The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  the scars I hope will never show,

  the smudge of blue on my left hand

  that you will never understand:

  the scars of little Rachel Lee,

  the things I cannot let you see,

  the crime of Glormenethalee.

  I couldn’t stand to see you go;

  you know the pain, I know you do.

  I wouldn’t hold up like you did;

  I’d go back to the yellow wood

  and give myself to Claws von Snout

  and never, never come back out…

  You think the things I say are true—

  it isn’t fair, I know, I do.

  The lens through which I’ve seen my life—

  a restoration of belief

  would be difficult enough,

  but to begin at twenty-three,

  feel happy to be Rachel Lee—

  I have to try but not just yet.

  I know that not all men are bad;

  I think that some are like your dad.

  Your mother trusted me with you—

  it might destroy her if she knew.

  I mustn’t sentimentalize:

  a heart of gold and, oh, so wise—

  but she saw more than you could see

  the first time she locked eyes with me.

  I’ll do my best, it might take years

  to read some book that isn’t Hers,

  or write uninfluenced by Him.

  The words come when I summon them

  but don’t do what I tell them to;

  someday they will, I promise you.

  I shouldn’t promise anything:

  I still fear what the night will bring.

  There’s so much that I haven’t done;

  I lost the knack of having fun.

  I think I had it way back when,

  but maybe not, not even then.

  I don’t feel like remembering.

  The future, then, let’s think of that…

  but then again, I’d rather not;

  I’d rather count the things we’ve got.

  We have each other, first of all,

  the shadows on the bedroom wall…

  the sounds that came from the canal,

  the children running on the bridge,

  the humming of the garret fridge.

  It isn’t hard to find the good—

  let’s look for it, I think we should.

  The casement curtains rise and fall;

  there’s hardly any breeze at all.

  In Newfoundland there is no war,

  no midnight knocks on neighbours’ doors,

  no fear that, next, they’ll knock on yours—

  not that the past has been undone,

  but this is now and that was then.

  —

  But this is now, it’s all we have:

  how good it is to be alive

  when you are only twenty-five;

  how wonderful to be in love

  at any age in any time;

  the lines still scan, the words still rhyme.

  Ten years of yellow have gone by

  but now, perhaps, another sky

  is showing through the yellow cloud

  (dishonesty is not allowed).

  I don’t know what more I can do

  than dedicate my life to you,

  and dedicate my life to Them,

  my literary heroines.

  There is a watch I have to keep

  with you beside me, sound asleep.

  There is a pledge I have to make:

  I’ll be the one who stays awake,

  the one who’s ever vigilant

  (this is what your mother meant).

  I looked away once, not again:

  I’ll guard you with my soul and then

  I’ll guard you with it when I’m gone.

  WADE

  She still reads only Het Achterhuis. She writes in her diary, in Arellian, for one hour every day, a copy of Het Achterhuis beside her. Sometimes she’s alone. More often, I sit with her, reading while she writes, as we did in Cape Town. I ask her what she’s writing, knowing that she’ll answer “Nothing new.”

  I sometimes ask myself: Does the truth never matter where the van Houts are concerned? Never? Is it only the consequences of telling the truth that are important? Is the truth not important for its own sake? What if the Holocaust had somehow been concealed? What if the disappearance of six million Jews was a mystery to everyone but you? Would you keep the solution to yourself forever lest the truth do you more harm than good? Rachel is not a Nazi, but she is the daughter of one.

  There is nothing left of the van Houts. Rachel’s sisters have taken their husbands’ names, and their children bear those names. Rachel and I do not have children yet. Perhaps we never will. Small wonder that Gloria was right that they were soon to separate for good, for none of them needed to start anew more than she did. They don’t keep in touch and they live far apart. Rachel says she doesn’t miss them, because she sees no point in dwelling on things that might have been. The longer I keep her sister’s secret, the more unthinkable it becomes to reveal to her the truth about the deaths of her parents.

  The books I hoped to write remain unwritten, because, as I came to realize in the wake of all that happened to me and to the van Houts, especially to Rachel, there is a great difference between wanting to be a writer and being meant to be one. I am not a writer, just a reader. Just. Merely. No, I’m a great one, I think. There may be as few of us great readers as there are great writers. It torments me not at all. To be a great reader is its own reward. To my relief, I no longer bear the burden of a counterfeit vocation. To read, and to teach others to read with hard-won discrimination, is what, if anything, I was meant to do.

  Rachel is a writer. I think she knew from the moment I told her that I meant to become one that I never would. Rachel is a writer who needs no readers, no one’s admiration or approval. She writes neither for the moment, nor for the ages, but merely, irresistibly, for herself. Rachel is a true writer, the kind who has no choice but to be one, just as she had no choice but to be Rachel van Hout.

  She’d like to be as normal as she thinks I am. But I fell in love with a greater, more tormented mind than mine. I had underrated normalcy, the preciousness of an ordinary life. Still, it was not her exoticism, but her pathology that drew me to her, her courage in the face of it, her insistence on confronting it no matter what it cost her. She will always be miles ahead of me, but I can’t keep from wanting to catch up, because I need her as much as she needs me. Each of us was what the other was in search of when we met, though neither of us knew it. She is my elusive masterpiece and I am her one handhold on the real and solid world.

  * * *

  —

  Home is the place we visit, and away is where we live. It’s had to be that way for Rachel’s sake, though she doesn’t think of home the way I do.

  As for the real Newfoundland, I miss it more and more. My parents, my brothers and sisters, the many friends I’ve made there since I moved away. It isn’t true of everyone that they can’t go home again. Almost any path but the one I stumbled onto when I was twenty-five might have led me back to Newfoundland.

  Still, my mind and my house are at peace more often than not. Only those who have paid it understand the price of peace.

  From The Arelliad

  THE HEAVEN OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN (1985)

  The slightest tweak of circumstance would have saved Anne Wilansky’s life. If one thing had been otherwise, if he had shown up at the rink early or on time or even later than he did…he turns left from the parking lot instead of right, and it’s
me he takes out to the Cape instead of her. He did before…But everything happened as it had to in order to ensure her death, including much I’ll never know. As it had to. It makes it sound as if her death was meant to be.

  What happens when she gets back in the car? I followed the Frank sisters to Auschwitz, and to their deaths at Bergen-Belsen, but I cannot bear to follow her to hers. When I write about it, it always ends there on the sidewalk in front of our house. “You seem so nice. I hope we meet…” But it should end beside that road in Maddox Cove. I think of no one more than her, the two of us standing there beside the car in which her life is soon to end. Small for her age, as tall as she will ever be, she puts her hands on my shoulders as if she’s been my friend for years. I think of those green eyes of hers, the wind so cold they fill with tears. She sees something in my eyes, a need that she can think of no way of fulfilling but by giving me her book.

  * * *

  —

  “Some have had it worse but didn’t do what you have done. You seem to expect perfection from everyone except yourself.” So says the nagging voice of guilt:

  “Thou shalt not kill. Though shalt not kill,

  you must submit to those who will.

  Be brave and turn the other cheek,

  forgive the ones that stalk the weak.

  “What could have been so bad that it led four girls to patricide? Why did their mother have to die for what their father did? Who knows what was done to him when he was just a child, what happened in that house of theirs? His father fled the very year his mother died and left him on his own, a boy who had no one when Amsterdam was overrun—who knows what he was like by then?

  “The tanks of the master race come rolling into Amsterdam. One day it seems some things make sense, the next it seems that nothing does. So begins four years of madness: he sees the inconceivable day after day, and it begins to seem possible that life will always be like this. He is among the lucky ones, who are only witnesses to everyday atrocities, not the victims of them. All around him, people die but, somehow, he survives. Is that a crime? Whose fault is it that he goes mad? Who knows for certain that he does? What is the law, what are the rules throughout the reign of savagery? Surely some allowances can be made for those who come back from the dead.”

  Was it the sum of his experience that made my father what he was, or some mechanism in his brain, some defect in his DNA? Perhaps it was the chain that he descended from, his parents, grandparents…

  There are no pictures of him from his childhood, so I try to think of him on Elandsstraat, where he grew up, a boy at play, perhaps alone. He comes to mind, that little boy, who didn’t know that he’d grow old, never having heard of time—his life would always be the same, a simple, sweet, unending game. Was he a child such as I never was, because of him?

  I imagine him as innocent, though it may be that he never was. It’s hard to say what “evil” is, hard to say if it exists. Is it a thing you freely choose, or is it that it chooses you? Perhaps it’s just a word meant to account for the unaccountable.

  I think there is hope. Not every child must live in fear of the House by Night. Our children will be happier than us, their children happier than them. So goes the endless dream of time, the consolation of the future.

  In the heaven of what might have been,

  where no one dies, not even Him,

  there’s laughter in the Land of Hout

  and nothing to complain about.

  We do not fear the Land Without,

  which seems just like the Land Within:

  we never have to keep Them out;

  we never have to be kept in.

  We think of Them as Mom and Dad. We know they did the best they could. How companionable they seem, as do we all, an ordinary family. We reminisce, as families do. We think about the good times and tend to overlook the bad. We’ve never heard of Special Love. We never really speak of love, even though we love each other. Typical, unremarkable, we muddle through like all the rest.

  I see four sisters, hand in hand,

  the sister ghosts of van Hout Land

  who never were but might have been:

  this elegy must speak for them,

  four lives that never quite began—

  I see them playing in the sand

  or trying to outrun the waves

  as if they’re running for their lives.

  The water catches them sometimes;

  sometimes they win and raise their arms.

  The sisters grow to womanhood;

  they still believe what children should—

  that some are bad, but more are good.

  The four untroubled sister ghosts

  must vanish in the morning mists—

  the search for them goes on and on,

  though some would say, “What’s done is done,

  what never was cannot be gone;

  these are the girls that never were

  that you insist on searching for.”

  Sisters, daughters, mothers, wives—

  the search is what keeps us alive.

  My two Annes. I never think of one without thinking of the other. I still can’t help believing that he killed them both. It’s to both of them I write when I write the words “Dear Anne” in The Arelliad, and it’s both of them I picture when I say their name.

  My sisters and Wade don’t know that Anne Wilansky is the key to me. They take me to be the exceptional sister, the one who, relative to them, emerged unscathed from the Land of Hout, somehow able to love and be loved.

  No one but Gloria and I know what she confessed to Wade the afternoon they came so close to death. He has never said a word to me about it. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember who knows this or who believes that, so I no longer think about that kind of truth.

  I remember when they found Anne’s body. The police closed the road and put a khaki tent around her, as much to shield them from the cold as to preserve the evidence and her privacy. Some people managed to get close enough to see the tent, which almost came unmoored, so hard was the wind still howling from the west. It was sunny but so cold that, unless you wore a ski mask, you had to use your hands to shield your face. What a strange sight it must have been, all those people peering through the fingers of their gloves as if they couldn’t bear more than a glimpse of what lay inside the tent. She’d been out there for twelve hours, her body frozen to the core and to the ground. I don’t know how they got her free or how long it took, or how, later, others went about doing the things they had to do.

  The memorial that marks the place where Anne Wilansky was found still stands beside what looks like it will always be an empty stretch of road. I find time to visit it whenever we go to what we still call home. I leave flowers or small stones or other tokens of remembrance at the base of the memorial, as do many people who never knew Anne Wilansky and will never know who killed her.

  RACHEL

  Once, alone as always, I drove in a rented car to the place she was discovered on the morning of December 15, 1974. I parked the car so that it blocked me from the view of passersby.

  Her family and friends had erected the roadside memorial to her about twenty feet from the woods, a few feet from the pavement—not a memorial like those you see at the sites of fatal traffic accidents, not a wooden cross and plastic flowers and, perhaps, a graduation photograph. Facing the road, on the edge of the woods on the far side of the ditch, is a black marble gravestone like the one erected at Bergen-Belsen for Anne Frank and Margot Frank. It has a rounded top, below which is etched in white the Star of David, the name Anne Wilansky, and the dates of her birth and death.

  As with Bergen-Belsen, the place seemed too ordinary to have been the site of anything exceptional, let alone what it was famous for. The stunted spruce had been cut back to make room for hydr
o poles, whose hum was constant, almost soothing. On the other side of the road, you could just make out the ocean in the gap between two hills. Perhaps, on a cloudy night, you could see the faint glow of the city in the sky.

  It was a typical early morning in May, sunny but cold, the dew frost not yet melting from the trees and grass. There was no reason for the foghorn at Cape Spear to blow, and yet it did, just once, perhaps by accident.

  Dressed in jeans and a peacoat like the one she wore, I knelt on the ground and sat back on my heels. I moved one hand over the letters of her name as if they were written in Braille.

  Every word I said came out as a puff of breath.

  “Anne, I’ve been writing to you and your namesake for so long I feel as if I know you, but I don’t know you at all and I don’t know her and I don’t know what to say. I feel the way I did when we lined up with all the others to visit Anne Frank’s stone. It’s just me today and the sky is clear, not grey like it was at Bergen-Belsen. They found you here on a morning much like this one, just as sunny but much colder. He must have thought you were a fluke, an opportunity that dropped into his lap, until it hit him that you knew him and he couldn’t let you go. I think of you every day. I remember your voice, the smell of your hair when we hugged outside the car. They’re such small, normal things, aren’t they, to get into a car, to get out of it, to get back in. They all seem so momentous now, so laden with foreboding, so obviously leading to something that need not have happened. I’m so sorry I didn’t stay in the car. I’m so sorry.”

  Beside the stone, encased in glass, there was a plaque that bore this verse:

  THIS STONE MARKS THE PLACE

  WHERE ANNE MARIE WAS THROWN,

  SURROUNDED BY THE WOODS SHE LOVED

  BUT OTHERWISE ALONE.

  SHE IS FREE, AS WE SHALL BE,

  FREE FROM ALL CONCERNS,

  FREE FROM DARKNESS AND DESPAIR

  WHEN THE LIGHT RETURNS.

  Author’s Note

  I was a young writer, in my late twenties, writing my second novel in the wake of a very successful first one, which had made its way into the hands of Annie Dillard, Robert Finch and many other writers who summered on Cape Cod. Annie and Robert had written to me, asking if they could come visit me in Newfoundland. I told them I’d be delighted to meet them and show them around, as I was a fan of their books. This is what my life would be like, I fancied. I would write books that were admired by famous writers, who would come to visit me in Newfoundland. I would myself soon achieve such fame as they had, even though I was just out of the gate. A greener, more naive, more parochial young man may not have existed in life or literature.