by Alba Arikha
Derek looked at him, then at me. “OK. So if she didn’t abandon me, then what the fuck happened?”
I took a sip of my water. I could feel my knees shaking underneath the table. “She lost her parents during the war. They died.”
“Yeah? How?”
“They were Jews,” Ben stated slowly. “They were Jews and they were sent to a concentration camp.”
Derek’s face turned pale. “What? What did you say?”
Ben repeated the exact same words. Derek looked stunned. For a brief moment, he rocked in his chair and a cold shadow passed across his eyes. “They weren’t Jews. They couldn’t have been bloody Jews.”
“Why not?” I asked, feeling my stomach tighten up.
Derek pushed his chair back again. “I need another beer.”
I didn’t dare look at Ben. I knew what he would do next. He had finished his drink, and he would have another. Five dry years and now this. He couldn’t stop himself. I couldn’t stop him. I was the one to blame. He had wanted to come on this trip with me to keep me company. I shouldn’t have agreed. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I could hear myself breathing loudly, breathlessly. “This isn’t good,” I whispered to Ben. “We should go.”
Ben laughed. “Oh no. I’m starting to enjoy this. I want to hear what he has to say about the Jews.”
“I don’t. We should go.”
“Not yet.”
Ben stood up, walked to the bar and returned with a replenished glass. He sat down and finished his gin-and-tonic quickly, eagerly. I said nothing. What was there to say? He had fallen through the cracks, into a place I couldn’t reach. But he would recover this time. I could feel it. This was a bad dream, for him as well as for me. One that would end as soon as we stepped away from Derek. But when? Was there still reason to stay? It could only get worse, not better. A man walked past me, picking at a plate of soggy chips. I felt nauseous. I had to act. Speak. But I couldn’t move. And now Derek had returned with his beer. He cupped his glass in his hands, his eyes like misted windows. For a split second, he appeared lost, as if trying to find his bearings. Then his phone rang again, and this time he picked it up.
He spoke in such a low voice that it was hard to hear anything he was saying. He hung up and looked at us. “Trouble at the shop. Old bint wants an exchange. Says size 4 is too small.”
Ben got up to get another drink. A song blared out over the sound system. The music jarred against my eardrums, and made me want to scream. Everything about the situation made me want to scream. This was not a man worthy of his mother. What would she have made of him? To think that until her last breath Flora had believed the Robert Schumann connection. That Robert had truly been an ancestor of the man now sitting in front of me. “These words are for him to know,” Flora had written about her son. “How great and illustrious his pedigree is.”
The encounter was beyond anything I could ever have imagined. Az’s concerns had proved correct. But at least I had found him. That was the main thing. I had found Derek, and we could go home now. There was no reason to stay one minute longer. I was about to get up when he started speaking again. His face looked different. Harder. “So she was a Jew, was she?”
“Yes,” I answered, as Ben returned and sat down again. “And she lost her family because of it.”
Derek stared at us. “Don’t you know?”
“Know what?” I asked.
“No one lost no one. The Holocaust never happened like they say it did. It’s all a fucking Zionist plot. All of multiculturalism is a fucking Zionist and Islamic plot.”
Ben stared back and said nothing. But I couldn’t hold it in. “Where did you ever hear such a thing?”
Derek smirked. “Nick Griffin and the BNP is where. He’s the only man who makes sense in this fucking nation. The only one who can see what this nation needs.”
“What’s that?” Ben asked. “A white nation for Britain?”
“Yeah!” He grinned and drank his beer quickly. His hand shook again. I wondered whether he was suffering from a neurological condition. And when I looked into his miscreant eyes I detected vulnerability, a glint of fear I hadn’t seen before. He was nervous. He was holding something back, I was sure of it.
“Well I think that Nick Griffin is a fucking animal,” Ben was saying. “And so are you,” he added in a lower voice.
Derek scowled. “What was that you said?”
Ben stared at him. “I hope you understand that by having a Jewish mother that makes you Jewish too. Do you understand that? You’re Jewish, Derek.”
Derek burst out laughing. Then he banged his fists loudly on the table. So loudly that for one split second the noise around us stopped.
“I never asked to meet you,” he hissed. “I never asked to hear this shit. I don’t like either of you. You come barging into my life. No one asked. Do you hear? How do I know you’re not a bunch of fucking liars? Who says we’re fucking related? Where are the documents? Fucking poncy London liars.”
The barman stopped by the table. An apron was tied around his waist. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah,” Derek sneered. “You should hear the shit I’ve just heard.”
“What shit?”
Derek hesitated. “I’ll tell you later.”
I asked the barman for the bill. “Pay at the bar,” he mumbled.
I got up and went to pay. Derek nursed his last beer while I pocketed the change. I motioned Ben to get up. “We’re going now,” I said to him.
“Not yet,” said Derek. His voice was coarse, loud, slurred. “There’s something about your face,” he said, pointing a drunken finger towards Ben. “I’ve seen it before, and not on telly. I’m good with faces.”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t think so. You must be confusing me with someone else.”
Derek leant towards him. “What did you say your name was?”
“Ben.”
“Ben what?”
“Ben Karalis.”
“Ben Karalis.” Derek stepped back a little and took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He lit one and looked at my brother. “I can’t put my finger on it,” he repeated, “but I’ve seen your fucking face before. Little nob of a fucking face.”
Ben stood up. His face had turned a deep red. I knew that colour. I had seen it before, when he was a child, a shade short of crimson. This time, the alcohol had tinted it redder. “We’ve got to go, I’m afraid,” I repeated.
“You’re afraid?” Derek laughed an inebriated laugh, then took a deep drag of his cigarette. “Nah, I don’t think you’re afraid,” he said, blowing the smoke straight at me. “I think you want to get the fuck away from me, right?”
“Yeah, that’s about right,” Ben said, his words sounding slurred. “I don’t even understand why you fucking accepted to see us in the first place. Waste of everybody’s time. So fuck you too. Can’t say it was a pleasure,” he added, walking towards me with some difficulty.
Derek bolted upright: “Hey! You come here, the two of you, and tell me this crap about a fucking Jew mother I never heard of before! You think I’m interested? You think I ever asked to know? Do you?”
“You didn’t ask, but you agreed to it,” I snapped. “We thought you were interested. It was obviously a terrible mistake. As my brother just said, it was a waste of everybody’s time. Come on,” I said, taking hold of Ben’s arm. “We’re going home.”
“Listen,” Derek said, in a more subdued tone. “You’ve come all the way from London to basically tell me that you knew my birth mother, yeah, and that I’m actually a fucking Jew. Then you tell me my own mother was a liar, yeah? That she was a liar, when we all know my Jew mother abandoned me. So how’s that supposed to make me fucking feel, yeah?”
“Flora never abandoned you,” I said, looking straight at him. “I told you what happened. She never abandoned you. She
loved you. All of her life she loved you and waited for you to come looking for her. But you never came.”
“She did not!” Derek shouted. “She never waited for me! Shut the fuck up!”
I looked at his face and saw it all then. His was a cry of despair, so deep he couldn’t keep it in. It wasn’t only she who had waited, but he too. He had waited for Flora all of his miserable life. He had dreamt of her and imagined her and probably spoken to her sometimes, in the dead of night.
But he never thought it would come this close.
He stopped and stared at us, still swaying. He looked so pale I thought he might faint. “What’s going on?” Ben asked, barely standing on his feet.
“Everything,” I whispered.
The expression in Derek’s eyes was now one of a desperate man, whose history had finally caught up with him. A history of shame and shadows, but also of light.
He didn’t know that light. The glimpse-of-beauty light. He had probably never seen it. I wished I could tell him, as he slowly turned away from us and staggered outside, where we followed him.
I wished I could tell him about the light. How it had filled his mother and probably filled him too.
He just didn’t know it. That it was there, in his bloodstream, shining.
4
Harry rang to say that Derek wanted to see me. “He has something important to say to you.”
I hesitated; I was still coming to terms with the events of the previous day. I had felt so overwhelmed that I found it hard to put my feelings into words. When Az had asked about the encounter, all I could say was that Derek had taken it very badly.
“I’m not surprised,” Az said. “I had a feeling.”
“I know. I can usually trust my instincts, but this time I was wrong.”
“I’m so sorry…”
“So am I.”
He cooked the two of us dinner, but I couldn’t really eat or speak. We sat in silence, as gypsy music strummed in the background. I poured myself a glass of wine and drank it quickly. Az ate his food in a hurry. When he was done, he sat down beside me. “I should have been there with you today,” he said, holding my hand. “It was a mistake.”
I couldn’t tell him the truth. That it was a blessing he had stayed away. That Derek was a racist and more. That had Az been there, the situation might have further deteriorated and involved racial taunts. That the mistake was mine: I should have listened to Az. I shouldn’t have gone searching for answers, but followed the Arab proverb instead. I should have looked forward rather than back. Because back had made everything worse, including Ben. As soon as we left Canterbury, he became violently sick and we had to stop the car several times for him to vomit on the side of the road. When we got home, he ran straight upstairs to his room and didn’t appear again. Az enquired after him, and I blamed it on a stomach bug.
This morning Ben had rushed to an AA meeting before boarding his plane to Latvia. When I tried to discuss the matter with him, just before he drove off in a cab, he raised his hand to stop me. “Let’s pretend this never happened,” he said. “Let’s pretend we never found him and this didn’t happen.”
But it had happened, and now Harry was telling me that Derek wanted to see me.
“You must accept,” said Harry. “You’ll understand why when you see him. He would like to explain himself.”
This morning Derek walked through my front door with Harry.
As soon as I saw him I shuddered. The toxic words he had used rose again like fumes, and it was all I could do to maintain my composure. It was too soon, as I had told Harry. Even if Derek had seen the light, it was still too soon. He had spent his life using hatred as a repository for his pain – how could he possibly change overnight? Or perhaps this wasn’t about change, but something more malevolent: was he here to claim the notebook? If that was the case, he was going to be disappointed. It was staying with me, in the third drawer of my desk, just as Flora had kept it. His mother’s words belonged to Derek, but not her pages. That’s the way I saw it. I needed to guard her truth. It was safe with me. She hadn’t asked, but I knew that’s what she would have wanted. We understood each other, Flora and I.
I hoped her son would understand too.
And here he was, standing in front of me, wearing jeans, a black shirt and looking very nervous. No matter the reason for his visit, I had to give him a chance. I had no choice. “Hello again, Derek,” I said.
A packet of cigarettes was sticking out of his jacket. He kept his hands in his pockets as he began to apologize. He rarely came to London, he explained, but this was no ordinary situation. “I had to see you in person, yeah? I didn’t mean all the things I said, back there in the pub. It was just the shock talking. Not me. It was somebody else. I hope you and your brother were not too upset,” he added, sounding genuinely contrite.
His words took me aback. For the briefest of moments I wondered whether he was bluffing, but then seeing how agitated he was I quickly came to the conclusion that he wasn’t. “It’s fine,” I answered carefully. I didn’t want to appear too immediately forgiving, nor did I want to intimidate him. “Ben and I are both fine. And I appreciate you coming here,” I added.
“I’m sorry, yeah?” Derek continued. “I don’t know what came over me. I really don’t. Like I said, I was shocked. So all that shit came out. I don’t really mean those things I said about Jewish people. I don’t know much about them. It was somebody else talking, not me,” he repeated, in a hoarse voice. Derek had lived his whole life believing he had been abandoned. Now that belief had been shattered; he had been loved after all, and it was going to take some getting used to.
He followed me into the sitting room. He looked at the river, the room, the flecks of sun on my desk. “You have a nice house,” he remarked.
“Thank you. Have a seat,” I said, pointing towards the sofa. I offered him something to drink, but he declined. “Maybe later.”
He sat upright on the edge of my sofa and cracked his knuckles. “There’s something I’d like to ask you,” he said.
“Yes? Please do.”
He cleared his throat and motioned towards his cigarettes. “Before I ask, yeah – is it all right with you if I smoke?”
I looked at him, at the way his hand trembled as he replaced it on his knee. “That’s fine,” I said, even though I didn’t usually let people smoke inside the house. But this was an exception. Everything about Derek was an exception.
Harry, who had been standing there the whole time, announced that he was leaving. “I’ll speak to you later.”
I waved at him. “Thank you, Harry. Derek, let me get you an ashtray.”
I went into the kitchen, returned with a small bowl and placed it in front of him. “This should do,” I said.
Derek removed a cigarette from his pack and lit it quickly. I went to sit opposite him and crossed my legs. I could see it again, the disquiet in his eyes. But yesterday’s wrath had been replaced by something different. Something soft, like an expectant child.
“I would like to know about my mother,” he said. “I’d like you to tell me everything about her, my mother.”
He took a few quick puffs of his cigarette and blew the smoke towards the garden door.
I stood up and walked to my desk drawer, and then it hit me: he was about to find out that we were, in fact, not related at all. That his mother and I had met for no more than an hour. That until I read her memoir, I had known next to nothing about her. Nothing. I needed to come clean, just as he had. I didn’t want to, but I had to risk it, no matter the consequences.
“Derek, you came all the way here to see me, so I think I need to be honest with you,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
He looked at me, and the colour began to drain from his face. “What? What is it?”
I cleared my throat. “I met your mother twenty years back, and we got
along very well. She was wonderful. But the truth is that we’re not related. She dedicated the manuscript to me, as you will shortly see, and I felt that it was my mission to find you. But in order to do so, I had to pretend that we were distant cousins. It was the only way. Otherwise, I wouldn’t legally have been allowed to track you down.”
He continued to look at me, and was quiet as he took a long drag on his cigarette.
“So we’re not related?”
“No. We’re not.”
“So you lied in order to find me, yeah?”
“Yes. I had to.” He went quiet again, and I feared the worst. But then he smiled. “I like that.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “Sort of thing I would have done.”
I smiled back. “I’m relieved. Very.”
He looked at me now with a different expression in his eyes. “So she still de… del… what was that word?”
“Dedicated.”
“Yeah. That one. She still delicated her book to you? Even if she barely knew you, yeah?”
“Yes. It’s not a book, but yes, she did.”
“She must have liked you, my mother,” he said, crushing his cigarette in the ashtray.
“It was mutual. We liked each other very much.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” He cracked his knuckles again. “Can you show it to me?”
“Yes of course.”
I opened the desk drawer. “Here it is.” I retrieved Flora’s notebook and handed it to her son. “It’s all in here. All you need to know about your mother is in here.”
Derek held it gingerly, then placed his palm on the front cover. He raised his head and looked at me. “She wrote this? My mother wrote this?”
“Yes Derek, she did.”
“Can I read it now?”
“Of course you can.”
He opened the notebook and began to read.
The house was still. I was still. The river flowed silently. Silver shapes shimmered on its surface, dancing like fireflies.