The Mascot

by Mark Kurzem

  When I got up the next morning, I wrote a note. In it I apologized to Lobe for frightening him and explained again who I was. I wrote that I knew he had saved my father’s life and that I wanted to thank him for that. I folded the letter, put it in an envelope, and sealed it.

  I headed back to Handens. I slipped the envelope under Lobe’s door and stepped away to wait at a safe distance. From where I stood, I could hear movement inside. Several moments passed.

  Then I heard the lock click. The door opened, this time more gently, although still on its chain. Lobe’s partly hidden face again appeared in the gap. His eye still appraised me, but it was less wary. He must have been satisfied by my submissive demeanor because when the door closed for a moment, I heard the sound of the chain being removed. Finally the door opened to reveal the full figure of Commander Lobe.

  He was short and fairly rotund, no longer the fit and dashing commandant he’d once been. He looked like any other man in his seventies, apart from the fiery expression etched into his face over the years. “Please come in,” he said, shaking my hand rather formally.

  I stepped inside.

  The interior was cozy, what the Germans call “gemütlich,” but also quite shabby. It was clear that he was not well-off. An elderly woman was standing rather awkwardly behind him. He introduced her as Mrs. Lobe. She seemed kindly, smiling warmly at me, and then, as Auntie used to do, she stepped forward, took my face in her hands, and kissed me on both cheeks.

  “Little Uldis!” she exclaimed. “A perfect angel.”

  Lobe gave a chuckle. “A little rascal, that’s what I remember,” he said.

  “He looks like his father, doesn’t he, Krlis?” Mrs. Lobe continued.

  I felt Lobe appraising me more closely. Then he grunted in response to his wife’s words.

  Mrs. Lobe ushered me further into the room. “You must be freezing,” she said. “Come and sit by the heater.”

  I sat down on the shabby sofa and Lobe sat down next to me. Suddenly he was full of bonhomie.

  “May I offer you coffee?” he said. “Or something stronger? Schnapps! That’ll warm us. Dearest! Glasses!”

  Mrs. Lobe brought the drinks, and the commander proposed a toast to my father. After that we chatted about him. The curious thing was that Lobe seemed to know so much about my father’s life in Australia: his job, that he had three sons, that I was the oldest.

  What followed was mystifying at the time and has stayed with me all these years.

  “My father has spoken of how you found him,” I told Lobe. Immediately he went on the alert; I could sense his tension.

  “Did he?” Lobe said. “What did the corporal say?”

  I told him only what I knew at that time: that soldiers on patrol had found a small boy in the woods, dressed in rags. And so on.

  You could almost see the tension leave Lobe’s body. He laughed loudly at what I’d recounted and poured himself another schnapps. But there was one tiny part of him that was still on guard, and coolly observing my movements.

  Then Lobe started to add to what I’d just told him, describing how my father couldn’t remember his name, not even his first name, or where he was from. All the boy knew was that he was a pigherd who’d lost his animals. He told me how his soldiers chose the boy’s name and birthday.

  “What was I to do?” he said. “I couldn’t let this child wander alone in the forest. He would surely have died: if he didn’t starve to death, the wolves would have devoured him, and if not that, then the partisans would have captured him. They were ruthless—they would have cut his throat on the spot, the partisans. Make no mistake about it!”

  By that stage, Lobe was drunk, and he became slightly aggressive for a moment. “Nowadays,” he grumbled, “those partisans are looked back upon as heroes. Not us, though! After the war the Soviets portrayed us as devils.” He paused for another swig of schnapps.

  “Tell me,” he said, “if we were villains, then why did we worry about a little boy in the forest? Who cared whether he lived or died? We did! Nobody else! We, the devils, took him with us.” Lobe laughed harshly.

  He rambled on incoherently about the war so that I thought he’d forgotten that I was sitting beside him. I let him talk. I’d begun to nod off in the stultifying heat of the room when suddenly he gripped my forearm tightly. I snapped awake. For a second I wondered where I was and what he was talking about, when I heard him say, “He was a brave little boy and what a soldier!”

  I laughed because I’d never thought of my father as a soldier. He’d always made it sound as if he were a Boy Scout. I was a little unnerved by the description.

  “No!” Lobe exclaimed. “He was! He looked magnificent in his uniform. We called him our mascot.”

  The heat and the alcohol must have gotten to him, because then he, too, drifted off to sleep. I sat silently on the sofa listening to his snores and waiting for him to come round. Finally, his wife, who’d been quietly listening to our conversation, left and returned with coffee. She woke him. The doze seemed to have reinvigorated him, and he picked up another thread.

  “I am still considered a hero in Latvia,” he said. “There were so many requests from patriotic Latvians all over the world, even old members of the Eighteenth Battalion—‘Why don’t you write about your life?’ ‘We want to hear of your feats in the struggle for independence,’ those sorts of things—that I decided to write my memoirs.” At that, he rose heavily from the sofa and disappeared into another room.

  He returned moments later with a box. I noticed his labored breathing as he sat down beside me and gently placed the box on the coffee table in front of us. It appeared to be nothing more than an old cardboard grocery container.

  “My box of memories,” he said, patting it lovingly, as if it were a loyal old dog. He lifted off its lid and delicately removed a book. Then he passed it across to me. It was a copy of the memoirs he’d just spoken of. I opened it, and the frontispiece carried a photograph of him, taken perhaps when he was in his fifties. I wouldn’t have said that he was a handsome man—his expression was far too austere—but he did have a commanding presence, even on the page.

  He reached across for the book and flicked through it until he found what he was searching for. He cleared his throat in between his ponderous intake of air and began to read a passage aloud, translating into German, about how my father was found by the soldiers.

  When he’d finished, Lobe poured himself yet another schnapps. “That’s what we did for your father,” he said proudly. Lobe had had so much to drink that I worried he’d drop off to sleep again.

  But instead the schnapps fueled his ire, and he began to rail a second time against those who had tarnished his reputation. As he gesticulated somewhat wildly with one hand, he pulled a folded sheet of paper from his box with the other. He gripped the paper tightly and rubbed it repeatedly, almost neurotically, with his thumb. It struck me as a rather childish gesture.

  “After the war they called us Nazis,” he said, outraged. “They said that we Latvians welcomed the Nazis when they entered our country. Absurd! We didn’t follow their philosophy. We hoped the Germans would be a means to an end: to free us from Soviet oppression. That’s all! They said that we turned on our own people. But they were not our people! They were partisans. Bolsheviks! Traitors!”

  I remember thinking to myself “and Jews as well.”

  Lobe claimed to me that he’d had one wish his entire life—to see Latvia free, and that was not a crime. At the time I knew little about Latvia’s role in the war, but I recalled enough to see that he was trying to justify Latvia’s past. There was little I could do to stem the tide of his mounting hysteria as he began to rave, running his words together into an indecipherable mixture of Latvian, Swedish, and German.

  His rant was reaching a crescendo and he’d become quite disturbed, almost apoplectic. Mrs. Lobe must have been listening from the kitchen because suddenly she rushed in with a tablet and a glass of water, anxiously reminding him abou
t his high blood pressure. He swallowed it and then sank back on the sofa. I waited beside him in silence, until he had calmed himself, and after several minutes his wheezing subsided.

  All through his tirade, and even now, as he rested, Lobe had continued to wave the paper around in his fist. When I asked him what it was, he was startled. He appeared to have forgotten that it was still in his hand and looked at it curiously, but ignored my question. He returned the paper to the box. Then, shifting awkwardly in his seat so that he was almost facing me, he said with finality, “War is a nasty business. And I have paid the price.”

  I was young, with no experience of war. I didn’t know how to respond, so I nodded, putting on a grave expression that I hoped was appropriate. And the truth was that I did sincerely feel for him and was indignant on his behalf.

  By this time it was getting late, and I thought it best that I should leave. Besides, I’d grown increasingly uncomfortable. Intuitively, I knew something was amiss, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Before I departed, I took a photograph of the commander and his wife together on the sofa. For an instant, they both seemed so vulnerable as they sat there, looking up into the camera lens as I focused. Poor Mrs. Lobe gave a weak, tired smile, while beside her, Mr. Lobe’s face regained its sharp, bullish expression. The abruptness of the transformation unnerved me.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lobe at home in Stockholm, early 1980s.

  But still he wasn’t well enough to see me to the door. He couldn’t even rise to shake my hand. Instead he gave me a salute from where he was seated and told me that he was sad to see me go; he promised to stay in touch.

  Mrs. Lobe unbolted the door to let me out, and when she shut it behind me, I heard her refasten the locks. It struck me as quite pathetic, and I had to pause outside for a moment; I felt quite moved by their circumstances. I sensed that I would never meet them again.

  I departed Stockholm, aware that much lay beneath the bonhomie of my father’s relationship with the Lobes but perplexed as to what it could be. I never told my father the truth about what had taken place in Sweden. I’d merely described it as pleasant and said it was good to have met Lobe. He’d never asked me more about it. Now I was certain that it was the key to something very significant.

  I also had questions about the other men in my father’s life. Uncle—Jekabs Dzenis—had been a central part of my own life as I grew up in Melbourne. To me he was an austere and formidable figure, but I had never sensed any malevolence in his character; rather I thought of him and of his wife, Emily, as my adoptive grandparents. I fondly remembered driving with him to his holiday cottage in the countryside outside Melbourne. En route, to try to engage him, I’d recited poetry by Goethe, Schiller, and Heine in German. As the car wove its way through the narrow, hilly lanes, he gently corrected my mistakes in memorization and pronunciation.

  As a child I had felt sorry for the Dzenises, whom I saw as being buffeted by fate, pawns in the theater of war. Now my sympathy had evaporated: Uncle had deceived me about who he was—and their exodus from the fatherland seemed less a cruelty and more an attempt to cover their tracks.

  Jekabs and Emily Dzenis were dead, but I hoped that I could turn to surviving relatives for more information about the role they had played in my father’s past. I knew I’d have to tread cautiously while ferreting out their wartime sympathies and associations.

  Then there was Jekabs Kulis, the soldier who had actually saved my father from the firing squad. He would be in his late seventies or early eighties by now. Was he still living near New York City? If not, where?

  I drifted into a light doze, only to wake with a start as heavy turbulence hit the plane, causing it to shudder violently. I gave up on trying to sleep.

  During the seemingly interminable hours that followed, I couldn’t help but reflect on my father, even though I had tried deliberately to avoid doing so. My image of him had been turned upside down.

  On one hand, he was still my father, the person I thought I knew. We would banter and joke easily with each other, and had what many would see as a good relationship. But as is common with fathers and sons, there was also a suffocating silence between us whenever our emotions were exposed. We never confronted each other, and as I matured into adulthood I understood that we could both live comfortably with that tacit agreement.

  But it was also true that my father had lived a double life, and I didn’t really know who he was.

  Why had my father kept the truth from us? While I could accept what he had said to me about protecting his family from the shadows of his past, I didn’t believe that this was the full story. Were there threats from other sources that he was yet still unwilling to discuss?

  Was he frightened of himself and of his own memories? To never speak of one’s memories did not mean that one had escaped them. I could not imagine what it would be like to live in the imminent danger of the revelation one’s self.

  When my father looked at my brothers and me, did he see what had been cruelly taken from him? Did he long to utter the words “my brother” or “my sister,” words that my brothers and I used without a second thought?

  Above all, I wondered how my father had managed to keep his past “unspoken” all these years. Had his enduring silence been a form of survival he was as unwilling to relinquish as his life?

  Questions like these plagued me during the flight, and I realized I would have to let my father fill in the details of his story at his own pace. I decided to walk to the rear of the plane to stretch my limbs.

  I had paid little attention to the other passengers, so I was surprised when I entered the rear cabin and found myself in the midst of what appeared to be a religious jamboree. On the side of the plane where I stood, four Orthodox Jews draped in their traditional prayer shawls and wearing yarmulke had gathered in the space around the emergency exit. In low voices they were chanting in unison while davening toward the wall of the cabin. I felt inexplicably confronted by their behavior and turned away, only to notice that on the far side of the cabin a much larger prayer meeting was going on. It seemed that most of the rear cabin had been occupied by a group of Japanese Christians, perhaps en route to a pilgrimage in Europe. Standing at the front of the group, a man in a priest’s collar was leading row upon row of followers in slightly fevered prayer.

  I moved unsteadily back toward my seat, feeling lightheaded and disconcerted.

  Half an hour later the plane entered its holding pattern, circling to the west of the airport and waiting for permission to land. But I felt anchorless and directionless, cast adrift on a sea between past and present. Filled with an inchoate fear that the mysteries of my father’s past would be the harbinger of a dangerous squall for our whole family, I had no idea when and where I would reach safe harbor again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  OXFORD

  Eventually I settled back into my routine in Oxford, but my academic research quickly took a backseat to my father’s story, which now dominated my thoughts.

  In the weeks that followed my return, I made numerous phone calls to my father; the little dance that had begun over the telephone in Tokyo continued. Whenever I tried to broach what had happened to him, let alone the mere existence of the tape and its contents, my father would lapse into an unshakable silence before either abruptly changing the topic or, more often, rapidly handing the telephone to my unsuspecting mother.

  I soon grew tired of pursuing my elusive father. In the meantime, I would gather what scraps of his past were available to me and see where they would lead. I retrieved the videotape from where I’d hidden it in the bottom drawer of the desk in my study, perhaps in an unconscious emulation of the way my father had secreted his case. Then I found myself repeating the ritual I’d developed in my studio in Tokyo. I spent an entire weekend with the curtains drawn, playing the tape repeatedly. Only this time, I coolly jotted down further details of his story. By Sunday evening, I had filled a small notebook with observations and queries and, after I had
returned the video to its hiding place, I settled into an armchair and began to review my notes.

  Ultimately, my father’s recollections were impressionistic. With few exceptions, they lacked objective markers that could pinpoint a precise moment or place. I had a handful of names of places and people from which to begin my research—Laima chocolate factory, Valdemara Street, Riga, Carnikava, the Volhov swamps, Lobe, Dzenis, and Kulis—and the mysterious words “Koidanov” and “Panok.” It wasn’t much to go on. My father’s vivid account of the burning of people in a synagogue was unaccompanied by a place or a time.

  While I did not hold my father responsible for the nature of his memories—one would expect little more from a terrified child’s point of view—I felt thwarted by them. By the time I’d reached the last page of my notes, I realized that my frustration had boiled over unconsciously. In the margin, I had jotted down words such as “silence,” “memory,” and “truth,” which I had then underlined once or twice for further emphasis.

  I lay on my bed, mulling over the information that I did have. Foremost in my mind were “Koidanov” and “Panok,” the words my father had revealed to me at the Café Daquise in London. Where did they come from? Were they the names of people or places? Did they have any connection with his family? My father claimed that he’d held these names inside him for as long as he could remember. Had the extermination itself imprinted them on his soul?

  I was intrigued, too, by my father’s cryptic recollections of his early family life. He had said that he had a younger brother and a baby sister. What were their names? How old were they when they were killed? His memories of his own father were baffling: sometime after being told that his father was dead, Alex saw him. His father lowered himself from a hole in the ceiling of the family home to gently whisper good-bye to Alex.

  Finally, my father was adamant that on the night prior to the extermination of his village his mother had taken him onto her lap and told him that they were all to die in the morning.