The Mascot

by Mark Kurzem

  I walked across the meadow toward the river Thames, feeling even more dispirited since meeting with the professor. Despite my earlier objections, I had to be honest with myself and admit that the professor’s words had planted in me seeds of confusion and doubt. Were my father’s revelations too fantastical or, even worse, a Wilkomirski-like deception? However, my father had not spent most of his lifetime telling people “embellished” stories about his wartime past; rather, he’d spent his adult years trying to prevent them from being discovered.

  And then there was my father’s behavior when giving evidence on the videotape. Surely this was proof, I thought, that he had not softened his story to protect himself: although I knew my father to be a resilient man, I had seen how painful it had been for him to speak for the first time of his terrible past.

  Though he had risked condemnation from the interviewers, he hadn’t skirted around their questions or compromised his story in any way. He’d stated what he could remember and what he could not; in particular, much to the annoyance of the interviewers, he had refused to condemn his Latvian “kidnappers” out of hand. It seemed to me that having begun the painful task of dragging his wartime past into the open my father would remain adamant about the truth, even when I suspected that this would not be the last time he would face pressure to tailor it to the agenda of his audience.

  Doubtless there would be other individuals who would question my father’s integrity, especially in the light of his fifty-year silence. He told me that he’d maintained his silence to protect his wife and sons from the trauma of his past. I’d accepted that but also suspected that he may have faced pressure from Dzenis and Lobe. Did he feel shy or even ashamed about his original identity?

  The question that loomed largest was how my father had maintained his silence all this time. I began to reflect on a childhood spent in his company, wondering whether there was anything, in retrospect, that might provide a clue.

  I reached the riverbank and sat down opposite the wooden footbridge that traversed the river. I started to nod off in the warm afternoon sun, and as I did, I remembered a favorite family anecdote.

  My father loved two-up, the illegal game of chance and mateship that he’d first learned to play while on the road in the Australian outback. Two or three times a year he would suddenly announce that he was gripped by the urge to “play the pennies.” My mother would never let us wait up for him because he rarely returned before midnight. However, one night my father failed to return at the expected hour. At around 2:00 a.m. I was roused by the sound of my parents’ voices in the kitchen. My father had only just come in, and my mother was making him a cup of tea. As I tiptoed past my brothers to the kitchen, they fell in behind me. I put my ear to the door.

  “That was a close escape,” I heard my mother say. “You were lucky this time.”

  Upon hearing those words, my youngest brother, Andrew, became overexcited. “What happened, Daddy?” he cried out. At the same moment, my brother Martin pushed me forward so that I stumbled into the kitchen and almost fell on the floor.

  My parents jumped in surprise. “In God’s name, what are you boys doing up at this hour?” my mother exclaimed. “Back to bed this instant. The lot of you.”

  “No!” Andrew protested loudly, ignoring our mother. “Tell us about your lucky escape, Daddy.”

  “Well, it was like this,” he said, looking slowly at each of us in turn. “We were all gathered in a circle around the spinner. He had the coins on the paddle and was holding it in the air. The toss was about to begin, so we were all as quiet as mice. You could have heard a pin drop, when suddenly there was a noise, like the whistle of a bird. Only it was the middle of the night.

  “It was the warning signal from Bert, the ‘cockie,’ or watch, who was on lookout upstairs. The police were on their way to raid us. Before we’d even fully taken that in, Bert called out, ‘Crikey, the coppers are already at the door.’

  “Everybody panicked. All hell broke loose! Mayhem. Somebody gave the order ‘out through the back door,’ so all of us made a charge in that direction. There must’ve been more than a hundred of us, and we were all desperately trying to squeeze through the door at the same time. Somehow I made it through and into the backyard. It was almost pitch-black so that I could just make out the figures of men hoisting each other up over the fence. You see, we’re all mates there and we look after each other.

  “Behind us,” my father whispered excitedly, “we could hear the police breaking down the doors of the warehouse, and I thought, ‘This is it. My number’s up,’ when somebody yelled out: ‘Over here. There’s a loose plank. We can get through the fence here.’ With that we all charged over like a swarm of ants.”

  My father’s eyes moved slowly across each of our faces with such dramatic intensity that we all held our breath.

  “But it was just my luck,” he said, his voice unexpectedly dropping a register. “Just as I reached the gap, a fat man jumped in ahead of me. And you wouldn’t believe it, boys: Fatty was stuck.”

  We all squealed with pleasure.

  “Alex,” my mother interrupted him, “don’t talk about the poor chap like that. He can’t help it if he’s overweight.”

  My brothers and I shifted irritably on our stools. Our mother had broken the spell.

  “But that was his nickname,” my father protested. “We all called him that. He didn’t mind in the least. Anyway, where was I?”

  “Fatty’s stuck, Dad,” I said.

  “That’s right. His head and shoulders were on one side of the fence and his enormous bottom and legs were on our side. We were trapped.”

  “What did you do?” Martin asked solemnly.

  “What could we do?” my father answered. “We pushed! We got a good grip on his cheeks and shoved him as hard as we could. But he didn’t budge. He was wedged in so tightly that he began to squeal like a little piggy.

  “By this time, I could hear the cops making their way across the warehouse and heading toward the yard. In the next moment they were at the back door.”

  We were all wide-eyed with terror.

  “I called out one final desperate time,” my father said. “‘Everyone together…one…two…three,’ and we gave Fatty one last big push. Lo and behold, we heard a pop, like a bottle of champagne being opened, and Fatty was flat on his face on the other side of the fence.

  “With that I jumped through. I was free.”

  We all sprang to our feet, cheering. I recalled with clarity how my father then switched to the present tense, heightening the drama of the moment.

  “I make my way in the darkness along the back lane, careful to avoid being caught by the police. There is nobody else around, not a soul. I am totally alone. I have no idea where the other men have gone.

  “Then suddenly I come to a clearing and beyond that is a small park. I am sure that my car is in the street on the other side of the park. It is deadly quiet, and through the trees I can see my car, its surface glistening in the rain.

  “I make a dash for the park. I sneak through the trees. I only have to cross the street and put the key in the lock. It’s now or never. I take a deep breath and run for the car. I do it. I escape…

  “Hey, presto! Here I am!” My father snapped his fingers and smiled.

  My brothers and I leaned back in our chairs, exhausted and relieved.

  The room was silent, and it took several seconds before any of us could rouse ourselves. Finally, it was my mother who made a move.

  “Come on, Alex,” she said. “Let’s get the littlies back to bed.”

  The sound of a jogger crossing the rickety bridge brought me back to the present and I suddenly had a revelation. I was certain that my father’s silence had some connection with his storytelling.

  Everyone who heard my father tell a story appreciated his talents. He had embellished his various tales, usually about his early years in Australia, transforming them into wondrous adventures. If my mother was around at the time, she w
ould castigate my father, playfully saying, “You’ve put the enlarger on again, luv.”

  I sat bolt upright. I’d had a flash of clarity about my father’s two-up story: as he told us about his getaway, he might have been reliving another event whose memory exerted itself so powerfully in him that he spoke of it as if it had only just happened.

  Even though the surface details were different, my father had been reliving the extremity of his escape from his village: his climb through the fence at the back of his house and his journey past the open graves of his neighbors. I shuddered.

  He had found a way to tell us what had happened to him without telling us. Somehow, incredibly, he’d woven a cataclysmic event of his childhood—the separation from his family—into a recent humorous incident. Perhaps the story had denatured his terror and alleviated the pressure of keeping his secret.

  I could see already that without the safety valve of his stories, my father was having more trouble repressing the truth of his childhood than he had perhaps imagined. But this did not in any way compromise the veracity of his words now that he had finally found the courage to speak. To tell his most amazing story, the consummate storyteller would have to abandon the tools of his trade. Although I could not as yet say unequivocally that I was relieved the truth was coming out.

  The flurry and squawking of ducks on the river snapped me back to the current time in a flash. It was twilight, and the meadow was now nearly deserted apart from the occasional solitary cyclist taking a shortcut across the field. I got up and dusted myself off.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ELLI

  I could no longer keep my father’s story to myself. When I was a student I’d become friendly with an Israeli woman at my college. We first met one evening when she was seated across from me in the dining hall.

  She overheard a conversation I was having with a colleague and detected my slight Aussie accent. Later she approached me and introduced herself over coffee in the common room. Her name was Elli. She was a historian keenly interested in issues related to Judaism.

  She mimicked my Australian accent while telling me that she’d spent some of her teenage years in Sydney—her father had been posted there as an executive for an Israeli import/export business. She told me no more than that, and even as our acquaintanceship grew, I could not get her to open up about her time in Australia.

  I sought out Elli now, thinking that she might understand my predicament. Although the new academic term had not yet begun, I called her on the off chance that she’d already returned from her home in Jerusalem.

  She answered the telephone immediately. “Dearie, you’re back!”

  We exchanged news about our respective travels and then I suggested that we meet for coffee later in the week. Elli must have sensed something in the tone of my voice.

  “You sound worried,” she said, becoming serious. “Is everything okay?”

  “I’ll tell you more when we meet,” I said.

  “As you wish,” she replied.

  We made arrangements to meet at a tearoom on the High.

  Two days later, I waited for her at the appointed time at the rear of the shop. I heard the bell above the door ring and looked up to see Elli struggle into the shop with a carryall full of, I was sure, academic books and journals. She was something of a cross between a bag lady and the stereotypical absentminded professor, but one with a shrewdly appraising expression.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon with Elli doing my best to describe in a coherent manner what my father told me and all that had followed: the question of who Lobe really was, my father’s memories of exterminations, and my inability to unearth the significance of Koidanov and Panok.

  I was impressed and grateful for the extraordinary care Elli took to understand the details of my father’s case. When I had exhausted myself, she was silent for some time. She was clearly mulling something over. Then she reached across the table and took my hand in both of hers. Her grip was firm.

  “Don’t worry, dearie,” she said. I could sense the compassion in her voice. “We’ll get this sorted out. First of all, if your father is Jewish, then these names that he’s held inside him probably have Jewish or perhaps even eastern European Yiddish associations. And I know just the person to help you with that,” she declared decisively. “Frank. A genealogist who specializes in Judaic culture.”

  I jumped at the opportunity to meet Frank, and there and then Elli called him and arranged for me to meet with him the following morning.

  I waited for Frank at the Jericho Café. I’d barely had time to seat myself at an empty table by the window when I saw a motor scooter pull up outside and, somewhat incongruously, a man in his late forties dismount. He was perilously thin and sparrowlike, but his dark hair, dark brooding eyes, and dark beard gave him a rabbinical aura.

  Somehow he must have surmised that I was the individual he was to meet. He waved from the other side of the window, giving me a broad and intelligent smile, and entered with a vital nervous energy. Over coffee I described my father’s story, and it was clear that Frank observed the effect it was having on me.

  “Both my parents lost their families in the war,” he said. “It had a terrible effect on me as well, but you’ve got to learn to live in the light, Mark. Not be consumed by the darkness of the past as some of them have.”

  Frank told me more about his interests in the genealogy and dialects of eastern European Jewry, and I learned of his especial interest in life in the shtetlach before the war. We eventually got down to the question of Panok and Koidanov. Frank was immediately dismissive of my suggestion that either of these words might be my father’s family name. He must have noticed how disheartened I was by his opinion, because he quickly promised that he would investigate them further and get back to me.

  Early the next morning I was woken up by the telephone. Groggy at first, I didn’t recognize the man’s voice at the other end of the line.

  “I was wrong! There was a family of Panoks!” It was Frank. He was so excited that he hadn’t bothered with the formality of a greeting. I was instantly alert.

  “It’s a very uncommon name for Jews,” he continued, without pausing for breath, “but there was one extended family of Jews who went by that name. They lived mainly on the outskirts of Minsk, the capital of Belarus.”

  I started to shiver uncontrollably. I was shocked and greedy for more good news.

  “Anything on Koidanov?” I asked, my teeth slightly chattering.

  “Not a scrap,” he replied, “but I’m working on it. I’ll get back to you as soon as I know more.”

  I thanked Frank profusely and hung up.

  I lay back on my bed. For the first time in quite a while I felt optimistic. “Was my father a Panok?” I asked aloud. Perhaps he was from Minsk. A Belarusian. I knew nothing about the country. But what was Koidanov?

  My thoughts were racing. I was far too restless to return to sleep, so I decided that I would head to the Bodleian Library in town, where I would look for a detailed map of Belarus. I was climbing the stairs to the bathroom to take a shower when suddenly the telephone rang again. It was just eight o’clock, far too early for a regular caller. “It must be Frank again,” I told myself, “already back with another clue.”

  I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. At first I thought that there was nobody at the other end of the line. Then I heard a familiar voice.

  It was my mother.

  Immediately I knew that something was wrong. It was the first time that she had ever telephoned me in Oxford.

  “Is that you, Mark?” I heard her ask for a second time.

  “Mum?”

  “It’s your father, luv,” she whispered, sounding worried.

  “What’s up?” I snapped, fearing the worst from a call such as this.

  She hesitated. I could hear the sound of her breathing as she struggled to say something. “He won’t stop crying.” She choked on her words for a moment. “Your father’s been crying f
or two days. Every time I ask him what’s wrong he just shakes his head and says, ‘All the memories are coming back to me now. I can’t stop them.’ That’s all he says, over and over. Nothing else.

  “He’s been unsettled for months now. But it’s gotten worse recently.”

  My mother began to sob gently. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” she murmured. Then she regained her composure. “You don’t know what this is about, do you, luv?”

  “No, Mum,” I said quietly, “I don’t.”

  It was clear that my father had still not told my mother anything. I wanted to tell her what I knew, if only to allay her fears, but I worried that the truth would devastate her. My father had put me in an untenable position.

  My mother spoke again: “Your father said he wants to talk to you in person. You should be here.”

  I didn’t go to the Bodleian that day. Maps would have to wait. Instead I headed back to Heathrow airport that evening to begin my long journey home.

  PART II

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HOME, AGAIN

  My father was waiting for me in the arrivals terminal at Melbourne airport, as he had some months ago. He was less buoyant than he’d been and was silent during the entire journey home. This time it was the tape that had become the lodestone of our relationship, and until it was broached we wouldn’t have much to say to each other.

  I had a strong sense of déjà vu as the car turned into the driveway. My mother waited on the porch and ushered me into the kitchen to give me breakfast. It was as if I’d never been away, as if nothing had changed. In one respect at least, this turned out to be true: my father had still not revealed his past either to my mother or to anyone else we knew. Instead, he had videotaped a testimony at a Holocaust center.

  I’d slept well on the flight and didn’t feel the slightest bit jet-lagged. Indeed, the bright sunshine of the Australian September spring morning energized me. I chatted with my mother before heading outside to my father’s workshop with a cup of tea. I crossed the yard, calling out in advance, “Tea’s up!”