The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Juno was head of black studies in his own department and well-versed in deprivation and suffering. But in this instance she was wrong. For the fact was, the first half of his childhood had been plugged with secrets, like living in a space lined with locked doors. He’d had to fight hard for his history, and he’d put up the biggest fight for his grandfather.

  ‘It’s not fair to tell me how much I resemble my grandfather and just leave it at that,’ Raphe had complained from his earliest years.

  ‘You have to understand, your mother has a lot to forget,’ his father would say.

  Alice’s forgetting clearly suited Phil, but it did not suit Raphe. In fact as Raphe grew, little about his parents’ life suited him. It seemed so dreary.With the exception of a trip to Canada, Phil had never travelled outside the United States, and although Alice’s work took her to Europe, she never stayed longer than a few days. They followed American sport, they saw only American movies, they drove American cars, they talked American politics. Plenty of his friends had been to Europe, plenty could speak more than one language, and when Raphe visited their homes he would eat food that would never find favour in the Carter home.

  ‘We have to look after your mother,’ his father was quick to say whenever Raphe suggested they try something different. And Raphe would look at his mother, that strong, self-possessed woman who refused him nothing except an escape from ordinariness, and think she needed very little looking after.

  ‘He’s so like my father,’ she’d say when she observed Raphe buried in a book.‘He’s so like my father,’ she said when he got his first pair of glasses. ‘He’s so like my father,’ when she saw how popular he was with his friends. But when Raphe pushed for further information, he was always disappointed.

  ‘Your mother wants to protect you,’ his father said.

  But from what? Raphe would wonder. From what?

  At last he found an opening: his first year of high school and a project which required each student to write their family history. It was the major social studies assignment for the year, and no matter what his parents’ preferences, it had to be done.

  ‘You wouldn’t want me to fail,’ Raphe said.

  His father was unstoppable. Born and bred in California as were his parents and their parents before them, he produced a gaggle of clerks and shopkeepers and small business people going back more than a century.

  This was not the history Raphe wanted. ‘How about a cowboy?’ he said.‘Surely after all that time in the wild west, there’s a cowboy. Or maybe an outlaw. Or a sheriff. What about a sheriff?’ But the best Phil could produce was the sheriff ’s bootseller or dry goods supplier.

  Raphe turned to his mother. ‘It’s your turn,’ he said. ‘Tell me about your family.’ And when she remained silent, ‘All right then, just tell me about my grandfather.Why am I so like him?’

  If it had been left up to her, Raphe suspected she might have spoken. But Phil was adamant:‘Don’t bother your mother.’

  For a twelve-year-old imagination, silence is a rich canvas.

  Raphe knew his mother had been born in Germany, that she’d left in a hurry before the war, and that none of her family had survived. He also knew there was a Jewish connection because of the Mosers and his uncle Willi, but attempts to learn anything more had been firmly stymied.

  In his own short life the only information Raphe had stifled quite as strenuously as his parents had stifled Alice’s past concerned actions he was ashamed of. Like the time he had told on a boy for cheating, or when he had stolen some candy from the drugstore. People hide bad things. Raphe turned to his empty project book and with a mind swirling with Jews, Germany, killings, aggressive silence, and a rich diet of westerns and comics, he started to write.

  A month later his parents were summoned to the school and shown the project. They were advised in the strongest terms to seek help for the boy. That night both parents sat him down and attacked him, there was no better word to describe it. How could he have made up such lies? And after all his mother had suffered. He’d dishonoured her family and he’d reserved the worst for his grandfather. A man who never hurt anyone had been portrayed as a spy and child deserter, all for the sake of a school project.

  ‘We protected you,’ his father shouted, ‘and this is how you thank us.’

  Raphe was bewildered.Why were they attacking him? He’d done nothing wrong, he’d merely tried to work out his mother’s history.

  ‘You know nothing,’ his father kept shouting.

  ‘And whose fault is that?’ Raphe yelled back.

  Phil was all fury. His scalp shone red and glistening through his thin hair, his hands were clasped into fists. ‘You should have done your project on my family,’ he said.‘You should be proud of your long American heritage.’

  How could Raphe say it wasn’t enough? How could he admit hewanted something different? Howcould he own up to a curiosity that simply would not lie down? His mother’s story dangled just out of reach, rather like a brand-new, state-of-the-art television locked away in an attic.

  Throughout the drama Alice had remained tight and quiet. Now she whispered something to Phil, then turned to Raphe and told him to go to his room. He sat on the floor squeezed in the narrow channel between his bed and the wall listening to his parents argue in a way he’d never heard before. And when he couldn’t bear to listen any longer he turned on his transistor, stuck the earpiece in one ear, a ball of bubblegum in the other, and turned the volume up high.

  It was late when his mother entered the room. His legs were cramped and his stomach rumbling. She helped him from the floor and hugged him long and hard. But it was only when she admitted she and his father had been wrong and she was so sorry, that he returned her hug.

  The next day he began to learn about his mother’s background, and how he preferred it to his father’s, who could not help where he had come from but neither could he expect his son to feel the same pride. With his mother’s story he had something special, a mark of distinction, but most of all he had a hero. Martin Lewin managed to fill the spaces in Raphe’s humdrum life.

  Raphe would imagine long talks with his grandfather about all manner of thing: friends, teachers, books, baseball, worries, decisions, hopes, dreams. Nothing was out of bounds. Unlike his friends, Martin was always available, and Raphe was never made to feel a fool. Even when he grew into manhood it was invariably Martin he turned to in times of trouble. It was as if his grandfather lived inside him, protector, conscience, guardian angel. In fact, until his mother’s revelation about Henry Lewin, Raphe had never really experienced his grandfather as being dead.

  His grandfather had infiltrated every aspect of his life, even his fascination for volcanoes owed something to him. Raphe had never wanted the same passions as everyone else, just like he’d never wanted the same family history. Juno said the differences he was wanting were all very safe. But where, he wanted to know, was the safety in volcanoes? Where in the Holocaust? Where in being Jewish? She was a tough judge, his beloved.

  The Jewish connection at first had little impact, but once he entered college and fancied himself as an intellectual, he made more of it. He found himself gravitating towards Jewish students, exchanging Holocaust stories, reaching for certain books, being involved in Jewish-related discussions. He stepped further and further into a milieu spiked with Jewishness, so by the time the new discipline of Holocaust studies was established, Raphe slipped into it as if he had been waiting for it to happen. And such a fit it was. Finally he could delve deep and long into areas relevant to his life and history and make a career of it.

  There was so much excitement in those early days as an academic, a flood of ground-breaking research, and his own contributions making quite an impact. And discussions like he’d never had before or since as he and his colleagues quarried the new area. Such heady days they were.

  The reality today was far more mundane: too many classes, too many lackadaisical students, too many meetings, too many hosti
le colleagues, and too little time for research. Although it was research he had first turned to after his mother’s terrible revelations. He was enraged over what had happened: a piece of German scum had stolen his grandfather’s life. Suddenly there was a voice in his head demanding revenge, trying to goad him into action and accusing him of cowardice when he tried to silence it. Raphe knew it was the voice of his grandfather appealing for justice, but he didn’t know how to respond. He immersed himself in his research, he read, he made notes, but the rage beat a hot storm through him and he found he couldn’t concentrate. Even Juno, who had never failed him in the time they had been together, was unable to restore him. In fact, nothing was the same after his mother’s revelation.

  As to the extent of its effect, Raphe was to discover this a few weeks later. He was standing at the Bart waiting for a train when he heard Australian voices along the platform. Two men, young, gay by the look of them and minding their own business, and Raphe suddenly wanting to march up to them and shove them on the rails for no other reason than they came from the same country that had harboured his grandfather’s murderer. And when the three of them entered the same carriage, the rage was so overpowering it threatened to strangle – either him or them, two young Australians who probably knew nothing about the war or Jews. At the next station Raphe moved to another carriage because he did not trust himself, and besides, he could not breathe.

  Juno believed his rage was part of the whole survivor package and not specific to the wrong done to his grandfather.

  ‘You simply can’t leave the Holocaust alone,’ she said.

  She was quick to remind how she would have got nowhere if she had chosen to immerse herself in the rage of generations of black women. There are victims and victims, she went on, and Raphe was turning himself into a dangerous one. He might also have added he was turning himself into a person he did not like, but he didn’t want to fuel her arguments.

  Although without the Holocaust he would be nobody. As it was he was a second-rate academic at a second-rate college forced to spend far too much time vying for promotion with younger and hungrier colleagues. In fact, if there were a grand master handing out grades for life, despite all his hopes, Raphe knew he would be awarded a B. Better, he thought, to have failed properly, at least that would have been a definitive statement. Instead, he was condemned always to be a smudge behind the best.

  He was employed at his second-rate university as deputy head of the Culture and Identity Studies Centre –Victim Studies by any other name. The centre had replaced the Holocaust studies department of a few years earlier, despite his vocal opposition. Clearly a B grade at argument too. With each passing year he was forced to watch his own specialty become ever more diluted as it was lumped in with Armenian massacres, the Irish troubles, KKK lynchings, South African apartheid, Palestinian exile, Rwandan genocide, Kurdish oppression, Yugoslavia’s entrenched hatreds. So many new atrocities, and as soon as each was tidied up in the field there was another new unit to offer the students, or in the words of the university administrators, a new product for enhanced market penetration.

  With bloodshed and brutality on every continent of the world, the Culture and Identity Studies Centre was bursting its seams. But worse than the huge classes, even worse than collegiate competition for top victim status, was the loss of integrity which had given rise to departments like his in the first place. When a new professorial position to be occupied by Raphe was approved earlier in the year, it was endowed by an armaments company. Raphe was being paid in profits from nuclear weapons!

  No doubt about it, definitely a B for work. And a B for love, too, although he desperately hoped this had changed with Juno. But before he met her, serial partners, none of them lasting longer than five years, and among them not one Jewish girlfriend.

  ‘You wouldn’t want any competition for your Holocaust,’ Juno said.

  A B in all aspects of life, although after learning about Henry Lewin he was heading towards an A in violence. He, Raphe Carter, who not so long ago had been a man whose violent impulses extended no further than squashing a mosquito, a man who felt protected by the benign presence of his beloved grandfather, now understood how men could hurl their children at walls, bash their wives senseless, and kick their animals to death, how the anger could build until you had no option but to let it out. Raphe could understand this and it terrified him. And it was getting worse; his imagination without the restraints of reality was making freedom of movement a dangerous privilege – witness the event with the Australians on the train.

  And then his mother died, far too young like most members of his family, and no one to blame this time. He was already filled with anger over Henry Lewin and now with grief as well. Juno did her best, but in the end she ran out of patience. Six months after his mother’s death, Juno suggested they take a break.

  ‘You need to temper all this emotion,’ she said.‘Or rather, you need to temper the rage. I can cope with the grief.’

  Juno, Juno, Juno. He couldn’t bear to think of life without her. He pushed Henry Lewin out of his thoughts, he tried to silence his grandfather’s demands, and he turned all his attention to Juno. They went to concerts and the theatre, they had a weekend away at the beach, they made love more often and with much the same vigour as they used to. And when a bequest arrived at the college specifically tagged for Holocaust teaching, even work started to look better.

  One evening at the end of a particularly enjoyable dinner, Raphe poured a sauterne and the two of them sat at the table surrounded by maps, planning their first trip to Europe together. Germany was on the proposed itinerary.

  ‘And you’ll show me Krefeld,’ Juno said. ‘It’ll be different, less disturbing, seeing it with me.’

  Raphe, wrapped in the mellowness of the evening, answered without thinking: he’d never visited Krefeld before, he said, nor Düsseldorf for that matter. He’d always imagined his grandparents in Berlin – he had visited there twice – and in various concentration camps – Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald had each received a visit.

  Juno was appalled. ‘It’s as if you’ve let the Nazi years erase all the life which came before.’ She found it macabre that the regime which had killed his grandparents was now being given exclusive licence to define them.‘Perhaps you Jews ought to excavate a little deeper.’ Her whole pose was a mix of bewilderment and derision. ‘Where do you think African-Americans would be if we’d looked no further than slavery?’

  All mellowness was gone as Raphe tried to explain his position, how despite his efforts the Holocaust seemed to stand like an impenetrable barrier between him and his grandparents’ early life. How with only a handful of objects from that life remaining, the public knowledge – history – had an uninterrupted opportunity to dominate.

  Then there was the not inconsiderable matter of interest, although he would never admit this to Juno. But the fact of the matter was he was much more interested in his grandparents’ wartime experiences than their unremarkable earlier life. Their lives as he knew them were braced with history; it lent them a solidity, an authority he welcomed.

  Over the next hour he tried to justify his omissions, tried to justify what he didn’t fully understand himself, but Juno remained unconvinced.

  ‘So many sick fixations,’ she said. ‘And I thought you’d moved on.’

  Despite his best resolve, Raphe’s attention started to slip again, and within a day or two of their argument his grandfather’s voice had returned stronger than ever, his demands for action infused with a new urgency. This battle was endless; Juno didn’t understand, could never understand. And Raphe had only dwelled on half the story. There was his grandmother, Renate, also murdered, and in evil’s own front parlour. Raphe justified his focus with the Auschwitz aura. Auschwitz was millions, Auschwitz was horror on the grandest scale. Auschwitz was synonymous with mass atrocity, mass murder, mass barbarity. He could leave Auschwitz to humanity. But not the single, one-to-one confrontation which made
up the last hours of his grandfather’s life.

  Which brought him to justice. If justice had been done, Raphe would not now be wearing the tragedy like a lead-lined vest. But justice wasn’t done, either for the whole Nazi era or specifically for his grandfather. So here he is, a different country, a different hemisphere, on the precipice of a hissing volcano and as fixated as ever on his grandfather and the circumstances of his death. Somebody should pay. Nothing less would let his grandfather rest in peace, nothing less would loosen the grip of Raphe’s own inherited responsibilities. There is Henry Lewin’s son, Daniel, but according to his mother’s account it is Laura who was close to her father, so in Raphe’s imaginings it is Laura who should pay. But how? Raphe is no Nazi and it is not the 1940s any more. How should the daughter pay?

  Raphe stares into the crater of the volcano. With so much activity, the sides are falling away. If he were to return in a year or so the crater would be unrecognisable. If only life moved in the same way. Raphe brushes the fine velvety ash off his jacket. The movement makes him think of his grandfather too weak at the end even for this small action. Laura Lewin should suffer her father’s wrongs, Raphe is just not clear how.

  In contrast, what is perfectly clear is his failure to live with history. Here he is, a generation removed, and shuffling through his days lugging a great load of hatred and resentment because no one has paid for what happened to his grandfather and all the other millions. Or at least none of the guilty have paid. Plenty of Jewish survivors have paid, he’s seen that first-hand, and their children have paid, and now their grandchildren are paying too. When it will all stop? he wonders as the volcano roars about him. What will make it stop? Not forget, must never forget, but stop the sufferings from being handed further down the line. Even he bears the scars, a man in his forties, not unattractive nor unintelligent, but the longest relationship he’s ever had is with a dog who left him after seven years for a more congenial home a couple of blocks away. There are leavers and leftovers and Raphe sees himself as one of the latter – although not any more, he pleads silently, not after five years and Juno still putting up with him.