The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  You think no matter what you do,

  no matter what is done to you,

  it cannot change what you call You.

  We’re all the same when we start out,

  each one of us a clean blank slate

  (who was the fool who first said that?)

  on which the world writes God knows what.

  We share the same environment

  (don’t be absurd—of course we don’t),

  have equal opportunity

  (except for things like family,

  geography, intelligence,

  random events, coincidence),

  and even if you doubt all that

  it’s easy to make up for it—

  just pull free will out of your hat:

  free will is free, no matter what

  (the one such thing on planet Earth);

  free will can conquer anything

  (so you’re to blame for everything).

  You could have used what God gave you,

  you could have done what others do

  whose every cell is just like yours

  (except for the above, of course).

  As for free will, the magic pill,

  they’ll go on preaching it until

  they find something to take its place—

  a phantom with a human face.

  How can anything be free,

  affected by no agency?

  It’s something that the church contrived

  to keep belief in guilt alive

  when science showed that God was dead,

  the bogeyman beneath the bed

  who wasn’t really there at all

  but seemed so big when we were small.

  You only have to look about

  to see the reason things turn out

  the way they do, the way they must:

  it’s nature that determines us.

  This is not a dress rehearsal—

  there is this and no reversal,

  no chance to do it all again;

  there is, at best, “remember when,”

  perhaps the game of might have been.

  The world to come makes nothing right

  if nothing follows day but night,

  no second chance, no change of mind,

  no past-perfecting afterlife,

  no cure-all of eternity,

  no never-ending history,

  no soul but merely flesh and blood.

  No kiss and make it better God,

  with iodine, Mercurochrome,

  is waiting for us to come Home.

  From The Arelliad

  DEAR ANNE (1985)

  It may be that, one day, I’ll be

  the last one of the family,

  the last van Hout still left alive,

  the last of some forgotten tribe

  whose native tongue will die with her,

  untranslated—who would bother?

  It could have been like that for you—

  Anne Frank, the last remaining Jew.

  I know every word of The Ballad that he recited to me, still hear the words inside my head and always will. I hear that voice of his until I close my eyes and I can see the five of us—but where is She? She must be somewhere in the house. She listens and she waits for us.

  I wish we’d had our minders too, not that I envy the Franks and the others, but it would have meant so much to my sisters and me to know that we were not alone, that someone knew about us and cared enough to intervene, our personal Resistance. It may seem ridiculous that I compare us with the Jews, that I equate what four girls lost with the murder of six million, but tell me, Anne, what do you do when he who should be hiding you is he that you are hiding from and his lieutenant is your mom?

  The two of us are kindred souls, for we had a common enemy, a member of my family whom no one but my mother really knew. He hated you for being famous, even though your fame came at the cost of your life and because of a book that he swore that others wrote for you.

  I wish I could forget the night we put an end to her, the also-Anne. We struck a deal without ever saying so: “I’ll let you go, if you pretend…”

  We didn’t use those words or any others. I gave her and my sisters up. Was there nothing else I could have done? My sisters think I got the worst of it, alone with him so many years, the only daughter in the house. I think they feel the same guilt that I feel, something I could relieve them of if I had the courage.

  He told me what he did to you, how much he got for just eight Jews. He made his gloating, boasting confession. Now I’m flaying myself with new guilt because it was your blood he spilled, even though it was not my fault. Yet it seems to me that I’m to blame for his every crime, even those he committed before I was born. No one accuses me but me, and also-Anne, my Shadow She.

  The yellow light is long since passed. You’re here with Margot and the Shadow She. Von Snout will have his way with all of you unless I intervene. You look as if you think the same thing, stare at me as if to say there must be something I can do, the deal-making daughter whose deal with Dad saved only me and let him have the rest.

  The stream of time flows but one way,

  it has to carry you away,

  it has to carry me away.

  The trick is to remember how

  you saw when you were just a child

  and see that way when you are old

  in spite of everything you’re told.

  All things are what they were again;

  time is an illusionist,

  a charlatan, a sorceress.

  You must look forward to the past

  and make the future what it was.

  No one, no thing is ever lost,

  no moment is the uppermost

  because it seems it happened last.

  Time streams in all directions;

  dismiss all the contradictions.

  Don’t try so hard to understand—

  the truth will get the upper hand.

  Death is neither near nor far—

  it simply isn’t anywhere.

  You are not gone, you never were—

  just know that you are always here

  and you will never know despair.

  Wise words I wrote when I got better

  are nothing now but rows of letters,

  a mere recasting of the Curse

  that’s always written in reverse.

  The night persists, as do all the things of night. Von Snout, who lacks the courage of a boy, must destroy the things he fears.

  What I wouldn’t give for one night’s sleep. I’d give my gift with words to sleep and never dream again. To sleep and never wake again.

  The west wind rocks my mind from side to side. Perhaps, the more often you choose it, the easier the ultimate alternative becomes.

  The yellow sky may not return. The rhymes that used to scare him off, the words I used to save my life, will soon be of no use to me. He’ll call my bluff and revoke our deal. Should I give in or should I fight? Fight. A euphemism for what I have in mind. I can’t go back; I’d rather fight him to the death, his death or mine. I hear him pacing back and forth, weighing the odds, remembering what it was like when I was young and he would bounce me on his knee.

  “She’s crazier than her sisters. She’s been taking me for granted for ten years, ten years I have to make up for. I’ve had enough of it. I’ll never have enough of her. Parading around the house half-dressed in front of me since she was thirteen and we happened upon that stupid girl.

  For nights on end, I lay awake,

  I listened to the sounds she’d make

&nb
sp; as she lay awake in bed,

  reminding me of what we did

  and what we could be doing now—

  she won’t say no, she won’t know how.

  She’s back to where she used to be:

  she’s holding nothing over me.

  One vanished then, she’ll vanish when

  The wind blows from the west again.”

  Von Snout is almost sure of me.

  He paws the dust and mauls the trees

  and thrashes through the underbrush

  as if I might grant him his wish

  if he destroys Arellia.

  He’s roaring with frustration now,

  but he’ll work up the nerve somehow.

  It won’t be long, he’ll come for you,

  for Margot, Anne and You Know Who.

  It won’t be long, he’ll come for me,

  but not tonight—for now, we’re free.

  RACHEL

  There wasn’t a trick he didn’t know, such as how to find out when my sisters and I were alone, or likely to be. Gloria, Carmen, Bethany and I, we all knew what he was up to when he asked Mom to fetch something from his office at the university or get him something at the supermarket. She knew too, and never said no. No one asked what sense it made for Mom to walk to the university or the store, to spend an hour or two doing what they could have done in ten minutes if they used the car.

  Even when we were sailing from Cape Town to Southampton, it continued. We had three berths on the Edinburgh Castle, one for Bethany and me, one for Gloria and Carmen, and one for Mom and Dad. In each of the children’s berths, there were two narrow bunks.

  At various points during the voyage, Dad invented ailments for all four of us—seasickness, toothaches, tummy aches, earaches—and removed one of us from our bunk and sent us to sleep in his and Mom’s bed so that he could be on hand if the “sick” one needed him through the night. When he announced that one of us had told him we weren’t feeling well, we didn’t contradict him or even say a word. We’d been chosen and that was it. Mom said nothing.

  I sometimes worked up the nerve to be mischievous. “Why can’t Mom keep me company?” I asked one night during dinner in the ship’s dining room after Dad announced that I had told him I had an earache that would keep me up all night.

  “Your mother’s too tired after all the sun she had today,” he said. My mother had spent the day in the shade, as she did every day, but didn’t protest.

  On another occasion, also at dinner, when he announced that Gloria was seasick, I observed that the rate at which she was working her way through dinner would have been remarkable even for someone who wasn’t sick. “Seasickness is like that,” Dad said. “Food makes it better for a while, but not for long.” No one challenged this absurd assertion, not even the strangers who shared our table. It was as if he couldn’t be bothered to make up a convincing excuse.

  As a child, I thought every house with one or more girls in it was like our house. I didn’t know that other fathers didn’t do what he did to us. I had nothing to compare us to. I didn’t ask the few friends I had about it.

  He was like a doctor, gently persuading me to submit to things that, though new to me, were old hat to him, momentarily unpleasant things that he would see me safely through, just as he had done for many others. I was so young when he started that, by the time I was ten, I knew my part as well as he knew his. He didn’t have to say a word. I didn’t wonder why it happened. It was how things were, just as Elsie living in a shed and eating by herself in the kitchen and going back to Langa on the weekends was how things were.

  I woke to the sound of doors being eased open and closed in the middle of the night, the floor of the hallway squeaking as he padded back and forth in his bare feet. I wondered which room he was headed to, preparing for the possibility that it was mine, but hoping it wasn’t, and hating myself for hoping that he would go to one of the other three, or that he would go out in the car and look for girls whose names I would never know. Once I was certain that he hadn’t chosen me, I went quickly back to sleep, so normal-seeming was it to be, or not be, spared. There was Dad by day and Dad by night, the house by day, the house by night; they were entirely different. He acted like a dad in the house by day. No one ever talked about the night, as if it was only an interval of silence and darkness and dreamless sleep that separated one day from the next. There was a place in my mind for what happened in the house at night, a place that, except at night, was locked and sealed.

  I thought that, if I kept absolutely still and didn’t make a sound, he would go to one of the other rooms. I clung to this notion even though he sometimes came to my room no matter how quiet I was. I pulled the blankets over my head and covered my ears with my hands as if the darkness and the silence would protect me, and I went on doing this even though it didn’t work. I worried that he would come to my room every night if I wasn’t careful. I thought of Anne Frank, lying awake in the Secret Annex, listening for sounds from outside, footsteps in the courtyard that might be those of the Gestapo, the clumping of boots on cobblestones growing louder as they neared 263 and then receding as her prayers that they wouldn’t stop were answered every night. I thought of her wondering if Dussel, in the bed so close to hers, could hear the pounding of her heart.

  When I heard the door opening, I pretended to be asleep, even though I knew it would not deter him. It was my opening gesture of doomed defiance, a delaying tactic that he seemed to relish. “I know my little Rachel Lee is not asleep,” he said as he closed and locked the door.

  “I’ll tell Mom,” I said. He didn’t answer. “You have to leave in five minutes,” I said.

  “Ten minutes,” he said.

  “You should go to Carmen’s room,” I said. “You never go to Carmen’s room.”

  “You know that’s not true,” he said as he knelt beside my bed. “But your sisters would be jealous if they knew that you’re my favourite girl.” I shook my head. “It’s much too warm in here for all these blankets,” he said.

  “I’m afraid of my room.”

  “A room can’t hurt you. You know that.”

  “This one can.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Now you have eight minutes.”

  There had to have been a first time. It was likely Gloria that he chose first. Then it got easier for him. It must have. How long had he considered it by then? Didn’t he realize that there was no going back? Once you touch your daughter, you will forever be a man who touched his daughter, even if you never do it again. If you stop just short, you will only be a man who considered it. Did he know he was about to cross an infinite divide? There are many other infinite divides. By then, he may have crossed some of them. During the war. Once you cross one, you may as well have crossed them all. Is that how it is? Is that how he saw it? You can’t take a life and give it back. And once you’ve taken one…

  * * *

  —

  The day after they went shopping together, Gloria came by while Wade was at the library and told me she had confessed to Wade. She was in a panic but, though I was near panicking too, I managed to calm her down.

  “He believed you?” I said. “You’re absolutely sure that he believed you?”

  “How can I be absolutely sure?” she said. “But he seemed to believe me when I said that no one was involved but me and Fritz and the man he hired.”

  “Have you told Fritz about this?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about what to do, but I haven’t done anything.”

  “Thank God,” I said. “Don’t tell Fritz Wade knows. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “But I thought you should know in case Wade confronted you, or told you, or something.”

  I hugged her and said she had done exactly what I would have done. She touched up her make
up in the mirror and left looking more or less composed.

  * * *

  —

  I had called her on a Wednesday night when Max was away in Amsterdam.

  At first I was so nervous I couldn’t speak. Then I managed, “I think we need to do something about Dad.”

  Gloria said she didn’t know what I meant.

  “I can’t stand to say it any other way,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You do know what I mean,” I said.

  I told her things I’d never told anyone else. Each of my sisters had always known that what was happening to us was happening to us all, but we’d never said a word about it to each other until Bethany’s accusations. But I told Gloria. She broke down, sobbing. And then she began to tell me things.

  “I can’t stand it,” she said. “When I’m alone with him, or even just speaking to him on the phone, I feel as if I’m six years old again. I become a frightened little girl who does whatever Daddy says. I believe it when he tells me I’ve been bad and must be punished, or when he tells me that I have to do something again tomorrow because I didn’t do it right today. He calls me his ‘little G.’ One minute, he tells me that I’m his favourite daughter because I’m the only one who loves him, that he’d be all alone if not for me, and the next he says that he likes you and Bethany and Carmen more than me because I never do what he tells me to. I still get sad when he tells me that he’s sad. I still tell him, ‘Don’t be sad, Papa.’ I still feel guilty when he tells me that he’s mad with me. Jesus, Rachel, I can’t go on like this. I can’t. I literally can’t. I’ve been thinking of how easy it would be to kill myself…It’s the only thing that makes me feel a little better.

  “You were the only one of the four of us still at home with them for years. You don’t have to tell me what that means. I believe you that he hasn’t gone near you since they came back from Switzerland. But he will. Once he’s sure of Wade’s daily routine, he will. And when you and Wade settle down somewhere, they’ll visit you, mark my words, announced, unannounced. He arranges his entire life to maximize his access to his girls. He’s bored to death between visits. That’s why he can’t keep still when none of us is available. Even if the police and the courts were an option, I know I wouldn’t hold up through a trial. You wouldn’t, and neither would Carmen or Bethany. And what credibility would we have? We’re not exactly shining examples of normalcy. They moved back to South Africa because they knew you would soon be leaving home and Carmen and I are here. If Max and I moved, they’d follow us or go to live where you or Bethany are living. Max has actually given them money so they could visit us. He’ll go on doing that, and he’ll give them money so they can visit you, too. I’d give them money if Dad asked me for it. You and Wade would. They’d visit often and stay for as long as you let them. I can’t say no to them. None of us can. If we could, we’d have done it by now. That’s why we have to do something else.”