The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  “Yes,” he said, “really. It’s not that odd. Many people in South Africa thought that way back then.”

  “I shouldn’t have laughed. It just sounded a bit old-fashioned. But maybe it was like that in St. John’s, too.”

  “I doubt it. Ladylike women are rare in this place, present company excepted, of course. But Myra enjoys being a fish out of water. She says it makes her feel as if she’s a rebel among a crowd of conformists.”

  “She sounds interesting.”

  He felt like asking her why she insisted on talking about his wife. Instead, he said, “Very well, then, let’s get this Malibu Classic on the road.”

  She eased the gearshift into drive and pulled out into the street. “I still can’t help feeling that it’s magic,” she said, “the way a car just goes when I want it to. It gives me such a feeling of power.”

  “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

  Why did he say things he didn’t mean? What was he doing, letting this impudent, gum-chomping Jewess drive his car? Everything she’d said since he stopped to pick her up had been at his expense or that of his wife or one of his daughters. “Can you even see over the dashboard?” he said. “I think this may be too much car for you.”

  “Do you want me to pull over? I bet I made a mistake, didn’t I?”

  “I was just having fun with you, Anne,” he said. “I am just a passenger. The wheel is yours. You’re a very good driver.”

  “You’re so nice.”

  The pavement was bare and dry and bore large stains of salt. It hadn’t snowed in a week, after a storm that had changed to heavy rain had left nothing on the ground but wind-polished ice. “Would it be okay if I drove over to the Brow and out to Cape Spear? Otherwise, I’ll be stopping every ten seconds for a stop sign or a traffic light. I’d love to just drive.”

  “Of course,” he said, “that would be fine. There’s something about just driving, isn’t there, getting away from all the things that slow you down or stop you in your tracks? There’s freedom in it.”

  “Definitely.”

  “I often go out to Cape Spear when I drive around at night. You should get a car of your own as soon as you can.”

  They crossed the bridge that spanned the small stream that divided the city in two. She really was a good driver, confident, relaxed. As if she had done it a thousand times before, she shifted gears as they climbed the steep hill to the crest from which the road dropped off to the sea in a series of winding curves that led to the unmanned lighthouse at Cape Spear. There were no houses now, and the street lamps were so far apart that, between them, there was nothing visible but the stretch of road revealed by the headlights. “It’s really dark,” she said, “but I know this road like the back of my hand. I like hiking in these woods with my brothers and our dogs, even in the winter. We have snowshoes. I’m a tomboy, I suppose.”

  “I’ve never gone hiking in my life,” he said. Everywhere he’d lived, but here especially, he’d assumed that the woods were even more boring than the parks he’d sometimes been obliged to stroll through.

  “Because you’ve lived in big cities.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What’s Amsterdam like?”

  “There aren’t as many Jews there as there used to be. Some that survived went to Israel. But many didn’t survive.”

  “I’m sure that you and the others in the Resistance saved a lot of people,” she said, glancing at him. “You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

  “I don’t like to think about it.”

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned it again. It’s just…I remember the first time I read The Diary of Anne Frank. Until I read it, I thought that no one stood up for the Jews. And it’s so sad because, by the end of the diary, she knows that the Allies are so close, and she’s convinced that she and the others will be rescued, but—”

  “But the Allies were delayed because they fell short of taking an important bridge. I remember that very well. Too well.”

  “You must have been so disappointed when you heard they had to stop.”

  “I shouldn’t be talking about it.”

  “So many people died trying to help Jews get out of Europe.”

  “Yes, they did. I was there. I didn’t die. I hope you don’t hold it against me.”

  “Oh no, I’m not saying that. I’m so nervous that I’m saying all the wrong things.”

  “Why are you so nervous?”

  “You’re my professor!” She giggled.

  “Do you speak Hebrew, Anne?”

  Yet another laugh. “Mom and Dad speak a little bit. But ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ are about as much as I can manage. My brothers were taught it, but I wasn’t.”

  “I speak five languages fluently: English, Dutch, German, French and Afrikaans, the official language of South Africa. And I can get by in Spanish and Italian.”

  “Wow. Five, almost seven. I’m taking French.”

  “You need to live where the languages are spoken.”

  “I’ll do French immersion—”

  “In Canada. Yes. My eldest, Gloria, did that a few years back. But French isn’t spoken properly in Canada.” He thought of the trip he would soon take to see Gloria in Quebec.

  “Almost seven languages and you were in the Dutch Resistance. Everyone in Accounting 214—well, if they only knew.”

  “Why? How am I regarded by everyone in Accounting 214?”

  “No, it’s not that. I just meant—”

  “You meant that, if they only knew, they would think even more highly of me than they do already.”

  “Exactly,” she said, sounding relieved that he didn’t mind that his students laughed at him behind his back, didn’t mind hearing that he was the butt of a universal joke.

  She pointed out the windshield. “There it is,” she said. He saw the flashing light atop the barrens of Cape Spear. “We’re nearly there,” she said. “I drove all the way. You should drive back, Professor van Hout. I don’t want to push my luck.”

  “Whatever you like,” he said as she pulled into the small parking lot at the end of the road. The lighthouse and its ever blinking light were just a hundred yards away, behind and above them.

  “Let’s just stop here for a few moments,” he said. “This has been a refreshing change for me. I should hire you to drive me around when I can’t sleep.” She laughed. Did she do nothing but talk and laugh? Every time she had laughed since she got into the car, he had smelled the gum that she was chewing.

  “It’s so windy,” she said. “It’s so loud I can’t even hear the ocean.”

  She put the car in park and turned off the headlights. “You can usually hear it. It sounds nice at night when you can’t see it.”

  “Do you often come out here to listen to the ocean when it’s too dark to see it?”

  Another laugh, a loud one, another waft of the gum that she was grinding with her teeth.

  “What’s so funny?” he said.

  “Couples come out here to park. I came out here with my boyfriend once or twice before we broke up.”

  “Aha, a boyfriend. I might have known, a pretty girl like you.”

  “Yes, but not anymore.” No flirtatiousness, no guardedness. The boyfriend was history, whoever he was, water under the bridge. He hadn’t known it, but that was all she had ever meant him to be.

  “What’s the expression? You washed him right out of your hair.”

  “Yes,” she said, vigorously nodding her head and smiling, “that’s exactly what I did.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He’ll live.”

  He’ll live. “The war wasn’t just about the Jews, you know,” he said.

  “Oh, I know…I know there were many other factors.”

  “Factors? Factors. Yes, there were many other factors. You’d be surprised how
many other factors there were. The kind that people never hear about.”

  She nodded solemnly, trying to look chastened, indulging an old man’s memories of things that were still important to no one but him. He could just make her out, looking straight ahead as if she could see the ocean. “I should just zip up my mouth,” she said.

  He eased apart the fasteners of his winter coat, each one popping loudly. “So cold out there, so warm in here,” he said. “Ten or fifteen minutes out there and we’d be done for.”

  The wind slammed the car so hard that it rocked slightly from side to side. From time to time, the foghorn sounded. The light from the lighthouse came and went, super-illuminating their surroundings for fractions of a second. “I wish we could see the waves,” she said. “But you couldn’t pay me enough to get out of this car.”

  “Imagine if the car stalled and wouldn’t start,” he said. “We’d freeze to death. You shouldn’t have suggested that we come all the way out here on such a night.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right, you’re right, what was I thinking? We should head back right now in case something does go wrong.”

  “You can make it up to me,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just like a girl to ask a question that she knows the answer to. My daughters do it. Rachel does. You know what I mean, Anne. It won’t leave a mark on you or me.”

  He unzipped his fly. “Be a good girl,” he said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” She stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief. He saw it all in the look she gave him, the scorn, the revulsion, the outrage and amusement. Another Jewess had once looked at him like that. “You picked the wrong girl, mister. We’re getting out of here.”

  He grabbed her hair with his left hand just as she was shifting the car into reverse.

  It might have been over in a minute. Or an hour. All he wanted her to do was what she had done many times with boys she didn’t even like, such as the one she’d come out here with until she’d decided she would rather come out here with a different one. She had done it here in this very spot, in the front seat of her boyfriend’s car. In car after car. Why not in the front seat of his? He had been kind to her. He had indulged her far beyond the point at which other men would have lost all patience with her, and had asked for nothing in return but what she had goaded him into asking for. She wouldn’t do something to him, so he was left with no choice but to do something to her.

  So he did it. It was done.

  He had got on top of her. He hadn’t been ready for a fight of any kind, let alone a fight like that. All women had to do was announce their availability and men came running. They could get it whenever they wanted it, but not men. Men had to play by their rules. Men had to play their stupid games. He had only done to her what she wanted him to do, except that he ignored her rules and games. It was absurd of her to think she had to play so hard to get. He was used to the dark and silent rooms of his own house, and ever-available daughters who complied and followed his instructions and liked what he did, and didn’t make a sound as he crept back to his room. But this had been fury and anger and vicious desperation, the first fight of his life. She had said things that made him want to shut her up, but that was not his fault. She should not have spoken of Anne Frank or the other Jews whose deaths she thought he was haunted by. She should not have spoken of the girls she thought were still alive because of him. Every word she’d said since she got in the car had been an insult in disguise. He could have let it all pass and driven her home and swallowed his pride as he had done so many times before. But there comes a point when you have to act.

  It seemed to him that his life had led inexorably to this very time and place. He’d invited Rachel to stay in the car. He hadn’t stopped for this girl with anything in mind but giving her a lift. And here he was with a woman who was not his daughter or his wife. She had left him with no time to consider the risks of doing what she drove him to. A Jew who so loathed the idea of doing what he asked of her that she couldn’t hide it, or didn’t bother trying to, but laughed at him. What sort of man would accept such an insult from a Jewess who, thirty years ago, would have been his for the taking if not for the Nazis, who kept such women for themselves and were amused when he tried to convince them that he didn’t mind because he had women of his own and no need of theirs? How could he have looked at himself in the mirror again if he’d let her deny him?

  He’d heard her fingernails breaking as she tried to get a grip on the back of his coat. She punched the windows until there was no skin left on her knuckles.

  When he was done with her, he looked in the rear-view. There was blood on his face, which he wiped clean with his sleeve. Her blood. There wasn’t a mark on him except for a scratch on his left earlobe, on which a drop of blood had formed. A girl who fought and screamed like that would never cease to fight and scream until she brought him down. He couldn’t let her go. So. He crossed the only infinite divide that was left for him to cross. He took another life with his bare hands. He put both hands around her neck and squeezed until all the things that need not have happened stopped and silence took the place of all the things he need not have heard. During the war, others had taken the lives of people he betrayed, but he had managed to keep death at a distance so that, when the war was over, the winners thought his hands were clean.

  He had been about to drag her from the car and leave her when he remembered that Rachel had written their phone number on a piece of paper that she had handed to the girl. What had she done with it? He checked the pockets of her coat and uniform. He pulled inside out the pockets of the jeans that he had tossed into the back seat. Nothing but Kleenex and a few coins. He took off her boots and socks. Nothing. She must have put the note in her knapsack. Aside from having innumerable pockets, the thing was crammed with textbooks, into any one of which she might have slipped the piece of paper that, if it were found, would lead the police straight to his front door.

  He realized he couldn’t take the time to check the books, and he knew he might have missed the note when he rifled through her clothes. He had to get rid of everything. He stripped her naked and stuffed her clothes in the knapsack, along with her boots and socks. He tried to refasten the straps but couldn’t.

  He got out of the car, walked around the front, opened the driver’s door and lifted her until he was able to push her onto the passenger side. He backed the car up and turned it around. Leaving the parking lot, he pulled onto the road with no thought in his mind but that he would submerge her, her clothing and her knapsack in one of the lakes or ponds out here that were so numerous they had no names. But then he remembered that every stream and pond and lake was frozen over. He would freeze to death looking for a place to safely conceal her.

  He stopped in the road, putting the car in park but leaving the headlights on and the engine running. He got out and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and carried her from the car to the gravel margin. He tried to throw her into the ditch, but she merely tumbled from his arms onto the ground at his feet, lying on her side, facing the road. He crouched and positioned her arm and her leg so as to cover her private parts.

  He got back in the car and drove at a steady pace toward the city. A strange calm came over him, almost a sense of peace. He believed he would be caught. He was resigned to it, not because of Rachel, who, he knew, wouldn’t say a word, but because of whatever it was that would catch up with him this time, backfire on him as something had always done no matter how carefully he thought things through, no matter how sure he had been that he had made allowances for everything. He drove down into the city, his ears popping on the steepest hill. He went past his house five, ten, fifteen times, until, at last, there were no lights on but the one above the door.

  He felt contempt for those he thought had wilfully misunderstood him, and those who would condemn him even though, dealt the same card
s, they’d have played them just the same, or even worse, than he had. He began to laugh in scorn of his hypocritical accusers, because he had done what they had stopped short of doing simply because they lacked the nerve.

  He pulled into the driveway and turned off the headlights but left the engine running. He looked at the bulging knapsack resting against the back of the seat beside him like some odd-looking passenger. “Be a good girl,” he’d said to her, as he so often had to his daughters, and to other girls who never saw his face because he wore a ski mask that, even now, was in the glove compartment. She’d decided she would rather be dead than good. Her intransigence would cost him everything.

  He turned off the car, grabbed the knapsack, got out and walked to the door with it, swinging it back and forth as if he was coming home after a long but pleasant walk, even as the wind again forced him to grab hold of his fur hat. He opened the front door and went inside, closing the door loudly behind him, then doing the same with the door that led into the vestibule, where, after turning on the light, he took off his hat and coat and boots and threw them on the floor.

  In the living room, he drew an armchair close to the fireplace, put the knapsack in the chair, picked up the coal scuttle, which was almost full, and emptied its contents into the hearth. He made no effort to minimize the noise, for he knew that, unless he called out to Myra, she would not come down to see what he was doing. He doused the coal with lighter fluid from the can beside the scuttle. He picked up the knapsack, sat down in its place and settled it on his lap. He lit a match and threw it on the pile of coal, which erupted into flame with a loud whoosh.

  He waited for the coals to reach white heat, then began to burn the contents of the knapsack, feeding the fire with her flimsy coat, her jeans, her green store uniform, her underwear. He poked the clothing into the coals and watched it turn to ash. Next he burned her leather boots, which sent up clouds of thick black smoke until nothing but the heels remained, hard, square, wooden heels that he thought would never catch—but, once they did, they quickly vanished. Last, he burned her books, all of them hardcover, tucked into one of which, he was convinced, was the note on which his telephone number and Rachel’s name were written. He placed book after book on the fire, splayed open, covers facing up. He saved until the very end the accounting textbook he had written and self-published and prescribed as a mandatory text in his courses. He didn’t notice that The Diary of Anne Frank was missing.