True Confections (24 page)

Irene was in talks with a literary agent about collaborating on a book about Abu’s experiences when their interview on
All Things Considered
aired on National Public Radio. Within days of the broadcast, it all began to unravel. Numerous listeners phoned or wrote to say there were many details that didn’t add up in Abu’s story, starting with the way his accent was all wrong for Côte d’Ivoire. This was correct; Abu was actually from Cameroon. Everything else was wrong, too: dates, places, the story of the bulk container of cacao in the Dutch port and his two dead friends, his journey to Paris in a truckload of tomatoes. None of it added up.

Abu was, of course, a fraud. All the parts of his story that didn’t add up were always right there in plain sight. His compelling story was true, in a sense. It just wasn’t his story. It was a blend of several stories he had heard about or read in newspapers. An athletic boy from a family of cacao farmers on the edge of Mount Cameroon (his two younger brothers, Malik and Jumo, were alive and well), Abu, who did in fact spend time working on his family’s small cacao farm, was the star of his school’s soccer team. He had been recruited by a soccer scout to try out for the French national team. His family had given all their meager savings plus some borrowed money to pay his way for this opportunity.

And so Abu was brought to France, to the soccer training camp in Vichy, where he had been housed and fed, and he had drilled and played long hours every day with the French team for three weeks. But he wasn’t good enough. Very few of the African recruits ever were, though they were useful practice fodder, and every now and then someone with star quality actually did make the team. And so at the end of the three-week tryout
(that he had only ever been offered a three-week tryout was news to Abu), he had been put on a train to Paris with fifty euros. Ashamed and frightened, Abu didn’t know what to do when he arrived at the Gare de Lyon.

A sympathetic Senegalese taxi driver gave him a free ride to the Cameroonian embassy in the sixteenth arrondissement, but there was a long line outside, and he was discouraged. Abu found a very cheap and not very clean hotel room near noisy train tracks in the Little Africa neighborhood the cabdriver had told him about, La Goutte d’Or in the eighteenth arrondissement, and in a café on rue Doudeauville he listened to two Cameroonians at an adjacent table talking about three men from Ghana who had been found dead in a container ship in New York City, poisoned by the fumigation of cacao beans in the container in which they had stowed away.

When he awoke the next morning, his money and his passport were gone. The man at the front desk shrugged and turned away. Abu found his way back to the Cameroonian embassy and got on the end of the line, but at noon everyone on the street was told that the embassy was only open a half day on Fridays and they should all come back on Monday. He spent the day walking aimlessly through the streets. The next morning, Abu woke from a fitful doze on a park bench to see a rich American in her black running tights and her red fleece and her puffy white sneakers going through her Tai Chi poses in front of him. He never dreamed that Irene would believe his story, he admitted in his official statement to the American immigration authorities (from which I have gathered all this information) before he was deported to Cameroon, and he had really only meant to get a free meal and maybe a little money from her.

Abu’s story brought out the best in Irene. I have certainly never seen her happier. Was her compassion any less real, was
the issue any less true, when it turned out he was a fraud? But the outrage over his deception and her unwitting part in it was hugely humiliating for her. She went into a depression. She didn’t return calls from agents and editors clamoring for her to write a book about her experience with Abu, and after a while the calls stopped and everyone lost interest. The story got pushed down the page, and then finally it was off the page.

Irene had been so moved by her own virtue, by her compassion for Abu. As were all the people in their audiences who gave generously to help change the system of child labor on cacao plantations in Africa. Was harm done, in the end? (Other than the bruises to Irene’s sense of her own certainties about the world?) The money they raised didn’t enrich Abu; it went to agencies set up to assist the child slave workers on the cacao plantations in Africa. Abu lived well for a few months and dined out on his appropriated story for a while, but he ended up right back where he started, with a wardrobe of Patagonia fleece and polypropylene underwear he would never wear in Cameroon.

He hasn’t been heard from since. I can’t imagine why some enterprising editor hasn’t tracked him down with an offer of a ghostwritten memoir deal. It wouldn’t be the first time such a book has been published. Maybe Irene bought his silence. Maybe in his own way he has some dignity and integrity. Maybe he came to feel
that she
had taken advantage of
him
.

Do I believe Irene’s repeated claims that she never suspected Abu of any deception, that she never once questioned his story at any point in those months, from their first conversation in the park in Paris to the unraveling that followed their Public Radio interview? She defended him in the beginning, when the holes in his story first came to light, but then once the
irrefutable facts just couldn’t be explained away, she never made any public statement reversing her belief in him. She just withdrew. She completely dropped all her involvements with the various organizations working to end child slavery in cacao production in Africa. When I asked her a few months after the whole Abu crisis had died down if she no longer felt concern about the child slaves in Côte d’Ivoire, she was irritated, and snapped something at me about how that issue had become toxic for her and she had refocused her positive energy on global warming instead.

Fortunately, Howard had listened to me at the outset, when I enumerated all the reasons Zip’s Candies should make no official statement of any kind about Abu or about Irene’s campaign, given all the obvious conflicts and problems that association could have ignited, so when it came apart we didn’t have to do any embarrassing backtracking. We dodged a bullet, not that anyone thanked me for my judgment. The sad truth is, we use chocolate that has been made from processed cacao beans that have probably been harvested by children living in deplorable conditions. We use this chocolate every day to make our candy. We make Little Sammies and Tigermelts, and we make Mumbo Jumbos. We source the best ingredients we can, for the right price. Zip’s Candies is a business. We are not the UN.

I
DO BELIEVE
Irene. Despite how irrationally suspicious Irene can be about people who don’t match her distorted expectations—like me—I think she believed Abu’s story with all her heart. As I said, it wouldn’t be my place to suggest that sexual obsession blinded her to the truth. Perhaps she was made especially gullible by her desire to see herself in such a noble light.

Lady Bountiful solving the world’s problems. Because sponsoring Abu, doing all she did to rescue him and help him tell his story, that worked for her. It suited her needs perfectly. In the end, that kind of naiveté is actually a form of entitled arrogance, isn’t it?

I
N
1920, E
LI AND
Morris left their little brother, Julius, in Budapest with some cousins. There is nothing in any Zip’s Candies record or family story about what provisions, if any, they made for him. Did they feel guilty about Julius, abandoned at the last moment with the Fischer family, barely known second cousins on their mother’s side? Or did they put him out of their minds completely as they sailed away, leaving him behind along with everything else that was familiar? He was fourteen years old. Their parents had died just a few months earlier in an influenza epidemic (first one, then the other), and the brothers had promised their mother they would stay together. Now his two older brothers had foisted Julius on strangers who lived over a shop in a strange, bustling city, nothing like the small village, two days’ walking distance from Budapest, where the Czaplinskys had been rooted for generations, selling live poultry in the market square.

Did Eli and Morris miss him, as they began their new lives in America? Did they think of him and wonder how he was managing, as they ate their meals, as they tried to get used to the bland American flavors he might have enjoyed, or despised? Did they wonder if that sour-looking aunt Borbála ever gave their little Julesy any sweet treats, a kiss good night, if she ever cracked that
ferbissenah punim
to give him so much as a smile? Was he in school, or had the Fischers put him straight to work in their dry goods business? Surely Eli and Morris had made
promises to send for him when they could. Did they try to write to Julius, to Aunt Borbála? Did they think of sending money?

If Morris hadn’t died in the 1921 diphtheria epidemic that swept New York, perhaps the brothers would have saved up enough money for Julius’s passage. What then? The joyful arrival of young Julius after those terrible but mercifully few years of separation, and after that, perhaps the three reunited brothers would have gone into business together. And who can say, Czaplinsky Brothers Candy might have been very successful, even without
Little Black Sambo
for inspiration, and their sweets could have been delightfully appealing to young and old, and their business might have flourished, not only rivaling the likes of the now-vanished D. Auerbach & Sons, Peaks Mason Mints, or W. P. Chase in those halcyon years of candy manufacturing in New York City, but perhaps even outlasting them, swallowing them up, growing bigger and bigger. Who can say if the synergistic energy of the three brothers might have made Czaplinsky a household name, maybe the third big name in American candy, after Hershey and Mars.

But of course, that never happened.

H
ERE’S WHAT
I imagine did happen. Yes, these are my perceptions. These are necessarily my interpretations of events. Does anyone have a more authentic or plausible version of this story? If so, let’s hear it!

Julius was grudgingly taken into the Fischer family, and as time passed he became more and more content with his life in Budapest, the so-called “Paris of the East,” as his aunt Borbála liked to say as she unfurled an array of the latest yard goods from France across the worn wooden counter of Fischer’s on
Dohány Street while persuading a prosperous customer that her social status required the more expensive Jacquard-loomed damask drapery materials favored in the most fashionable salons on La Rive Droite.

Julius finished school and went on to university, where he was a methodical but uninspired student, though he enjoyed the café life that surrounded the university. He wrote several letters to his brothers in America, but he could only address them to Morris and Eli Czaplinsky, care of General Delivery, New York City. He didn’t know that Morris was dead or that Eli had moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he had become a Ziplinsky. The name change made for simpler spelling and less confusion. Zip’s Candies was such a good American brand name. And surely the change was also inspired by Eli’s desire to make himself unfindable either by New York City detectives who could have wanted to discuss his presence at the Essex Market Courthouse the day Kid Dropper Kaplan was murdered, or by anyone nosing around on behalf of Little Augie, who no doubt wanted his money back, with interest.

Ziplinsky was, anyway, a little bit more of an American kind of name than Czaplinsky, Eli thought, and it was a nice zippy, peppy, zingy name at that. Changing it more would have signified shame about his heritage (he considered Zipple, but even with his beginner’s English he recognized that it was an undignified name, too much like the word
nipple)
, and he looked down on all those eastern European Jews who chopped their names, those Whites and Whitemans who used to be Wieder-mans, the Breitkopfs who became Brodheads. (Perhaps he was unaware of a certain Saxe-Coburg und Gotha family who simply became Windsors not long before then, in 1917.) By the time Eli became an American citizen in 1928, he was proudly signing his name with a big, flourishing Z, with the bottom serif of the Z
underlining the rest of the name, a habit he maintained to the end of his life.

Julius had no way of knowing that Eli had written to him five times from New York, the last time to tell him the sad news about their Morris having succumbed to diphtheria. The letters were intercepted by Aunt Borbála each time, who opened them when they arrived from America. Finding no money or specific promises about any, she hid the letters away in a desk drawer, feeling justified in keeping Julius from getting his hopes up. Maybe she would give him the letters some day, but not now. In the future, when he would thank her for keeping him grateful for what he had, for all that the Fischers had given him, instead of dreaming about America. Julius was better off if he didn’t think his brothers were going to send for him. These useless letters would keep him from forgetting his brothers. He needed to stop moping around so much, as if he was always waiting for something.

If they did send money for Julius, she told herself, the first priority would be to pay her back for the expense and bother of having added Julius to her household. It was too bad about Morris, because now it was even less likely that any money would ever come. Eli was just a boy himself, and probably he would forget about Julius. Soon there were no more letters, which proved her right. Her father always said those Czaplinskys were good for nothing.

When Julius never heard from his brothers he began to think they might both be dead, and even though Aunt Borbála never said anything, he tried on his own to make himself stop hoping for a letter. He didn’t even know with any certainty that they had ever reached America. He continued to work behind the counter at Fischer’s for several years, until he left to go into business with his cousin Péter, the least gloomy and conceited of the
Fischers, whose apprenticeship to an elderly baker in the old Jewish Quarter had given him skills and ambitions to open his own shop.