The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  for accolades or decorations,

  yet the fates of many nations

  rest on the deeds of unknown men.

  No statues have been built for him,

  no public buildings bear his name;

  no one but you accord him glory—

  I tell no one else his story.

  The man who almost saved Anne Frank

  was mocked by men of lesser rank.

  (Yes, it’s true, I almost saved Her;

  I must save that part for later.)

  The man I mean is Hans van Hout—

  I speak the truth beyond all doubt.

  Historians do not record

  what no one saw and no one heard.

  Hans, a boy of great persistence,

  too young for the Dutch Resistance,

  convinced men who were twice as old

  that he was brave and he was bold.

  They guessed that he was but fourteen,

  the right age for a go-between,

  so small and thin the German men

  would think that he was nine or ten.

  For years he moved about the streets,

  the very picture of defeat,

  the laughing stock of Amsterdam.

  “They don’t know who or what I am.

  The Information Underground

  would turn its back if I was found.”

  Nazis, vicious brutalizers,

  sycophantic sympathizers,

  he was the mascot of them all,

  amused the Nazis with his gall.

  He wanted to be one of them,

  the master race of master men—

  or so they thought; this was the plan.

  The Underground instructed Hans

  to infiltrate the Nazi ranks:

  go-between and infiltrator,

  he became “the Nazi waiter,”

  despised by starving patriots.

  They sent young Hans to penetrate

  a café where the Germans ate—

  a new place that was called Van Dobben,

  where the men of the Luftwaffe

  went to find the best Dutch women.

  Once popular among the Dutch,

  who worked there now for nothing much—

  the scraps the Germans left behind,

  oddments of most any kind,

  bits of grizzle, lumps of rind—

  it was the perfect place for Hans,

  looked down upon by also-rans,

  a skinny runt with spectacles,

  a malnutrition miracle,

  a bag of bones in stolen clothes.

  He had a way of charming those

  who held themselves in high regard.

  He always played the same trump card:

  you best brown-nose brown-shirted men

  by wishing you were one of them.

  He served their food and poured their wine,

  pretended that he didn’t mind

  that he stood starving while they dined,

  lit their cigars and buffed their boots

  and imitated their salute

  until they said he got it right.

  So it went night after night—

  they had him goose-step round the room

  while shouldering a kitchen broom.

  They dubbed him the Nazi waiter

  (Hans the master imitator),

  Hans the clown, the step and fetcher.

  When he was done, dead on his feet,

  they ordered things for him to eat,

  gave him a table and a chair

  and let him put them anywhere,

  though never side by side with theirs.

  A man they called the Dutch waiter,

  who considered Hans a traitor,

  waited on the Nazi waiter,

  who ate just what the Nazis ate

  and no longer had to wait.

  Each night before Van Dobben closed,

  while some still drank and others dozed,

  the officers gave him his wages.

  Men and women of all ages

  were given less than half as much.

  Word soon spread among the Dutch

  of Amsterdam and far beyond

  that Hans, the fawning vagabond,

  was growing fat while children died

  for lack of anything to eat,

  ignoring beggars on the street

  where he conducted his affairs.

  They said that Hans, the profiteer,

  bartered bread for silverware

  and marzipan for chandeliers.

  Rumours and exaggeration

  spread throughout the starving nation.

  The profiteer of Amsterdam

  was getting rich—they hated him.

  A Nazi he would be unless

  he turned his back on their largesse.

  But the side he was fighting for

  could not afford to lose one more.

  The Nazis thought they knew for sure

  that Hans was really nothing more

  than Hans the lackey seemed to be,

  so Hans the lackey easily

  did what he had to do by night—

  by day did what he knew was right.

  The man who almost saved Anne Frank

  was mocked by men of lesser rank.

  Saluting, from the Nazi bars,

  the Nazi flags on Nazi cars,

  he saved the lives of many Jews,

  while loose-lipped Nazis drank Dutch booze.

  The Germans, drunk on beer and wine,

  each half half-crazy half the time,

  swilled sauerkraut and sausages

  while Hans wrote coded messages.

  By August 1st of ’forty-four,

  the master race had lost the war,

  but could not say the war was lost

  until they hid the Holocaust,

  disposed of all the evidence

  of history’s most vile offence:

  the gas, the ovens and the graves,

  the remnants of six million slaves,

  the Jews that they had yet to kill,

  the ones who were in hiding still,

  the ones in camps but still alive,

  witnesses who might survive.

  Hans overheard some drunken Klaus

  discussing plans to raid a house

  where someone who withheld his name,

  who may have thought he’d take the blame,

  said that eight Jews had, helped by friends,

  been waiting for the war to end.

  Hans relayed the information—

  he deserved a commendation—

  and never thought of it again

  until the war was long since won.

  RACHEL

  In the days after the disastrous dinner party, I thought a lot about Elsie, the last black maid we had before we moved to Canada. The sky was blue, the sand between my toes was warm, and our coloured maid, Elsie, lived in the concrete shed at the end of the garden. It never occurred to me to wonder how things had come to be that way or to ask anyone about it. Elsie’s shed had a corrugated tin roof like those of the houses in Langa township, where Elsie lived on weekends. (There was also Tom, the gardener—I didn’t know where he lived. He was always just there, in the yard, trimming the hedge, raking up leaves, pruning the bushes, anything he could do to look busy. I don’t think I ever talked to him, and I don’t think he ever came into the house.) Elsie went home on weekends because Elsie went hom
e on weekends—that’s just the way it was.

  I didn’t say goodbye to Elsie when we left for Canada. I was excited that we were going somewhere far away, and I didn’t understand what my mother meant when, as she sat crying at the kitchen table, she said that we were never coming back. But that’s not why I didn’t say goodbye to Elsie. I’m sure that Elsie was more concerned about losing her job than she was about saying goodbye to me, or never seeing me or the rest of us again, but that’s not why we didn’t say goodbye.

  It’s hard to imagine that, every morning when she got up, she looked forward to spending time with four spoiled white girls who turned up their noses at the food I’m sure she wished she could afford to feed her kids, four white girls who complained about things her kids could never dream of having. She may have seen me as nothing more than a little brat whom she only allowed inside her shed and read books to because I would complain to master if she didn’t. How charmed could she have been by the chubby little blond white girl she was paid next to nothing to spend more time with than she spent with her own children?

  “I have two little boys and a little girl,” she said to me one day. “They are older than you, but not as old as Gloria.” I couldn’t picture them at all.

  I was young enough to think that a woman my parents all but owned was more fond of me than they were, that she loved me as if I was her child, cared for me as much as she did for her own children, bore me no ill will for the circumstances of my birth, the manner of my upbringing, for coming into the world on the guilty side of a profound injustice of which she, her husband, her children, her friends and what should have been their country were the victims.

  Elsie was allowed to scold us mildly and often did, though she more often invoked the wrath of our parents to try to keep us in line. She was given to hyperbole that we found hilarious: “You mustn’t do that. If you do that again, master will smack your bottom one hundred thousand times.” Using pen and paper, Gloria calculated that, if done non-stop, this would take about ten days. “Do not talk back to Elsie,” Elsie said. “I say goodbye to my three little ones on Monday morning and do not see them again until Friday night. They are always so glad to see me. They do not talk back to me or to my sister, who takes care of them when I am gone. They are like angels, but the four of you are little devils.” Yet she punished me only once, by forbidding me to lick the bowl after she made frosting for a cake.

  It was because of a thing that happened before we left for Canada that Elsie and I didn’t say goodbye. I went out to the shed early one evening to visit her. As usual, she seemed to be glad to see me, even though I was intruding on what little private time she had. I fancied that I made her feel less lonely, that all thought of her own children vanished the second she saw me. Elsie had a stack of Torkar comic books. Written in Afrikaans, the Torkar series was based on the character of Tarzan, the books illustrated not with drawings but with panels of photographs of white actors or models in various action poses. There were rangers of the veldt who, in their pursuit of criminals, were forever throwing or receiving a punch, or pointing a gun while in mid-stride, driving cars, kissing women. Their every altercation was with some city-dwelling villain. The police were assisted by the Tarzan-like character Torkar, a white, tall, handsome, muscular, loincloth-wearing veldt dweller without whom they would never have managed to maintain law and order, let alone stop the encroachment of city-born wickedness.

  I sat on Elsie’s lap while she translated the dialogue balloons and captions from Afrikaans to English. I was never as transfixed by the stories as Elsie was—she covered her face in fright sometimes, or screamed and looked away. I’m not sure how good her translations were. And she may have toned down the violence and skipped ahead when women fell in love with Torkar, as they were always doing. There were Bantu characters in the series, gun-toting assistants to the rangers of the veldt, all happily supportive of the Afrikaans, whose right to own and police the veldt they implicitly acknowledged. When I was older, I wondered if Elsie read Torkar because that was all she was allowed to read when she wasn’t in Langa, or because it was all she was able to read or all she could afford. I didn’t know.

  On that evening, a few days before we left for Canada, Elsie took me on her lap as always. She had no sooner begun reading to me than my father appeared in the doorway of the shed. Elsie froze. “It’s time for bed, Rachel,” he said, extending his hand to me. I slid down from Elsie’s lap, ran to the door and took his hand. I looked over my shoulder, intending to say good night to Elsie, and saw her staring at the floor on which the photo book lay face up, its pages splayed apart. She looked so desolate I didn’t say a word.

  Hours later, I woke to the sound of someone soft-stepping across the landing, then slowly descending the stairs. I sat up in bed. There was no light beneath the door. I wondered if Dad had gone down to the kitchen for some Horlicks. I lay down and closed my eyes, only to open them again when I heard the creaking of the back door. I got out of bed as quietly as I could, went to the window and parted the curtains. The lamp above the back steps was on and Dad stood barefoot on the steps in his pyjamas, looking up at the sky, adjusting his glasses as if the better to make out a constellation. It occurred to me that he might be sleepwalking.

  He took his glasses off and rubbed them on the hem of his pyjamas, put them back on, tiptoed down the steps and made his way over the sun-scorched yellow grass toward the back of the garden, walking out of the light cast by the lamp above the steps into the darkness. I thought he would soon reappear, but he didn’t. One, two, five, ten minutes went by. It was as if he had gone off into the night for a barefoot stroll in his pyjamas. Only in the wake of that thought did the obvious truth occur to me. He had gone to Elsie’s shed. Dad, who almost never spoke to her when she was in the house, leaving that to Mom, had gone to visit Elsie in her shed. Why? It was for no possible reason but the one I guessed when I was older. But at the time I was stymied. For him to leave the house alone at night, to go out walking, to drive around for hours in his car, was not uncommon, but I had never known him to go out walking in his pyjamas.

  I stayed there at the window, ready to scramble back into bed at the sound of Mom opening my bedroom door. At last, after about an hour, when I was just short of falling asleep with my forehead pressed to the window, Dad re-emerged into the light, looking exactly as he had before. He walked slowly to the steps, which he climbed with his arms at his sides, his body as erect as that of a soldier. It again occurred to me that he might be sleepwalking.

  I got back into bed and listened to him make his way upstairs to his room. I lay awake for quite some time, wondering why, if Dad had gone to visit her, Elsie had not turned on the light. Why had he gone to visit Elsie, the maid that he and Mom drove to the train station every Friday when she made her way back to Langa township?

  The next evening, when I went out to Elsie’s shed, she was lying on her cot, her shoes still on, staring at the ceiling. “Hi, Elsie,” I said.

  “Go away now, child,” she said. “I am very tired. Too tired to read Torkar.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  She moved her head from side to side on the pillow. “No more Torkar. No more. Go back to the house.”

  “Why are you being so mean?” I said, but she made no sign of having heard me.

  “Please,” I said.

  She sat up on the bed, then, her hands supporting her, swung her legs onto the floor and stood. “Hamba suka wena,” she shouted at me.

  Shocked to hear her use an expression that was forbidden at school, only in part because it was Zulu, I ran back up the garden to the house.

  Now, in the wake of the dinner party, I thought of Dad standing on the steps, staring up at the sky before he walked across the grass and disappeared into the darkness. Perhaps he had many times thought about visiting the shed but had only worked up the nerve that one night because we were soon to leave for another country. Or had t
here been other nights?

  I doubted it, given Elsie’s demeanour those last few days. I doubted it but didn’t, couldn’t, stop considering it. Soon, my mind was jumping about between seemingly unconnected ideas, something it had also done before each of my breakdowns. I told myself that a third was not imminent even as I began to think of how odd it would be if Wade wrote a book and became as caught up in it as I was in Anne Frank’s, read his own book hundreds of times, became consumed by it to the point of nearly losing his mind, read it to the point of excluding all other books and never wrote another one. What if Wade were to come down with what I had?

  Madness is not contagious. You are nowhere near as sick as you were years ago. A series of such mantras ran through my mind. I began to see myself as I fancied others did, as a figure of scorn and amusement. I felt, more so than I had in years, worthless, hopeless, useless.

  I wrote in my diary on the sly, at the nearest public library. I skipped yoga class to do it or, when Wade was working at his desk, told him I was going for a walk or taking the car out on some invented errand. Sometimes, I wrote in the diary while he was out on a run, often having to stop in mid-sentence when I heard him coming up the stairs. I told myself that I was merely having a setback, not regressing, but I wondered how much worse I’d be if I had the privacy I’d had when I wrote in my room back home. I doubled my daily dose of lithium, restored it to its doctor-prescribed level, but it made no difference that I could detect.

  I had gone into hiding at the same age Anne Frank did, when I was thirteen. I went into hiding in her diary and mine.

  The day I showed Wade my first copy of the book, I’d felt like telling him that there was another version of the book in my mind, one that goaded me on irresistibly toward destruction, a book that was the child of the mating of her book and my life.

  From The Arelliad

  THE SECRET ANNEX (1985)

  Resigned to imminent defeat,

  the German side will soon retreat.

  The Nazi bully boys are done—

  their reign was brief, the war is won.

  I’ve sunk into the page and I am in the Secret Annex, where, an invisible voyeur, I move about among the Franks, the three van Pels, the dentist Anne calls Dussel. All of them are fluent in Arellian, though they rarely speak above a whisper for fear of being heard by someone other than their minders, whose tantalizing voices they can hear.