The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  “And what brought that on?”

  “Some people just get sick, Wade. But then they get better. Please don’t get hung up on this. If you do, I’ll get more hung up on it. I’ve told you this much so that you know I’m not stark raving mad, not so that you think I am.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “You’re stuck with me.”

  She nodded, obviously unconvinced. I may have looked unconvinced, though I was feeling less and less so. I brushed her cheek with the back of my hand, which she trapped between her cheek and her shoulder as she tilted her head and sighed. She closed her eyes.

  “Tired?” I said. She took my hand in hers, opened her eyes and again surveyed the books in her closet.

  “She was an insomniac, too. And chronically depressed.”

  “Anne Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think of her as an eternal optimist.”

  “You really didn’t read the book very carefully. Her parents gave her valerian. It’s a tranquilizer. They also gave her dextrose, cod liver oil, brewer’s yeast and calcium supplements. None of it worked. The girl who wrote ‘Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy’ also wrote ‘Outside, you don’t hear a single bird, and a deathly, oppressive silence hangs over the house and clings to me as if it were going to drag me into the deepest regions of the underworld.’ ”

  “Now that,” I said, “is a sentence that deserves to be erased.”

  “She was fourteen when she wrote it, Shakespeare.”

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  VON SNOUT (1964)

  You asked me for a scary story—

  I told you that you might be sorry,

  but you insisted anyway

  and still regret it to this day:

  The Tale of Claws von Snout

  In the place she left behind,

  the baby chick was blissful, blind

  to everything except her mind,

  and even that she couldn’t see

  because she had no memory

  of anything but sound and touch,

  which really wasn’t very much

  to think or dream or fuss about,

  so she decided she’d get out

  before she knew that Out was there,

  the blank blue sky, the blinding glare,

  the cold, the night, the Land Without—

  and there were other things about

  that thought a chick, though no big deal,

  was big enough to make a meal.

  So she made an application

  to reverse her own creation,

  to hire a construction crew

  much bigger than the four of you,

  to build an egg just like the one

  she wished she could make whole again.

  Her application was denied—

  they said she could not live inside

  the confines of another shell

  where it was warm and all was well

  as that would violate Rule Ten

  which said that, once it left the hen,

  an egg belonged to Claws von Snout,

  the Monster of the Land Without,

  “whose property you had the gall

  to peck to pieces, shell and all.

  You live now in the cold, bright world,

  and may I say you were not hurled

  but came here of your own volition,

  compromising your position.

  The order of this court is that—

  selfish girl, ungrateful brat—

  you owe yourself to Claws von Snout,

  the Monster of the Land Without.

  But since you cry and since you beg,

  you may give Claws von Snout one leg.

  If your leg is not delectable,

  two arms will be acceptable.

  If He is still unsatisfied,

  the rest of you must go inside.

  That’s what you wanted, I recall—

  von Snout will eat you, head and all!”

  Now that von Snout is in your mind,

  you cannot leave the Beast behind;

  you asked for him and he is yours

  (or should I say that you are his?),

  the Beast who dines on things with wings

  that play their harps while listening,

  the Cherubs of the Land Within.

  Henceforth, when he appears, von Snout,

  the Monster of the Land Without,

  will roar with his voice, not with mine—

  it will send shivers down your spines,

  spine-sliding shivers that make sounds

  like those of mice trapped underground.

  RACHEL

  It’s a very simple code—the English alphabet in reverse. A=Z, B=Y, C=X, D=W…At first I had to consult a chart I made of the English alphabet stacked on top of the Arellian. It took me an hour to write a paragraph. After I got sick, my output increased until I reached the point of not needing the chart. It wasn’t long before I was writing at near normal speed, though I found that it was easier to print the letters than to write them cursively, as I was not used to joining them into words. Printing also felt better, more intense and secretive. Once I had completely mastered Arellian, I wrote like a stenographer on speed. I preferred writing my diary to reading hers, constantly rushing headlong, never looking back, never rereading what I’d written.

  I didn’t mind that people knew that I was writing a diary, because to do so seemed normal, purposeful, even at the rate at which I wrote mine.

  The Encyclopediary of Rachel van Hout, Wade had called it. I liked the sound of that. But I remembered what it was like to be unable to go a day without writing reams of words, to go from one sleep to the next without reading, or to write without feeling like a medieval monk whose sole purpose in life was to make handwritten copies of philosophical and sacred texts—to be able to read a book, any book, other than hers.

  I didn’t often visit the book closet. Millions of words. Wade was so impressed. I could hardly believe it myself as I looked at the diary. I’d made it look very orderly, managed, controlled, like a set of files organized according to some simple system, files containing mundane information that was easy to access. But it was not, in any sense, an achievement. Just looking at it gave me cold shivers. Inside each volume of the diary was a foment of words cast in a code that no one else could understand. It’s possible that, even had they not been coded, no one else could have understood them because my writing was so cramped. I wrote most of the diary in that bedroom, at my desk or, more often, sitting up in bed late at night.

  I knew I should stop. I knew the cost of not stopping. Every night, I told myself over and over that I would stop after I had written one more page. Rest, relief, freedom from the clamour of my mind, was always one tantalizing page away. If I wrote one more page, I could put the diary aside for good. I would sleep and, the next day, I wouldn’t fall for the tricks my mind had played on me the night before. The key was to not be drawn in by the first trick, to hold out against the first false promise. But I couldn’t.

  It got to the point, what with reading the book and writing the diary, that I refused to go to school. My parents didn’t mind this part so much because I had been promoted two grades ahead of other girls my age. But I refused to leave my room.

  Eventually, I got to the point of doing nothing but writing my diary and reading Het Achterhuis over and over. I lost the few friends I’d had. Everyone thought there was something morbid about being obsessed with a girl your age who died in a concentration camp. I didn’t stay holed up in my room because I thought I was Anne Frank. Those stories about me were blown out of all proportion. I didn’t think I was hiding
out from the Nazis. But I did spend hours upon hours in my room reading that book and writing. I wasn’t sure if the book was making me worse or if it was all that was holding me together. My supposedly secret illness. But it somehow reassured me to think about the ways my sisters coped. Carmen had her drugs. Gloria had her hypersexuality, though not many people called it that at the time. Bethany had her anorexia. I had my diary and Het Achterhuis, which I kept reading even after I knew it by heart. The thought that we were all freaks made me feel less like one.

  There was a lot missing from Anne’s diary by the time her father had it published, things he had removed for family reasons, such as how much she disliked her mother, and things he removed because publishers said they were unfit for young people to read. Things that she somehow found the privacy to do. Portions of the original were quite explicit. She wrote about exploring different parts of her body, discovering them—that must have raised her father’s eyebrows. I saw the movie and a production of the play and I hated both of them. They made her and the others seem like characters in a situation comedy based on hiding out for years from Nazis.

  A diary is all about secrecy, writing to yourself and no one else. That’s why a lot of diaries have locks. There is nothing more isolating than reading constantly about isolation. In the Secret Annex, everyone was forced to keep secrets because there was not enough room for privacy. No one could say what they really thought of someone else. They had to hold it in to keep the peace. The only exception was that, in the bathroom, you had a few seconds to yourself, but visits were kept to an absolute minimum because of the sound made by running or flushing water. If you wanted privacy other than in the bathroom, you had to do what Anne sometimes did, climb under your bed or your blankets. I thought it must have been suffocating and wasn’t surprised that she dreamed of going for walks by herself in the woods.

  My parents made excuses for me to everyone who noticed how I looked. They said that I was run down from trying too hard in school, that I was a perfectionist where both my body and my mind were concerned, so I stayed in my room, alternating between studying for school and doing yoga.

  They said I had mono and there was no telling how much school I’d miss. They said I was travelling abroad, visiting a series of relatives who made sure that, where my studies were concerned, I didn’t fall behind.

  It seemed that, overnight, I went from thinking it was funny to leave notes written in Arellian lying about the house, or to write my diary in front of my parents, teachers and classmates, to wishing I could do nothing but read Anne’s diary and write mine, to resenting anyone and anything that prevented me from doing so.

  Eventually, I couldn’t sleep at all. My mother found me sitting up in bed, speaking in what I assume was Arellian, for she wasn’t able to make out a word.

  When I was diagnosed with bibliomania, one doctor told my parents that it wasn’t unusual for teenagers to seek sanctuary from the trials and tribulations of coming-of-age in the pages of a book that focused on such things. The Catcher in the Rye was such a book, he said, as well as an example of what could happen when the attachment to a book, for whatever reason, becomes a fixation and the teenager doesn’t just identify with the hero or heroine, but begins to mimic them, dress like them or, in extreme cases, believe that they are them. I told the doctors I didn’t see hidden meanings in the book. I didn’t think that Anne Frank was writing to me before I had even been born. I wasn’t like Mark David Chapman, who thought The Catcher in the Rye was telling him to kill John Lennon.

  The doctor said that, no matter what I thought, I was using unhealthy coping mechanisms. I wanted to control everything, but I couldn’t, so I tried to control something, in this case the amount of time per day I spent at my diary and Het Achterhuis. He said that I thought something bad would happen to my family and me unless I wrote and read to the point of exhaustion—he didn’t know what I thought would happen, he said, because I refused to tell him, but bibliomanic patients were always compelled to hyper-repetition by the fear of something.

  “This book doesn’t ward off evil or misfortune,” he told me. I told him I agreed with him, but he wasn’t convinced. He reminded me that, by the time of my admission to the hospital, I was buried in the two diaries twenty hours a day.

  They tried to wean me off them altogether, but whenever they took the books away from me, I had a panic attack. I wasn’t faking. So they let me keep the books but said that it was likely that I would never get to the point that I could ignore them if they were sitting right beside me. The new goal, they said, was to get me to the point where my obsession with the books was under control and had a minimal effect on how I lived. They got me to that point, then released me.

  I decided not to tell Wade that it was two years since I’d even tried to read any book but Het Achterhuis.

  I did tell him that, after my first breakdown, I was able, with the help of medication, to maintain a front of normalcy but that, as time passed, I began to once again write in Arellian in my diary, always on the sly. The truth was that I never completely put the diary aside. But, as I told Wade, it was also true that, for a while, I managed to not let it interfere with my pursuit of a university degree. In my final undergraduate year, my adviser approved my honours paper proposal—I wanted to write about Het Achterhuis, of course.

  At university no one seemed to care that I had had a breakdown, or why. I was not the only one who was considered eccentric, or the only one who had had some sort of emotional or psychological collapse. There seemed to be a notion that true intellectuals were high-strung by nature and forever on the verge of something. It was almost a badge of honour to have had a breakdown.

  When I told my mother of my honours paper topic, she paused for a few seconds before saying, “Well, you seem to have your mind made up and I certainly don’t intend to consult a psychiatrist about my family every other day. You’re old enough to do as you like, and to judge for yourself.” The only one of my sisters who might have tried to intervene was Bethany, but she was in Halifax, at university too, and, for reasons we would later learn, not keeping in touch with anyone back home.

  When I finished my paper, I was invited to present it at an Anne Frank conference at Leiden University, but Leiden isn’t far from Amsterdam and I would have been closer to Anne Frank’s house than I could stand to be, so I didn’t go.

  The next year, I proposed Anne Frank as the subject of my never-to-be-completed master’s thesis. Great things were predicted for me. My professors helped me get grants. I was believed to be on my way to becoming a significant scholar, my specialty the influence of Anne Frank’s diary on post-war writers and historians. What my mentors didn’t know about their prodigy was that she was cruising for another breakdown. In the periodicals section, Wade had happened upon as classic a case of burnout as could be found in academia. I had been getting so much done so fast because I never paused to rest, sleeping only when I was too tired to read or write. I was supposed to show my professor a draft of a chapter or two once in a while, but I started making excuses for missing my deadlines. I would tell her that things were going so well I didn’t want her input just yet lest it interrupt my momentum—or that I didn’t write in drafts but revised as I went along and therefore had only a small number of highly polished pages.

  Eventually, I was once again no longer able to do anything but write my diary and read Anne’s book. I began to think in Arellian—not always, but often and for long stretches of time. I spoke to myself, struggling to pronounce words without vowels, words without consonants, groups of letters that defied syllabizing, such as znhgviwzn, which is Arellian for “Amsterdam.” When I realized it didn’t matter how I pronounced them, since I was never going to say them in front of another human being, I soon became as proficient at speaking Arellian as I was at writing it. I dreamed in a jumble of languages, Arellian included.

  From The Arelliad

  RELAPSE (1979)

&nb
sp; Now comes the quickening of time

  that happens in Arellia—

  the yellow sky was overcast

  that winter night; the wind was west—

  of all the winds the West is worst,

  though some mistake it for the best—

  the only light the lighthouse light

  that came and went, the foghorn, too.

  Remember what she said to you:

  “Von Snout approaches from the past.

  He always saves the best for last.”

  He’s not the beast he used to be.

  I get away—for now I’m free.

  I surface from the page again—

  I call upon my heroine

  to calm my words and guide my pen.

  I learned to write by listening to Dad all those years. My diary goes something like The Ballad, an answer to it, I suppose, a kind of anti-Ballad, which is why I sometimes drift into his rhyme, his metre, no matter how much I resist.

  I used his words to ward off fears

  so often for so many years

  that over time it came to seem

  that I alone had written them.

  By then I couldn’t frame a thought

  except in words my father wrote;

  nor could I write a decent line—

  they sounded more like his than mine.

  In part, at least, most lines were prose,

  though I admit that even those

  were something like prosaic verse.

  The rest I cast as poetry:

  a hybrid style, unique to me.

  But it became my tendency,

  as I declined from bad to worse,

  to slip more often into verse.

  When I was thirteen years of age,

  I sank so deep into the page