The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  that I had read ten thousand times,

  forget the house, forget the names,

  throw them on the yellow flames,

  erase The Ballad from my brain,

  douse the roaring flames with rhymes

  collected from the Night Salon

  to help the roaring flame along.

  The diaries and memories

  turned into flame that scorched the trees,

  from which flankers flew like leaves

  blown by the flame-borne yellow breeze.

  From my pyre of burning books

  flew a swarm of flaming sparks;

  each one began another blaze—

  the sky became a yellow haze

  till a single conflagration

  swept through my imagination

  and rid it of Arellia

  and all that I’ve been telling you

  and all that I have yet to tell:

  the future burned, the past as well.

  From deep within the yellow flames

  I heard von Snout recite the names

  of those purged by the Holocaust,

  the souls that were forever lost,

  the roll call of the innocent,

  the when and where and how they went—

  their souls, at last, were heaven sent.

  And by that list of those who died,

  Arellia was purified.

  Or so it seemed within the dream from which I woke, trying to breathe, gasping, crying, wishing I could rest before I plunged into the page again.

  It will take all night to undo what I have done. The sky is still yellow, but the trees that never lose their leaves are black and bare. Wisps of smoke rise from the ashes on the ground. I gave no thought to the girls: Anne Frank, now joined by her sister, Margot, and the Shadow She. There is no sign of them. How could there be? I fled the fire that I set and left them as I did before. Did we get away again, the two of us, Claws von Snout and me, and leave three girls to die?

  The Frank sisters, the Shadow She—

  Was He to blame, or was it me?

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  THE INFILTRATION (1967)

  Brave Hans is sleeping like a log

  when, like a sneak attack of fog,

  the Rumours spread by Claws von Snout

  advance upon the Land of Hout.

  They wrap themselves around the House,

  they seep in through the cracks and pores,

  they drift like mist beneath the doors

  and cat-like creep across the floors

  and cat-like make their way upstairs

  and cat-like trouble no one’s ears

  and slip into the little room,

  the one as quiet as a tomb,

  where four girls who have never dreamed

  peacefully undreaming seem,

  the four of them all in one bed,

  one big four-sister poster bed,

  head by head by head by head.

  The Rumours swirl about the bed

  and make their way into their heads

  until their once undreaming minds

  are vexed by dreams of many kinds.

  The Rumours leave the way they came,

  up the chimney and down the drain,

  across the floors, beneath the doors,

  they seep out through the cracks and pores—

  the wall that couldn’t keep them out

  is of no use to keep them in.

  No sooner have they come to Hout

  than, like that, they are gone again.

  They leave but leave their lies behind:

  each one of your undreaming minds

  becomes a factory of dreams.

  There is weaving, there is sewing,

  there is the stitching of the seams.

  There is Language, there is Knowing,

  and Ideas overflowing

  that make you toss and turn about.

  You think about the Land of Hout—

  you go so far as to surmise

  your father has been telling lies.

  You used to fall asleep at sunset,

  you used to wake up at sunrise.

  You haven’t seen the darkness yet

  but now you wake and cannot see—

  you think that you are dreaming

  though you have never dreamed before.

  You hear a sound outside the door;

  the door swings open, Light comes in—

  you girls can see the room again.

  Though this is not the light of day,

  though it is but the smallest spark,

  whatever chased the night away

  is so much better than the dark.

  Hans van Hout stands in the doorway,

  a pair of candles in his hands.

  Myra stands behind her husband

  and says, “From now on, they’ll be bad.”

  WADE

  Her writing for one hour as I read for one hour soon became an evening routine, she on one side of the room, me on the other. I often found it hard to concentrate on my book because I couldn’t help but be distracted by her strange ritual. She said that she wanted to keep the diary in front of me—no secrets. But if she was going to keep the diary in front of me, I couldn’t interrupt her and I couldn’t ask her any questions about what she’d written. She sat with her notepad at a little desk, a copy of Het Achterhuis on her right as she faced in my direction. She pressed down hard on the paper, printing in blue ink slowly but never deliberating, raising her pen after forming each letter as if she was writing a mathematical equation on a blackboard. The scratching of the pen was an incessant irritant, but I thought better of protesting.

  As the hour progressed, her writing gathered speed and urgency, getting louder every minute as she dotted i ’s and crossed t ’s with more and more emphasis. It was as if she was carving the letters into the page. When I announced, “Time’s up,” she continued to the completion of a sentence and ended the session with a final flourish of punctuation—a period, question mark or exclamation mark—and a loud sigh such as runners give when they cross the finish line. “Free,” she’d say, or “Done,” or “Time to play,” dropping her pen and raising her hands, a student aiming to satisfy an exam invigilator that she had obeyed his instruction to stop writing.

  When reading Het Achterhuis, she put the book on the desk, folded her arms in front of it and hunched over as if she had bad eyesight and was examining the text with a magnifying glass. She read slowly, or, at least, lingered a long time before turning a page—a page she had read a thousand times before. I wondered how a page she knew by heart could absorb her so completely, but I never asked.

  One evening, I gave in to my curiosity about her writing, though. “Do you write about her diary in yours?”

  “Classified information,” she replied.

  “Who do you address your diary to?”

  “That, too, is classified.”

  I nodded. She smiled and, as if to mollify me by divulging something, she said, “The last words in her diary are ‘if only there were no other people in the world.’ It’s just by chance that those were her last words. She was arrested by the Gestapo before she could start another entry. But it goes to show, doesn’t it, how much she craved privacy, cooped up with the others for two years in those little rooms. All right, I’ll tell you this much: I address my diary to her, to Anne. Books have endings. Lives end. Diaries don’t. On the last page of a diary, the next entry is endlessly deferred, as mine will be when I put the diary aside for good.”

  “How are you able to write so steadily?”

  “
During the day, I often think about what I’m going to write. I make a mental list.”

  “Still.”

  “Jealous?”

  “If it’s any good, I am.”

  “It’s a private diary that I never reread and wouldn’t write a word of if I could help it. It doesn’t matter if it’s, as you put it, any good.”

  Before I could say I was sorry, she stormed off to the bedroom.

  RACHEL

  When my preoccupation with the diaries had just begun, when I thought it may have seemed to others like nothing more than a typical thirteen-year-old’s infatuation with a celebrity, a superstar of history, Mom read the book, or seemed to, shadowing me to keep me company, she said, even though I told her that I preferred to read alone. Sometimes, when I stayed home from school on the pretense of not feeling well, we sat around for hours, each of us reading the same book, the house silent but for the turning of the pages.

  One day in January, when there was a snowstorm and school was cancelled, she followed me about the house, ignoring my protests that I didn’t need to be supervised. We settled in the front room. After a time, I looked up from my book and, as if she’d been waiting for me to do just that, she looked up from hers and smiled at me.

  “Are you actually reading that book or just turning the pages?” I asked.

  “I’m reading it,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Something’s wrong, Rachel,” she said. “Each of your sisters began to act up when they were your age.”

  “Anorexia isn’t acting up,” I said.

  “I don’t know what it is,” she said. “One of the doctors said that Bethany is punishing herself for something she knows she didn’t do.”

  “Like what?”

  “He had no idea. She hasn’t said. Or if she has, he wouldn’t tell me.”

  I began to write in my diary.

  “What are you writing in there?” she said.

  I stood, crossed the floor to her and turned my notepad around. “See for yourself,” I said. She leaned forward, her face just inches from the page, squinting. “I can’t make out a thing,” she said. “I never could read your handwriting.”

  “It’s Arellian. You know that.”

  “Why would you want to hide anything from me?”

  I left the room and, this time, she didn’t follow me.

  Another day, I pretended to be so ill I needed to stay in bed, but she came to my room to read with me. I sat up against the headboard with my diary and a copy of Het Achterhuis open on the blankets on my lap, a pen in one hand. She drew a chair up beside the bed and began to read her copy of the book. “Rachel,” she said, after about half an hour, “I think it’s admirable that you’ve taken such an interest in Anne Frank instead of some rock and roll maniac of the sort that other girls your age adore. What was that book about a teenage drug addict called, the one that Carmen worshipped?”

  “Go Ask Alice.”

  “That’s it. I think I know why you’re so fascinated with this book. You’ve noticed that there are a lot of similarities between the Franks and the van Houts. The two families had to go to a foreign country because they were being unfairly treated in their home country. There were no sons in either family, only daughters. Like Otto Frank, Hans van Hout is the only male of his household. Otto probably complained about it sometimes, just as Hans does. Otto and Hans are both businessmen. Hans runs his own publishing company. The fact that he only publishes and sells his own books doesn’t make him less of a businessman. It’s a shame that they rejected his application to the Rotary Club. It hurt his feelings. At any rate, Anne used pseudonyms in her diary for everyone in the Secret Annex who was not a family member. All of the carefully chosen pseudonyms consisted of a German word that she thought best described each person, and almost all of them were uncomplimentary, which just goes to show that you can never tell what someone else really thinks of you, or is writing about you. The only person Anne was consistently fond of was her father.”

  “I’m not reading the book or writing my diary because the Franks remind me of the van Houts,” I said.

  “Then why are you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, I’m glad you don’t worship them,” she said, “because the Frank family had their flaws. Do you know what they were?”

  I sighed and shook my head. “I have to read and write,” I said. “I’m falling behind.”

  “I’m worried about this language you’ve created. What’s wrong with English?”

  “Nothing. I speak it all the time. You can’t speak Arellian. You can only write it. I can, that is.”

  “Could you teach it to me?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I was talking about the flaws of the Frank family. So. Their worst flaw, a tragic flaw, was that they trusted other people to take care of them.”

  I rolled my eyes and slammed my book shut. “They had no choice,” I said. “That’s the whole point of the book. Or one of them.”

  She smiled as if indulging a simpleton. “But it brought about their downfall, you see. Surely you see that?”

  “Yes, but they had no choice. If they hadn’t trusted other people, they would have died long before they did. At least they gave themselves a chance.”

  She was silent for a while, staring at our reflections in the oval mirror on the wall beside the bed. “That’s one way of looking at it,” she said. “But I can tell you from experience that there’s no telling when someone you think of as your closest friend will turn on you. This happened to your father and me many times until we changed our ways. You should never tell anyone outside your family anything that could be misunderstood and used against you—personal things, private things, family things, the kind of things that make perfect sense when they are said or done behind the closed doors of your house. You see, Rachel, a family is like a diary. In a diary, you are absolutely honest the way you are with your parents and your sisters, but you never show the diary to anyone else. The point of a diary is secrecy.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Anne Frank kept a diary because of the constant presence of outsiders in the Secret Annex. In the diary, she wrote things about the outsiders that she didn’t want them to see. Without her diary, she would have had no privacy at all. She was brave but she was also so naive. She wrote that she believed that, deep down, people were basically good, an idea that her parents probably put in her head, for they, too, were naive in believing that outsiders could be trusted. Sad to say, most people are not basically good. I don’t mean that whoever betrayed the Franks was necessarily bad. It may have been one of the people who helped them. They may have realized one day that, for the sake of their own family, whose food rations they’d been sharing with the Franks, they had to turn the Franks in or else be left with not enough to eat. For them, it wasn’t a betrayal, except that it backfired on them, because they should never have been hiding the Franks in the first place. Look at what happened to them when they got caught. Some of them were sent away to prison.”

  “No one knows who betrayed the Franks and the others,” I said, “but it wasn’t the handful of people who risked their lives for them.” I opened my diary and jotted something down in the hope that she’d see that I wanted her to leave.

  “That’s right. No one knows. But if some family managed to survive by doing so, I don’t blame them. I would do worse to protect our family. The Franks put themselves in their own predicament. They were naive enough to think that Amsterdam was a safe distance from Germany. They should have gone at least as far as England or even North America. It would have meant going very far from home, but we, the van Houts, we did that when we had no other choice and, although not everything has worked out, we’re getting by, aren’t we?” She smiled again as she waited for my answer.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “But I don’
t think Carmen or Bethany would agree with you.”

  “Well, I’m so glad that you brought them up. Carmen spends all her time with the wrong sort of people. Bethany hasn’t made another attempt but, as you know, she’s in hospital again. Every time she sees a different doctor, she changes her story. This time, she says that it’s because of your father and me that she won’t eat, but she refuses to explain what she means. It is the height of ingratitude, after all that we have done for her. I left my homeland for my children.” Her eyes filled with tears. “In this world, it is every family for itself, so there is no point in starving yourself just because you and your family aren’t perfect. She demands perfection from everyone except herself. She will excuse no flaw, no matter how insignificant. A more cold-hearted child has never walked the earth.”

  “She’s sick,” I said.

  “She’s selfish,” my mother said. “So is Gloria and don’t even mention Carmen. We’ve given the four of you all the leeway in the world, and what thanks do we get for it? It’s my hope, Rachel, that you will prove to be the one daughter who truly appreciates the importance of family.”

  “I have to read my book,” I said. “I have to read it twice today, and after that I have to write for God knows how long or I’ll never get to sleep. That’s how unlike my sisters I am. I’m the normal one.”

  She wiped at her eyes with the heel of one hand. “You once said that what you love about the Franks is that, in the book, they are always together. No one leaves for school. No one leaves for work. No one goes out at night. It was crucial that they never be apart. I thought it was sweet of you to say that. But now it reminds me of their second fatal flaw. Before they went into hiding, the Franks kept to themselves and didn’t interfere in other people’s lives, and other people didn’t interfere in their lives. But, when they went into hiding, they tried to merge two families, and made matters worse by allowing a stranger, Fritz Pfeffer, to join them. I know that the Franks were not betrayed by Fritz Pfeffer, but they were betrayed because of him. Many Jews hid out during the war and many of them were still alive and well when Amsterdam was liberated. The Franks and the van Pels would have made it through the war undiscovered had Otto Frank not allowed a mere acquaintance of his, this dentist named Fritz Pfeffer, to join them in the Secret Annex. Before Pfeffer’s arrival, each family had separate sleeping quarters. Mr. and Mrs. Frank slept in one of the downstairs rooms, Margot and Anne in another. It wasn’t perfect but it might have worked. But when Pfeffer arrived, Margot and Anne were separated. Pfeffer moved into their room with Anne, and Margot slept in her parents’ room in a separate bed.