He watched his textbook burn, certain that everyone in the house was awake and listening. In the extreme unlikelihood that one or more of them came downstairs and caught him in the act of burning clothes and books, they would simply go back to bed and forget about it if he told them to. A roaring fire at one in the morning. Finally, he burned the knapsack.
He found a small Band-Aid in the downstairs bathroom and put it on his ear.
He went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, took out his glass of Horlicks and gulped it down.
* * *
—
No one was more surprised than him that he got away with it, that the knock on the door never came.
He spent the night after he came home from killing Anne Wilansky lying on top of the blankets of the bed in the spare room, his hands behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling through the glasses he thought it would be pointless to remove because of the imminence of his arrest, which he planned to meet without remorse or cowardice.
A memory came to him. The worst row in the history of the family had erupted over Gloria’s decision to leave home when she was just eighteen. That August, she’d announced that she was engaged and had been accepted at Laval University in Quebec starting in September.
“And how are you going to pay for it?” he’d said.
“Stephen’s father is paying for us both,” she said. “Tuition fees, residence, everything.” She’d met Stephen on a trip to Halifax, had become engaged after five days and had been flying back and forth between St. John’s and Halifax ever since, courtesy of Stephen’s wealthy father. Eighteen and flying back and forth for liaisons with her fiancé.
He’d become enraged. “I won’t have another man paying my daughter’s way,” he’d said. “Don’t you see that he is buying you for his son to play with?”
“I love Stephen and he loves me. Stephen’s father knows that. I want to learn to speak French and Dutch and German so that I can be a flight attendant and move back to South Africa.”
“Why don’t you just become a stripper?” he said. “There’s not much difference.”
“They don’t teach French properly here,” she said. “They don’t teach anything properly here. Not even accounting.”
“I speak French,” he said. “The European kind that is spoken by those who visit South Africa. I could teach you.”
She said she was sure he wouldn’t let anything cut into the time he spent dropping in unannounced on total strangers or driving around the city at all hours of the night.
“No daughter of mine is going to leave home before she has the sense to keep her legs closed,” he shouted at her. She ran upstairs to her room in tears. He sat for hours on the back deck by himself until Myra came out and sat with him in silence.
Until Gloria’s departure for Quebec, he acted as if the argument had never happened. So did the rest of them. How he’d hated that a mere boy had won her away from him, got the better of him with the help of his rich father. As she was leaving the house to get in a cab to go to the airport, he whispered in her ear, “Until we meet again.” It was a promise that he’d made good on when he and Myra flew to Quebec six months later and dropped in unannounced on his daughter and her all-but-adolescent husband. There’d be no more surprise visits to Quebec now, all because of that girl.
And so it went, night after night, other memories of other times whose like he would never see again. The unfairness of it made him feel such spite that his stomach churned. A night came when he wished the police would come for him, and another when he considered turning himself in just so that he’d never again have to wait for the knock on the door. But, just as that knock had never come during the war as he lay awake, waiting for it, it did not come now. Eventually, he realized that he was not even a suspect, that he had got away with murder and could resume his life in freedom and impunity.
He often said to himself, while eating, driving, standing in front of a classroom, lying in bed with Myra: Of all the people alive, I am the only one who knows what happened in the car after Rachel went inside the house.
There were others after her. Each time, he told himself that this one was the last.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
VAN DOBBEN (1980)
Perhaps I shouldn’t write this down—
I think of it when I’m alone,
what happened in that place that night;
no one but me, if I am right,
no one remembers anymore,
though most of us survived the war.
I dream about it all the time;
I may go mad and dream in rhyme
the way my youngest daughter does.
(Am I the only one who knows?
I’ve heard her rhyming in her sleep,
translating from that book she keeps,
repeating lines she heard from me
and memorized indelibly,
the ballad of the family,
but also lines that Rachel wrote,
a rush of rhymes but none of note.)
In a back room at Van Dobben,
the Germans slept with girls and women,
the wives and daughters of the men
who brought their food and drinks to them;
others, too—some were regulars—
the favourites were teenagers
who did what they were told to do
to stay alive, the chosen few,
for those who didn’t please the men
were not brought back or seen again.
The techtelmechtel Night Salon
that never closed till after dawn:
no Dutchmen went into the room
but those who cleaned up after them,
kitchen workers, older waiters,
sullen, bitter Nazi haters
who never said a word out loud,
not even to young Hans van Hout.
(The Luftwaffe left by the back,
the women, too, half-dressed and drunk.)
My fellow Dutchmen wined and dined
on what the Germans left behind,
the glasses of champagne and beer
that were abandoned everywhere—
they drank them all, flat though they were;
on hands and knees they searched the floor.
They ate the smallest scraps of food,
the crumbs of cake and crusts of bread.
As well-fed as the German men,
I sat and watched, ashamed of them.
I locked up after all were gone
and walked home in the morning sun.
I slept until late afternoon
and rose when it was dark again
for the night shift at Van Dobben.
My birthday came, they sang to me,
pretending I was twenty-three:
Zum geburtstag liebe van Hout;
they said I was männliche Jungfrau,
too old to be a virgin now.
“We’ll take you to the Night Salon,
where virgins go, but not for long:
hanky-panky, techtelmechtel,
give some frau your pumpernickel;
a strapping lad like Hans van Hout,
make sure you put it in her mouth.”
I claimed I was not a virgin,
I had slept with many women,
some who were almost twice my age,
so famous was I for my sausage.
“I doubt you’ve even kissed your mother,”
one of them said, at which the others
threw back their heads, mouths open wide,
and laughed as if to split their sides.
“You’re going to the Night Salon—
you’ve been a virgin far too long
for one with one that is so long.”
I played the fool to lesser men
(I swore I never would again).
They sang their songs, I played along,
as if I thought nothing was wrong—
but then they sat me in a chair
and stripped me to my underwear.
They hoisted the chair from the floor
and raised it high into the air.
Above my subjects, looking down,
I sat as if upon a throne
that rose and fell upon the sea
of soldiers who served under me.
“King van Hout must not be late—
his queen longs for her potentate.”
They chaired me round the restaurant:
“Three cheers for Hans, the sycophant.”
And then they chaired me to the room,
the techtelmechtel Night Salon—
and then, at last, they put me down.
Before the war, the Dutch elite
had gone there late at night to eat,
to mix with others of their kind—
for this the room had been designed:
leather and lace from wall to wall,
elegant booths and private stalls.
To see and to be seen they came,
the upper crust of Amsterdam.
The middle class, the mere riff-raff
who hoped to glimpse the other half,
always went home disappointed—
they were kept from the anointed.
Now the room was but a brothel:
the whores had once been clientele,
the women who had dined so well,
their husbands the celebrities
the lesser lights had hoped to see.
Despite the half-lit chandeliers,
I couldn’t see the officers,
so acrid was the drifting smoke,
so thick it almost made me choke.
I heard the snickers and the jeers:
“That’s quite a uniform he wears.”
“I think the boy’s a fusilier,
but he forgot his bayonet
or else he hasn’t grown one yet.”
“Well, I can see no sign of it.
It may be in his underwear,
assuming that it’s anywhere.”
“Great oaks from little acorns grow.”
“Well, this boy’s wood has yet to show.”
“He’s got a pair of acorns, though,
to come like that into this room.”
“Good thing for him the light’s so dim.”
“Good thing for us, I think you mean.”
My eyes adjusted to the light—
there was a table on my right:
four men were sitting side by side,
none even bothering to hide
that they wore even less than me—
nothing at all that I could see
but what I guessed were pillow slips
that lay like napkins on their laps;
the crazy images of dreams,
for nothing there was what it seemed,
the smoke so dense I couldn’t see
if they were looking back at me,
those faces conjured from thin air,
or even noticed I was there
or realized that I could hear.
The men who chaired me in were gone.
In many booths along the walls,
some things were taking place, my girls,
that I had never seen before,
and so I couldn’t help but stare:
women with women, men with men—
some Germans stood round watching them.
Their togas had been tablecloths;
their laurel crowns were made of wreaths
from which the flowers had been picked.
The smell of something made me sick
but I did not give in to it.
A woman with a painted face
who wore a tablecloth of lace
came up to me and took my hand—
the woman may have been a man.
In that place it was hard to tell
what wasn’t there and what was real.
She led me through the smoky room—
my underwear was my costume,
a pair of shorts, an undershirt
that I had not removed since birth,
or so it seemed, for they were grey,
their colour long since washed away,
threadbare and frayed and full of holes,
my only set of underclothes.
She turned around and spoke to me—
her voice seemed so unwomanly—
“There was a raid this afternoon,
eight Jews crammed into tiny rooms
like rats that live between the walls
of houses on the cold canals.
Two girls have been our guests tonight,
two virgin Jews still full of fight.
I think they look much better now
than they will look at Birkenau.
Two virgins, just the right reward
for Hans van Hout, who is the third.
Who better, Hans, to lose yours to,
than such a pair of sister Jews?
They’re yours to do with what you will,
they’re yours until you’ve had your fill,
until they are brimful with you,
two untouched girls, two nubile Jews.
They fight like cats when we come near,
they bite and scratch and pull their hair.
We were saving them for later—
I think Hans, the Nazi waiter,
could make a meal of both of them:
I’d rather watch than touch the scum,
so you can have the Jewesses.
What would der Führer think of us?
We can use the inspiration
and avoid miscegenation.”
“It’s not as if he has a choice—
a boy that age could do both twice
and still have room left for dessert;
it’s time he had a piece of skirt.”
The voices came from in my head,
or so it seemed, from what they said:
“They’ll need some taming, I’m afraid,
before they’re well and truly laid.
They’re locked in cloakroom number one:
we’ll let them loose and have some fun.
They’re here, just here, behind this door,
bound, gagged and naked on the floor.”
Then, as if of its own accord,
the door swung open and I heard—
nothing at all, not one small sound.
The German men all gathered round.
“They seem to be much more subdued—
you’d think they were already screwed.
There’s not much left for Hans to do—
he might not have to force them to.”
The two girls lay upon the floor,
bound back to back, beyond the door,
heads bowed as tears ran down their cheeks—
one bit her lip and crossed her feet.
Their hair was wet with tears and sweat;
I couldn’t see their faces yet.
They slumped to hide their breasts from me;
I saw more than I’d ever seen,
&nbs
p; one blond, the other raven-haired—
I didn’t care that they were scared.
It was not as if I could refuse
this gift of virgin sister Jews.
I’d never touched a girl before—
they soon lay naked on the floor
in front of me, their legs splayed wide,
two sisters lying side by side,
afraid to move lest they be shot.
“It’s time to show us what you’ve got.
Are you a man or are you not?”
They made one get up on all fours:
“Show her that massive thing of yours—
it’s time, young Hans, to drop your drawers.”
I wanted them so much it showed—
it showed too much—“Oh look, good God,
the Cock of Doodle Do has crowed.
We thought you were the Prince of Males.
Prince Hans has crowed before two girls.”
“He saw a bit of Jewish tit
and off his gun went, just like that.”
They went on with their gleeful rhymes,
their stupid jokes, their stupid games—
and then began to shoot their guns.
They shot the pictures on the walls,
they shot the leather booths and stalls,
they even shot the ceiling fans.
I covered my ears with my hands,
for they were ringing from the noise,
and tears ran freely from my eyes,
so heavy was the smoke by then—
the popping of spent Luger shells,
the dust as chunks of plaster fell…
I grit my teeth and shut my eyes—
I was convinced that I would die
when all at once the shooting stopped
as if someone had spoken up.
“Good Lord, young Hans just came again.”
“His gun goes off so easily.”
“It doesn’t look like that to me.
I think young Hans just took a pee.”
And so I had, unknowingly.
Despite them I continued to—
The Mystery of Right and Wrong Page 49