The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  “It’s beautiful,” she said as we drove down the hill toward the sea. “It reminds me a bit of Cape Town.”

  “Really?”

  “All the brightly coloured houses—they’re like the ones in the Bo-Kaap, the East Indian part of Cape Town.”

  “I bet you spent a lot of time there when you were growing up.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It doesn’t look like the setting of a novel, does it?” I said.

  “No place does until it is, I guess,” she said. “But I think it’s beautiful. Besides, aren’t novels set in here?” She tapped her forehead. “That’s where everything I write is set.”

  * * *

  —

  My parents’ tiny house was built into the side of a cliff, as were the houses around it, the front supported by wooden beams that looked like stilts. “No flat land,” I said. “Hillside soccer was invented here.” As she parked I warned her, “Better put on the handbrake or this car will wind up in the harbour.”

  As soon as we got to the door, I smelled pork chops frying and glanced at Rachel, who seemed unconcerned. Mom came out to the porch and I introduced them.

  “Hi, Jennie,” Rachel said and stooped to give Mom a hug. Mom was barely able to rest her chin on Rachel’s shoulder. When they pulled apart, Mom smiled at me in a way I knew she couldn’t fake. My dad was right behind her.

  “Hi, Art,” Rachel said, as she hugged my father, too.

  “So, Jennie,” she said, turning back to my mother. “I’m a vegetarian.”

  My mother looked at me, nonplussed, then back at Rachel. “My love,” she said, “I haven’t even got a head of lettuce in the house. Pork chops, potatoes and bread is what we’re having. I usually boil up some carrots and turnips, but I forgot to get some.”

  “I eat potatoes and bread,” Rachel said, “and I can make an omelette if you have some eggs.”

  “You’ll have to make it, my love,” Mom said, “because I’ve never even seen an omelette in my life.” None of us had. Eggs were boiled or fried.

  “There might be something in the deep-freeze that she’d like,” my father said. We considered him to be an adventurous eater.

  He went downstairs and came back up with a frost-encrusted bag of Brussels sprouts—infused with Béarnaise sauce, the label said.

  “My God, Art,” Mom said, “she can’t eat those. They’ve been down there for at least ten years. That sauce will taste like vinegar.”

  “All the better,” I said. “It might disguise the taste of the Brussels sprouts.”

  “I’ll give them a try,” Rachel said.

  While Mom tended to the pork chops, Rachel warmed up the Brussels sprouts and, just before the chops were done, whipped up two eggs in a bowl with a fork while my mother, looking worried, watched. “Breakfast for dinner?” she said. Rachel smiled at her and nodded.

  Two of my brothers had moved out, but my sisters—Cathy, who was sixteen, and Sylvie, who was fourteen—and my twenty-year-old brother, Paul, were still at home and joined us for dinner. Rachel and my father split the Brussels sprouts between them.

  “Dig in,” Dad said. The rest of us, as we dug in, watched Rachel. As we noisily and self-consciously cut and chewed our pork chops, she virtuously, frugally and silently devoured an entire plateful of things that had not been killed just to please her palate. She did not eat at what I had once imagined was a vegetarian’s pace. She finished everything on her plate before the rest of us were halfway done.

  “You don’t savour your food,” my father said. “You’re a bolter.”

  Cathy piped up: “It doesn’t take as long to stab a Brussels sprout as it does to cut a pork chop.”

  Rachel laughed, but my mother scowled at Cathy.

  “Does it bother you that we’re eating meat?” my father said.

  Rachel shook her head.

  “So your motto is live and let live?”

  “If it was,” Rachel said, “then it would bother me that you’re eating meat.”

  “She got you there, Dad,” Paul said. My father grinned sheepishly.

  * * *

  —

  After dinner, as my mother started to clear the table, Rachel put her hands on her shoulders and gently guided her to a chair. “You sit down, Jennie,” she said. She pointed at my sisters. “And the two of you stay put. I’ll do the dishes and the men will help me.” And we did.

  When the dishes were done, we sat around in the living room. We would normally have watched TV, but Mom considered it rude to turn the set on when company was in the house.

  “What’s yoga like?” asked Sylvie.

  Rachel looked at me and I explained: “I’ve told them a lot about you.”

  “Well,” she said, “my kind of yoga has nothing to do with burning incense or meditating.”

  “Do some for us?”

  “Is that the price of dinner in this house?” Rachel teased.

  “Now, Sylvie,” Mom said, “Rachel doesn’t have to perform for us.”

  “I’m not exactly dressed for it,” Rachel said, “but there’s one pose I can do in a dress.” She lay on her stomach, put the palms of her hands on the floor just above her hips and, with no apparent effort, rose up on her hands, her feet off the floor, her legs, back and head in a perfect, horizontal plane.

  “Holy shit!” Paul said.

  “Do you think you can do that, boys?” my father said. Paul and my sisters stared at Rachel in wide-eyed disbelief. My mother looked mystified as to what the point was of practising for years to get the knack of doing such a thing.

  When Rachel went to the bathroom, Paul clapped me on the back and, laughing, said that she was pretty much what he thought the first girl I brought home would be like, only better-looking. The family consensus seemed to be that I had fallen for a surprisingly charming, outdated hippie.

  “The yoga girl,” my father called her ever after.

  When Rachel got back, my father asked her what Switzerland was like.

  “Switzerland was boring,” Rachel said. “My mother went off to see other relatives in London for a while, so I was there alone in this village in the mountains with my aunt and uncle. Six weeks with no one else for miles. I was twelve. All I did all day was hike.”

  “Yes, but you were in the Swiss Alps,” my father said. “I don’t think I’d be bored in Switzerland. I was never bored when I was twelve.”

  “Because you weren’t alone,” she said, and smiled at him as if to say she knew that, like her, he couldn’t stand to be alone.

  “Maybe,” he said, nodding.

  I couldn’t help marvelling that my fisherman father and my girlfriend had just bonded over yoga and Switzerland and boil-in-the-bag Béarnaise-infused Brussels sprouts that had been fossilizing in our deep-freeze for ten years.

  From The Arelliad

  WADE (1983)

  I sink into the page again;

  I’m writing in Arellian.

  It still seems strange, despite the years,

  and once again I feel the fear

  that comes when I give in to hope—

  once I give in, it’s hard to stop:

  a drug I’m not supposed to take

  in case it turns out that I like

  it more than those that Doc prescribed

  when I began to diarize.

  I wish I’d known you years ago, the boy next door whom I’d annoy when I pretended not to see you showing off in front of me. What were you like before you dreamed of writing books, your fondest wish to become what I wish I wasn’t? You may have been content to be one of the Jackson family that made its living from the sea, the Petty Harbour Jackson clan that chose to stay where it began, or gave no thought to leaving home for much longer than a week or two. I wish I’d been one of the girls who’d never seen the outside wo
rld and never really wanted to, or wanted anything but you. I wish it had been understood that you and I would live together happily in a hillside house above the harbour, where I’d keep watch until your boat came into view before last light.

  You still taste like the sea to me,

  the fisherman you used to be;

  the wind, the mist, I know that smell,

  for I am from the sea as well.

  Perhaps I swam beneath your boat.

  You cannot swim or stay afloat—

  the water is too cold for you

  to swim in as I used to do.

  You skim the surface of the sea—

  you cannot make your way to me

  so I must make my way to you,

  an old tale with a turn that’s true.

  Do your parents wonder if I’m just a symptom of your far-fetched ambition? Maybe they think that you and I are just putting on airs to set ourselves apart from them. You shun the girls you grew up with and bring home the yoga girl, the foreigner. They might be right, your mom and dad, and I’m nothing more than something weird washed up on shore that will soon go back to where it came from.

  I love your home, your hillside lair, but I might not if I’d grown up there. Some of the houses are inches from the road that narrows to one lane where the settlement begins. Hvggonvmg. Settlement.

  You stressed it: “The proper word is settlement. I don’t know why, I really don’t. The townies come to visit from the city, the Sunday tourists who, after they have been to church, come here to gawk.”

  You’re writing when you talk like that. You haven’t got it all worked out, the place you love but sometimes hate, how much you’ll miss where you were born once you begin to write about it.

  On stormy nights as a child you could hear the foghorn blare from the lighthouse at Cape Spear; the smell of the cold, landward wind, the fishing gear, the nets spread on the rocks to dry. You’ll remember it all, what it was like to be a boy, to be a boy there, exactly there, a place you’ll long for when you move away.

  I know that I romanticize the look that comes over you when we arrive at Petty Harbour—more puzzlement than wistfulness, over a riddle you would try to answer if only you knew what the riddle was. What is it that’s eluding you? What’s there in every inch of home? You say that it will drive you mad. I doubt it very much, I say—well, not aloud but in my mind, for mad is more than just a word to me and something you will never be.

  Perhaps I should explain to you how far from mad you are, how far from mad you’ve always been, but then I’d have to tell it all, spill it all out, and I think I know what you would do.

  The Encyclopediary. You didn’t get it. How could you? If I showed you pictures of me recovering from injuries, on crutches or in bandages, on life support in the ICU, you’d understand what I’d been through. But you missed my message, which was: Here’s what writing books can do; I wrote all these and it’s a wonder I’m alive. Those injuries you couldn’t see because you were so jealous and impressed. A blocked writer and his hypergraphic girlfriend. You can’t start and I can’t stop. A match made in Arellia.

  I’ve lived in a Secret Annex of my own, left the world behind in favour of the confines of Arellia, the sanctuary of my mind. Or so my mind would have me believe.

  I’ve never been to the secret house where Anne Frank and the others hid out for eight hundred days. I’ve never seen it except in photographs, though I’ve often been to Amsterdam. I’m afraid to go there. It might only make things worse.

  Avoid the windows lest they see

  a face where faces shouldn’t be.

  Like Anne, I left the world behind—

  I chose the confines of my mind,

  or was it that my mind chose me

  to live in it in secrecy?

  It was the same for Anne and me:

  the two of us wrote silently.

  The time for speaking was at night—

  I wrote and spoke by candlelight;

  the candles flickered in the gloom

  and made a chapel of my room.

  I whispered every word I wrote,

  but even then I spoke in code

  and made sure that Their door was closed.

  The candles burned down as I rhymed;

  by keeping count, I measured time.

  By number ten, the night was done,

  the curtains framed by morning sun;

  the smell of wax, the smell of smoke—

  I fell asleep as others woke

  until I heard Her at the door

  just as I had the day before.

  She turned the knob and peered inside,

  surveyed till she was satisfied

  I hadn’t set something ablaze,

  then shut the door and went away.

  What have I done all night except

  the very thing I shouldn’t do,

  or run the risk of losing you?

  WADE

  Rachel’s parents returned from Amsterdam, something I’d been dreading all summer, both in spite of and because of Rachel’s assurances that they acted the same way toward most people whether they liked them or not. “Remember,” Rachel said as she drove me to the house to meet them in the afternoon, “Dad’s parents died before the war. He was on his own from the age of fourteen, I think. And Mom is an only child and her mother died a long time ago. They’ve left it all very vague.”

  “Thanks for the family necrology,” I said.

  “Touchy subjects, I guess,” she said. “Dad’s mother died after his dad, I think, which is why he was on his own. I can never remember the story. A couple of months later, the Nazis seized the house and the houses of all his relatives. After that, he was pretty much on his own. I should know more, but I don’t.”

  I met them in the kitchen, where they were standing about, waiting for us.

  “Hans van Hout,” her father said, stepping briskly toward me with his hand held out. I took it and he looked me in the eye in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of way. His eyes seemed pea-sized behind his thick lenses, the pale blue irises not much more than dots. He was a big man, not quite as tall as me, but broader in the shoulders, his legs of a thickness that even his baggy slacks could not disguise. He was bald but for some shortly cropped grey hair at his temples. Everything he wore had the homemade look of the clothes Rachel had worn the night we met: a wrinkled white shirt, the oversized grey slacks whose cuffs bunched about his shoes, which looked like they had been left to dry in the sun after having been submerged in muddy water.

  “Wade Jackson,” I said, matching the firmness of his grip and the earnestness with which he’d said his name. I had never offered my name like that before and felt ridiculous. I dearly hoped he was not customarily so earnest. I didn’t think I could go on pretending to be the forthright, upstanding young man he seemed to hope I was for very long. I needn’t have worried. It would be more than a year before he addressed me directly again.

  “Nice to meet you, Wade,” Myra said, smiling at me. She had a mass of dark freckles on her cheeks, and eyes as round and brown as Rachel’s. Her hair was short and going grey. She was much stouter than the rest of her family, her face and her bare arms darkly tanned. Her accent was not like her husband’s. It was, Rachel told me later, the accent of the non-Afrikaans South African, whereas Hans’s was a blend of several accents, the primary one being Dutch. Myra stood in a kind of recitation posture that I later learned she had been taught at convent school, forearms at waist height, the fingers of one hand gripping the fingers of the other—Rachel said later it was a kind of glee club singer’s pose, taught to her by the nuns of the Star of the Sea Convent in Kalk Bay, a way for a girl to keep her hands, arms and torso absolutely still while she was among grown-ups. She looked about the room as public speakers do to e
ngage their entire audience, smiling all the while in the most gracious-seeming, welcoming of ways. This was Myra’s public posture, indoors, outdoors, no matter what the setting or the circumstances, but it seemed to me that it was not meant to fool anyone. It was as if she wanted people to see that she was posing so as to keep them at a distance.

  Hans said something in another language.

  “Afrikaans,” Rachel said, looking playfully at her father, “is the language they speak to each other when they don’t want people to know what they are saying. When they’re keeping deep, dark secrets. You two forget that I can speak it.”

  “You speak it very badly,” Hans said. “You should never translate it.”

  “I will, though,” Rachel said, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “I’m dreading the jet lag from that flight,” Hans said to Myra. “Sitting in one place for all that time with nothing to do, it’s pure torture. I’m exhausted but I feel like I should stretch my legs for three or four hours.”

  “Hans is very restless,” Myra said to me. “He can’t stand to stay put, whereas I quite like having nothing to do but read or talk. Even on a plane he’s more often on his feet than not. He stands beside his row as if he’s waiting for someone to come back from the washroom.”

  “I have to drink my Horlicks later,” he said. “Don’t let me go to bed without it.”

  “Hans has ulcers. If he is going to have any chance of getting to sleep, I’d better not forget the Horlicks,” Myra said. “So Rachel tells us you want to be a writer?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I—”

  “And you’re a reporter now?”

  “Yes—”

  “So you’re already a writer. Or do newspapers and magazines not count?”

  “They do. I’m a writer but not the kind of one I want to be. The kind who writes.”

  She smiled and tilted her head slightly to one side as if she was both charmed by my youthful idealism and hoped that the inevitable dashing of my dreams wouldn’t break my heart.