The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  On the way to the bathroom, I saw Bethany talking to Nora, the maid, a short, stout woman of about forty with skin the colour of toffee, who was listening with eyes downcast. I stopped beside her and waited to be introduced. Bethany, seeming not to notice me, said, “Nora, I’m starving. Get it? I’m literally starving. What I mean is, don’t hurry up with dinner.” Nora continued to stare at the floor.

  “She doesn’t get it,” Bethany said, not looking at me as she set off to the kitchen.

  “I’m Wade,” I said, nodding to Nora.

  She nodded slightly, said, “Yes, mister,” and stood, one hand gripping the other, eyes still fixed on the floor.

  “You’re Nora,” I said.

  “Yes, mister,” she said.

  Hans, whom I’d yet to encounter, came out of the kitchen and, ignoring me, said, “Nora, it’s time to make the rounds of the front room. Our guests are running low on drinks.”

  “Yes, master,” she said as Hans pushed past me and Rachel and Myra arrived at my side.

  Myra kissed me on both cheeks. “Hello, Wade,” she said. “Homesick yet?” Before I could answer, she followed Nora to the kitchen.

  “Master?” I said.

  “It’s not meant in the sense of master and slave, as it was on American plantations,” Rachel said. “Master is what English servants called the master of the house. This is a holdover from that, that’s all. Master, madam, mister.”

  Nora moved among us as unobtrusively as if she were invisible. Rachel’s parents spoke to her only to pass on instructions or to issue mild complaints. “Nora, there’s no ice left in my drink.” Nora, head bowed, said “Yes, madam” or “Yes, master,” her tone just as perfunctory.

  The inside of the house was meticulously well kept, ordered and clean, not my usual experience of a van Hout residence.

  “Thank God I’m back in a country where we can afford a maid,” Myra said as she showed Rachel and me about.

  * * *

  —

  When Fritz and Carmen arrived, Carmen flashed me a wide smile and gave me a hug. “Oh my God, look at you, in South Africa and everything,” she said, stepping back to appraise me as if she didn’t remember that we’d flown in on the same plane.

  “Well, if it isn’t the tourist and the tart,” Fritz said. “You absolutely must come out to our place on the Flats sometime. We’ve been approved for running water. All I have to do is dig down to the water table. Shouldn’t take me more than a year. How is the great South African novel coming along? You’ve been here, what, a week? You should have it down pat by now.”

  “I’m not writing about South Africa,” I said. “Just about you, Fritz.”

  “Legs have been broken for less,” he said.

  “Rachel’s Wade is in South Africa, Rachel’s Wade is in South Africa,” Carmen more or less sang. She was stoned but not like she had been on the plane, staring at me in apparent disbelief that I could exist outside of Canada.

  As we stood about the front room while Nora made dinner, Myra told the story of the conversation she’d once had with Tom the gardener, who had worked for them when the girls were very young. She’d asked him, “Tom, if something were to happen, you wouldn’t kill us, would you?”

  “No, madam,” Tom said. “I would get one of my friends to kill you, and I would kill his master and his madam and their children.”

  The DeVrieses laughed. Myra, her hand on her chest, said, “I was so relieved, because I sometimes wondered how safe we were around him, or around Elsie, for that matter.”

  If something were to happen. That was the euphemism for the uprising that everyone of whatever colour seemed to think was inevitable but never imminent, always vaguely fated to happen during the lifetimes of people not yet born.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m looking forward to,” Myra said. “The Star of the Sea Convent annual reunion and fundraiser. It’s not far off. A chance to see so many old friends. Theresa’s a graduate too.” Theresa nodded and smiled.

  “A weekend-long hen party,” Hans said. “Thank God husbands are not invited or, worse, required to go.”

  “When I was in the mental hospital,” Bethany said loudly, “I used to have my bed examined. Really. They used to search my bed for hidden food.”

  “We should all have our beds examined,” Fritz said.

  Bethany extracted something from the pocket of her blouse. “I have to take my happy pills,” she said. She popped two capsules, each one half green, half black, into her mouth and washed them down with a mouthful of water. “Ahhhh,” she said. “Now I’m all normal again. I also have some just like Rachel’s—higher dosage, of course. They’re the ones I stop taking now and then. I hate them. They make me feel like I’m underwater. But I have better drugs than Fritz does, and I’m not risking arrest. What do you think of that, Fritz?”

  “Drugs?” Fritz said. “In South Africa? You could get twenty years for smoking a joint, if that’s the right word.”

  Bethany cackled.

  When Gloria and Max turned up, Gloria acted as if she had no memory of our short stay in their house or of Rachel’s outburst.

  After the reintroductions, with everyone settled again in the living room, Max said, “I used to go out with a woman from the Pacific Northwest. She called my penis a scrotum pole.” Thinking that, if nothing else, it was an okay pun, I laughed, but no one else did. Gloria shot a glance at Rachel, who affected fascination with the ice cubes in her drink.

  Hans, raising his glass of Perrier, stood and announced that he wished to propose a toast. “To South Africa,” he said. “Let us live and strive for freedom in South Africa, our land.”

  “To South Africa,” said Bethany, smirking at Fritz, who smirked back.

  “To South Africa,” everyone but me said in chorus, sipping from their glasses.

  “The little verse Dad recited,” Rachel told me, “is from the national anthem.”

  “It sounds better in Afrikaans,” Hans said. “It rhymes. The whole anthem does, especially when sung. I try to get Myra to sing it like she used to, but she won’t.”

  “I’m doing you all a favour,” Myra said. “I wouldn’t want to desecrate the anthem of my homeland.”

  “We’re home again,” Hans said. “That dreary place of ice and snow will soon be a distant memory, thank God.”

  “It’s been a long time since all your daughters were together, which means it’s been a long time since your last harem, Dad,” Gloria said.

  “Oh, Gloria,” Myra said, smiling, “your father doesn’t need a harem anymore. He’s let himself go ever since he went completely bald.”

  “I can tell,” Max said. “He has more hair in his ears than I have on my balls.”

  “And just as grey, I’ll bet,” Hans said.

  Myra surprised me by shrieking with laughter.

  “Why a harem?” I said to Rachel. As if my question had set them off, the four girls sprang out of their chairs and fled the room. I heard them in the kitchen and the bathroom, rifling through drawers and cupboards, then running up the stairs. One by one, they returned to the front room. Bethany cleared various knick-knacks and ashtrays from the coffee table, leaving only a white doily. “Everyone but Dad get off the couch,” she said. Max and Fritz stood, crossed the room to the loveseat and sat on either side of me. Bethany knelt at the coffee table, where the sisters unloaded Q-tips, tweezers, scissors, nail clippers and a nail file. Gloria plunked down an electric razor and a bottle of aftershave. Hans, removing his glasses, spread his arms and legs wide on the couch in a gesture of helpless abandon.

  As the rest of us watched, his four daughters went to work on him, Rachel on his left, Gloria on his right, Carmen in front of him, Bethany handing instruments to the others like a surgical nurse. Rachel and Gloria each swabbed one of Hans’s ears with a Q-tip. Then, with small pairs of scissors, they snipped th
e hair from the insides of his ears. Carmen and Bethany worked on one nostril each, clipping and plucking his nose hairs. Hans, his head tilted back, eyes closed and mouth partway open, obeyed their every command. “Tilt your head back more.” “Flare your nostrils.” “Don’t move. Don’t sneeze.”

  I got it now: his girls were a “hairem.” I looked back and forth between them and Myra, who wore a smile of amusement until she noticed I was watching her, at which her face went blank. The girls pored over their father, sometimes holding his head in their hands to get proper leverage, peering into his ears and nostrils as if into his very brain. Rachel and Gloria clipped his eyebrows while Carmen and Bethany shaved him with the electric razor, which they passed back and forth between them. When they were done, Rachel poured aftershave onto her hands and patted his cheeks.

  “Ta-dah,” Bethany said, throwing up her arms. The four girls backed away from him to survey their handiwork. Hans let forth a tremendous sneeze, after which he slipped his glasses back on.

  “Bless you,” Myra said.

  Fritz and Max applauded, and I joined in half-heartedly, appraising Rachel, who, with her sisters, was staring at their father.

  “You seem quite astonished,” Myra said, pointedly, to me. “The girls used to do this all the time when they were younger. Self-grooming has never been Hans’s forte.”

  “Come here, Rachel,” Hans said, his arms held wide. She went to him and sat sideways on his lap, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek. He slapped her on the backside several times, then smoothed one thigh, all the while staring at me through his glasses, his smile as wide as it had been when he’d hugged my sisters. After a few minutes, she scrambled off his lap and came back to climb onto mine. I wrapped her in my arms, hoping I didn’t look as unsettled as I felt.

  * * *

  —

  Nora served dinner, then retired to the kitchen, where she quickly ate and departed for her shed in the backyard. We had barbecued boerewors, concentric circles of beef sausage that looked like a coiled whip, and cheddar scalloped potatoes. For Bethany, Rachel, Carmen and Fritz, Nora had halved pepper squashes and stuffed them with all manner of chopped vegetables. Bethany never touched her meal, merely sipping water from time to time.

  “I can drink as much as I like,” Max said as he filled his glass, “because I don’t have to drive. It’s one of the lifetime perks of being married to a teetotaller.”

  Fritz laughed. “Lifetime perks? Glore doesn’t believe in the ‘till death do us part’ part of the wedding ceremony, do you, Glore.”

  “Don’t call me Glore,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Fritz said, “only Max is allowed to call you that. Was that the pet name your other husbands used?”

  I thought someone—certainly Gloria or Max—would object, but no one did.

  “Did I ever tell you,” Bethany said to no one in particular, “that when I was in hospital, I tried to kill myself so often, they used to call me Deathany?”

  Again, no one spoke or gave the slightest indication that she had.

  I glanced at Rachel, who was sitting beside me, playing with her squash, moving it about with her fork. I gave her leg a reassuring rub beneath the table. She extracted a pea and lifted it to her mouth.

  Bethany tried again to get a rise. “I could drink,” she said, “but I would have had to skip my pills forty-eight hours in advance, which my doctor advised me against doing. I shouldn’t have listened to him. I’d love to get hammered.”

  “There are other ways, Bethany,” Fritz said. “In case you’re interested, I’ve come prepared.”

  Again, it was as if I’d only imagined that he’d spoken. I looked at Hans, who was cutting his sausage vigorously into identically-sized pieces but seemed not to have eaten any yet.

  “I don’t know how you’re able to stand Canada, Rachel,” Gloria said. “It’s like the place is starting from scratch. I mean, there’s nothing there. Are you really intending to go back?”

  “There are places you can go in Canada without endangering your life,” I said.

  “Screwdrivers at dawn,” Max said, pointing his knife at me.

  “Canada is a big place,” I said. “You all talk about it as if every square inch of it is the same as every other square inch.”

  “You’ve never set foot on the mainland of Canada,” Fritz said. “Most of us have seen more of it than you have.”

  “Touché,” I said, feeling more foolish than usual.

  “Hans,” Peter said, “do you still recite that verse when you have dinner guests?”

  “Now that I’m back home, why not?” Hans lowered his head and closed his eyes as if to say grace, then launched in:

  “In this enlightened century

  We’re better than we used to be

  except when some who’ve come so far

  forget how fortunate they are.

  I mean those who have it better

  but want it better to the letter.

  They know they have improved their lot

  but want exactly what we’ve got!”

  Fritz snorted in derision and Carmen rolled her eyes, but most of the others applauded. I joined in out of politeness but stopped when I saw that Rachel’s lips were a thin, straight line.

  “So, writer,” Bethany said, “what are you reading these days?”

  “A biography of Albert Einstein,” I said.

  “Hah,” Hans said so loudly that everyone jumped. He put down his knife and fork, placed his elbows on the table and leaned his chin on his clasped hands as if he was pondering what to say. But he said nothing.

  “How is this Einstein book, theoretically and relatively speaking?” Bethany said.

  I laughed, as did Rachel and Clive.

  “Theoretically and relatively speaking,” I said, “it’s very good.”

  “A patent clerk is what he was,” Hans said. “Once a patent clerk, always a patent clerk. Once a Jew, always a Jew. If not for the Jews, there would have been no war, no reason for Peter and me to risk our lives when we were just young men—boys, really.”

  Rachel pressed her leg against mine. Peter and Theresa were as blank-faced as Myra.

  “Peter went to England and fought against the Germans, didn’t you, Peter?” Hans said.

  Peter nodded.

  “You should have fought against the Allies.”

  “Hans!” Myra said, laughing in a way that seemed to say that he often said such outrageous things to Peter.

  “Daddy, you’re awful,” Gloria said. Bethany stood up, pushed back her chair and left the room. Rachel and Gloria exchanged a look.

  “Hans is just pulling your leg,” Myra said to me. “He’s been saying the same thing about Einstein since we were married.”

  “So you’re the one person in the world who doesn’t admire Einstein,” Max said.

  “One of millions,” Hans said.

  “He’s having us all on,” Myra said, tilting her head and smiling at me. “He never talks about how many Jews he saved. Nor does Peter. It’s not bigotry but modesty. Those were hard times. It’s his way of dealing with it.”

  “Let’s move on to something else,” Rachel said.

  “I was passed over time and time again for professorships,” Hans said. “Here and in Canada. I was told I’d be made a professor if I earned an M.A., so I did, and then they chose a younger man instead, a man who, like me, didn’t have a Ph.D. ‘You need to publish a book, Hans,’ they said. I did that, a textbook that sold two thousand copies. ‘But you published it yourself,’ they said, ‘so it doesn’t count.’ Another man was hired, one who’d never read a book, let alone written one. It was all pretense, all politics. I complained to the dean about the conduct of others in the faculty and came to be seen as some sort of informant or bootlicker. I was blacklisted. I am now
regarded as someone who came back home because he couldn’t make the grade in the least-esteemed province of a second-rate country, an assistant professor who will never be anything more. There’s no such thing as an assistant professor emeritus. This is the reward I get for risking my life to help rich Jews get themselves and their fortunes out of Europe. In Amsterdam they stand in line for hours to see the place where Anne Frank and her family hid out from the Germans. There are no plaques on the childhood homes of men like me.”

  “Dad,” Rachel said, her voice barely audible, “please, please don’t talk about her.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Gloria said. “You know you shouldn’t.”

  “The Jews whose relatives died in concentration camps, the Jews who survived the camps, they think of me and my fellow Resistance fighters as having failed them,” Hans said. “What about the thousands of Dutch who died, or the ones who had to eat tulip bulbs for months to stay alive? Do the Jews stand in line to worship at their graves?” He pointed at Rachel. “No one in Canada ever had to live every minute of every day with death one step behind them. What did the Jews do when they had no one to help them? Nothing. They didn’t lift a finger for themselves. They marched into the gas chambers like little children marching into school.”

  “Professor van Hout,” I said, as Rachel pressed her leg even harder against mine, “how can you, a member of the Dutch Resistance, talk like this?”

  “I could tell you stories,” Hans said, though he didn’t look at me. “Some of them might not be true. Some of them might. The old farmer I worked for recruited me. He took a chance when he asked me if I’d help him. I took a chance when I said yes. I delivered messages that were written in code that I couldn’t have deciphered if I tried. A far better code, I’ll bet, than the one that she made up.” He pointed at Rachel. “It was not a game. I took risks, bigger ones than most. I never met the people who left the messages. It was best to know as few of your fellows as possible in case you were caught and forced to give up their names. I tucked the messages between two cobblestones in the street while I was pretending to tie my shoe. I don’t know who collected them. I never knew. How many times did I stop on that very spot and pretend to tie my shoelace while I was wedging a piece of paper between two cobblestones? But no one ever noticed, no one ever recognized me, the young man who so often chose the same place to go down on one knee and retie his shoe.