Beside them Zachery had fallen to his knees in the sodden earth. The white-bearded man spread his thin arms as if in prayer and stared upwards at the wild thing that was his son. Pip felt a crashing wave of sympathy for the man. What had he done except try to raise his family and look after his farm?
In one final attempt to change fate, Pip put his hands to his mouth and yelled again with all his might, ‘That’s high enough now, Erwin! You come back down! We all care about you, Erwin! We want you down now!’
But his words were stolen by the wind and hurled across the fields.
At the very top section of the tower, the black cables were as thick as legs. Erwin tried to reach them, but there were objects in his way – ceramic insulators, which kept him from his prize. Now he changed his behaviour to something so primal and reckless that Pip thought of an ape in a forest rather than a human being. Erwin reached up, grabbed the girder above his head and rocked his body outwards, again and again. Backwards and forwards he swung. Soles to the churning sky.
With each swing, his feet came closer to that deadly cable. A man of ordinary height could not have swung far enough, but Erwin was so very tall and agile . . .
. . . and at last he swayed outwards one final time, and the tips of his long feet must have made contact with the cables, because in that instant the sky was torn by a colossal eruption of white light. Pip heard an evil sound which he would never forget – the ripping and surging and crackling of a vast sheet of electrical power:
ZZZZZ-Z-Z-Zzzzzz-RR-R-RR-ZZZZ-TTTT-T-T!!!!
See! See! He’s dancing! Erwin is dancing! His body is crackling and phosphorescent, and he’s twisting and shimmying and jiving and dancing. It is the terrible, terrible Dance of Death. And . . . Oh! His body is alight and burning. Who would know that a human body could burn like matchwood?
As Pip stared in revulsion and horror, Erwin’s blackened body dived, beautifully, gracefully, into the morning sky, where the storm was easing and a gentle rain fell. It was a beautiful sight to see a man fly, like Icarus against the delicate lemon sky. And then that great acrobat tumbled and turned over and over in perfect somersaults. He hit the barbed-wire fence, and for a moment Pip thought he would be caught there; he wondered how they would fetch him down. But no! Erwin snagged for just one moment, and then his smoking body tipped over the edge, landing with a gentle thud beside them.
Pip’s nostrils filled with the smell of summer barbecues. Erwin lay right by his feet. Only this was not Erwin. It was not a man at all. The thing beside him was like a large roasted insect – a praying mantis or a huge ant burned in a forest fire – because its legs and arms were at strange, rigid angles, and there were rounded stumps where fingers and feet should be, and his face . . . his face was nothing but a charcoal skull.
In every part of his body and mind Pip felt numb. He wished with all his might that he could unsee what he had seen, and that Hannah and Zachery could unsee it too. Because once it is seen, it is always seen, and in odd unguarded moments throughout his life, Pip would see the flying man as clearly as if he were still that fourteen-year-old boy at the end of the long strange summer of 1963.
It was Hannah who guided him gently away, and her voice was so tender that it penetrated the ugliness and brutality of what they had witnessed. She said, ‘It’s finished. We can walk right away. The tale has ended. The tale has ended now.’
And it was Hannah who found the strength to lead old man Zachery, drenched by rain and tears, like an infant in his drooping long johns. The three mourners walked slowly down the hillside, past the apple trees and across the yard to the farmhouse, where Hannah sat Zachery in the kitchen and fixed him hot sweet tea, while Pip rolled him cigarettes and answered Lilybelle’s tinkling bell.
The police officers arrived later that morning, and an ambulance with black windows drove right up the path to the barn, although the wheels spun in the mud and had to be freed with shovels. With their boots sticking in the oozing clay, the men carried a stretcher across the fields to the tower, where they collected the strange charcoal sculpture that lay there. And Pip could have sworn that two of the officers and one of the ambulance drivers were Klansmen.
The authorities were baffled about why Erwin should choose to end his life in that violent way; but everyone who knew him testified that he was always an unstable man.
From that day, Zachery seemed a little older, but somehow a little softer too. ‘Th’ boy’s gawn,’ was all he would say. ‘He died in the jungles o’ ’Nam. Ah don’ never wanna talk ’bout him again.’
And they never did speak of it again, although something very peculiar occurred on the day Erwin died: when Pip came out of the pink bedroom where he had spent hours comforting Lilybelle, he walked into the living room and noticed that something was different. It was not the animal heads on the walls, which still stared at him; it was a gentle ticking. And when Pip looked at the mantelpiece above the wood stove, he saw to his astonishment that the clock, which had stopped at twenty to nine on the day Erwin returned from the war, had started again. At the precise moment Erwin fell from the tower the old clock had begun to tick, slowly and steadily, as if time had restarted at Dead River Farm.
Pip and Hannah stayed three more days to help Zachery and Lilybelle in that difficult time. Pip helped the old man to build a bonfire of the flags and nooses and Klan material from Erwin’s room. The one thing he took, with Zachery’s permission, was a small rucksack in which he began to pack his few belongings for the journey ahead.
On a golden afternoon in late September, Pip and Hannah prepared to take their leave. One last time they went up to the valley, to retrieve the cookie jar; pausing for a moment by the apple trees to gaze down at the farmyard, small and quaint as one of Lilybelle’s paintings.
Behind the red barn, Hannah found that her hidden track was almost overgrown with a late spurt of shoots and flowers caused by the storm.
As they approached the valley, Pip caught an unfamiliar sound through the trees. The place had always been so silent, but now he heard a gurgling and rushing from far below. Sprinting down the slope to the valley floor, they were amazed to find water, rushing and tumbling head over heels through the valley – the Dead River had begun to flow.
Hannah laughed in wonder – ‘Take a look, Pip! Can you believe your eyes? I reckon they call it Livin’ River now!’
Pip was not listening. A terrible thought had crossed his mind – suppose the river had swept away the cookie jar with his great expectations inside!
In a moment he had tugged off his sneakers and waded to his waist in cold water. After some effort, he located Hannah’s hiding place beneath the twisted willow. He reached deep into the roots and pulled out, first, the radio, still wrapped in polythene, and then the cookie jar with the flour bag and roll of banknotes rolled safe and dry inside.
As Pip’s father had taught him, the safest bank is a riverbank.
When he returned to his room above the stable block, Pip wrapped the cookie jar carefully inside his few items of clothing and stuffed it deep into the rucksack alongside his book.
What he found heart-wrenchingly sad was saying goodbye to that scruffy faithful old dog, Amigo. What he found harder still was the walk across to the farmhouse to take his leave of Lilybelle. But to his astonishment, as he climbed the steps to the porch, the screen door creaked, and there she stood, on her own two legs, with a walking stick in each hand. Lilybelle filled the doorframe from side to side, but her doll-face shone bright.
‘Ah had ter see you off,’ she crooned. ‘Ah jes’ couldn’t lay in bed when mah fav’rite people wuz departin’.’
‘Lil’belle! You’re walking!’ shouted Hannah rushing to her side.
‘Ah’m walkin’, you’re tawkin’ – ain’t no end o’ miracles!’ And she gathered the children to her mountainous bosom and squeezed them until Pip thought he would suffocate in the cologne-soaked warmth of her flesh.
Then Pip went over to Zachery, in his usual place on the
porch, with a cigarette in hand and Amigo at his feet.
‘Mr Zachery, I’d like a word with you, sir.’
‘Say what ye have t’, boy.’
‘I wanna thank you for the kindness you have shown me, sir. Also . . . I don’t wanna cause no inconvenience, but I would be obliged if you would release me and Hannah from our employment.’
‘One o’ ye don’ tawk, an’ one o’ ye use twenny words when faive will do. Listen, boy, if ye wanna go, then go. Me an’ Lilybelle’s perf’ly capable of takin’ care o’ ourselves. Always has bin, always will be. So go on, skedaddle . . . vamoose!’
But as Pip turned to leave, Zachery grabbed his arm and hissed in his ear, ‘Gonna miss ye when ye gawn, boy. Gonna miss th’ both o’ yous.’
‘We’ll miss you too, sir. Truly we will. It seems long ago now, and maybe you don’t recall, but when you collected me from St Joseph’s, you wanted to shake my hand. I . . . I guess I was kinda wary. Wal, I hope it ain’t too late, Mr Zach . . .’
The boy spat on his palm and firmly shook the old man’s hand.
‘Snee, hee, hee!’ said Zachery.
Then they walked away – the boy with the pack on his back, the girl with the guitar. Hand in hand towards the mauve mountains.
48
This Is How the Tale Begins . . .
Well now, do you hear that whispering? Perhaps it’s the seagulls calling, or the waves on the shore at Dingle Bay, or perhaps it’s the voice of the wind. See, my voice is the voice you have always known . . .
And now it’s time to awake . . .
I’m going to count from one to ten, and you might want to gently stretch your arms . . . One . . . two . . . three . . .
It’s almost time to close the book . . . four . . . five . . . You will awake feeling strong and happy . . . six . . . seven . . . eight . . . resolved to overcome all adversity and use whatever Gift you possess to live your life . . . and to love . . .
Nine . . . ten . . .
Wide awake now . . . The Hypnotist’s tale is over. But yours has just begun . . .
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I didn’t mean to write The Hypnotist. I wanted to tell a different story all together. The story I had in mind traced my own family history, beginning way back in Persia in the 1700s when our first known ancestor, Jacob Sjoesjan, led his bedraggled family across the deserts and mountains to Europe . . . just like so many poor refugees today.
Jacob and his family were Jews in a society that had turned against them. It has always been my worst nightmare to find myself in a world in which the very authorities that are meant to protect you – the police, the government, the army, the law, the educators – are on the side of the mob that is baying for your blood. You are powerless. There is nowhere to turn.
That dystopian scenario often begins with bizarre rules designed to intimidate and humiliate: you must go here, but you cannot go there! So Persian Jews were banned from all but the most menial jobs; theatres and public baths were closed to them; they were not allowed out in the rain or snow in case impurities leached from their skins and infected others. And here’s a familiar one – Jews were forced to sew yellow stars onto their clothing, so that people could be sure they were discriminating against the right minority.
Next comes the violence – the smashing of glass in the night, the splintering of doors as uniformed bullies demand documents, which you never seem to have. Unsurprisingly my ancestors decided to flee and I bet it was a terrible journey. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them died on the roadside – the young ones, the old ones; that’s what usually happens. After many months, the Sjoesjan tribe rolled up at the Dutch-German border. They were dirty and hairy and kind of foreign-looking, as many refugees are. In my imagination it was a snowy night and the official who demanded their names couldn’t understand a single word they were saying. What old Jacob was trying to convey was that Jews didn’t have surnames where they came from; they were named after their town of origin – Sjoesjan was just a funny way of spelling Shushan, their hometown in Persia. All the guard could think about was his warm bed and his warm wife. He stamped their papers and, to save further confusion, replaced their funny name with the sensible name of the border town where they were standing. That town was called Anholt, which suggests to me something like ‘Stop and hand over your papers!’
Jacob’s family took their shiny new surname and settled into the horizontal and tolerant Netherlands. They were a creative lot and over the generations, they became art dealers and artisans, including a wonderful painter named Jozef Israels, who was much admired by van Gogh. I wanted to write about Jacob and Jozef, and the many powerful women of the family. I wanted to mention my great-grandfather, Martin van Straaten, who went down with the Lusitania in 1915, so that when his remains drifted onto a beach in Ireland, only the jet-black ring on his bloated finger identified him. My sister wears it to this day – the ring, I mean, not the finger.
But the person I wanted to write about most of all was an olive-skinned, black-haired boy named Simon ‘Gerry’ Anholt, who became my father, although I never felt I knew him well. When Gerry was 16, that thing happened again – the nightmare I’ve been trying to describe . . . the one in which you are a powerless scapegoat, and the authorities that should be there to protect you are siding with the thugs. (There must be a name for that kind of dystopia, but I don’t know what it is.)
Hitler’s armies had invaded Holland and the cancer of prejudice, which never really goes away, oozed through the beautiful canals of Amsterdam like a foul oil slick. Up went the cry in the Jewish neighborhoods – ‘Here we go again!’ Along came the bizarre rules: you are allowed here on Tuesdays, but not there on Fridays. You had to sew on the old yellow star for easy identification. And when they heard the snarling of Alsatians and the smashing of shop windows, many of my father’s family went into hiding in cellars and attics, exactly like Anne Frank’s family. Those who stayed were herded into cattle wagons and freighted to concentration camps. Among the 6 million Jews, homosexuals, disabled people and Roma who were murdered by the Nazis, more than sixty members of the Anholt family also perished.
My dad was lucky . . . at least, he thought he was lucky. His parents had contacts in London and they got out before things turned nasty. My father thought he would be safe, but . . . you know how these stories go; the nightmare had just begun.
Gerry was drafted into the British Intelligence Corp and took part in dangerous missions in occupied France, Holland and later, Germany; for which he was ‘Mentioned in Dispatches’. Like many Dutchmen he spoke several languages, so part of his job was to translate the often-brutal interrogations of captured SS officers. My father didn’t often talk about these events, and it wasn’t until the last years of his life that I learned about the worst horror of all – in 1945, that olive-skinned, black-haired boy was amongst the Allied troops who liberated the death camp of Bergen-Belsen. He said that although the stench hung over the nearby town like smog, the residents denied any knowledge. I think my father lost a lot of things in there – his youth, his optimism and even a sense of joy. What I know for sure is that the skeleton-people wandering naked amidst the heaps of bodies haunted his dreams for ever. These were his own people.
When it was all over, Staff Sergeant Anholt tried to forget what he had seen. He married an English girl. He became a Christian. They started a family. But of course my father was not ready to raise children of his own. What he actually needed was someone to look after him. We spent some years back in Holland and then at nine years old, I was packed off to an English boarding school, which I detested with a passion.
That was the story I planned to write. I wanted to mention that although he was not a great dad, my father was a deeply tolerant humanitarian who despised prejudice of every kind. Touchingly, he held a special fondness for Germany, which he visited many times.
But, in 2011 my father died. Suddenly the whole thing seemed too painful, and too complicated, and generally too close to h
ome. Maybe I’ll return to that story one day, but for the time being, I decided to write something completely different . . .
The problem was that some of those themes just would not go away; the stuff about powerlessness and prejudice – what it feels like to be defined by a yellow star, your gender, your sexual orientation, or the colour of your skin . . . what it’s like to live in that hellish world for which I have no name; the place where there is nowhere to turn. I began searching the history books for other less personal examples. And it didn’t take too long.
It starts with the bizarre and humiliating rules, like the Jim Crow laws, for instance: You must step off the sidewalk when a White person walks by. You may not share a drinking fountain in case you pollute the water. You must sit at the back of the bus. No Coloured barber shall touch the hair of White women or girls . . .
Then comes the fear. The rumbling vehicles in the night, the lynch mob waiting at the corner. There’s nowhere to go for help because the very people who are meant to protect you are pulling on their jackboots or their scary pointy hoods.
Like my father, I despise prejudice of all kinds, but surely there has never been a more ignorant form of prejudice than colour prejudice. The idea that the pigmentation of half a millimetre of skin might somehow define the person within seems as laughable as old man Zachery choosing a goat or a horse by the colour of its coat. Colour prejudice would indeed be comical if it were not subjugating, dividing and murdering to this very day. (And let’s not forget that colour prejudice can work both ways.)
The point I am making is that although The Hypnotist is set in the Southern States of America in 1963, it could be anywhere; anytime. For the record, I love the United States and have many friends and relatives in that great country; indeed my own daughter worked for several years at the United Nations in New York City. There is not one country on this planet that does not carry the bloody stain of prejudice and oppression. It’s what we tribal humans do, and always will do until we wake up and look in the mirror.
The Hypnotist Page 22