by Helen Dewitt
I thought that I was beginning to get the hang of this. I had started by picking the wrong kind of father, but now I knew what to look for I could build up a collection of 20 or so. I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the years I’d spent trying to identify the father who happened to be mine, instead of simply claiming the best on offer.
Today as I was riding the Circle Line a man came running down the stairs at Embankment. He ran into the car followed by three men. He ran along the car, dodging poles, and at the last moment dashed out again. The doors closed on the three men, who swore.
Hate to do it to him, in a way, said 1.
Still, he’s not being exactly cooperative, said 2.
I had recognised his face. It was Red Devlin.
Red Devlin had reported on atrocities in Lebanon, and then he had been transferred to Azerbaijan and kidnapped the first day. He had been held captive for five years and then he had taught one of his captors to play chess, and then he had escaped over mountains and desert. Then he had come back to Britain and gone into hiding and he had come out of hiding to publish a book six months later. It had only just come out in hardback, so I didn’t know whether it talked about ragged urchins.
It doesn’t matter really, said 3. We’ll catch him at his house.
Right you are, said 1.
They got off after four or five stops and I followed them to a street with semi-detached houses. A small crowd of people were standing outside one. The three men joined them.
At the other end of the street a man hurtled around the corner and stopped dead. Then he began to walk forward, very slowly. He stopped in front of the house and said something I couldn’t hear. The men crowded round. I thought of going forward and saying This man is a Norwegian citizen! or My father is the Polish vice-consul! but I could not see that it would help. Even a real Danish consul could not have helped him now.
He opened a gate in a hedge and disappeared inside.
Most of the crowd dispersed. A few stayed behind.
I threw Lee and Brian at judo today. Lee is 14, and Brian is 13 but taller and heavier.
I told Sibylla & she asked what my teacher had said. I said he had said it was very good.
Sibylla said that didn’t sound very character-building. I said most authorities on child psychology said a child should be given encouragement and reinforcement. Sib said Bandura and who else? I said everybody else. I didn’t say that the authorities also said a parent had to be able to set limits because I was afraid she might suddenly decide to make up for lost time and set a lot of limits.
Sibylla said: Well just remember Richie, becoming the great judo champion is not the end of the story.
I said I didn’t think I was the great judo champion just because I could beat Lee and Brian at Bermondsey Boys Junior Judo.
Sibylla said: It isn’t a question of beating X and Y. What if there’s no one you can’t beat? It’s a question of perfecting your skill and achieving satori. What on earth are they teaching you in this class?
I said we mainly concentrated on learning how to throw people to the ground. Sib said: Must I do everything myself? She was grinning from ear to ear. Carpworld was a thing of the past. I decided not to tell her I was beating everyone at piquet 9 times out of 10.
I have been going by the house every day for two weeks. There are still a couple of people hanging around in the street. Sometimes people go in and out of the house—mainly a woman, a girl and a boy. Once he came out and walked to the corner and turned around and came back. Once he came out and looked up at the sky and stood looking up at the sky for about ten minutes. Then he turned around and went back into the house. Once he came out in a tracksuit and ran off down the street and came back walking about fifteen minutes later. Once he came out in a suit and tie and walked briskly away.
I went over to the house to watch for a while. This time all of them came out the gate: Red Devlin, his wife and the boy and girl. He had his arm around his wife’s shoulder. He said: What a spectacularly beautiful day! The wife and the girl said: It’s lovely! and the boy said: Yeah.
I have been spending a lot of time watching his house. There is a bus stop with a bench up the street; I sit there mainly working on solid state physics. My concentration is almost back to normal.
I was outside the house today when a taxi pulled up. They all came out and put suitcases in the taxi and his family got in and he said: Have a wonderful time.
The wife said: I wish you were coming too
And he said: Well, I may join you
And the taxi drove off.
It’s now or never.
I went to the house and knocked on the door but there was no answer. I thought he was probably there so I went around to the back of the house. I couldn’t see him through any of the ground floor windows, so I climbed a tree. He was standing in a bedroom with his back to the window. He left the bedroom to go into the bathroom. There were three or four bottles of pills on the dresser and a bottle of Evian. The bottles had been emptied onto the dresser; there were probably a couple of hundred pills.
He came back into the room with another bottle of pills. He struggled with the child-proof cap, and then he struggled to get a wad of cotton wool out, and then he poured another fifty pills onto the dresser. He poured out a glass of water and picked up a couple of pills. Then he laughed and put them down. He took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. Then he left the room.
I couldn’t see what kind of pills he was planning to take.
There was a kind of narrow ornamental stone moulding around the house underneath the windows on each floor. One of the windows was open on the next floor, and a branch hung over the roof. The moulding wasn’t much over an inch wide but the mortar was crumbling between the bricks so I thought there would be good handholds. I climbed up and went out the branch and lowered myself onto the moulding. Then I inched along to the window. In one place there was a lot of ivy growing over the moulding and for a moment I thought I’d have to go back—there was nowhere to put a foot, and it was impossible to get through to the wall for a grip. But when I pulled on the ivy it was tough and thick, so I took hold of that and went hand over hand. Then back to the moulding. I slipped in the window. I went through the door and ran down the stairs, not bothering to be quiet. At first I couldn’t find the right room—the first door I tried was a study and the next was a broom closet. Then I found the bedroom. He was back there now. He had a drink in his hand.
I said: What are you doing?
He said without surprise: What does it look like I’m doing?
I said: Is that paracetamol?
He said: No.
I said: I think aspirin is also a bad idea.
He said: It’s not aspirin.
I said: Then it’s probably all right.
He laughed. He sounded surprised to be surprised. He said: Who are you?
There was no going back.
I said
I’m your son.
He said
No you’re not. My son doesn’t look anything like you.
I said
I’m another one.
He said
Oh, I see.
He said
Wait a minute, that’s impossible. There was definitely just the one boy when I went away. One boy and one girl. You’re not going to tell me you’re five years old. Besides, if she’d had another child while I was away she’d have told me.
One thing was clear: if there was one thing guaranteed to make everything a hundred times worse, it was saying Well actually I’m not your son after all. I said: Not by your wife. I said: My mother told me you were my father. Maybe she made a mistake. It would have been about 12 years ago.
He said
Oh, now I see.
He finished the drink and put the glass down.
This isn’t a very good time, he said. I can’t put it out of my mind, you see. But I can’t let people know. They don’t like to see it. I don’t like to see that they don’t like to s
ee it. They can see I don’t like to see that they don’t like to see it.
He said
I’ve already got too many people to protect. I can’t take on any more. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go away.
I said
I don’t want you to protect me.
He said
What does that mean? That I can talk about it? What do you want.
I said
I wanted to see you.
He said
You’ve seen me so you can go away
I said I would go away
He said
Do you know how old I am? 37. I could live another 40 years. 50 years. People live to be 100.
He said
I see it every day. It never goes away. These eyes have seen, that is they’ve been in the same room with, that is you’ve seen Lear, maybe, people flinch when Gloucester is blinded. What do you think it’s like to see the bloody socket where a thumb went? He was crying with the other eye. You’re not haunted by Lear, I mean it doesn’t come back to haunt you, whereas the real thing—you see it day after day after day. You think of something else again and again and again. It’s not the blood, it’s the fact that a human did that.
He said
You need something to set against it. When you’ve seen that much badness you need something to set against it—some dazzling glorious act of goodness—not to redeem your faith in humanity, whatever that might mean, but just to make you stop feeling sick.
He said
It’s not fair on my family. They’re fine. I mean they’re perfectly OK. They’re not bad. It’s been hard on them, and they’ve responded pretty well. But not dazzling. Well, why should they be dazzling? But I feel sick.
I said
What about Raoul Wallenberg?
He said
What?
I said
Raoul Wallenberg. The Swedish consul in Budapest who handed out Swedish passports to Jews. This man is a Swedish citizen.
He said
You mean the one the Americans and the Swedes abandoned to the Russians because on top of saving 100,000 Jews he did a little spying for the Americans on the side and neither of them wanted to admit it? He was grand but it’s enough to make you sick
I said
Well what about Szegeti?
And he said
That charlatan?
Mother Theresa? I said.
That nun?
Jaime Jaramillo?
He said Jaramillo was all right. He said
But I haven’t seen it. What I’ve seen is
He said
You go into these situations as a journalist and you keep thinking you should stop reporting and just help. You have to be professional. You tell yourself you’re helping by letting people know what’s happening.
Well, they know what’s happening but it doesn’t do any good. You try to get some people out before it’s too late and you run into a blank wall of officialdom, and nothing does any good. And then it’s not just that you’ve seen stupid thugs with another language and a foreign uniform commit atrocities, but someone pretty much like yourself say I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do. If you’re lucky the person says Well, I’ll write to the Minister.
He said
I don’t want to go on. If I’ve got 50 years ahead of seeing the eye and the leg and the girl and the rest and the best I can hope for is someone promising to write to the Minister I’d be better off if I were out of it now.
I know it will cause a lot of people a lot of pain. Can I go on for 50 years so they can go comfortably on saying I’ve adjusted?
People tell me, you can’t let them win. You made it this far. If you kill yourself they’ve won. But it’s insane. Who the fuck is they? How the fuck does it defeat them if I wake up howling every night?
He said
Maybe reporting does a little good. But does it do enough good to justify living this way? There are plenty of others who’d be glad of my job and could do it well.
I said
Well just as long as you stay off paracetamol.
He said
What?
I said
You should never try to kill yourself with paracetamol. It’s a horrible way to die. People think you just pass out, but actually you don’t lose consciousness, you think nothing’s happened but then a day later your organs shut down. It destroys the liver. Sometimes people change their minds, but it’s too late. I’m not saying you would change your mind; but almost anything is better than dying of paracetamol poisoning.
He laughed.
Where did you pick all that up? he said. He laughed again.
I said
My mother told me.
I said
A guillotine is very quick and pretty painless, though they say the head can be conscious for a minute or so before the blood supply to the brain is drained off. I made a miniature one when I was five with my Meccano set. I think it would be pretty easy to make a big one. Of course, it would be a bit gruesome for the person who found the body. You could call the police if you didn’t want to upset a family member. There’s no way they could reach you in time to stop you.
He laughed. I’ll bear that in mind, he said. Do you know any other good ways?
I’ve heard that drowning is pleasant at the end, I said. A friend of my mother’s was rescued when she was going down for the third time. She said it hurt at first, when her lungs filled with water, but then it was drowsy and lovely. It hurt when they pulled her out and forced the air back into her lungs. That might not be too bad. You could jump off a Channel ferry at night, or maybe it would be nicer to jump off an outboard motor in the Aegean and drown in blue. There might be a few problems for your family if the body wasn’t found, but I expect it would be all right if you left a note.
Yes, he said. He was smiling. That would probably be all right. I’m going to have a drink. What do you want? A Coke?
Thank you, I said.
I followed him downstairs to the kitchen.
You seem to know a lot about it, he said.
I’m better on mechanics than pharmaceuticals, I said. I can make a noose. You want to break the neck rather than suffocate, if possible; apparently that’s quite difficult to achieve with a sheet. My mother thought I should know how in case I was ever put in prison and tortured—I’m terribly sorry.
That’s all right, he said. He drank a lot of the drink. She’s probably right. It’s not a bad thing to know—if you’ve use of your hands. I was tied up the whole time, so it wouldn’t have helped.
Except when you played chess, I said.
No, I was tied up then too. He made my moves for me. Sometimes he’d deliberately move a piece to the wrong square and pretend not to understand if I objected. You wouldn’t have thought I’d have cared, with everything else, but it made me absolutely furious. I’d refuse to play, and he’d beat me. Or he’d beat me if he lost. He didn’t beat me if he beat me.
He said
He was kind of split up. He’d be quite friendly when he brought out the board, and he’d smile. That would last for a few moves and then sometimes he’d start to cheat, and sometimes he’d lose his temper and hit me with the gun, and sometimes. The friendliness was the horrible part, because he’d be hurt, genuinely hurt, when I wasn’t pleased to see him or took offence because he’d beat the shit out of me the day before. And now that I’m back that’s all I see. That horrible friendliness everywhere. All these people who simply don’t realise, it just doesn’t occur to them that
He said
That’s what I mean about the ordinariness. That’s why it’s not enough. It’s not enough to stand up to what’s there, but people go on smiling pleasantly
My wife smiles and I see that horrible friendliness on her face. My children disgust me. They’re delightful, extroverted, confident. They know what they want, and that’s what interests them, and it disgusts me. They allowed me two weeks to be a bit strange, and then they all came to me separate
ly.
My wife said she knew what I’d been through but this was hard on the children. My daughter came to see me and said it was hard on Mum, I didn’t know what they’d been through. My son said it was hard on his Mum and sister.
So then I think, this is bloody ridiculous. It’s unfair. They’re perfectly OK. It’s not their fault. What do you want? Do you want them to be shell-shocked and dreaming of horrors? You want them to be safe from all that. You want all the rest to get away to be ordinary. And I think, we’ve got so much. Let’s celebrate life. We’ve got each other, we’re so bloody lucky. And I throw my arms around them with tears in my eyes and I say, Let’s go along the canal and feed the swans. I’m thinking, we can walk straight out of the house, there’s no one to stop us, and we can walk by the canal because there are no land mines and no one’s shelling us, let’s not waste this. And they all look absolutely appalled because it’s such a totally wet thing to do, but they come to humour me, and of course it’s awful.
He said
When you’ve seen things, or things have been done to you, this badness gets inside you and comes back with you, and then people who’ve never been near a war, people who’ve never struck an animal never mind tortured anyone—people who are completely innocent—get hurt too. The torture comes out as disgust, and it comes out in that gush of sentimentality that chokes them. I see that but I can’t kill the badness, it just sits inside like a poison toad.
He said
Is it really doing them any good to keep the toad alive? Or even if it is can I go through a lifetime of it?
I said
It would obviously be better to die before rather than after years of suffering; no one would condemn an innocent man to a life sentence to make someone else happy; the question is whether it is really the case that nothing will blot out these memories and that nothing could be good enough to make it worth undergoing them. If that’s the question you can’t seriously expect me to know the answer.
He began laughing again. Could I give you a word of advice? he said. Don’t ever apply for a job with the Samaritans.