The Mascot

by Mark Kurzem

  My mother and I were left alone to face each other.

  “It’s a lovely day, Mum,” I said enthusiastically. “Let’s go down to Williamstown Beach.”

  We lived a couple of miles from the bay at Williamstown, one of the oldest parts of Melbourne. I parked on the foreshore close to where my mother had spotted a vacant bench. We made our way to it and sat down. We were silent, listening to the sounds of the waves lapping gently against the small boats moored just offshore.

  Suddenly, out of the blue, my mother spoke.

  “I’ve seen the tape,” she said. “I know now what was bothering your father. All those years, he never said a word.”

  My mother told me that after I had left the house to meet Alice my father had simply left the tape on the kitchen table, telling her that he was off on an errand and that she should watch the tape while he was out.

  “Your father didn’t return until nearly four o’clock,” she said. “He went straight to his workshop. I tried to speak with him, but he refused to say a single word about it. There was no choice, I left him to it. You know how obstinate he is—he’ll only talk when he’s ready to.

  “Moments later the phone rang. It was Martin, and I’d no sooner hung up with him than Andrew called,” my mother said.

  Both my brothers had been at home when my father appeared on their doorsteps. Without even exchanging pleasantries, he had passed over copies of the tape. As with me, he had given neither of them a clue about the tape’s contents.

  Certainly my father was a shy man, and he must have known that its contents would be traumatic for us, but nonetheless it struck me as perversely reticent the way he had gone about revealing his past to us by videotape.

  “How did Martin and Andrew react?” I asked my mother.

  She turned away from the view of the bay so that I could see her full expression. It was clear that she was disturbed.

  “Andrew was too upset to talk about it very much,” she said quietly. “It really shocked him.”

  “And Martin?” I asked.

  “Martin hardly said a word about it,” my mother said. “He told me about the tape and then changed the topic. But that’s Martin’s way. He keeps things to himself.

  “Your father was like a man possessed yesterday,” my mother continued. “Not long after he returned home, he announced that he was going to visit Mirdza and Edgars.

  “‘Now?’ I asked. ‘Are you going to tell them?’ He was desperate to have it all out in the open.

  “‘Will you come with me?’ he asked.

  “Of course, I couldn’t let him go by himself: Edgars is a reasonable man, but I worried about how Mirdza would react. This would be difficult for her to accept. He was so impatient to get over there that he jumped in the car and waited for me there—beeping the horn several times to hurry me up.

  “Mirdza answered our knock. She was startled to see us standing on her doorstep, but welcomed us inside. Edgars was home as well, reading the newspaper in the kitchen.

  “Your father didn’t even wait for Mirdza to prepare coffee. We’d barely sat down when he started telling them his story.

  “Mirdza and Edgars sat in silence staring at him the entire time. I’m not even sure how much they absorbed of what he was saying; he was speaking so quickly and jumping from event to event. When he’d finally finished, they looked shell-shocked. They didn’t say a word.

  “Then after several moments your father looked at his watch. ‘We’d better be going,’ he said. ‘It’s almost seven. Mark might be home by now.’

  “Your father rose, and as he did so, he produced a copy of the videotape from his case. ‘Let me leave this with you,’ he said, putting it on the table.

  “With that, we were out the front door and on our way home. I felt sorry for Mirdza and Edgars as they waved us off from their front gate. Your father had swept in like a whirlwind and then disappeared as quickly.

  “What I don’t understand,” my mother said, turning to look at me, “is that I saw on the tape that it’d been recorded over two months ago. Why didn’t he tell me sooner? He’s kept it from me all the years we’ve known each other, and even after he’d told those characters on the tape?”

  I had no answer to her question.

  “How long have you known, Mark?” she asked.

  I’d been put in an awkward position once again. I did not want to tell my mother about my father’s visit to Oxford. Somehow his muteness about the past was one thing, but its offense would be worsened by the revelation of a secret journey to the other side of the world.

  “Just this week, too,” I answered instead.

  “Still, for better or worse, we all know now,” she said. “But he owes people more of an explanation than simply thrusting a tape at them, don’t you think?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s funny,” my mother said pensively on the way home from Williamstown. “You know how your father’s been about chocolate all his life? He wouldn’t share it with anybody, or if he did, he had to be in charge, handing out a piece at a time.”

  My father had always been a “chocoholic.” He would hoard supplies of chocolate, hiding little stashes all over the house. His addiction to it had become a family joke.

  “A few weeks ago,” my mother said, “he gave it up completely. In one go. I came home one day and found him clearing out his various stashes. Bars and slabs and boxes of the stuff were piled up high like a treasure. I thought he’d lost his mind.

  “‘In God’s name, what are you doing?’ I asked.

  “‘Disposing of it,’ he said. ‘You can have it. Or give it to the grandkids, if you want.’

  “‘But why on earth?’ I asked, but your father only shrugged. ‘Lost my taste for it,’ he said.”

  We turned into the driveway. “You okay, Mum?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll be as right as rain. Just need time to take it all in.”

  I admired her attitude, but I wondered if she would be “as right as rain.” Her mood was somber and she shook her head resignedly. “This world…” she said.

  I don’t believe that she ever really recovered, despite her best efforts to put on a brave face. I still wonder if it would have been easier for her to deal with my father’s revelations if I’d not been so fearful of her emotions during those days.

  Now that my mother and the rest of the family knew about my father’s past, it was as if a brief Indian summer had descended on our house: the curtains had been tied back and the windows thrown open to let in the fresh, mild air.

  My father’s decision to speak gave me the tacit go-ahead to begin a more concerted search. Two mornings after he had made his disclosures, I was reading the newspaper in the living room when I heard what sounded like a minor explosion in front of our house.

  “What on earth?” I heard my mother exclaim as she came into the room, hurried to the front window, and peered through the curtains.

  When I joined her there, I saw a dilapidated car shudder to a stop.

  The driver’s door opened and Alice Prosser got out, collected her bag from the passenger’s side, and struggled up the driveway. She was carrying a rolled-up map and a number of books under her arm.

  “Poor thing,” my mother said sympathetically. “She looks like she’s in constant pain with that leg of hers. I wonder who she is…she must want your father to repair something for her.”

  Evidently, my mother had no idea who Alice was.

  “Come away from the window or she’ll see us staring at her,” my mother said, giving me a nudge. “I’ll get your father. You look after the lady.”

  “Alice!” I exclaimed as I opened the door. “This is a surprise. Come in.” At that moment I heard my father enter the kitchen.

  It was an awkward moment. I could see my mother wondering about this goblinlike woman whom we’d befriended.

  “This is my wife, Patricia,” my father said. Alice reached out for my mother
’s hand. My mother seemed momentarily nonplussed.

  “Alice has been helping me with my story,” my father added, noticing the question in my mother’s eyes.

  “Oh,” she said, before collecting herself and offering Alice a chair.

  “Fine to smoke?” Alice asked. When my mother nodded, she got out her tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette.

  “Coffee, Alice?” my mother asked.

  “Please, Patricia. May I call you Pat?”

  “Yes, you go ahead, dear.” My mother seemed to have shed her suspicious attitude.

  Alice placed her hand on top of the pile of books.

  “I haven’t had a chance to look at these yet,” she said. “The target is Koidanov. We’ve all got to put our minds to it.”

  “I’m not clever enough for that,” my mother said from where she was preparing coffee. “I’ll make the drinks and sandwiches instead.” After she brought our coffees to the table, she retreated to her territory on the other side of the kitchen counter, near the stove and the sink.

  In the end, the discovery of Koidanov was surprisingly easy, if not quite straightforward. Once we had finished our coffee, Alice reached for one of her many books, all of which were written in either Yiddish or Russian. She popped her reading glasses on the end of her nose, put a pen behind her ear, and got down to business. Hunched over the table and squinting at the pages of the book in front of her, she reminded me of a Damon Runyon character, perhaps a bookie taking bets on my father’s past and future.

  “Let me see…” she said, going through various possible spellings, “Koidanov…Kuidnov…Koydanev.” Within about ten minutes she had found mention of Koidanov in a list of the various samulbuch that had been published. “A samulbuch,” she explained, “is a collection of historical information—photos, anecdotes, essays, and memoirs—that were kept by the Jewish communities of many towns and villages in eastern Europe.

  “Here,” she said, pointing at a word on the list. “There’s one for a village called Koidanov in the Minsk region in Belarus. Aah…I know why you couldn’t find it on any map. It states that just before the Second World War the name of the village was changed to Dzerzhinsk. Named after the ignominious founder of the Cheka. Stalin must have been keen to give the place a more Soviet flavor.”

  In the atlas I’d scoured with my father nights earlier I had in fact come across the name Dzerzhinsk.

  Alice shifted her attention to another book among the stack on the table. This one contained maps of prewar Europe, and she consulted one in particular. She had no difficulty in pinpointing Koidanov, and we gathered around her, staring at the spot where she had placed her finger. I was unsure. Koidanov lay some distance to the northeast of Stolbtsi—the town that my father thought might have been referred to as “S” by the soldiers and the site of their base camp, not far from where they claimed to have “discovered” him.

  But it was possible, especially if my father had wandered for months on end in a wide circle before being picked up by the Latvian police brigade in the vicinity of Stolbtsi. Taken there by Kulis, who received permission there from Lobe to adopt the boy as the troop’s mascot, he was tidied up, given a uniform, and could easily have been dispatched to Slonim, where the massacre had occurred. Of course, it was feasible only if my father had been picked up by the soldiers earlier than they claimed. Professor M. at Oxford had conjectured that any extermination in my father’s village would have to have occurred before December 1941 if my father was also to have witnessed the Slonim massacre, which has been variously dated from late 1941 onward. That is, of course, assuming that the Soviet accusation against Commander Lobe and the Latvian police battalion was justified. Or perhaps my father had been picked up in June 1942, as Lobe and others claimed, and was not a witness to the massacre at Slonim but to another unnamed incident.

  I scanned the map further to reconfirm what my father and I had already discovered: that to the west of Stolbtsi lay Slonim. Was this distance also too far for the Eighteenth to have ventured on duty?

  I cast a quick glance at my father, who was already staring at me. He must have had a similar train of thought. I was on the verge of commenting on this when my father indicated with his eyes and an almost imperceptible shake of his head that I should say nothing.

  Fortunately, Alice hadn’t noticed our exchange. She continued to stare at the name on the map as if it would somehow magically transform into a window through which we could see Koidanov, past and present. We were all buoyed by the discovery that Koidanov was an actual place. Alice rifled enthusiastically through her books, trying to learn more about Koidanov, while we hovered expectantly around her.

  My mother placed another cup of strong black coffee on the table for Alice, who sipped it gratefully. Then she reached across for another of her tomes, this one written in Russian. In it she found a brief reference to Dzerzhinsk and a massacre that had occurred there on October 21, 1941. It spoke of the killing of sixteen hundred patriots by Fascists during the Great Patriotic War.

  Alice grunted in annoyance. “In other words,” she said, “translating from Sovietspeak, sixteen hundred Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.”

  “What do you mean?” my father asked.

  “The Soviets didn’t acknowledge the Holocaust,” Alice explained. “Exterminations of this sort were just called crimes against patriotic citizens. And the Second World War was referred to as the Great Patriotic War.”

  She leaned back in her chair and took another sip of coffee. “The next thing we need to do is to establish contact with Koidanov. I have one contact in Minsk: Mrs. Reizman, a historian who works at a Holocaust research center there. We’ve exchanged letters a couple of times.” She plucked her address book out of her bag.

  “Here it is,” she said. “If anyone has access to information about Koidanov, then Frida Reizman will be the one.”

  Alice rolled another cigarette and took a long drag.

  “Why don’t we write to her now?” she suggested.

  “This minute?” My father seemed shaken by the immediacy of it.

  “What do they say in English?” Alice asked, looking at me cheekily. “Strike something while it’s hot…”

  “Strike while the iron is hot,” I corrected her.

  “Okay…Okay,” she said. “We need to get all the details of your story written down and then send it off to her.”

  My father’s face started to brighten at the possibility opening before him. He nodded in agreement.

  I felt my mother looking at me from across the kitchen. She gave a smile when our eyes met, excited in her own cautious way. She reached into one of the drawers under the kitchen counter and pulled out a pad of paper and envelopes.

  I sat alone in the living room, listening to the soft murmur of my father’s and Alice’s voices as they composed the letter. I began to plan the logistics of the journey to Minsk. My thoughts were interrupted when I heard Alice call my name. I went to the kitchen, where my father sat anxiously by her side.

  “It’s finished,” she said, looking up at me. “Tell me what you think. You’re the young man with the good education.”

  I laughed, and returned to the living room to proofread the letter. It was fine, describing as much as it could of the details we had to go on—the words “Koidanov” and “Panok” and a description of the massacre my father had witnessed in his village.

  I heard the sound of Alice’s walking stick on the polished kitchen floor as she hobbled around, stretching her legs. Her face appeared around the doorway, followed by my father’s.

  “You approve?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I replied.

  “It’s great, Alice,” my father added.

  Alice smiled shyly, pleased with our praise.

  “You must post it yourself,” she said to my father. “It will be symbolic.”

  “Do you think something will come of it?” my father asked. His words had a hopeful tone, but Alice only shrugged.

  �
�Time will tell,” she said.

  “I’ll take it to the post office straight away,” my father said, already heading for the front door. “Be back soon.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I called after him, grabbing my jacket.

  I tried to keep up with my father’s stride; shamefully, he was in better shape.

  “Why didn’t you want me to mention Slonim to Alice?” I asked, already slightly breathless.

  “I don’t want Alice to think that I was associated with something like that,” my father answered, maintaining his speedy pace.

  “You mean suspect that you might’ve killed people yourself?”

  My father nodded.

  “You didn’t, did you, Dad?”

  It was a question I had always dreaded asking him. I was relieved that we were both facing ahead, and I didn’t have to look him in the face.

  “Never,” he said. I saw him shake his head.

  “Never,” he repeated. “Not once did I lay a hand on another person, even though the soldiers tried to get me to do so. Much to their amusement I would always run away, petrified.”

  We continued to walk side by side.

  “There was one incident, the worst of all,” my father said quietly, as if he feared the neighborhood would hear him. “We were on patrol in a forest. I’m not sure where. The soldiers had captured a Jewish lad—he must have been with the partisans. He was no more than sixteen or seventeen, a teenager, really. They bound his hands together and led him back to our camp.

  “When we got there, they tied him to a tree with a long piece of rope. Then they started firing their pistols on the ground around his feet to make him jump and dance around the tree. They were laughing, as if it were a game.

  “I couldn’t bear to look. I’d caught a glimpse of the terror in the boy’s face. Just as I was trying to slip away, one of the soldiers thrust a pistol into my hand. ‘Shoot!’ he shouted at me. ‘Shoot!’

  “They all began clapping their hands together, chanting ‘Shoot’ over and over.