The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  In late July, Rachel and I went to the long, sandy beach at Eastport, about two hours from St. John’s. In spite of how fit she was from doing yoga, she was hopeless at running. We ran along the wave-flattened sand at the edge of the water. I ran faster backwards than she could forwards, the two of us facing each other as we ran, she laughing so hard she would stop now and then and put her hands on her knees, out of breath, her sea mist–drenched hair hanging almost to the ground.

  In the Malibu, which I always doubted would start but always did, we drove the Irish Loop, a four-hour trip that included a long stretch of the Trepassey barrens, where the car was so hemmed in by fog that we had no hope of seeing, or even hearing, the caribou herd we had come to photograph. But even such futility struck us as hilarious.

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  THE EARLY DAYS OF HOUT (1962)

  Across the veldt HVH roamed.

  (His monogram, a palindrome,

  was engraved upon his rings,

  as well as many other things,

  his tie clip and his money clip,

  his pocket flask and pillow slips!)

  He liked the look of this new Land,

  so it was here he made his stand,

  and it was here your parents met,

  the best part of the story yet.

  You can’t be a proper family

  Unless you number at least three.

  Soon, our number rose to six,

  which left us in the strangest fix.

  We made up names night after night

  because, by morning, we forgot

  which names were yours and which were not.

  But suddenly it came to me:

  it might be easier if we

  referred to you collectively.

  We called you Glormenethalee.

  “Now there’s a name we won’t forget,

  the strangest name we’ve made up yet.”

  (Glor)ia was almost eight

  by the time she got it straight:

  “She is daughter number one,

  Car(men) is two more than none,

  B(etha)ny is number three,

  and last is little Rachel (Lee),

  and that spells Glormenethalee.”

  —

  When Hans said “sun,” the sun came out—

  it hid behind what Hans called “clouds.”

  When Hans said yes, such happiness—

  for certain things were now allowed.

  Young Hans said this, Young Hans said that—

  soon, this and that were everywhere.

  When Hans said “hat,” a hat appeared;

  Of course it wasn’t called a hat

  until he said, “Let’s call it that.”

  As the family grew and grew

  the fame of Hans van Hout did too,

  at least among his family,

  for there was no one else, you see,

  in all the land of Hans van Hout

  that he could tell the truth about

  what happened in the Netherlands,

  no one who’d ever understand

  what his family understood—

  that Hans was brave and Hans was good

  but there were secrets to be kept,

  things done to people while they slept,

  while others looked the other way

  so some at least could get away.

  When you are forced to compromise,

  to serve the truth by telling lies,

  when you must abandon some

  or else abandon everyone,

  you’ll understand why even Hans

  could not abide the Netherlands.

  We were safe in the House Within—

  no one got in, no one got out.

  But still there was a constant din

  of noises from the Land Without.

  Hans sealed the windows, locked the doors,

  cemented all the cracks and pores

  and thumbed his nose at those Without

  who coveted the girls of Hout.

  He kept one eye out for the horde

  who wanted in, and one eye out—

  O, ever-vigilant van Hout—

  for those who thought they wanted out.

  He barred the house both day and night;

  there was no air, there was no light.

  You couldn’t breathe or see the sun;

  it seemed that Death itself had come.

  Hans thought of aught to do but think—

  you heard him thinking all night long

  of someone who was on the brink

  of doing something very wrong.

  You heard him thinking through the night

  about what was and wasn’t right.

  Just when you thought you heard him say

  that Wrong would never go away,

  Hans said that Right had won the day.

  There was the house by day,

  there was the house by night.

  By day you couldn’t say

  what was or wasn’t right.

  By night you couldn’t think a word

  for even thinking could be heard

  in the silent house by night.

  I tell you now, there’s nothing worse

  than knowing how the universe

  is fixed for sheep that cannot sleep

  because you count them every night

  and always get the number right.

  The five of you, each one a ewe—

  I might as well be counting you.

  A drink of rum might knock me out

  but there is never drink about.

  I’d never think of sleeping pills—

  I haven’t yet and never will.

  Why do they say, “If walls could speak?”

  As certainly as floorboards creak,

  these walls can speak, they always have—

  some things they say are very bad,

  but that is not to say untrue:

  walls tell the truth, you know they do.

  They never say that I am good,

  no matter how I wish they would.

  From deep inside his inner ear,

  Time is the sound that Hans can hear,

  the sound it makes as it goes by.

  He cannot sleep and that is why

  he drowns out Time with other sounds—

  the ones he makes while making rounds,

  as if I have it in my head

  that you don’t hear me leave the bed,

  open the door, creep down the stairs,

  the creaking stairs that no one hears.

  I walk about the rooms below,

  roaming from window to window—

  I never bother with the lights:

  I like to stare out at the night,

  recalling this, recalling that,

  though frankly I would rather not

  recall at all the kinds of sounds

  the Germans made while making rounds,

  their boots upon the cobblestones

  of Amsterdam night after night,

  a cry for help, someone in flight

  that ended when a shot rang out

  far from the house of Hans van Hout.

  WADE

  “I haven’t told you how I came to be known as the Anne Frank Freak,” Rachel said. We were sitting on the floor in front of the fire in the front room on a weekend night. “I went through a kind of phase that started when I was thirteen. It lasted from the first time I became very obsessed wi
th her book to when I was released from hospital, almost two years later. Yes, I am talking about that kind of hospital. My sister Carmen was a secretary for a while. She wrote outrageous things in shorthand on pieces of paper and left them all over the house, things about what drugs she was doing and who she got them from and what she did to get them—I think she made up a lot of it. I asked her to teach me shorthand, but she said it had taken her months to learn and she didn’t have the time. So, instead, I made up a pretty simple alphabet code I call “Arellian.” The first and last letters of my name, Rachel, are R and l. R-l-e-n. Arellian. Get it?”

  “How does the code work?”

  She frowned. “No one else knows, so there’s no need to feel left out. I left my own risqué notes around the house. It was just for fun, kids’ stuff. Other girls at school had codes too. When we got around to studying Het Achterhuis, I came up with the idea of writing a diary in Arellian. It was the kind of thing that most teenagers would get bored with in a few days, but I didn’t get bored. I started out writing about as much per day as Anne Frank did. Then I sort of became addicted to diary writing—diarizing is the word for it. I wrote for quite a few hours every day. I also read Anne Frank’s book a lot. A lot. I became a hypergraphic, hyperlexic bibliomaniac with a major in Anne Frank. The Triple Crown of Craziness, Bethany called it. Now the hyperlexia is gone and I only read her book when I feel like it. When I was sick I read it so often that I memorized it. I did. I can quote it, chapter and verse. The hypergraphia is gone too. In the library, when I was writing in the book, I was just making a few notes—grad school habit. I don’t keep a diary. When I did, I wrote so many pages a day that I wound up having a kind of breakdown. Her book is still like a security blanket, I suppose. I don’t go anywhere without a copy.”

  “That’s your big secret?” I said, trying not to look as taken aback as I felt.

  “I didn’t say it was a secret. Remember that night at the picnic table when you almost walked away? Don’t deny it. I should have told you then, but if I had told you, you really would have walked away. It’s not too late. I guess it never will be, will it?”

  She began to get up, but I grabbed her arm to keep her there. “I’m glad I didn’t walk away,” I said.

  She stared into my eyes, assessing me. “We’ll see,” she said.

  I tenderly brushed her hair back from her forehead. “Really. I’m glad I didn’t.”

  “We’ll see,” she said again, this time in that whisper she used when she seemed to be talking to herself.

  I was partly bluffing, of course. Would I have run a mile if she had been a less attractive woman speaking almost jauntily about having had a breakdown at thirteen? She intrigued me, and I was flattered that she seemed to find me intriguing. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. I had seen nothing more beautiful than the way those eyes of hers lit up when she saw me. I had never been in love. I wondered how I’d know if I was.

  * * *

  —

  In her parents’ bed, a couple of days later, I asked, “Do you still have that diary you kept?”

  “Yes. Every single volume. I might show them to you sometime. When you’re ready.”

  “But not now?”

  “I haven’t done much more than glance at them in years. I have this notion that it might set me off again. Or something like that. I’d rather not talk about it.” She studied my face. “You look like you’re trying to think of a nice way to say that, if we ever meet again, it will be by accident.”

  I shook my head and kissed her. “Why did you become so wrapped up in that book? When we first met you said it was your favourite, but—”

  “No. I said that Anne Frank was my favourite writer.”

  I told her I’d never thought of Anne Frank as a writer. It seemed to me that her diary was more historical document than work of literature, its fame owing to the circumstances of its composition, not to the book itself. For that I could think of no kinder word than ordinary, even by the standards of the books I imagined other children her age might write.

  “It’s a very important book,” she said, “at least to non-purists like me. But it’s not my favourite book.”

  I told her I saw the point of this distinction. I said that Thomas Wolfe had once been my favourite writer. Each of his books about small-town life in the American South read like an eloquent catalogue of the contents of the universe. I had spent years under the spell of Wolfe and his repeated attempts to get to the heart of everything in page-long, highly repetitive sentences. I had yet to read a writer more driven to write something commensurate in scope with life itself, as if the Answer was always one tantalizing step ahead, one level of perception removed. The question of what lay behind the veil goaded all six feet seven inches of him to a tremendous, formless, outpouring of words and a tumultuous, voracious life that, to a young man like me, seemed profound. When I happened on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assessment of Wolfe—that his “awful secret” of having “nothing to say” was evident on every one of the thousands of pages that he wrote—the spell that Wolfe had cast on me was broken, but I had yet to put Wolfe aside, so in awe was I of the sheer pace at which he wrote.

  “All right,” she said, “all right, I’ll show you the damn diary.”

  * * *

  —

  On a bookshelf in her bedroom closet were countless diaries of various sizes and colours. Hardcover diaries, writing tablets without covers, some ruled, some not, children’s sketchbooks, graph-paper tablets—I felt her watching me as I surveyed them.

  “I actually had two breakdowns,” she said. “A few years after I recovered from the first, I had a relapse and disappeared into the diaries again. It’s been a couple of years since my second recovery.” She pulled a notebook off the shelf and handed it to me. “Arellian,” she said. “I call the whole thing The Arelliad. You know, like The Iliad?” We exchanged smiles. “Remember I told you that I don’t go anywhere without a copy of her diary? Well, I don’t go anywhere without my translation of her diary, either. They’re in that bottomless shoulder bag of mine.”

  “You translated The Diary of Anne Frank into Arellian?”

  She nodded. “It didn’t take very long. You’re not allowed to see it, so don’t go snooping.”

  I crossed my heart and flipped open the notebook she had handed to me. Lines and lines of unspaced, unpunctuated clumps of letters. A single, endless sentence. “I can’t read a word of it,” I said.

  “That’s the point,” she said, taking the notebook from me and replacing it on the shelf. “The astonishing, fascinating truth about me is written in Arellian in these books. The drama of teenage girlhood. Anne Frank coded her own diary, in a way. She made up pseudonyms for the others in the Secret Annex. She addressed her diary entries to an imaginary friend named Kitty, a character from a book she liked. There are three versions of her diary, A, B and C. A is Anne’s original version. B is a revision of A, done by her in the hope that, someday, it would be published. And C is a revision of B, done by her father, just before it was published. Layers upon layers upon layers.” Arms folded, she stared warily at the shelves.

  “It’s amazing,” I said. “All this writing in just a few years.”

  She sniffed and whispered, “Amazing.”

  “But you’ve written so much, Rachel. Millions of words, judging by the number of books. The Encyclopediary of Rachel van Hout. You don’t write it anymore?”

  “Not much. Hardly ever. It’s all very juvenile and boring and repetitive.” She threw back her head and laughed. A joke was coming. I felt like telling her it was better to laugh after you told a joke. Then she frowned as if she’d forgotten entirely what she’d been about to say.

  I took hold of one of her hands. With the other, she pointed to the opposite closet shelf. On the spine of every book was the name Anne Frank. “My other diary,” she said. “Hers, I mean, in a lot of
languages.” She chose and handed me a German paperback edition—Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank—and opened it at the middle.

  “I can’t read a word of that, either. Can you?”

  She nodded. “I’m fluent in German and a few other languages. I prefer to read her book in Dutch, the language she wrote it in.”

  I shook my head in wonder. A few other languages.

  “You go through a lot of books when you read them like I did back when all this started,” she said. “I joined book-of-the-month clubs. Copies of Het Achterhuis were delivered to the house, along with other books I was required to buy, which I chose randomly and ignored when they arrived, presenting my mother with book club bills as if they were report cards. I ransacked used bookstores and libraries for copies of Het Achterhuis. I stole them. I stole new ones too. I was a real klepto. I got caught at one bookstore. They called my mother. When she came to get me, she told me she was disappointed in me, but never said another word about it. She actually wrote to anyone even remotely likely to send me a present on a special occasion to let them know that my hobby was collecting copies of The Diary of Anne Frank. People she had long since lost touch with sent me books. English, Dutch, German, French, Afrikaans and other editions turned up in the mailbox. Pretty strange, right? All of this, I mean.”

  I shrugged and tried to look as if I’d heard of stranger things.

  “With a face that easy to read, you’ll never make a living playing poker. What I have is under control but not cured. I’m recovering and I always will be. It’s not contagious. It can’t hurt you any more than my having diabetes could hurt you. Arellian is not a language, okay? It’s a coded form of English that substitutes one letter of the alphabet for another. It’s like the cryptogram in the newspaper, only more complicated.”

  “Can you say something in Arellian? You could teach it to me and we could have conversations.”

  She sighed in frustration. “I could say something in Arellian but I’m not going to, and you’re never going to. I’m not supposed to talk about it. Doctor’s orders. I just wanted you to know about it. I admit I hear it in my head sometimes. It’s really not that big a deal. Prison inmates study law to the point that they can advise their lawyers on how to get them out of jail. They have a lot of time on their hands. So did I. You can accomplish a lot when your days are longer than other people’s because you have insomnia. Insomnia brought on by my obsession with Anne Frank.”