The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  “I wouldn’t vote guilty if I was on a jury,” I said, “but this is not a courtroom.”

  “You’re wondering why she never said anything before this.”

  “I am. But you didn’t say anything either. And you’re still not saying anything, not really. There’s more than a semantic difference between ‘He never laid a hand on me, never’ and ‘I don’t remember him doing anything to me—maybe I repressed it or something.’ ”

  “I just wanted Bethany to know that I think what she’s saying is, I don’t know, plausible?”

  “Based on her word alone.”

  “This is not a courtroom, remember. Your words. Besides, it’s not just based on what she said. It’s based on how I feel.”

  “If you think it’s so plausible, how will you let her go back to that house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to speak to Gloria and Carmen about all this?”

  Rachel shook her head. “Bethany will speak to them about it when she wants to.”

  “If she ever wants to. I can’t believe your parents haven’t called us. I mean, they know that Bethany’s made another attempt, that she’s been in hospital for days and—”

  “This is what I have been trying to explain to you,” Rachel said. “This is how they’ve always done things. If they called us, it would make it seem like they were worried that we believed Bethany. Their silence is meant to say that, like them, we just think this is Bethany being Bethany again.”

  “But she tried to kill herself.”

  “Only to cause trouble for them, to upset them, and they won’t stoop to doing anything to make it seem like she should be taken seriously.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You didn’t say a word against them until we came to South Africa, not really. You just acted as if you thought the way they carried on was, I don’t know, eccentric?”

  “You sound as if you think I tricked you into coming here.”

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand what you mean when you say that you think it makes sense.”

  She nodded but was silent until she brought up the matter of my parents again. “If you tell them, they’ll think I’m not the Rachel that I seemed to be. I know they will. They’re so sweet, both of them. They’ll think I’ve fooled them and you. Maybe you really do think I did.”

  “I told you I don’t,” I said. “But I feel left out. And you have fooled me about how much you’ve been writing in your diary.”

  “I won’t hide it from you anymore.”

  “How will I know if you do? Van Hout this and van Hout that and all these languages that I can’t speak a word of. I hate to think of you buried in your diary alone somewhere—”

  “I don’t speak Arellian. I just write it.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that.”

  We pulled into the driveway of the duplex.

  “You go in,” she said. “I’m going to drive around for a bit to clear my head.”

  “We could go for a walk.”

  “If we did, we’d argue. I won’t be long. I just need some time to myself, okay?” She managed a smile. I’ll be back soon. Promise.”

  * * *

  —

  I couldn’t even think about writing. Sitting at my desk in front of a typewriter made me feel like some delusional no-hoper. I had always known I would be a writer. I had always assumed it, but now I couldn’t account for that assumption or even say for certain when it had begun, let alone what its origin was. I suspected that, were I in the middle of writing a book, I would likely put it aside now and never return to it, so upended by Bethany’s accusations did I feel, even as, casting back to when I met Rachel, I began to discern what sometimes seemed like unmistakable signs that Bethany was telling the truth—Rachel’s oddly forthright manner when we met, the maniacal smile with which her father greeted the sight of my sisters, Rachel’s sisters, the relentlessly off-colour banter between Gloria and Max, the Hairem, the way, after the Hairem, Hans had smirked at me while he rubbed Rachel’s backside. What writer would have failed to see all these things as signs of what now seemed to be obvious?

  I paced the apartment, waiting for Rachel to return. I felt ridiculous for wondering if it was possible that she alone of the four girls had escaped untouched, but I wondered anyway. Perhaps whatever Hans had by way of a conscience had lent him just enough restraint to spare his youngest daughter for no reason but that she was his youngest daughter. Perhaps one or more of her sisters had shielded her from him by threatening to tell unless he left her alone, or by some other impossible-to-imagine strategy. I concocted outlandish scenarios in which she avoided the fate that might or might not have befallen her sisters. Perhaps Rachel, by sheer smarts such as the other three did not possess, had evaded him for years, avoided situations of opportunity, such as spending the summer alone with him in some Canadian city. Perhaps her being spared had happened by sheer fluke. If what Bethany was saying was true, and if Gloria and Carmen had suffered the same fate, there had to be some explanation for the fact, if it was one, that Rachel remembered nothing. I once again tried to convince myself that Bethany had invented everything and that Rachel, when she said “It makes sense” and talked about not remembering and repression, had merely been responding out of love, panic and confusion.

  I went back and forth like that, trying to explain it all away, until I realized that I was doing exactly what Rachel said she and her family had been doing for years.

  We argued when she came home, the two of us moving about the apartment, barely avoiding collisions with each other, rehashing and rehashing my questions, Bethany’s accusations, Rachel’s uncertainty.

  “Maybe you should go see a therapist.”

  “I’ve seen plenty of doctors. I was in hospital for months. They didn’t uncover anything like this. Why do I suddenly need another therapist?”

  “Because your sister suddenly attempted suicide and suddenly blamed it on your father. Because you’re writing in that diary for far longer than you’re admitting to me. Things have changed.”

  “Have they? For whom? If you’re disgusted by me, or ashamed of me, if you think I’m tainted or defiled, that’s not my fault.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Look, I know I’m not undamaged, so it makes sense that I was damaged by something. But Bethany said it’s been going on since she can remember, and is still going on. Going on since we came back to Cape Town. You said yourself that surely I’d remember if he did anything recently. Jesus, Wade. What do you think, that he’s been coming here when you’ve been out? Jesus. Look, the answer to all of this might be Bethany. She’s got you thinking that, if it comes down to a choice between her and you, I’ll choose her.”

  “Like you did before.”

  * * *

  —

  In the days that followed, in order to avoid such arguments, we had to avoid not only each other’s company, but even the sight of each other. I stayed in the bedroom, my elbows on the desk, my hands cupping my face, my eyes closed, my mind racing. She lay on the couch in the adjoining room or sat at the table. I heard the pen scratching, stabbing, slashing the pages of her notebook. We spent mealtimes in more or less complete silence, sitting opposite each other, as immobile and intensely adversarial as a pair of chess champions.

  We still slept in the same bed. But we didn’t touch. We didn’t talk except to say good night. She stayed on her side and I stayed on mine.

  One night, I woke to find myself alone. It was dark, so I assumed Rachel was in the bathroom and waited for her to come back. After ten minutes, I got up, checked the bathroom and found it empty. I called her name but got no answer. I went to the front room and saw that the door that opened onto the stairs was ajar, but she wasn’t on the landing. It was too dark to see the bottom of the stairs
, but I heard a noise down there, perhaps a door opening. “Rachel,” I whispered, fearful of waking Miss Norway. The downstairs door opened and I saw Rachel standing on the lower landing, beneath the light of a single bulb, looking out across the parking lot. She was bare-legged and barefoot, dressed in nothing but her nightshirt. “Rachel,” I said, but she kept staring out as if at something in the parking lot.

  I tiptoed down the stairs and was about to put my hand on her shoulder when she half turned my way. “Wade,” she said, “I don’t remember coming down the stairs. I must have come down in my sleep.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Rachel, let’s stop playing van Hout games.” She turned the rest of the way toward me and I saw that she held her diary in her left hand, the underside of which was intensely blue. “It looks like you came down to write for a while,” I said.

  She looked at the notebook. “I’m scared,” she said. She sat down, the book on her bare knees. “I’ve never walked in my sleep. But I must have. What if I had tripped and fallen?”

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” I said.

  “I couldn’t get to sleep, so I went out to the couch to write. I remember that. And then I woke up. Here.”

  I sat beside her on the stair. “Come back to bed,” I said, but she shook her head. “I’ll never get to sleep now. I’m afraid to go to sleep. After I’ve written for a while longer, I’ll take a sleeping pill. I have some in my drawer.”

  “You can write in bed with the lights on or under the covers with a flashlight, just as long as you don’t come down the stairs in the middle of the night. I don’t want you to think that you have to hide things from me.”

  “I might be writing for quite some time,” she said. “I feel like I might have to write for three or four hours before I can even try to get to sleep. The longer I write, the faster I write and the more worked up I get. I know you feel like maybe I’m cracking up again.”

  “I hope you’re not cracking up, but what should I do?” I said. “I’d be happy to sit beside you while you write. I’ll read, you write, like we used to do.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want you to see me,” she said. “I’m not doing this to upset you. I just can’t help it. Just go back to bed. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better in the long run if you didn’t give in so much?”

  “You may have noticed that there are no photos of me in the family albums from my extreme Anne Frank phase. I was not a pretty sight. I dressed as dowdily as I could to ward people off. I didn’t want friends. Spending time with others only made it harder for me to meet my daily reading and writing quotas. I avoided anyone who came from outside, the anti–van Houts, the non–van Houts, for there was no telling where the enemy, the stranger whose purpose was to do us in, might come from. I read and wrote day and night. It was like searching for the answer to a riddle without ever having heard the riddle. Oh, Jesus, the more I talk about it, the more worked up I get and the more upset you get. I can see it in your face. You’re scared.”

  “Come upstairs,” I said. “Let’s open a bottle of wine—”

  “Reading was as bad as writing. I would run my forefinger down the left page, line by line, then the right, then turn the page so fast I sometimes ripped it in half.”

  “Fine. Sit here and write for as long as you like. Don’t worry about what I’m thinking. It’s not as if you have to get up early in the morning. Don’t worry. Bethany will be better soon and so will you, and everything will work out and there really is a Santa Claus.”

  “Don’t compare me to Bethany.”

  “I was joking. Or trying to.”

  I threw up my hands in frustration and went back up the stairs, leaving her there with her notepad on her lap.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, Rachel came into the bedroom while I was sitting idle at the desk. She stood in front of me, put her hands on her hips and said: “If you want to go on being with me, you have to start believing me and you have to stop asking me questions. You have to stop insisting that I give you an explanation of my behaviour when no explanation exists. You have to stop keeping track of how long I write in the diary. You have to stop guessing to yourself about it. You have to stop staring at the smudge on my hand. It’s not the Scarlet Letter. You have to stop it—all of it.”

  I would have been surprised if she had delivered such an ultimatum after any length of time, but that it had come so soon from someone whose love for me I didn’t doubt made me realize that she had just set out the only terms by which she could carry on from day to day, that I had been obstructing her bid for survival, that she was on the verge of seeing me as someone she might have to live without if she was going to survive. I knew what losing her was like. I doubted that I could go through it a second, final time, except at the cost of abandoning the balance of my dreams. I had long believed that, if you tried hard enough, you could find the truth. But nothing I had experienced or read seemed of any use in getting at the truth of this one family, let alone the ultimate truth that I had fancied philosophy and history were inching toward.

  I promised her I would never again challenge her about her past, or insist that she somehow find the root cause of her obsession with Het Achterhuis, or doubt her love for me or mine for her. She climbed onto my lap and kissed me. “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  That night, she sat at the kitchen table for two hours, pen in hand, a copy of Het Achterhuis and a notebook in front of her. She sat there for all that time and never wrote a word. A couple of days later, she wrote frantically in the notebook for almost three hours, barely pausing to think, filling line after line, page after page. And then she ripped out the pages, methodically tore them into pieces smaller than postage stamps and threw them in the garbage can. Why she bothered to do this with pages crammed with notes written in a language that no one but she could read, I didn’t dare ask.

  RACHEL

  Everything seemed important. Everything seemed as important as everything else. My hand couldn’t keep up with my mind. I jumped from one thing to the next, rarely finishing a sentence, never finishing a paragraph. I regained my fluency in Arellian to the point of dreaming in it more often than I dreamed in the other languages I knew. I woke in the middle of the night to find myself speaking it. Wade slept so soundly that he didn’t hear me, though I was always convinced that he had and checked to make sure that he really was asleep.

  By day, especially when I was alone, Arellian crept into my mind more and more. It began to seem that it was not just my language but everyone else’s as well. In grocery stores, I saw it written on the labels of the items on the shelves and on the signs above each aisle, displacing English and Afrikaans. I was terrified that I would forget myself and speak it aloud in public, address perfect strangers in this language that they would take to be gibberish, proof that I had lost my mind. One afternoon, I held a can of tomato sauce in my hand and stared at it for minutes as the words on the label changed from English to Arellian, Arellian to English, back and forth until I was so dizzy that I nearly fainted. Only when I absolutely had to, when I was conversing with or listening to others, was I able to ward off what I feared would be a complete retreat into an imaginary world from which no doctor or medication could bring me back. Only in the evenings, in Wade’s company, the two of us having a drink in the kitchen after I had written in my diary and read Het Achterhuis for hours, was I able to relax for a while and put from my mind the language that I had invented, taught myself to speak and read and write when I was just a girl.

  From The Arelliad

  DEAR ALSO-ANNE (1985)

  I read the Diary she kept

  by day, by night while others slept,

  when she was all she’d ever be,

  a girl named Anne, like you and me,

  a girl who grew up hap
pily

  until the world, struck by a curse,

  turned good to bad and bad to worse.

  How could a girl who braved the odds

  go unacknowledged by the gods?

  If gods there are, strange gods they be

  who match a child with history

  in history’s worst century.

  If only I could pace myself, or read something other than her diary, or nothing. Write nothing. Sit back and rest until my pulse slows down enough for me to sleep. But I’m driven to keep up with something that forever pulls away from me. Some nights, fragmented sentences are all that I can manage, and even those disintegrate and I’m reduced to syllables that race like mice across the table. It can’t be done, it can’t be done, put down your pen, don’t start again. I’m not looking for pity from you, Anne. You must think that this is just what I deserve, or that it’s not nearly enough.

  Arellia is treacherous. There are no maps. The signs are unreliable. It’s dark now, but there is light enough to see you watching me, the Shadow She, the small girl in the black peacoat, too thin a coat for such a night.

  It seems the wind will never rest. This is not the kind of west wind to which English odes are written, but a wind as brutal and lethal as the barrel of a gun. The sun comes up; the wind dies down. The sky is clear; there are no sounds on days when girls like you are found.

  I must avoid the yellow wood. If I go in, I won’t come out. Your fellow Anne is nowhere to be seen. You follow me, silently, stopping when I stop lest you get too close. You might be my reflection except for your eyes, which are nothing like mine, so green they don’t seem real. I’m not the age that I was then, but you’re the same, still seventeen, as old as you will ever be, as old as Margot Frank was when she and her sister died. It’s ten years since you and I first met here in Arellia. Ten years you’ve been pursuing me, accusing me with silence or with words.