The Mascot

by Mark Kurzem

  My father was ashen-faced and drawn. “Or am I guilty?” he asked. “Am I responsible, like the soldiers, for what went on? I don’t know what to think. Those people in the yard at Laima were murdered, and I eased them on their way, not with a gun but with those damned chocolates.”

  My father withdrew further into himself. He seemed beaten: not a shred of his usual animation remained. “Even though I was only a child, I should have known. I must have blocked it out. It was only later that I understood what I had been party to.” My father bowed his head so that I could no longer see his face.

  “But at that time I didn’t understand,” my father pleaded meekly in his own defense. “I was shell-shocked. Frozen,” he said in a weak voice. “I didn’t understand the adults around me, or the world I was living in. I just went from moment to moment—what child doesn’t?—grateful for food and shelter and warmth. Even more than that, I was so terrified that my true identity would be discovered. I just kept my antennae up and my head down.”

  After several moments of silence, a gasp of grief came from him as he struggled to gain control of his emotions. He looked up at me.

  “Let’s stop, son,” he pleaded.

  I was thankful to do so. I didn’t know how much more I could endure.

  But I was more worried about my father’s emotional state. It seemed as if he were driving himself to the gallows to be hanged by his past. I was overwhelmed at the thought of the toll—the inner terror—his silence must have taken on him. It was not only his physical survival that had been at stake.

  I sighed, suddenly exhausted by all I had just learned and all that was still likely to come.

  “It’s almost five o’clock,” my father said. “You get some sleep, son.”

  “What about you, Dad?” I asked. I found myself fretting also about my father’s physical state. He suffered at times from high blood pressure, and I prayed that it would remain stable under the burden of this night.

  “I’ll be fine,” he replied. “I’ll just wash the teacups and then get some rest myself.”

  I left him to it, suddenly embarrassed by our intimacy. I sensed my father felt the same way, as he rose without another word, crossed to the sink, and turned his back on me.

  I dropped off to sleep just before dawn but not before scrawling a few notes on a scrap of paper. The rest I had was fitful, and in the few moments that I was able to doze off I had disturbing dreams: at one point I was standing knee-deep in a swamp, paralyzed by blood-red, glutinous mud. I struggled to raise myself out of it but was hopelessly trapped in the quagmire.

  My inner life had been churned up in ways that I was not yet able to fully understand. Soon wide awake again, I lay in bed feeling drained. Outside I could hear the dawn chorus and the sound of my mother rising and moving through the house to the kitchen.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JUDGMENT

  The sound of the front door slamming woke me. I must have drifted off into a light sleep again. I drew my arm out from under the blankets and looked at my watch. It was nearly 11:00 a.m. I’d slept about five hours, but I was instantly alert. I sprang out of bed and drew back the curtain. Immediately the light blinded me: it was a bright winter’s day in Melbourne. The sky was a thin cloudless blue.

  The house seemed deserted as I headed for the kitchen. There was no sign of life. Then I remembered that it was Friday. This time every week my mother met her close friend Maria in town for lunch, a film, and some window-shopping, returning at about six in the evening.

  Just as I went to the kitchen window to get a view of my father’s workshop, I heard the sound of his car pulling up in the drive. A few moments later the rear gate clicked open, and I saw him cross to his bolt-hole. I opened the window slightly and called out to him: “Dad! Coffee?” He gave a slight start and turned to face me.

  I’d expected him to be tired and subdued. I was mistaken. He seemed to have regained his composure completely. There was no sign of what had taken place only hours ago. He looked positively robust. He headed toward the house, warning me in advance not to forget his three sugars.

  I took his coffee over to the table where he’d just sat down.

  “It’s after eleven,” he teased me. “You should’ve been up hours ago. I’ve been working since nine.”

  “You’re superhuman, aren’t you,” I tossed back, before it occurred to me that my choice of words might have been an unconscious response to what I had learned about him earlier that morning. I joined my father at the table. In the harsh light of day the kitchen no longer seemed like the confessional from the night before.

  My father sipped his coffee in silence. Then I heard him clear his throat nervously, and unexpectedly he began to speak in a lively and confident voice.

  “I never finished telling you what happened,” he said, searching my face for a response. “Are you still interested?”

  His naïveté stunned me.

  “I’ve thought of nothing else,” I answered. His face registered relief and shyness in equal measures.

  “After the incident with the chocolates at Laima,” he began, “Commander Lobe partly surrendered me back to Uncle. I’ve no idea why this happened. On occasion I still visited hospitals and other institutions with the commander, but these were interspersed with days in Uncle’s office when I simply got on with my old routine of study.

  “Until one particular day,” my father said, “when the commander arrived in an exuberant mood. He didn’t bother to greet Uncle, and before I could even stand to attention, he’d snatched me up and then sat down on the sofa with his arms around my waist so I couldn’t escape him. ‘How is my little corporal today?’ he asked. ‘Have you been working hard at your lessons?’ I nodded, and he looked at Uncle. ‘Has he, Mr. Dzenis?’ It was no longer Jekabs, as he used to call Uncle. Uncle nodded but remained silent.

  “‘In that case I think you deserve a treat,’ Commander Lobe said, squeezing me so tightly I could barely breathe. My ears pricked up at the mention of ‘treat.’ I thought that with a bit of luck he might take me out to a fancy café for ice cream the way he used to do.

  “But it was even better than I’d hoped for. He offered me a break in Carnikava. ‘It’s a special holiday, only for important children of the Reich,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a wonderful time. A whole week there with boys and girls of your own age. Playing on the beach, dancing, exercises every day.’

  “I nodded, excited by the prospect.

  “Commander Lobe explained that I’d have to leave almost immediately, and Uncle insisted that he and Auntie accompany me. Uncle had been wary of the commander’s attitude toward me ever since the chocolates affair.

  “The commander shrugged as if he didn’t care either way. Then he sprang an even bigger surprise on me. ‘And you, Corporal,’ he said slowly and with gravity, ‘will have a special part to play at Carnikava. Berlin is sending a crew to film you.’

  “He lifted me off his knee and began to pace up and down, smoking his cigar. ‘Every single person throughout the German empire, even the Führer himself, will learn about the life of Latvia’s great mascot,’ he said, waving his hand in the air extravagantly. ‘It is a great honor for you to be chosen. You must make all Latvians proud of you.’”

  My father went on to recount his patchy memories of the filming. It had actually taken place in two locations—sections were filmed both at Carnikava and Dzintari, a town on the Riga coast, whose scenery was more appealing than that at Carnikava.

  He remembered clearly one scene in which he was filmed doing handstands and running on the beach with the other children. In a second scene, he recalled what may have been a kind of maypole dancing with a few of the young girls, who were dressed in traditional Latvian folk costumes. His other memories, he said, were too vague. “They are like shadows moving across a screen,” he complained, screwing up his face in frustration.

  One thing he knew for certain was that the material had been included in a German newsreel, which the com
mander later told him had been shown in movie theaters across the German Reich. He himself had seen it play in a cinema in Riga.

  I was intrigued by talk of the newsreel. Even these scant memories were more than I’d heard during my childhood when my father had mentioned the film. He would boast that he’d become such a celebrity in Latvia that they’d—we never asked who “they” were—made a film about him. But whenever my brothers and I would pester him about the film’s content, he’d always claim to be unable to recall any details.

  My father told me now that he didn’t know what had become of the film. It had occurred to him when he was younger to find it, but he’d had no idea how to locate it. As time passed, and he’d gone on to raise a family, he’d put it at the back of his mind. “I decided that the film belonged to a previous life,” he said. In any case, he suspected that the footage hadn’t survived the war.

  I suggested that we contact various film archives in Russia, Latvia, and Germany. My father seemed genuinely excited by this. His mood was buoyant, and he perched on the edge of his seat, apparently eager to talk more.

  Before he began, however, I was compelled to ask him something we had not yet touched on directly. My father and I had never discussed our emotions with each other, but I decided to take the plunge.

  “How did you feel about all of this, Dad?” I asked. Mere mention of the word “feel” made me awkward and self-conscious.

  My father was taken aback by my question and seemed perplexed. “What do you mean, feel?” He put stress on the word.

  “Well…did you feel close to the Latvians?” I blustered, not quite able to say what I meant after all. “Did you feel like one of them when you made this film?”

  The vehemence of his response surprised me. “Don’t be absurd,” he said. “I never felt part of them. I had to cooperate, that’s all.”

  My father shrank back into his seat. He seemed both annoyed and dismayed by my question and began to shake his head. “You don’t understand the way it was,” he murmured. “I just made the best of my situation. I stayed as silent as possible, all my time with them. I was never one of them. Ever! Deep down I knew they were not my people. They were strangers to me. All the time, strangers. They loved me, cared for me, treated me as one of their own. But I always knew what I was, even if I didn’t know who I was. I was a Jewish boy. That meant I had to be on guard every moment I was with them. I couldn’t risk being discovered. I would have been killed. I feared for my life all the time. The fear was ingrained in me. Can you imagine how it would be for a child to live like that every waking moment? And even when sleeping—I never slept well—I had nightmares about it. I always worried that I would talk in my sleep and somehow someone would overhear me.”

  My father’s features tensed and he stared bleakly in front of him. “I realize now, speaking for the first time,” he said, “that I have been frightened all my life.”

  This seemed to be an explanation for my father’s silence: his persistent fear of discovery.

  “It’s not like I could’ve run away or something. Besides, where would I have run to? Back to my village? I didn’t know where my village was. I couldn’t even remember its name. I still can’t. And even if I had, what would I have found there? The pit where my family was buried?

  “There was nobody else to care for me,” my father said with grim finality. “This was the card that fate had dealt me.”

  My father seemed lost for words. Then he leaned forward in his seat, staring intently at me. “Absurd!” he muttered under his breath. It was the first time in my life that my father had reacted so intensely to something I said.

  I tried to steer him onto another topic. “Why didn’t you speak of your experiences when the war had ended?” I asked.

  My father shrugged evasively. “I wasn’t protecting the Latvians, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said defensively.

  Our discussion had taken a turn for the worse, and I worried my father felt trusting me had been a mistake.

  My father took a deep breath. “Who wanted to hear about the horrors I witnessed? In those days everybody in Australia just wanted to get on with their life, forget their past, and I learned to want the same thing. I just focused on Mum and you boys and the future. I wanted to protect you from my past. Just think of the shadow that would have cast over your lives.”

  I let that go. “Do you think Mum even suspected anything?” I asked.

  My father shook his head.

  “I hope not. And that’s how I wanted it to be. I didn’t want to burden your mother. You know how she is. She’d grown up here shielded from the war and things like that. She has a kind nature, and she doesn’t understand cruelty at all. To expose her to what I’d been through—I feared that it would be too much for her.”

  “That’s terrible, Dad,” I said. “To live alone with this. Nobody you could confide in.”

  My father gave a nervous cough. Then he spoke again.

  “I did tell somebody once,” he said, “completely on the spur of the moment, in early 1960. I was in the center of Melbourne. I saw a nameplate on the door of a lawyer’s office. I could tell the name was Jewish. I thought to myself, ‘This man might be able to steer me in the right direction.’ I don’t know what came over me—I went in. It was a small office—a one-man show. The lawyer himself was sitting there behind a desk.

  “I asked if I could talk to him. He invited me to sit down, I began to tell him what had happened to me. He was spellbound. He let me talk on and on. When I’d finished, he asked what I wanted to do, and I told him then what I have told you now—I want to know who I am, who my family was, and where I come from.

  “The lawyer was silent for some time. Finally, he spoke: ‘Forget it, young man!’ he said. ‘If what you say is true, there is nobody left for you. And even if someone did survive, then they would believe that you had died with your family. Nobody would come looking for you, and in any case, how would they know where to find you?’ He said that the best thing was to look to the future. ‘You have a family, build a life with them. Your past is a lost cause!’ I was dejected, but there was nothing else for it. I resolved to follow his advice. ‘He’s an educated man,’ I said to myself. ‘He knows about these things.’ I thanked him and left. That was that—I buried my past.”

  “Do you regret that, Dad?” I ventured.

  My father seemed momentarily thrown by the question. He moved uncomfortably in his seat. “To be honest,” he replied, “I feel guilty now about keeping my secret from all of you. Perhaps it seems to you that I didn’t trust any of you. That I betrayed you somehow.”

  My father’s words struck a raw nerve in me. As I had sat with him through the early hours of that morning, I had occasionally felt toward him an anger that I’d only gradually been able to acknowledge. He was correct: I’d felt that he’d betrayed me and the entire family. Though he may have protected us from the horrors of his secret, I could not escape my growing sense that his secretiveness would, in the long term, make him a stranger to us all.

  My father shook his head, ashamed of himself. There was a momentary silence between us.

  “I’ve lied to you all, haven’t I?” my father said. “People outside the family assumed that I was Latvian, and I didn’t bother to correct them.” His regret was palpable, and I wanted to spare him any further self-accusation.

  “No you didn’t,” I replied. “You didn’t lie.” I hesitated, struggling to find the right way to describe what had gone on. “You simply didn’t tell us everything,” I said. “It was a sort of half-truth.”

  “A half-truth?” my father observed wryly. “How can anything be a half-truth?” He understood all too well what I was trying to do. I was trying to make excuses for what he’d done.

  “It’s like a truth not fully revealed,” I offered.

  “There’s no such thing,” he challenged me perversely.

  But he was wrong. An image of his brown case, firmly locked, came to mind. I recalled t
he control he had exercised over whatever was removed from it, in order to maintain the carefully constructed narrative of his life.

  I reflected on all those years growing up under the same roof as my father, and how we, his family, had let him get away with this narrative. None of us had ever stopped to reflect seriously on the mystery of his origins and existence, and we were content to let him deflect any mild curiosity we did show.

  What if we had pushed him harder? Would he have given in and told us more? I wondered whether it was us—our family—who had failed our father by not asking questions, and that his decision not to offer us anything was a terrible indictment of us all. Had he seen something in us that disappointed him? I was left with a sense that somehow he had not deemed any of us worthy of his secret.

  I had been so absorbed in my reflections that it was only the sound of my father’s voice that brought me back to the present.

  “Marky?” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I drifted off for a moment.” I met my father’s eyes. “You will tell Mum and the boys, won’t you?” I said gently.

  My father nodded, grim-faced. “I don’t know how I’ll go about it,” he said, “but I know that I must speak now.” In an unself-conscious gesture, he raised the brown case, which had been on the floor beside him, and hugged it to his chest, as if it were both his protector and his most precious possession.

  I looked at my watch. “I’d better get dressed. Mum will be back before too long. She’ll be wondering what’s up if she finds me like this.”

  My father took the cups over to the sink. “I’ve got some repairs to do,” he said and headed back out to his workshop.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE GROUND SHIFTS