
“You knew she had plagiarized them and didn’t tell me?”
“What good would it have done? You’d already promised to read them. And I wouldn’t say they were plagiarized, exactly—maybe variations on themes?”
“Not very varied.”
“Just be nice to her.”
The only original story was “We Two Are Now One,” the story Rachel had told me about not long after we met, set in a fishbowl in which two goldfish lived, a large male and a very small female. The male fish ate the female fish, then swam about to the end of his life in his lonely world. The feminist slant was heavy-handed, but I thought that Myra was at least trying to say something that was of importance to her.
The Mystery of Right and Wrong Page 21
