The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  Mother My must not come near it.

  She must not know the name of it,

  let alone that she is in it.

  The years will pass—if you forget

  The Ballad of the Clan van Hout,

  remember that I have it yet—

  so come to me, I’ll read again:

  to think that you’ll be women then!

  You’ll understand what it’s about,

  you’ll understand the ways of men,

  the reason some of them give out

  before their time and some do not,

  the sacrifices that I made,

  the prices that could not be paid

  without exaction from my soul

  things that time could not make whole,

  without the paying of a toll

  that left me lesser than before—

  you’ll know all this and so much more.

  Some men have no one but their wives—

  they have no girls but only boys.

  But Hans van Hout has five of you—

  you all know that, I know you do.

  I’m not the star that I should be

  because so many worker bees

  have spent their lives opposing me.

  It’s been so since the dawn of man,

  the great held back by also-rans

  who live lives of such fecklessness

  they cannot tolerate success.

  So promise me you won’t forget

  The Ballad of the Clan van Hout,

  the man who left the Land Without,

  which none of you know aught about,

  to travel here from far away,

  the wounds he suffers to this day.

  I have been your loving father,

  each of you my loving daughter:

  you’ll be my daughters all your life—

  and She has had to be my Wife.

  Things that we see fade like a dream

  and what we see we soon forget.

  What we forget soon reappears

  though none of it is really there.

  Girls, get used to contradictions,

  truthful lies and false non-fictions.

  What isn’t there is everywhere;

  the things which are, are not, you see,

  however much they seem to be—

  and what is not is what will be

  as long as you and I agree.

  ST. JOHN’S

  1983

  WADE

  No one else from my small town went to university. I moved to the city straight out of high school. At university, I made few friends, set apart by my outport accent and my inclination to be a loner. I wanted to make my way into the greater world, on which, I fancied, my island birthplace had yet to make a mark, in part because so few books had been written about it, none of them good enough to earn the attention of my teachers, all of whom were from countries that no one I knew had set foot in. I dreamed that I would put my island on the map by writing about it as no one ever had or ever would. Books were what I most admired. Poets, novelists, philosophers and historians seemed to be pursuing Truth, something that, everywhere but in books, was unrecognized, mocked or forgotten. Only when I read a book did I feel that I was meeting a fellow uncompromising soul. These were not notions that I ever spoke aloud, for I was aware of how young and green they would have made me sound, how foolishly earnest and intense, besotted with ambition that would most likely come to nothing more than the kind of ordinary life to which others my age were sensibly reconciled.

  By the end of university, I’d written nothing, because I believed that I was not ready to write. Instead, I’d devised a regimen of reading, a rigorous one that, so far, I had stuck to—five hours a night of making my way through all the big books of Western culture, most of which I hadn’t encountered in the four years I’d spent getting my degree in English literature. I was a reporter for a small newspaper, a way station, I believed, on my journey to greater things.

  When I wanted to escape my small apartment, I went to the university library to read, and it was there that I met Rachel van Hout. There have been few times when I can look back and say that there, exactly there, my life was changed. The moment I met her was one of them.

  I had seen her before in the periodicals section, sitting at the head of a table whose chairs were otherwise empty, writing with her left hand in a paperback, pressing hard with her pen, her lips a tight line. I, too, was left-handed, often with a similar blue smudge on the heel of my hand. This time, she looked up for a moment and our eyes met, but she looked away as if she had known me for years and I was the last person she wanted to see. She was there again the next night, in the exact same place. She sat there, facing the entrance to the section, like a receptionist to whom I was required to state the purpose of my visit.

  I wandered about among the stacks for a few minutes and then headed toward the door, but I couldn’t resist another glance in her direction. “Hi!” she said when our eyes met, again acting as if she’d known me for years but this time was glad to see me. I walked over to her.

  “What are you reading?”

  “I am rereading—” she raised the book so I could see the cover—“The Diary of Anne Frank.”

  “I read that in grade school, grade eight, I think.”

  “You outgrew it long ago.”

  “No, I—”

  “Not me, though I also read it in grade five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten. Long story. Mine, not hers. Hers was all too short. She’s still my favourite writer. I’ll never outgrow this book. It shouldn’t be called The Diary of Anne Frank. It’s called that because that’s what the Broadway play and the movie were called. Het Achterhuis is what she called it. Dutch. It means ‘The Secret Annex.’ For a while, the book was called Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “I have a personal connection to it. Through my father. Dad grew up on Elandsstraat, two streets away from the Secret Annex, which is on Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. Mom and Dad go to Holland a lot. And other places. We’re travel poor. Everything I’m wearing is homemade by me or my mother. Only my shoes are store-bought.”

  She wore a handkerchief-like head scarf, a too-big yellow blouse, a long white skirt that was so heavy and stiff it might have been fashioned from a sail.

  “Holland, Switzerland, South Africa. My parents visit acquaintances and distant relatives in all three countries once a year. My sisters and I took turns spending a summer in Switzerland when each of us was fourteen. My sisters went alone but I went with my mother. Long story. We stayed in the Alps at my father’s third cousin’s house. He died last year and his wife is too old for visitors, but my parents still know plenty of people who are willing to put them up and put up with them when they drop in unannounced.”

  The torrent of words left her flushed and breathless. She’d spoken as if she’d had to get it all out in a preordained amount of time. I wondered how much of what she had just said was true. I wondered if there might be something wrong with her.

  “I’ve seen that look before,” she surprised me by saying. “My name is Rachel van Hout. My father is a professor in the accounting department here. I was born in Cape Town, South Africa. I finished my growing up in Newfoundland. Would you like my rank and serial number?” She had a way of not looking at me while she spoke that made it seem like she was transfixed by someone looking at her from behind me. I kept wanting to glance over my shoulder.

  “A lot of what I just said is from something I wrote and memorized years ago.”

  “I have to go,” I said. She nodded and went back to her book as if she’d expected me to say those very words.

  The next night, I barely recognized
her, though she was sitting in the exact same place, jotting down, it might have been, the names of those who came and went. She wore a red cotton dress that fit perfectly. No longer tied up with a scarf, her brown hair hung down her back, almost to her waist, parting over each shoulder so that two long strands of it hung down the front as well, flanking a row of buttons undone in a deep V. Her outfit of the day before had made me overlook her eyes—wide, brown, long-staring eyes, whose effect on me she seemed not to notice. Every inch of her bare skin was deeply tanned. Even her feet were, her Birkenstock sandals kicked off on either side of them.

  I paused beside her table. “You’re still reading that book.”

  “I’m still rereading it.” She didn’t look up. Suddenly, and loudly, she snapped the book shut.

  “I’m sorry I interrupted—”

  She put up her hand to stop me and rose from her chair. “I’m going outside for a while,” she said as she slipped her feet into her Birkenstocks. “You may join me if you like.” She headed for the exit, walking at the pace of someone storming off in a huff. We were outside by the time I caught up with her. She removed her sandals on the last of the library steps and walked barefoot through the grass and onto the parking lot, which we crossed to get to a handful of picnic tables on the far side. We sat opposite each other. “My name’s Wade,” I said.

  Removing her shoulder bag and placing it on the table, she crossed her legs, reached down and massaged one foot. “The soles of my feet are not as tough as they used to be, Wade,” she said. “As kids, in South Africa, we never wore shoes. We climbed trees barefoot, walked everywhere barefoot. We were always getting cuts from thorns and broken glass, and splinters from broken branches, but we didn’t care. My calluses became so thick I could have walked on burning coals. I cut my leg once on a rusty nail and fell asleep while my dad drove me to the doctor. Pretty weird. I have three sisters but no brothers. Two of them got married when they were nineteen, but not because they had to. Four daughters born at two-year intervals, almost to the month, aged thirteen, eleven, nine and seven when we left Cape Town. Oh, and let me show you a picture of my unmarried sister, Bethany. She has anorexia.”

  She rummaged in her shoulder bag and held out a photograph of a girl in a green bikini. Smiling, her arms outstretched, Bethany ran toward the camera, her body like that of the little napalm-burnt Vietnamese girl on the front page of the New York Times. Rachel put the photograph back in the bag. “How big is your family?” she said.

  “I have three brothers and two sisters. Mom had four boys in a row and then two girls.”

  “It must have been hard for the first girl.”

  “Cathy? Not really. The four of us raised her. Mom and Dad both worked until a couple of years ago.”

  “Hmm. My name’s Rachel, in case you don’t remember.”

  “I remember.”

  She nodded. “Someday I might tell you about the ballad,” she said. “The Ballad of the Clan van Hout. Something Dad wrote for us in rhyme when we were kids. He’d read it to us at bedtime. You must never tell Dad or Mom or my sisters that I mentioned it to you. I mean, you may never meet them, I’m not saying that. It’s not as if we’re engaged. I’m saying just in case. It’s a small town, after all.” Then she shook her head slightly, rolled her eyes and sighed. “Look, Wade, if you’re still sitting here because I’m so beautiful, you may as well leave now.”

  Just before that last sentence, I’d thought about leaving.

  Eyes downcast, she looked as if she expected me to go, perhaps even wanted me to. “It’s okay,” she whispered. Those wistfully spoken words, which seemed meant to reassure her, not me, convinced me to stay. I felt like whispering her name.

  * * *

  —

  We met several nights in a row at the picnic table. I spoke of things I had never spoken of before. I had told few people of my plan to be a writer, but enough for it to have become common knowledge. Among the reporters at the paper I worked for and those who worked for other papers in the city, I was known as “Shakespeare.” When the nickname was first coined, I had had sense enough to take it good-naturedly, and that was how, for the most part, it was used. At worst, I was regarded as amusingly delusional by my co-workers and rivals, all of whom were older than me.

  I didn’t talk about writers or books, and probably wouldn’t have had there been anyone around to talk about them with, my reticence owing to a near-superstition that my chances of ever doing or becoming anything would have lessened in direct proportion to how covetous of success I revealed myself to be.

  In my world, the gods rewarded ambition, ostentatious or not, with humiliating failure, which I so wanted to avoid that I numbered myself among those I had to hide my secret from. I didn’t keep a diary or a journal. I didn’t read about writers who were not among my favourites. I read far more poetry, philosophy and history than fiction, though fiction is what I wanted to write.

  Everything Rachel told me about herself seemed exotic. She told me she was the star pupil of her drill-sergeant-like yoga teacher, who belonged to an especially rigorous school of yoga called Iyengar-Hatha, named after the man, Iyengar, who invented it—a man with whom her teacher had had an affair while in India, as had almost all the women he taught, as if women could not fully get the knack of the Iyengar method without sleeping with him. She seemed to think this was not only entirely reasonable, but something she would do if Iyengar was not so far away. “I do three or four hours of yoga a day. It’s one of the few perks of still being subsidized by your parents when you’re twenty-one. I’m told I’m not quite ready for a job.”

  “Not ready?”

  “Long story.”

  She looked ready for anything. She exuded an air of perfect poise and had the straight-backed posture of a ballet dancer. She was tall, slender but big-breasted, round-eyed and quick to smile, as if the sight of everything delighted her. When I told her that I was a newspaper reporter, she seemed impressed, as if she didn’t know my employer was a tabloid that made up the news almost as often as it got it wrong. “It’s only until I save up enough money to be able to take time off to write a book,” I said.

  “What kind of book?”

  I said, “A novel.”

  To which she replied, “Oh, really? Fiction or non-fiction?” She burst out laughing at the look on my face. “I’m kidding,” she said. “A lot of novelists were newspaper reporters. Ernest Hemingway was, wasn’t he? For the Toronto Star?”

  I was impressed that she knew of Hemingway’s brief stint at the Star. I told her I thought that, in order to write about Newfoundland, I would have to leave it.

  “Because of things that have happened to you here that you can’t bear to be reminded of,” she said, nodding. “I took you for a tortured soul the second I laid eyes on you.” I must have looked as sheepish as I felt, because she sighed. “Erase all that,” she said. “I misplaced my irony. Where did I put it?” She rummaged in her shoulder bag. “I know it’s in here somewhere.” I laughed. “Thank God,” she said, glancing up for a moment. “I thought you missed it altogether.” She took out a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”

  “No thanks,” I said. I’d quit smoking because I couldn’t afford it. She shrugged and lit up a cigarette with a Bic lighter. “I only average one or two a week,” she said, “if you count every day since I was born.”

  I told her that what I’d meant about getting away was that, in order to write, I would need the perspective that only distance and the passage of time would allow—otherwise, the people and things I would write about would be ever-near, ever-present, inhibiting. I said that I would be muted by the immediacy of the landscape to whose desolate beauty my writing would never do justice unless recollected in tranquility.

  “Erase that last sentence,” she said. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head in mock wonderment. “You sound younger than you look. I think it’s sweet. My mother�
��” She threw back her head and laughed as one might at someone else’s punchline, her mouth so wide her back teeth showed, then resumed the sentence, thereby stepping on a remark that might have seemed as funny to me as it did to her. “My mother once wrote a sixty-seven-word short story about two goldfish. The male goldfish ate the female goldfish. The story was called ‘We Two Are Now One: A Marriage Allegory.’ ”

  “Your mother is a feminist,” I said.

  She laughed again, her eyes wide with incredulity. “Yes. In the same way that the pope is Jewish.”

  RACHEL

  I told him I was ten when I first read Het Achterhuis. I joined the Anne Frank fan club. It cost fifty cents to join and the money went to the upkeep of the Secret Annex. They would send photographs of Anne and some of the others she shared the annex with, Anne in Germany at various ages when there was as yet no need to move to Holland or for hiding out, Anne in a beach chair with a book on her lap, Anne wearing what looked like a new pair of glasses, Anne posing on a beach somewhere with her sister, Margot. Anne before the world went stark raving mad. There were quizzes about her life and her diary, and essay-writing contests about what Anne Frank meant to you or to the world. For a while, I thought of her as a fictional character like Anne of Green Gables. Anne of the Secret Annex. Often, I wished I was her.

  Then I read survivors’ accounts of her time at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and soon I had pictures in my mind of her and Margot shorn of all their hair, unclothed, barefoot, peering through a barbed-wire fence as if they had never seen a camera before and assumed it to have some sinister purpose.

  Nothing really bad happened in Het Achterhuis, so I tried to concentrate on that. But images of Bergen-Belsen kept interfering. I knew she was dead but I couldn’t stand to be reminded of it by my sisters, who did it because they grew so tired of hearing me talk about her that they began calling me the Anne Frank Freak, a nickname that caught on at school.

  I often thought of her father, travelling by train from Auschwitz to Amsterdam in 1945, after the war ended. He found out on the train that his wife had died in Auschwitz, but he hoped to be told in Amsterdam that Anne and Margot had survived Bergen-Belsen.