He paused, as if taking himself in hand. Max had been speaking with more passion, feeling, involvement and finally distaste than I had ever heard. It was as if he was part of the events of which he spoke.
“When the Germans invaded...”
“Weren’t you in Germany?” Holly interrupted.
“No, Austria.” I answered quietly for Max, whose expression indicated that he couldn’t understand how such a question could be asked. “I am not a piefke.” He spoke the words as if spitting.
“When the Germans invaded they left to join the army. Both boys went leaving their parents…”
“and young sister.” Holly added. “Where were you?”
“… and went to war.” He finished, ignoring Holly’s question for as long as he could.
“Where were you?” she insisted.
“Me? I ran away.” Perhaps Max was still trying to distract Holly from asking about Rebecca. “To my eternal shame I ran away.”
This time, when he paused, neither of us interrupted. Max took a sip of his wine, savouring it before bearing something of his soul and offering hostages to fortune. Unusually he had offered none to us.
“You see, it was not a good time to be Jewish. Not very Jewish you understand, just a single grandparent in the dark recesses of our family tree. But enough to be considered tainted by the ignorant bullies who had taken over the world. Enough to bear the brunt of a nation’s fear and resentment and hatred.”
He took another sip of his wine, drinking it as if it was the last drop he would ever touch.
“I was studying at the Universität Wien, the University in Vienna, I was lucky enough to be enrolled in the School of Law there. My father was not a farmer, he was a shopkeeper, a man of the middle classes and he wanted me to do well. I had advantages that were not open to my sister’s family. I left the university in 1930 and began to practise law in the city. My parents hadn’t wanted Ingrid to marry Johannes.” Max paused, as if surprised at how easily the names came to be spoken. “He was a good enough man in many ways but he was a farmer and they considered her to be marrying beneath herself. They never saw her after her marriage instead they asked me to keep in contact with them and tell them how things were for their daughter and her children.” He could not keep the bitterness from his voice and he knew we had heard it, so he paused for another sip of the wine before continuing.
“I was quite successful as a lawyer and I enjoyed the metropolitan life. I met many English and American people in Vienna and learned their language. I was not political but after 1934 life was very difficult for anyone who did not allow himself to pretend to be. This was something I could not do. It was obvious even then that there would be a war, whatever the politicians let the people know. Austria was in Germany’s pocket and it was just a matter of time. I arranged for my parents to leave for France and I made sure my friendships with the English and Americans were sound. I persuaded Johannes to leave his farm and take Ingrid and Rebecca away with the rest of their village to Switzerland. Our country was invaded soon after.”
“So you ran away.” Holly had been listening closely, trying to slot this individual account into the impersonal history she had learned.
I sat fascinated at learning, after so many years of friendship, more about this man. I had never asked Max about his past. I had wondered, of course, but I had never felt confident enough to ask questions that demanded answers. As Holly was now doing.
“I ran to England. I won’t regale you with tales of adventure and bravery but I did have a war some would say was ‘interesting’. Suffice to say my knowledge of Austrian and of other languages was very useful to the Allied cause.”
“But, you bought the firm.” I knew that much about Max’ history. Everyone had commented on how this refugee from Eastern Europe had bought the firm in 1941.
“Not immediately. I had lived here for two years before I bought Roberts & Jones. I lived in Millcourt you know? I sold it to your parents when I moved here. I had married Elizabeth, who I had met when I first came over to England.”
“You had a daughter, Veronica. I remember her.” I was drawn into his recollections.
“She was not my daughter. Elizabeth had been married before. She was a widow. She had a child, born three months after her husband had been shot down. I was indebted to her brother and agreed to look after them both. I was always very fond of her.” I wasn’t sure whether he meant Elizabeth or Veronica.
“She died didn’t she? Whooping cough. It was when Mother left.”
“Yes, Charles, Veronica died. There was nothing I could do.”
In the silence that followed I remembered I had had the whooping cough at the same time, but had survived, thanks to Monika.
Holly asked a question I would never have had the nerve to ask. “How could you afford all that? I don’t know much about it but I can’t think it would be easy to get money into this country. Not during a war. You must have had a lot of it to afford to marry and to buy a house and a business.”
I expected Max to brush the question aside as impertinent or to ignore it. The last thing I expected was his answer.
“I stole it.”
I was trying to understand how I could know so little about him when I had lived in his house for so many years.
Max seemed so matter of fact about it, so unrepentant as he continued. “All you see around you, all the money I have given you, Charles, all the respectability I have purchased has come from stolen money. I can only excuse myself by saying that had I not stolen it would have been left for the Germans.”
“You mustn’t tell us if you don’t want to. I’m sure you will have had good reason.” It was so out of character for him to talk so openly when he had no need to that I had to give him an opportunity to stop, but he didn’t take it.
He continued as if relieved these things were out in the open, or perhaps he simply wanted to deflect the conversation from more painful issues.
“I had many clients in Vienna, many wealthy people who entrusted their documents to me, the keys to their safety deposit boxes, the deeds to their properties, that sort of thing. I had access to them all. Many of my clients were going to be persecuted by the Nazis. It was inevitable that they would lose their wealth and their position. Nothing was going to stop that. Even before I left some had disappeared, running away, leaving their keys and their papers. So I forged documents, sold the properties that weren’t mine, emptied the deposit boxes of their cash, their silver and jewellery. I only made use of the property of people who had run away, I took nothing from the brave who stayed. I knew if I got away and had money with me I could do far more good than if I ran away without. I have always tried to use the money well. I have tried to help people.
“You have helped people.” I had to say. This must have been what Graham had read, that I had not seen, why Max paid the blackmailers money. It wasn’t any fear of being called queer, or even his relationship with Monika.
It wasn’t to protect others.
He had paid money to protect himself.
“What happened to my father?” she asked quite gently. I hoped Max would regain some of his normal bearing, I didn’t like the way the telling of his story had diminished him.
“Ah yes, Mattieu.” He said, as if bringing himself back from somewhere he had not wanted to be. “Mattieu and August joined the army, quite willingly. They joined the Austrian Army and were subsequently conscripted into the German Army. I have to say I know little about their war though I believe they served together until the end.”
“What happened to August?”
“He died. He was killed just as the war was coming to a close.”
“But Dad survived.”
“He survived, somehow he found his way to Canada where he apparently took the name of a Canadian soldier who died in the same skirmish that accounted for August.”
“If you don’t know, what do you think happened?” I asked. Max looked at Holly, who was still sitting her brows k
nitted in concentration.
“It was the very end of the war. There was no glorious victory ahead for the Germans. Mattieu and August couldn’t go back to their home; they knew it would no longer exist. I think perhaps they argued about what they would do after the war. Perhaps August wanted to return to the farm, perhaps he was injured and Mattieu knew they couldn’t both escape to the west. I think he may have been killed in that skirmish with the Canadians, but for whatever reason Mattieu was on his own. Perhaps he killed August. We cannot know for sure.”
“I think Graham knows. I think Graham talked to Dad and knows.” Holly blurted out. “He called my Dad a ‘murdering Nazi bastard’. Why would he say that if he didn’t know? They must have talked about it. So Dad got to Canada and met Mom and came over here to live and, just by happy coincidence, happened to come to live in the same town as his uncle.”
“Of course it wasn’t coincidence. He was looking for me. He wanted to find me.”
“And his sister?” she asked almost slyly, continuing without waiting for his answer. “That must have been why he took Mom on those holidays in Austria, before we came over here. He must have been trying to track you down, you both down.”
Max sat in his chair, his arms on the armrests, his hands together, as if in prayer, his head slightly bowed as he came to the inevitable point.
“Yes Holly, Monika is, indeed, Rebecca. She is your aunt, your father’s sister but you must never, ever, tell her that. You must never give her knowledge that would destroy her.” He was pleading with her, he wasn’t ordering, he wasn’t making someone do what he wanted through the sheer force of his personality. He was pleading with her.
“You do not know how hard her life was, how hard her war was, how she has tried and finally succeeded in removing so much from her memory. Don’t I beg you, bring it back. She must not know while I live.”
“Holly, he’s right. Monika has so many reasons to forget her family and you absolutely must not bring it all back to her.”
Holly rounded on me, standing up and shouting “You knew!”
“No! I didn’t! I promise!” I lied.
“You must have! Stop lying to me!” She was staring at me, her eyes narrowed in a look of disappointment that I recognised as being pure Monika. She turned on Max “How can you say I can’t tell her! She’s got a right to know!”
“You’re being selfish now Holly. She doesn’t need to know. She mustn’t know. It would harm her beyond anything to have all those memories dredged up. You must not tell her. You must swear not to tell her.”
“Charles is telling you the truth Holly. He did not know. I have never told him.” As he glanced at me I wondered if he could see my embarrassment and read in my face that somehow I had known. “It is I you should be hitting out at. I knew that your father was Mattieu my nephew and Monika’s brother.”
“And you didn’t say anything? You didn’t welcome us? You didn’t help us when my Mother died? You did nothing?”
“No I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was afraid for Monika, Holly, don’t you see that?”
“Stop sticking up for him!”
“I’m not, I’m just saying he couldn’t tell anyone, you must see why.”
“Well I don’t.”
“You must not tell her.”
“Then tell me why not! Tell me what’s so goddam awful!”
“You don’t want to know.” I said with finality. There was no way Max was going to let Holly read the papers I had read, learn the things about Monika I had learned by reading them.
“But I must know.”
“I see so much of myself in you.” Max said wearily. “You will not go without the truth.” He paused as Holly looked at him, she was not going to give up. “He raped her, many times, he and his brother and their friends abused her when she was a young child.” He held up the photograph that had been on the table by his chair all this time. “Probably that day.”
“How do you know?” She instinctively came to her father’s defence “You can’t possibly know that!” But she remembered what he had said to her that day she had first visited him at his flat and she knew it was the truth.
“To my eternal shame and regret I did not know at the time. If I had I would somehow have stopped it. She told me when we first met again, after the war. She didn’t know who I was, she didn’t recognise her Uncle Maximilian, why should she? She had only been 8 years old when she had last seen me. It was ten years and they had not been easy on her. She did not even know her name when she talked of her childhood to the sympathetic army officer who befriended her and arranged for her repatriation to England in the winter of 1947. That gentleman has always felt too guilty to tell her who he was. He has never told her. She still does not know and she will not know until he is dead. Do you understand?”
Weight and authority had returned to his voice, but there was also an urgency for us to understand his pain.
We were both silenced by the strength of his sense of dishonour. “You swear that you will not tell Monika who you are and who I am?”
Holly pursed her lips and nodded assent, aware that there was so much she could not know or understand.
Frustrated by Max’s control she turned to me, “You knew. Why didn’t you tell me about Dad?”
“I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. I only knew about Monika’s past I had no idea who your Dad was, who you were.”
“Charles is telling you the truth, my dear, he didn’t know.” Why did I think Max knew I was lying?
“So what am I to do?” She seemed beaten.
Someone once told me years before that truth was an absolute thing. If you chose to know truth you couldn’t pick and choose which bits of it you learned. Holly had wanted to know everything, and now she wished she did not.
“What am I to do now? My Dad wasn’t anything I thought he was. He wasn’t Canadian he was Austrian. What does that make me? He was a nazi, he probably murdered his brother as well as my mum, is there anything else I should know?” There was the slightest hint of sarcasm in her voice “I really would like to remember him as he really was.”
Max was going to say nothing. I should have said nothing. I shouldn’t have ignored his frown and the barely perceptible shake of his head as I began.
“He was a shit. He and Graham were both shits. They were just using you to make money, through Max, through your grandparents, through me. It was all about money. He was only ever after your money. That much was obvious from when your mother died. They were just using you. Both of them were shits.”
“And what does that make me?” Holly’s voice was small. They were confirming what she had already learned but to hear it from someone else was more than she could take. “What does that make me? Their prey? Their victim? And you knew. All along you knew. And you did absolutely nothing.”
“Of course I knew but you wouldn’t have listened! You didn’t listen. Crispin tried to talk you out of it. Linda tried. You didn’t listen.”
“But what about since then! That was years ago! You’ve been talking behind my back, everyone laughing at me for being a poor little victim. You knew I was unhappy but everyone else’s happiness was far more important. Your bloody secrets were far more important. You let me put up with all that to keep your own bloody secrets. And now somehow it’s changed so we can all help poor little Holly. Well I don’t need your help. I don’t need any of you. Thanks! Thanks for nothing. Oh yes. There is one thing to thank you for. Thank you for the history lesson. And thanks for showing me that just as I’ve found out I have family I am really more alone than I have ever been.”
She turned and walked out of the room.
I let her walk out.
I wish, above everything I have ever wished in my life, that I hadn’t.
“Oh shit.”
“What possessed you to say those things?” Max sounded weary. “How could you be so crass?”
“I don’t know! I just could
n’t bear it that he was getting away with it! It was all about Matt but Graham was just as bad!”
“You still would have been best advised not to say anything.”
“How am I going to face her in the office tomorrow?”
“Take no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
“Thanks.”
The next morning I arrived at the office to find Linda fuming.
“What did you say to that girl last night? And don’t say ‘what girl’?”
“Why?”
“She didn’t come home last night and she’s just phoned to say she won’t be in for a few days. She knew we’d understand because of all the stuff she has to do clearing up after her Dad. Well I don’t understand. She was fine yesterday evening, well almost, but now she’s all upset about him. What did you say to her?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Well complicated or not we’re going to have to do without her ‘for a few days’ and it would be nice to know why.”
“I think I upset her.”
“Well that much was pretty obvious. Is it a permanent upset? Is she likely never to want to see you again? Are you going to be able to work together? It’s not that long since she was the greatest thing since sliced bread and the business couldn’t do without her!”
“Sorry. I’ll go round tomorrow if she doesn’t come in.”
The atmosphere in the office was not good throughout the day. Neither of us was in a good mood and Lorraine and the girls relaxed, knowing that their work wasn’t going to be as closely scrutinised as usual. I could hear them talking and laughing far more than was normally acceptable. It just made Linda and I more irritable.
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