by Gee, Maurice
One night as he stood up after washing her she batted his penis with her hand.
‘Don’t, Julie. Don’t do that,’ he said.
‘I’m playing with your sausage. Grandpa Leighton lets me.’
For a moment he stood paralysed, then spun her round and smacked her bottom hard, four or five times, and lifted her screaming on to the mat. Priscilla ran in.
‘Take her away. Get her out of here.’
He showered for a long time, trying to wash clean, but saw that he had to know everything there was. And Priscilla had to know as well: the man was her father. Then they must get rid of it and never let anything be seen.
When he went into the living room Priscilla was sitting by the fire with Julie dozing in her arms.
‘What did you do to her?’ Priscilla said.
Kenny knelt beside them. He woke Julie up and said to her, ‘I want you to tell Mummy what you told me. I promise I won’t smack you again.’
‘Leave her alone, Kenny,’ Priscilla said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s something you’ve got to know. Julie, go on.’
The child would not speak. Kenny said, ‘She touched me on my penis. She said Grandpa Leighton lets her play with his.’
‘It’s his sausage,’ Julie sobbed.
‘What nonsense,’ Priscilla said.
‘Shut up and listen.’
Slowly he got the child to talk. There were games she played with Leighton Spence. There was hunting for his sausage and making his sausage grow big, and others I’m not going to write the names of even though I can’t keep them out of my head. Her mother lifted Julie off her lap and put her on the floor, where she lay shivering on her side, answering Kenny sometimes and at other times refusing. Leighton Spence had warned her something bad would happen if she told – and he wouldn’t keep ice-cream dollars hidden in his pockets any more. Kenny kept on. He knelt on the floor and bent his head close to the carpet and forced her to look at him with his hand underneath her cheek. When she’d sobbed it all out, wrapped in her towel, she drifted off to sleep as though she’d been drugged. Kenny and Priscilla talked, whispering and hissing. Priscilla wept all her moisture out. At last she seemed to clear the stricture in her throat. Kenny cried too. Then they dried themselves with handkerchiefs and put blocks of wood on the fire.
They woke Julie, and Kenny told her how sick she had been. Part of being sick was nasty dreams, which she must never tell anyone or bogeymen would come and get her in the night. Priscilla said she must stay home and never go and see Grandpa and Grandma any more because they were cross about her dreams. She must never say sausage again, and try to keep only nice and pretty things in her head and say nice things about Grandpa Leighton. If she didn’t, Daddy would take her pants down and smack her very very hard. They sat on the sofa with Julie on the floor between their knees. Her mother stroked her brow, and after a while went to the kitchen and brought her back a glass of raspberryade.
That is how Kenny and Priscilla handled it.
I could not look at him. I could scarcely speak.
‘What happened then?’
‘We put her to bed.’
‘I mean, what happened?’
‘Nothing, Dad. We kept her out of his way as much as we could.’
‘As much as you could?’
‘And when she was old enough she went to boarding school. She seemed OK.’
‘What about your father-in-law? Did he know she’d told you?’
‘He must have, I suppose. Priscilla didn’t talk to him any more. She went funny. She’s as screwed up as Julie is.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘Shit, Dad, how could I? I was doing all right at Outlook. I was getting ahead. And he was my boss. Anyway, the old bugger had his stroke, he couldn’t do anything any more.’
I turned away from Kenny, away from my son. And then, because I must, because of Nancy, turned back and looked at him again. He must go to Julie’s therapist, I said, and tell her everything he’d just told me.
‘No.’
‘Write it, then. Put it all down and give it to me. I’ll pass it on.’
‘No. That head-shrinking stuff is hokum, Dad. It’s all bloody Freud. It’s bloody Jews.’
‘Stop, Kenny. Shut up. Please do.’ I went to the door. ‘And stay away from Julie. Just keep right away.’
‘I don’t want her any more.’ But again tears leaked from his eyes.
I walked back and gave him my handkerchief. ‘Wipe your face. There’s blood on it.’
He polished hard, then had a gulp of whisky.
‘Now go to a doctor. You need some stitches in your hand.’
I went home by taxi. And I’ve had the doctor myself, to look at my ribs. They’re bruised not broken. I lie up and creep about and write in my book: Kenny and Priscilla and Julie. And the other person, the creased old man whose corruption I smelled on the first day we met: I can no longer write his name. I only write ‘Kenny’ because he is my son. Elizabeth scolds me; she puts her arm around me and helps me here and there. I’ve told her what went on, in Kenny’s office and that earlier time, and she has arranged to call on Helen Henly and tell her. I hope it will help Julie – help her to go back there, help her to see, if she needs to see. Kenny needs to make that journey too, just as much. But I am no longer sure he can be cured.
As for the rest of them – I mean the Gummers and Mrs Lloyd – there’s nothing I can do for them any more.
I poked my nose in Julie’s room while she was out. She is growing hyacinths in the sun on her window sill. There’s a purple one and a cream one. They sit in jars of water and feed on pieces of charcoal trapped in their roots. The blooms are thick and beautiful, their scent fills the room.
She has already rejected caduceus and ankh so I won’t attempt an explanation of these flowers to her.
SIXTEEN
I lay in bed or pottered about the house while my bruises turned from blue to yellow and faded away. It took a long time. Old men do not recover quickly; often they don’t recover at all. It seemed to me that I might choose. Curiosity kept me going as much as anything else. I did not worry or brood. When I understood that I was looking forward not back I began to get well again. I want to see Julie recover, as much as she is able to, and start up her life, before I go. But I don’t intend to watch too closely or expect too much. I mean to enjoy the spring that is on us now. (‘On us now’ – isn’t that what one says about the winter?) And tomorrow morning I have arranged to visit Moser. Curiosity is my best medicine.
Because it is November we are having gales. The clouds race low over the hills, people bend as they walk and women hold their skirts down. It isn’t wet and isn’t cold so they look as if they enjoy the buffeting they receive. The harbour is blue flecked with white, and all the heavy colours are blown out of Somes Island, leaving it pale, leaving it pure. They don’t lock people up there any more. The name change is gazetted. The island is Matiu or Somes now, as you please.
Elizabeth walks about the house jamming rubber wedges in doors that rattle. She goes into the garden, she leans into the wind, her hair blows out, silvery. It is middle-aged now that she has stopped dyeing it. She and Julie plot a new flower bed. They’re like engineers. Julie’s hair has grown too. It slants across her eyes in the wind. Now, this minute, she catches it in one hand and holds it on top so she can see.
In weather like this Wellington stands on the frontier between the warm north and the cold south. I can see it; I’m aware; and feel that I have earned my right to stay. My hemisphere. My city. My place.
Elizabeth and Julie are my family. It does not matter what Moser reveals. So, I take it back, my best medicine is here.
We should have been friends. His Berlin is like my Vienna. He does not want it any more but it won’t go away. I advised him to write about it as I have done, and he became interested: ‘What language did you use?’
He never made the efforts to learn English that I made, he just let it happe
n, and has done pretty well. Both of us still have a tongue that won’t quite make the proper sounds. I’m a little better than him, as I deserve to be. It galls me that in finding colloquial language we’re about equal. All the same, I grinned at him and he grinned back. We enjoyed competing.
He lives in an apartment on Oriental Parade and looks across the water at the Wadestown hills. I tried to see my house but the tops of Norfolk pine trees blocked my view. Somes Island (we agreed that for us it would stay Somes) was out of sight around Point Jerningham. He can watch the ferries and container ships almost at sea level. If he opens his windows, which he tells me he doesn’t do because of traffic noise (‘when will they learn about double glazing in this country?’), he can hear the shouts of helmsmen training dragon-boat crews.
Moser has shrunk and grown more fierce, and grown more generous and emotional. He has become scaly: his old skin flakes, it shines in concave patches here and there. He does not enjoy being ugly, he says – but likes being thin and dry better than he would like being fat and sweaty, which is what most of the men he has done business with become. They have no minds, he says, they are all belly and stuffed up with money to the gills. That’s a practised speech, delivered, I think, for the metaphor.
I like his eyes, bright and blue – red-lidded though, with the lower lids collapsed. He has white eyebrows that slant down on one side, up on the other, like spear heads. Although he’s seven or eight years older than me he moves as quickly, with spiky legs and a beetle roundness in his back. I am straight, and less scaly too – but I’ve no doubt he’d find ways to describe me that would be unflattering. He has a cold. His nose collects a dewdrop that he’s quick to wipe away. He’s very clean and smells of mint.
We shook hands formally, overcoming our impulse to embrace. We talked for a while about unimportant things. That’s where Berlin and Vienna came in – they’re interesting but of no great importance, even though they provide the base on which we stand. Take them away and we’d fall down. I feel myself begin to wail and drift on the wind at the thought. But, from day to day, they’re of no importance. I asked Moser if he had worked in electronics in Berlin, but no, it was a hobby, he had liked fixing radios, he had liked to tinker. His real trade was printing. He could not work at it after the war because his English was not good enough, so he repaired toasters and irons, then went into making furniture, where he did well. I told him I could have done that too, not as a businessman but with my hands, and he acknowledged the superiority of that. He claimed that he could have baked bread. He seemed to think that he had started me off as a baker.
Often when I’m with New Zealand men, chatting away, I’m all right for a while, I can do the necessary tricks, but then I grow tired of it and I’m not with them any more, even those I like. I cannot sustain the jocular tone, or do the friendly insult, or pretend deep interest in shallow things, and cannot keep on smiling while they earbash me. So I take refuge in my foreignness, I make my courteous goodbyes; and they, understandably, are pleased to see me go. I can feel them unbutton as I slide out the door. I’m not upset by it. I’m simply relieved to have a means of retreat.
Moser and I could have talked all day if Willi Gauss had not stood between us. He told me that although he had not known Willi in Berlin he had heard his name and had probably set one or two of his articles in print.
‘You were his friend, you’re the one who knows him,’ Moser said, ‘but I am the one who knows about him.’
Willi was a gutter journalist, he said. When I challenged him on that, he agreed it was inaccurate for it was not sex and scandal Willi wrote about but politics.
Moser is less political than me. He’s not able to see that market dictatorship is political and the Me-firstism that infects us now political. I find that surprising in someone who lived in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis – and I said so. He can be frightening when he glares. His eyes flash and his eyebrows work. He told me I knew nothing and I saw he had forgotten that I was, like him, a Jew. I had to get up and walk to the window and stand looking out so that he should not see from my face how upset I was. But he is quick. He’s generous. He went away to his kitchen and made coffee. I looked out, seeing nothing but my parents in Vienna and Susi dying in Paris, and it came to me that Franz had loved her just as much as I. His love for her explained his life.
When Moser came back I asked him if he’d ever heard again from his friend in Berlin, if there had been more news about Willi – and Moser said yes, he had had a letter but had kept it to himself because the story in it was unconfirmed and it was better to leave Willi lying as he fell. I think he meant that to have a heroic sound and he miscued. I saw Willi dead in a gutter in East Berlin.
‘It is fifteen years old. Leave it now, Josef,’ Moser said.
‘This is a letter that says how he died?’
‘No. It is about what he was doing when he was caught.’
‘Can you show me?’
‘I don’t keep such things. Old letters. What is the use? I keep what I need in here.’ He tapped his forehead.
‘What did it say?’
‘If you must hear, Josef. It was not a long letter. My friend wrote because he had written before and this was the full stop, that is all. He has no interest. Nobody has any interest in Willi Gauss.’
‘Only you and me.’
‘Yes. Us. How can we not be interested? My friend in Berlin says Willi was trying to smuggle out a woman and her child. He had them in the boot of his car.’ Moser laughed. ‘He should have dug a tunnel.’
‘Who were they?’
‘I do not know. Perhaps it was for money, my friend says. There were such people.’
‘No, not money.’
‘Because he hated Stalinism? For some odd politics, you think? It could not have been because he loved the West.’
‘The child might have been his. And the woman too. He might have been rescuing them.’
‘His wife would have loved that,’ Moser said.
‘Willi wouldn’t care about that. Wives,’ I said. And I knew that I had it right. Some combination of arrogance and self-love had driven him. And romance too, his romantic view of himself. And love perhaps? Love at last, for the woman and her child?
‘He thought he had bribed a guard,’ Moser said. ‘But they were waiting for him at the gate. So Willi gets captured again. He is not the best escaper in the world.’
‘What happened to the woman and the child?’
‘Who knows? They have no names. They are little pieces of dust that blow about. We know about such things. Do not be sad.’
‘They didn’t kill women, did they?’
‘They would put her in prison. And take the child. They did that.’
‘And hurt Willi?’
‘Of course. Question him. And kill him after. Josef, it is fifteen years. It is all done.’
I saw an old man dressed in his underpants, squatting in the corner of a cell. He has silver hair and fallen cheeks. All his teeth are broken. He wipes his mouth. Footsteps sound in the corridor, a key turns in the lock. He tries to huddle deeper on the floor and hides his face. And I see Willi from Somes Island – Willi with his shirt off in the sun, curling his lip at this little city, Wellington. There is no dislocation. Both these men are Willi Gauss.
‘Josef, do not imagine. Do not make a story,’ Moser said.
No, I won’t. What happened in Berlin is over now, although in another way it is never done. And knowing Willi has helped me see my parents again. That is strange. I see them full face – but I won’t write any more, for it will make it seem that the important thing is not their pain and death but my ability to weep for them.
‘How much did Willi get out of you before he left?’ Moser said.
I told him one hundred pounds and he raised his eyebrows. ‘You knew you would never get it back?’
‘I told him it was a gift.’
‘Yes. So did I. Twenty-five pounds. Getting rid of Willi was cheap at the price.’
<
br /> Nothing Moser said about him would upset me now; and nothing Willi had said would cause me pain. I have moved a step: reconstituted Willi and got rid of inessential parts of myself. I’m on firm ground – which is not to say that I’m happy there. But I will not be put off balance and I will not argue. I told Moser Mrs Gummer’s claim that he knew what Willi had really thought of me.
‘Ach! It is nothing,’ Moser said. ‘The woman hurts and so she tries to hurt other people.’
‘How is it that you know her?’
The mother, Willi’s concubine, she used to telephone me when she lived in Auckland. I went to see her out of curiosity. Always it was news of Willi she wanted. I wrote and told her when he died.’
‘She doesn’t believe it.’
‘No. The daughter keeps in touch now. She pesters me. It is you and your son she wants to talk about.’
‘I think that’s all over.’ I told Moser about her visit to Kenny in his office and that she had stabbed him with a knife, but all he answered was, ‘Willi keeps on.’
‘So,’ I asked, ‘what did he say about me?’
‘It is not only you. It is all of us.’
To keep himself occupied, Moser had visited the National Archives and read the files on Aliens held there. He started with his own, which, he says, is much like mine, except that he ‘exhibits low cunning’. ‘We are not to be trusted because we are Jews, that is what I read between the lines.’ Willi is not to be trusted because of his ‘continental mentality’, which is ‘utterly at odds with our notions of fair play’. Also ‘he is a cad where women are concerned’. But they – the Tribunal – are impressed with von Schaukel, ‘an attractive type and soldierly’. They like his candour and are pleased to have captured this man who would have been a valuable fighter for Germany.