The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  “Lay off Bethany,” Rachel said.

  “No, no, that’s all right, Rachel,” Bethany said. “It was kind of fun to hear Clive’s resumé recited by someone who grew up in Blissville, Newfoundland.”

  “I wonder how Nora is doing,” Rachel said after a short silence.

  “I can tell you exactly how she’s doing,” Fritz said. “She’s unemployed and living in Langa. No one will hire her. No one white, anyway. Not the kind of conversation piece you want around the house.”

  “Poor Nora,” Rachel said. “Maybe we should give her some money.”

  “Severance pay,” Fritz said.

  “We’ll see what we can do,” Gloria said. “I’m not sure how to contact her, but we’ll try.” She wiped a tear away. “I can’t believe Mom and Dad are gone. And to go like that.”

  “Fast. Painless,” Fritz said.

  “You know what she means, Fritz,” Max said.

  Fritz shrugged. “They’ll pin it on some coloured, but they’ll never catch who did it. They were very good, whoever they were.”

  “And you know about things like that, Fritz?” Rachel said.

  “Fritz Boonzaire,” Bethany said, “expert on the underworld.”

  “You’d be surprised, baby sister,” Fritz said as if Bethany hadn’t spoken. “I know what I know.”

  “So, Fritz, why would someone ‘very good’ kill Hans and Myra van Hout?” Max said.

  “Money. What else? They did it for money. I know the type. Ex-cops, retired military. Which doesn’t narrow it down much in South Africa. What I wonder is, who were they working for? One thing I know: whoever did it was white. A black man, or black men, in that neighbourhood at night—well, they wouldn’t have been able to get into or out of that neighbourhood. Even the servants have to be in their sheds by nine o’clock.”

  “What did you do in the national service, Fritz?” Rachel said.

  “Enough,” Gloria said. “It’s our parents we’re talking about. Mom and Dad. Remember them?” She glared at Bethany. “Some of us are very upset.”

  “They were murdered, Gloria. Shot in their bed. Has it occurred to you that they might have died that way because he messed with the wrong guy’s daughter? Or do you think someone shot them by mistake?”

  “That really is enough, everyone,” Max said. “We’ve got things that need to be attended to. You can scratch each other’s eyes out afterward, for all I care.”

  Gloria wiped her nose with a Kleenex, then said, “The police and the coroner have been in touch with me because I’m the oldest. The remains have been released, though they’re still in the morgue. Max and I were thinking cremation might be a good idea. We thought maybe we could scatter their ashes at the Cape of Good Hope. They used to like going there. We wouldn’t go out in a boat or anything. We would just scatter their ashes from shore.” This was met with silence, but Gloria nodded as if everyone had given their assent. She also told us she had written a joint obituary that she was going to place in the newspapers.

  “Have you told your family, Wade?” Gloria asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “I thought we should run the obit in the paper in St. John’s.”

  “I’ll write to them by first-class mail, then,” I said. “I might lose it on the phone. I haven’t heard their voices in months.”

  “They’re very sweet,” Rachel said. “Very normal. They won’t know what to make of this.”

  “We don’t know what to make of it,” Bethany said.

  “Maybe some neo-Nazi took them out,” Fritz said, looking from face to face.

  “There are still Nazis out there,” Max said. “Lots of them. Plenty right here in South Africa. Maybe Fritz is right. Hans was a member of the Resistance. Some Nazi nutcase might have done this.”

  Rachel said, “It might be just as likely that a Nazi hunter did it, given some other things Dad claimed to have done.”

  “It’s absurd to even think about,” I said.

  “Will the rest of you come with us to the Cape of Good Hope to scatter Mom’s and Dad’s ashes or not?” Gloria said.

  “Will the DeVrieses be there?” Bethany said.

  “Not if you are,” Gloria said.

  “I’ll go if it’s just us,” Bethany said.

  “Mom and Dad didn’t have many friends,” Rachel said. “There’s no reason it can’t be just us.”

  “We’re in,” Fritz said, glancing at Carmen, who was hanging her head as if she had nodded off. Gloria looked at Rachel, who looked at me. I nodded.

  “Right, then,” Gloria said, pushing back her chair and standing up. “The Cape of Good Hope.”

  RACHEL

  Ten days after my parents were killed, Gloria and Max came by in their gleaming, just-washed BMW around noon. We followed them to Fritz’s house, where everyone got out to stretch their legs. Max wore a black bomber jacket, white shirt, black tie and black slacks, Gloria a black anorak over a new-looking black dress. Fritz and Carmen wore T-shirts and shorts, as did Wade and I.

  “We might have to hike a little bit,” Fritz said, appraising Max and Gloria.

  “We’ve been there before, Fritz,” Gloria said. “We brought some walking shoes just in case. It doesn’t matter that it’s the Cape of Good Hope. It’s still a funeral.” Fritz shrugged.

  We—Wade, Bethany and I—followed Fritz, who followed Gloria and Max along the Cape Road, a small procession of three cars.

  We soon got caught up in tourist traffic, lots of cars stopping by the side of the road to buy trinkets from the coloureds, mostly women. In addition to Cape souvenirs, there were pin-on Elvis buttons, Ronald Reagan buttons, Margaret Thatcher buttons, wooden crosses, metal crucifixes, prayer beads.

  “You can’t get more authentically African than that,” Wade said.

  Soon we came to a complete standstill on the narrow, dusty road. Max got out of his car, stopped for a second to speak to Fritz, then came back to us. “We might as well get out for a bit,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing, anyway.”

  We joined the tourists. It soon clouded over and the wind came up, gusting from the east, toppling some of the smaller items on the tables. Coloured pennants flapped loudly overhead. Clouds of red dust swirled along the road. The hawkers looked up at the sky as if waiting for a sign. The tourists looked up as well, perplexed, amused. The corners of the tablecloths rose up, revealing flimsy Formica tables with skinny legs propped with stones.

  It felt like it was going to rain. “I’m freezing,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself, wishing that I’d brought a sweater. Wade rubbed my upper arms. As if the something they’d been searching the sky for had finally appeared, the hawkers—all at once, it seemed—jumped up from their chairs and began to fold the tablecloths corner to corner to make huge sacks in which they dragged their wares along the ground. Walking backward, they pulled the sacks with both hands as they inched toward the vans, whose rear doors opened as though of their own accord.

  Soon, the dust was intermixed with drops of rain, large, discrete drops that stung like hail. The tourists, hands on their straw hats, headed toward their cars. There were so many hawkers and tourists on the road, I kept bumping into the person in front of me. I felt a sudden surge of panic. “It’s just a bit of wind and rain, for God’s sake,” Fritz shouted. “We’re less than a mile from the Cape of Good Hope—what do they expect?”

  Max, his bomber jacket glistening, asked us what we thought we should do.

  “Well,” I managed to say, “it looks like everyone’s clearing out, heading west. They’ll be bumper to bumper for an hour. Maybe we should go the rest of the way to the cape. By the time we come back, the road might be clear.”

  Impelled by gusts of wind and rain, we struggled toward the Citroën. When we got in, the windows were so caked with mud that it was dark inside. But the rain drummed even lou
der on the roof, and the mud began to wash away as the wind rocked the Citroën from side to side. “Now this,” Wade said, “is what I call a car wash.”

  My hand shaking, I started up the car. My hair hung in thick strands about my shoulders, red mud staining the front of my T-shirt with what looked like blood. The sight made me want to throw up, but I managed not to. We waited until most of the westbound cars had manoeuvred around us, then followed the BMW and the Saab.

  The end of the road, where we parked, was about a hundred yards from the sloping shoreline of the sea, down which several paths led among the rocks to the water. The wind, unimpeded by trees now, blew harder in a series of gusts, ramming our car time after time, causing it to rise and fall as if we were in a boat at sea. The rain was so heavy, the seaward windows were a blur, the raindrops sounding like a volley of small stones against the glass. “Jesus,” Bethany said. “I’m not budging from this car unless the storm lets up.”

  I kept the windshield wipers going, but I could barely make out the two cars in front of us. A handful of jackass penguins waddled up one of the paths, passed between our car and Fritz’s and continued up the hill. The sight of them made me feel desolate. “The poor things,” I said.

  “I’m sure they’re used to it,” Bethany said, just as a baboon leaped on the car roof and, hanging upside down, its white-rimmed eyes agape, stared in through the windshield at us. I screamed and pounded the glass with my fists.

  “Jesus,” Wade said, grabbing hold of my arms, “you’ll break your fingers.” He struck the glass with the heel of his fist, but the baboon didn’t move.

  “Please get it off the car,” I shouted.

  “God, Raitch, you’ve seen baboons before,” Bethany said.

  “It’s attacking us,” I said.

  “No, it’s not, Raitch,” Bethany said. “Wade, they’re harmless unless you corner or provoke them. There are car windows between us and him. We’re safe.”

  As if to prove her wrong, the car was stormed from behind by baboons that, as they galloped across it, pounded on the roof. I covered my ears and screamed, watching the baboons slither every which way down the windshield, grabbing each other for purchase, tumbling, leaping, arms and legs and tails flailing, their bright-red, ridiculous, affronting backsides gleaming in the rain.

  “The weather has them all worked up,” Bethany said.

  I wondered if any European sailors had ever made it ashore from a sinking ship only to have a herd of baboons converge upon them. They took the path the penguins had taken, and soon I lost sight of them among the rocks and wind-stunted trees.

  “We could have spread the ashes at Muizenberg Beach,” I said, wiping tears from my eyes. “Mom and Dad liked going there, too. Jesus.”

  “Maybe I should take the wheel on the way back,” Bethany said. “Right now, I’m the less crazy of the two people who can drive this car.”

  “Maybe,” I said, gripping Wade’s hand as tightly as I could lest I completely lose control.

  “Maybe we should get one of my tranquilizers from Max for you,” Bethany said.

  “Maybe,” I said again.

  In a few minutes, the rain began to let up. The wind was still a gale, now blowing from the north. From time to time, the sun broke through, clouds racing past it. When at last the rain stopped altogether, we got out of the car and joined Fritz and Carmen at the trunk of Max’s BMW. Max opened it and took out two purple velvet bags with drawstrings made of gold-coloured braid.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Bethany said. “Some of us were kind of losing it back there.”

  Gloria took off her pumps, put them in the trunk and put on a pair of black and white sneakers.

  “No photographs,” I said to Fritz, who had hung his brand-new Nikon camera from his neck.

  We made our way single file along one of the criss-crossing paths, which were covered in shallow mud and very slippery. Spray from the large, white-crested waves stung my eyes. I had left my sunglasses in the car.

  My legs shook so that I could barely stand, and I grabbed on to Wade to keep from falling. Max, the first in line, the velvet bags hanging by their drawstrings from his hands, came to a stop on a flat rock about twenty feet from the water and declared that it would not be safe to venture closer.

  He laid the bags down, undid the drawstrings and took out the bronze urns, which were smaller than I’d imagined they would be—they looked like martini shakers in his hands. Fritz snapped a photograph of them and glanced at Gloria, who merely shook her head. Max shrugged as if to say, How should this be done? The rest of us stood on the rock, facing the ocean that, without interruption, stretched to Antarctica, our backs turned to the freezing wind and the incessant spray that had already soaked us all to the skin. We looked around at each other.

  “Open them,” I said, surprised to hear my voice so shrill with impatience. One of the bags bore the initial H on the side, the other M. Max handed Wade the latter and they unscrewed the lids. Mom’s urn contained what looked like white beach sand, but the ashes in Dad’s were black—coal black. I gasped and covered my mouth. Everyone gathered around to look inside the urns. “Why are they different?” I shouted above the crashing of the waves. “Why are hers white and his black?”

  Bethany scrambled down from the rock and began to make her way back up the path toward the cars, slipping and sliding every which way in the mud.

  “Let’s get this done,” Max said.

  “Just hold them up and shake them into the wind,” Fritz said. “The ashes will make it to the water eventually, or they won’t—what difference does it make?”

  “I think we should take turns,” Max said, “unless no one else wants to.”

  Carmen, Gloria and I stood there, arms folded, as if refusing an order. Wade took the urn from Max, and Fritz snapped a picture of him as he shook a sprinkle of ash from each of the urns that was instantly dispersed to nothing by the wind. He extended the urns to me but I shook my head. Gloria did the same when he offered them to her. Next came Carmen, her hair blowing about her face, who stood there staring at them as if she was trying to make out what they were. Then she shook her head and turned away from us, her hair whipping out behind her.

  Wade gave the urns to Fritz, who, wielding them like salt and pepper shakers, dumped out what I hoped were their entire contents. Then he passed the urns to Max.

  “Last chance, Gloria,” Max said. She shook her head again. Mascara-tinted tears streamed down from beneath her sunglasses. “Someone should say something,” Max said, but, almost in unison, the rest of us shook our heads.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Max shouted as he emptied both urns at once. Fritz took several photos, the shutter of his camera clicking rapidly.

  “Don’t you point that thing at me, Fritz,” I said as I felt my legs regain their strength.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here, then,” Fritz said, grabbing Carmen by the arm and pointing her up the path.

  When we reached the cars, I opened the back door of the Citroën and poked my head inside to see if Bethany was all right. She said something but I couldn’t make it out above the noise of the wind. She wasn’t crying and didn’t seem to be sick.

  We were about halfway back to Cape Town when Bethany asked, “Why weren’t their ashes the same?”

  “Maybe they coloured his black so they wouldn’t get them mixed up or something,” I said.

  “I know it makes no sense,” she said, “but those black ashes—I can’t help feeling that he didn’t die, that he’s still out there. I know it makes no sense. It just gave me that feeling, that’s all.”

  “I’m just glad it’s over,” I said.

  “It will never be over,” Bethany said. She was silent for a while. Then she said, “It went on for a long time, Rachel. When it started, I remember not knowing it wasn’t normal. The doctors say that if a dad starts e
arly, he’ll stop by the time you’re ten or twelve, most of the time. They say that others start then and stop when you’re about fourteen, most of the time. And others start then and stop when you’re nineteen or twenty, most of the time. Most of the time, most of the time. But some of them start when you’re just out of diapers and they never stop. Opportunity is all they need. As long as they have opportunity, they never stop.”

  “Bethany,” I said, trying not to cry, “you have to hold up for your baby, okay. Think about your baby.”

  “Jesus. Advice about keeping it together from my baboonaphobic, Anne Frank–freakaholic sister. Don’t worry, I’ll hold up. It was Clive who knocked me up. It wasn’t Dad. He was careful. He was always careful.”

  Wade glanced at me then, and I faintly shook my head to indicate that he shouldn’t say a word.

  From The Arelliad

  THE SHADOW SHE (1985)

  I hear the roars of Claws von Snout—

  the more he roars, the more I write.

  It seems the words keep him at bay,

  he hears my pen, he stays away.

  He never knows what I might say,

  I never know what he might do—

  is that the deal between us two?

  He takes the other ones, not me—

  so far, at least, he’s let me be—

  for that’s the thing with Claws von Snout:

  he knows it’s him I write about,

  he knows I’m hurt and getting worse,

  he’ll separate me from the herd

  when I spell out my final word.

  I’m waiting for the yellow sky, for morning in Arellia—for all I know, there won’t be one. That other nights have come and gone is a guarantee of nothing. Arellia’s astronomy is still a mystery to me.

  I gave him my sisters, betrayed the three of them the way that Dad betrayed the Franks, the van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer. Did I? Did he? No sooner do I think of them than all eight of them appear, soon joined by the van Houts, me among them. They are my blended family, fourteen in all. They smile at me expectantly. They’re posing for a photograph, the girls in front, Anne Frank and I holding hands, and Bethany holding Margot’s. Dad’s hands are on Anne’s shoulders. I want to tell him to let go of her, but I simply turn away. How can any of them stand his presence? How can I? How can the other me?