by Mark Kurzem
My father paused. “I’ll skip the pleasantries,” he said, “and go to the nitty-gritty.”
I watched him as he scanned the page. “Here we are,” he said and began to read again.
“‘Recently I was pleased to meet your son Mark. A fine boy! We spoke a lot about the war, and I told him of the special bond between us. I am sure that there is no need to remind you of it, my little Corporal…’”
My father raised his head and looked at me. “Can you believe that?” he said, slightly astonished. “He called me corporal, as if to remind me that I still belonged to the battalion and that he was my commanding officer.”
My father didn’t seem to need any reminder. I had noticed that even though Lobe had been a civilian for many decades, my father still called him “Commander.”
He took up where he had left off.
“‘We were all very fond of you. Mr. Dzenis loved you—you were the son he’d always wanted. His wife, Emily, adored you. Mrs. Lobe and I did, too.
“‘When I said farewell to you in Riga, we agreed to bury the past. But I am worried that one day before too long, you, Corporal, will forget your promise to me. It would break my lifelong trust in you if you spoke of your memories now. Besides, memory is a strange thing. It can play tricks on all of us, so that we are unsure of what we remember and what we do not.
“‘Do you really want to destroy our reputations? You cannot betray all that many of us have done for you. Your debt can only be repaid by loyalty—nothing else!’”
My father ceased reading. “That’s it, more or less.” He folded the letter slowly and returned it to its envelope.
In the ensuing silence, my mother’s faint snoring could be heard from their room on the far side of the house. Suddenly the kitchen clock on the wall caught my father’s attention.
“Crikey, Mark,” he exclaimed. “It’s six a.m. The world is going topsy-turvy. We should both get some sleep.” He rose from the table.
“One thing, Dad…” I stopped him.
My father looked at me expectantly.
“Was I right?” I said.
He looked confused. “Right about what?”
“Would you have wanted revenge?”
My father did not hesitate. He shook his head in dismay. “Revenge?” he said. “What’s that worth? Nothing! It only makes you bitter and sick inside—and as bad as them! I never started out by wanting to point the finger at anybody.”
“What about justice, Dad?” I asked.
“Justice? I don’t even know what justice would mean for these sick, elderly men. Better to let them face their own conscience, if they have any.”
I rose to join my father.
Just then the kitchen door opened and my mother peered in. She must have heard our voices in the kitchen.
“You’re both up early,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FEAR
At times during my stay in Melbourne my father appeared willing to reveal more about his past to me. Then abruptly he would turn in on himself. Sometimes he seemed so worn down by the burden of his secrets that, irresistibly, the floatsam of his memory would float to the surface of his consciousness like debris from a submarine disaster.
He still hadn’t told my mother anything. Nonetheless, she seemed to tire very easily and frequently went to her room in the early evening. My father and I often found the night stretching out awkwardly before just the two of us.
After saying good night to my mother, my father would turn the television off and quietly retrieve his case from where he had placed it outside their bedroom door so that he wouldn’t disturb my mother’s sleep. Case in hand, he would pass me in the living room and head for the kitchen.
I would listen as he seated himself at the kitchen table and switched on the reading lamp as if to announce that he was ready to speak and that I should jump to attention and join him. Perversely I would remain seated, vainly attempting to assert my independence. The moment I heard the familiar clicking sound of his case unlocking, however, I would waver, then rise to join him.
Later that week, as I entered the kitchen, I noticed that he had opened a thick volume on the table before him. He furrowed his brow and squinted at the book.
He concentrated so intently on one page that he didn’t even bother to acknowledge my presence with his usual grunt.
I sat down beside him at the table. “Dad?” I whispered.
He gave a slight start.
“What’s the book?” I nodded toward it.
He looked at the cover as if he, too, were noticing it for the first time. “An atlas,” he mumbled.
“Koidanov and Panok?”
He regarded me silently for several moments.
“The most important thing is I’ve got to find out what these words mean,” he said. He sat, isolated and discouraged, in the small circle of light thrown by his reading lamp.
“Dad,” I said. “I promised you in London that I would help you.”
He nodded but continued to scan the book in front of him.
I hadn’t yet told my father that I had begun my own investigations in Oxford. I kept silent principally because I felt I’d dug around without his permission.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said, rubbing his fists over his eyes liked an overtired child. “Like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
He sighed heavily. Then, without looking up at me, he pushed the atlas across the table in my direction. “Pages twenty-three and twenty-four,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Eastern Europe. See if you can spot Koidanov or Panok.”
I turned to the pages in question. They were densely inscribed with a vast array of foreign words tumbling over each other higgledy-piggledy. “The first thing we’ll need is a magnifying glass!” I exclaimed, trying to make light of the situation.
My father didn’t laugh.
Sobered by his response, I buried my head in the book once again before concluding aloud, “We’re going to need far more detailed maps than this, for starters.”
I decided that it was time to tell my father what Frank had discovered in Oxford. “In any case,” I said, “we won’t find Panok anywhere on these pages.”
My father gave me a questioning look.
I hesitated for a moment. I felt cautious about Frank’s revelation—I had heard nothing further from Frank since my arrival in Melbourne, and there was nothing to confirm that my father was a Panok. I feared that my father would jump at even the simple likelihood that he was a Panok and that he would be bitterly disappointed if we couldn’t prove it.
“Come on,” he urged, becoming impatient.
Cautiously I told my father about what Frank had unearthed, that there was a family of Jews known as Panok who had lived in the vicinity of Minsk in the prewar period. And just as I had feared, my father’s face reddened with excitement.
“I told you, son,” he said, rising from his chair and moving around the room. “I remembered these words for a reason. I bet it’s my name. I must be a Panok.”
My father repeated the word several times, savoring it, while he paced back and forth. Then he sat down again, and I saw that he was so moved by the news that his entire body was trembling slightly. Without thinking about the usual physical reserve between us, I reached across and gripped his forearm to steady him and to get him to look at me directly.
At that exact moment my father jerked backward and removed a handkerchief from his pocket. He threw back his head and held the cloth against his nose, which had suddenly, as if under pressure from the news, begun to bleed profusely.
“Some tissues,” came his muffled order.
I fetched some and then waited in silence, watching him. The bleeding was so strong and voluminous that it took several minutes to subside. When it did, my father immediately picked up where he’d left off, still gripping his bloodied handkerchief.
“I must be a Panok,” he said emphatically. “Why else would I remember this word?�
��
I smiled at him, but my father must have sensed my inner reserve. He stared at me shrewdly. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.
“I don’t want us to jump the gun,” I said. “That’s all. We should take it one step at a time. Find a way to confirm whether you are a Panok or not.”
He looked at me, as if to dismiss my caution, and then reached for the atlas. “Minsk, you said?” he asked. “Where the hell is that?” He stared at the open page in front of him.
“Belarus,” I answered, deciding to feign enthusiasm rather than dampen his spirits. I pointed to a spot on the map. “Here it is.”
After Frank’s discovery, and prior to my sudden departure for Australia, I had crammed in a small amount of reading about the country. I now recounted it to my father, who sat attentively opposite me.
“The country is falling apart,” I began. A former satellite state of the Soviet Union, Belarus is now ruled by a despotic Communist dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko has chosen to align the country economically and culturally with its Russian master. It seems to be the only country in eastern Europe not to have benefited from the collapse of the Soviet empire. It is still impoverished and largely underdeveloped.
My father’s attention began to waver, and he interrupted me. “Let’s get back to this Koidanov. It could be where I’m from and, if so, it must be somewhere here if I am a Panok…” My father hunched over the atlas like a diamond merchant over a jewel. After several minutes, he leaned back. “No luck,” he said. He looked tired and drawn, and his optimism seemed suddenly to have faded.
“We’ll crack this, Dad,” I said feebly, trying to reassure him despite my own feeling of discouragement.
“I’ve already waited a lifetime,” my father said ironically, then fell silent.
I took advantage of the hiatus to change the topic to one I’d been dying to raise. “Now that there’s even the slightest chance of a name,” I said, “you must tell Mum and the boys. Now.” I was shocked by my challenge.
My father shrugged and stared straight ahead, avoiding my gaze. In the odd, flat silence between us I waited for him to say something. In the end all he said was, “I’ll tell them sometime soon.”
“What’s wrong with now?” I demanded.
My father pretended not to have heard me and instead turned the pages of the atlas as if searching for something.
“This can’t go on,” I insisted. “They deserve to know.”
His eyes began to move slowly from one object to another in the room, as if he were keenly interested in each.
“You’re avoiding even listening to me?”
“I didn’t hear you,” my father blustered. But I knew that he had.
Annoyed, I said, “I can’t keep covering for you.” Then I changed tack. “What’s bothering you, Dad?” I asked, trying to sound conciliatory.
My father shifted in his seat. He closed the atlas and reached for his case, snapping it shut and placing it between us on the table. His head dropped forward as if he were being forced to own up to a felony.
“It’s that I am…” he said, “you know…”
I waited for him to finish the sentence. But he didn’t.
“You’re what?”
“Jewish.”
He winced at being forced to say the word.
I didn’t understand.
“Will they accept it?” he asked, as if ashamed. “Your mother didn’t know she was marrying a Jew.”
“I don’t think that it will make a scrap of difference to Mum,” I said. “What will disturb her is that you kept your past from her for so long.”
My father gave me a sharp look but then nodded, grim-faced. “I’m worried that it’ll be too much for her,” he said. “She’s not strong at the moment.”
I’d noticed this myself. I had never seen my mother so low-spirited. “Still no idea what’s wrong?” I asked.
My father shook his head. “She feels weak and unable to breathe,” he replied. “She’s been to the doctor, but he can’t find anything wrong with her.”
I wondered whether it was her intuition that something was wrong with my father that was causing her symptoms. My mother had a keen loyalty to my father and rather than confront him and bring a matter to light—she was awkward with emotional language and mistrusted it—she chose to internalize her doubts.
“Martin and Andrew will be fine about it,” I said. “When will you tell them?”
My father held his hands together as if praying and then rested them on his case.
“This week then,” he said with finality. “The same time as I tell Mum. God knows how Martin will react…”
My father noticed my puzzled look.
“Think about it,” he said. “Martin’s married to a German girl.” I could see that he was uneasy about the possibility of her discomfort. My father screwed up his face.
“It’s not your problem,” I said tersely.
“I don’t want to make him feel awkward. Or anybody, for that matter. Think of Uncle’s family. Mirdza, Edgars, and their children. All the other Latvians who’ve helped me. They’ll say that I’ve betrayed all their kindness. And what about other Latvian nationalists—you know, some of the old soldiers have threatened me before.”
I did understand my father’s reluctance. I feared, too, that their oft-expressed patriotism for the mother country would blind some of the Latvians to the truth and provoke their condemnation. My father would risk losing the last remnants of the only family he had known as a boy. But my intensifying desire that the truth come out fueled in me a new bravado. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” I snapped. “If they can’t accept you, then screw them!”
My father rubbed the back of his neck.
“There’s more to this, isn’t there?” I said.
“What?”
“About being Jewish…”
He nodded. “I can’t explain it,” he said in a low voice. My father gripped his head in his hands, with his elbows resting on the table.
“Are you afraid of being Jewish?”
My father raised his head and looked at me sharply. I had hit a raw nerve.
“I don’t know, son,” he said. “All the time I was with the soldiers they spoke of Jews as vermin. Jews were evil, they said. I had to listen to this day in and day out—and remain silent—until it was drummed into my soul, until I felt ashamed of being Jewish.”
With their insults against Jews and, more frighteningly, in “Aktionen,” or “actions,” against them, the soldiers and other Latvians had terrified the little boy in their midst. Worse, perhaps, they had shamed this child to his very essence. Not only did my father have to hide his identity from others, he’d had to hide away from himself for all these years. It was a terrible self-obliteration.
My father hesitated, struggling to describe something else.
“When I summoned the courage, or stupidity—I don’t know what you’d call it—and went to the Holocaust center, I’d imagined that the shame would lift. But it didn’t. Somehow within myself I didn’t feel comfortable there, as if I’d betrayed my Jewishness. I was somehow unworthy of being Jewish, even though I’d been born Jewish, and had no right to speak about who I was. By the time I’d left the center, I realized that I was completely and utterly trapped by who I was. I felt doubly cursed by my fate.”
I felt almost uncontrollable anger rising at what a child living with a hidden identity must have gone through. Over fifty years later, it seemed that he was still struggling with himself to reclaim it.
“What about the interviewers?” I asked. “Did they understand what you’d been through?”
“They had their questions to ask,” my father said.
I realized that he was staring at me intently.
“Perhaps, after all,” he said, “it’s been wise to have stayed silent all these years…”
“I understand, Dad. At quite a few moments my instinct was to tell you to get up and leave the interview.”
&
nbsp; “You felt that, son?” My father’s face became more animated. He seemed relieved that I’d wanted to support him. He looked down at his hands.
“I couldn’t bear it,” he said. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I just fled. I can’t remember clearly what happened after that. I didn’t black out, but it is a blur.
“The next thing I do remember clearly was being on the street. I had enough sense to make it to my car parked on the other side. I got in and locked the doors, but I wasn’t capable of driving anywhere. And that’s when somebody knocked on the car window. A woman. She introduced herself as Alice Prosser.
“Will you meet her?” my father asked. “She’s a Ukrainian Jew from Odessa. She came to Australia in the early 1970s as a political refugee. She won’t go into much about what happened to her. All that she was willing to tell me was that she’d been arrested there, declared an undesirable, and quickly deported. After being shunted from country to country, she finally found asylum here.”
My father paused. “I’m sure they tortured her,” he said quietly. “Anyway, Alice is a volunteer at the Holocaust center, and that’s where I met her. You know what she told me?” he asked and didn’t wait for my response. “That I have the ‘true spirit of a survivor.’
“Those were her exact words. I’ve never thought of myself in that way. Imagine her saying that to me after all that she’d been through herself!”
“Too bad those interviewers didn’t seem more sympathetic,” I couldn’t restrain myself from commenting.
“They had their questions to ask,” my father repeated.
I remained unconvinced.
“They’ve been made bitter by their suffering,” my father said gently. “You can’t blame them.”
I found his generosity of spirit hard to accept—even though I was not surprised by it. I only wished that he was more forgiving toward himself.
“I told her about you,” my father said. “She wants to meet you.”
I sensed that he had already set the wheels in motion for a meeting with Alice, and I was annoyed.
“Go on,” he cajoled me. “You won’t regret it.”