The Mascot (21 page)

“Yes, perhaps ‘volunteer' is too strong a word,” the professor said, trying to sound reasonable, but I had no time for his semantics.

“You are wrong,” I said. “Nobody in their right mind could concoct even a single moment of what my father has been through.”

The professor remained silent for several moments, perhaps to let my anger settle. “Perhaps you've hit the nail on the head,” he said slowly, as if testing the water.

I gave him a look of incomprehension.

“Perhaps your father is not in his right mind,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I believe that your father may be suffering from a form of false-memory syndrome that causes him to exaggerate the story that he has thus far told.

“I'm not saying that he's lying intentionally. It's more complicated than that. Your father has chosen to speak for whatever reason, and he is driven by an urge to make sense of the story as he tells anybody who will listen. I've seen this with other survivors. They have to find a way to describe the indescribable.

“Especially child survivors have to make sense of an arbitrary adult world in which they had no grasp of why they survived. And, as I said before, because they feel guilt about their survival, they believe there is an incriminating truth about themselves that they cannot see, but which, nonetheless, they feel that they must hide. They exaggerate the details of their story, because they cannot face the truth about themselves even when no such truth exists. So it is with your father.

“Have you noticed,” the professor continued, “how your father describes himself in the story? He is the cute mascot at the center of the Latvians' world—”

“I don't think he has concocted that,” I cut in. “They protected him and showered him with love and attention. And I assume you have looked at the photographs and newspaper articles I sent you in which he was featured. And what about the film he remembers starring in? He was a hero to them. My father did not overestimate his importance to the Latvians.”

“True,” the professor agreed. “But guilt causes complex contradictions in the survivor. Your father also portrays himself, and wants others to see him, as the hapless victim of all the attention showered on him in that crazed adult world. He wants us all to believe that everything that happened to him was fate and beyond his control. Nothing of his survival was due to his own cunning or wits.”

“No!” I protested. “My father would be the very first to admit that he used all his cunning to survive—in the forest and to conceal his Jewishness from his captors and adopted family. He had to, in order to survive!”

And then, dishearteningly, the discussion changed direction.

“It's a complicated matter, this survivor business,” the professor reiterated. “It's rife with contradictions. This denial of involvement in one's own fate is a retrospective survival tactic by the survivor, not to save his body but rather his moral conscience. The fantastical elements of his story distract us from the most important question…” The professor paused midsentence. His eyes would not meet mine. Then he spoke. “Complicity,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

“My father was complicit in nothing,” I responded firmly. “What on earth can a child of that age be complicit in?”

The professor pursed his lips but remained silent, staring at me intently.

The implication was that a young boy was capable of conscious moral decisions, and my father had somehow been a willing participant in his terrible fate. Now he was trying to cover up his part in the war by manipulating the truth about his role. He was refusing to face up to his complicity.

I needed time to digest this. In a half-absent state, I repeated to the professor that he was wrong.

In response he removed a piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket and offered it to me. He had jotted down a number.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Don't be offended,” he said. “It's the telephone number of a friend of mine. Your father should speak with her. She's a psychiatrist, an expert in victims of war crimes and violence.”

“And how might she help him?” I asked with some sarcasm. “Therapy? Analysis?”

“You must not blame your father, Mark,” he insisted, misreading the look of irritation on my face. “Your father is sick, and he's not responsible for that,” he said with deliberation. “He was made sick, traumatized by what happened to him, and is now trapped by the workings of the subconscious of a terrified child. This has been the only way for him to handle what happened to him.”

He paused briefly to gather momentum. “Ultimately, your father is trying to distract us from the most important question,” he said gravely.

I didn't believe that there was much point in continuing the discussion. I had come in search of basic information and had been subjected to a barrage of criticism and doubt about my father's story. I knew that I would not be able to convince him otherwise. I'd had enough, so I rose to leave, hoping that he would take the hint, but the professor was determined to have the final word.

“Did your father,” he said from his comfortable armchair, “kill Jews?” For just a moment, an almost indiscernible smile of satisfaction crossed his face.

I froze to the spot, not because of the professor's smugness, but because the same question had crossed my mind.

“No,” I answered firmly.

Our good-byes were terse. I thanked the professor, and he told me to take care of myself, as if warning me further against my father. I made my way along a maze of passageways until I finally reached the main quadrangle of the college. From there, I easily found my way out through the gates and onto Oxford's bustling High Street.

Stunned, I hunched my shoulders, feeling diminished somehow by the buildings towering above me as I began to weave my way back to my digs on the other side of town. As I walked I thought about Benjamin Wilkomirski, the key figure in a recent literary scandal.

I was only vaguely aware of the Wilkomirski fraud. When
Fragments,
the memoir of his childhood during the Holocaust, had first been published, one couldn't help but notice the lavish praise heaped upon it from all quarters. It was considered nothing short of a masterpiece of Holocaust literature. Many had proclaimed Wilkomirski the iconic survivor—the innocent child who had miraculously survived the concentration camps.

When the memoir was exposed as a fraud—Wilkomirski was not Jewish, and, having grown up in Switzerland, he had no experience of the Holocaust—the establishment conceded that they had been deceived by the unsignposted memories and impressions described unanchored by historical fact in
Fragments.
It had made them wary of future impostors.

In our discussion, the professor had stated that my father suffered from a surfeit of unsignposted memories. “Your father's story is highly dramatic and fantastical in nature,” he had said, “but we cannot verify it. Children's memories are unreliable. They often distort things.” He went on to draw a connection between Wilkomirski and my father: “With Wilkomirski, the world has made the error of accepting his story without any anchors, and Wilkomirski has turned out to be an impostor. You should be wary…”

He had not bothered to complete his sentence, but his insinuation was clear: he had put my father in the same boat as Wilkomirski. But this was unjust. Despite what he'd endured, my father did have verifiable memories, especially after he was taken to Riga by Sergeant Kulis: in particular there were the newspaper clippings and other documents that he had removed from their hiding place inside his case. And my father had mentioned a propaganda film about himself made by the Nazis.

The professor's words challenged me to verify my father's story. I knew that I would have to find this film, even a scrap of its footage, if it still existed. Its discovery would put the veracity of my father's story on firmer ground.

Eventually I came to my front door. But I didn't reach for my key. I decided instead to head for Port Meadow, an expanse of commons near my home. As I made my way there along the narrow canal path, I sensed more than ever that my father and I were on our own. Another door had closed in our faces.

I walked across the meadow toward the river Thames, feeling even more dispirited since meeting with the professor. Despite my earlier objections, I had to be honest with myself and admit that the professor's words had planted in me seeds of confusion and doubt. Were my father's revelations too fantastical or, even worse, a Wilkomirski-like deception? However, my father had not spent most of his lifetime telling people “embellished” stories about his wartime past; rather, he'd spent his adult years trying to prevent them from being discovered.

And then there was my father's behavior when giving evidence on the videotape. Surely this was proof, I thought, that he had not softened his story to protect himself: although I knew my father to be a resilient man, I had seen how painful it had been for him to speak for the first time of his terrible past.

Though he had risked condemnation from the interviewers, he hadn't skirted around their questions or compromised his story in any way. He'd stated what he could remember and what he could not; in particular, much to the annoyance of the interviewers, he had refused to condemn his Latvian “kidnappers” out of hand. It seemed to me that having begun the painful task of dragging his wartime past into the open my father would remain adamant about the truth, even when I suspected that this would not be the last time he would face pressure to tailor it to the agenda of his audience.

Doubtless there would be other individuals who would question my father's integrity, especially in the light of his fifty-year silence. He told me that he'd maintained his silence to protect his wife and sons from the trauma of his past. I'd accepted that but also suspected that he may have faced pressure from Dzenis and Lobe. Did he feel shy or even ashamed about his original identity?

The question that loomed largest was how my father had maintained his silence all this time. I began to reflect on a childhood spent in his company, wondering whether there was anything, in retrospect, that might provide a clue.

I reached the riverbank and sat down opposite the wooden footbridge that traversed the river. I started to nod off in the warm afternoon sun, and as I did, I remembered a favorite family anecdote.

My father loved two-up, the illegal game of chance and mateship that he'd first learned to play while on the road in the Australian outback. Two or three times a year he would suddenly announce that he was gripped by the urge to “play the pennies.” My mother would never let us wait up for him because he rarely returned before midnight. However, one night my father failed to return at the expected hour. At around 2:00 a.m. I was roused by the sound of my parents' voices in the kitchen. My father had only just come in, and my mother was making him a cup of tea. As I tiptoed past my brothers to the kitchen, they fell in behind me. I put my ear to the door.

“That was a close escape,” I heard my mother say. “You were lucky this time.”

Upon hearing those words, my youngest brother, Andrew, became overexcited. “What happened, Daddy?” he cried out. At the same moment, my brother Martin pushed me forward so that I stumbled into the kitchen and almost fell on the floor.

My parents jumped in surprise. “In God's name, what are you boys doing up at this hour?” my mother exclaimed. “Back to bed this instant. The lot of you.”

“No!” Andrew protested loudly, ignoring our mother. “Tell us about your lucky escape, Daddy.”

“Well, it was like this,” he said, looking slowly at each of us in turn. “We were all gathered in a circle around the spinner. He had the coins on the paddle and was holding it in the air. The toss was about to begin, so we were all as quiet as mice. You could have heard a pin drop, when suddenly there was a noise, like the whistle of a bird. Only it was the middle of the night.

“It was the warning signal from Bert, the ‘cockie,' or watch, who was on lookout upstairs. The police were on their way to raid us. Before we'd even fully taken that in, Bert called out, ‘Crikey, the coppers are already at the door.'

“Everybody panicked. All hell broke loose! Mayhem. Somebody gave the order ‘out through the back door,' so all of us made a charge in that direction. There must've been more than a hundred of us, and we were all desperately trying to squeeze through the door at the same time. Somehow I made it through and into the backyard. It was almost pitch-black so that I could just make out the figures of men hoisting each other up over the fence. You see, we're all mates there and we look after each other.

“Behind us,” my father whispered excitedly, “we could hear the police breaking down the doors of the warehouse, and I thought, ‘This is it. My number's up,' when somebody yelled out: ‘Over here. There's a loose plank. We can get through the fence here.' With that we all charged over like a swarm of ants.”

My father's eyes moved slowly across each of our faces with such dramatic intensity that we all held our breath.

“But it was just my luck,” he said, his voice unexpectedly dropping a register. “Just as I reached the gap, a fat man jumped in ahead of me. And you wouldn't believe it, boys: Fatty was stuck.”