The Prosperous Thief (40 page)

I bet he didn’t, Raphe is thinking. He has prepared himself carefully for today. No falling for her charms, no failing in his responsibilities towards his grandfather. For it is incomprehensible that Laura, a highly intelligent woman fully aware of life’s complexities, could not know the truth about her father. If Phil, Raphe’s own all-American father had been a Nazi and a murderer, Raphe is sure he would know. Either Henry Lewin played his stolen identity to perfection or, far more likely, Laura was in cahoots with him and deserves to share the blame.

At the beginning of this visit Raphe had resolved to approach the topic of Henry Lewin with restraint, not wanting to arouse Laura’s suspicions. But now he casts his caution aside, he simply can’t wait any longer, and soon he is conducting the complete survivor’s questionnaire. He asks about Henry’s background, his family history and early social circumstances, his movements during the war, how he ended up in Australia, who of his family survived, what searches he did and what reparations he received.

Laura’s answers are neat and sure and lacking detail; her father didn’t talk about these things, she explains. And when Raphe persists, she stresses there is no more information to give.

‘You’re just like Nell,’ Laura says, surprised and saddened by his sudden brusqueness.‘She’s convinced my quiet, reserved father was neither so quiet nor reserved, just hiding something.’

‘And what do you think? Was your father hiding something?’

Hiding is such a sweetly innocent word, Raphe is thinking.

Two simple syllables to cover a multitude of sins. He holds his gaze hard ahead, sketching in his mind’s eye a clearing, not in a German wood, but here on this jagged Australian coast, a pocket hidden from the road, with the steep cliffs rising on one side and the steep drop to the ocean on the other, and he and Laura standing together in the blustering wind. And coinciding with a heavier gust, a gentle shove, and at long last blessed justice for a crime committed more than half a century before. Not trusting himself, yet knowing that within the courageous confines of his imagination he wouldn’t hesitate in that nonchalant, calamitous nudge, he keeps his gaze away from her and his hands locked painfully together.

‘Was your father hiding something?’ he asks again.

The road is narrow and treacherous. A metre to the left and the car will bounce down the brutal cliffs to the ocean below, a metre to the right and it will be in the path of oncoming traffic, yet Laura twists her gaze from the road and looks at him, clearly deliberating whether to speak or not. And suddenly he is afraid of what she may know and equally afraid of what she may not know. Wishes he had not asked the question, wishes his mother had not bequeathed him this terrible knowledge, wishes history had left him alone to mosey on through life without these wrestlings with revenge and justice. And now he’s met Laura Lewin who makes such an unacceptable enemy, there’s forgiveness to grapple with as well. Forgiveness after all these years, as if he doesn’t have enough to lug through his days. I’m not my grandfather, he wants to shout. I’m not my grandfather. Yet against the hum and whoosh of the car on the curling road he feels the beat of his grandfather’s blood in his veins.

It jerks him back to reality. He reminds himself this quest is not his alone, that he has no right to dwell on fear. Fear is his grandfather’s province, real fear in the face of life-threatening dangers. Raphe sucks in his breath: if he won’t act on behalf of his grandfather, no one else will. Yet with Laura Lewin sitting just inches away from him, no amount of logic will alter the fact that enemies should feel different from her. When it comes to the real, very much alive Laura Lewin, Raphe simply does not want to shoulder his responsibilities.

‘What do you think?’ he says again, trying to grasp a new determination.‘ Was your father hiding something?’

Laura begins to speak, so slowly that it seems to Raphe she’s deciding with each word whether to continue. She says she doesn’t believe her father ever revealed the whole story – a long pause – but he resisted all her attempts to discover more. A longer pause now, and Raphe already sparring with his own demons doesn’t need to put up with impatience as well. He wants to drag the words out of her. But he remains silent, he does not even look at her, just wills her to continue.

The road is very high at this point, the plunge to the ocean sharper than ever, and it occurs to Raphe that he is as much at Laura’s mercy as she drives this precarious Australian coast as his grandfather was with her father in that wood outside Belsen. For a moment the possibility is terrifyingly real, then the road widens and bends briefly inland. The word ‘mercy’ lingers; it strikes him as peculiarly un-Jewish.

‘My own investigations,’ Laura says, ‘small as they were, suggested there was more to be learned.’ She checks the rear-vision mirror and slows the car down. ‘But my father’s gone now and,’ there’s a slight hesitation, ‘I suppose I’m resolved to let him have the last word.’

She pulls in at a scenic observation point and stops the car. She’s picking at a knob of loose plastic on the steering wheel. ‘I loved my father,’ her voice is no more than a murmur.‘I loved him enough to accept his version of his life, even though I knew –’ Raphe leans forward, a small interrogative explosion escaping his lips. ‘Oh yes,’ she continues, ‘I always knew we didn’t have the whole truth. But it was, after all, his life. And who needs to know the almost unthinkable? Who can afford to remember it? I never wanted to force that on my father.’

She’s lucky to have had the choice, Raphe is thinking. He swallows the bile and forces himself to listen as she tells about her so-small investigations, how there was no record of her father ever having worked in labour camps.

‘And now I’ve stopped searching,’ she says.‘Both my parents are dead, I’ve never had any grandparents, my brother’s thrown in his lot with the
meshuggeners
, I can’t afford to lose any more.’

There follows a long silence, with Laura still nagging at the knob of plastic and Raphe assaulted by questions and objections, and through it all a mess of fear, self-pity, resentfulness, envy and, as much as he would prefer otherwise, fatigue. At forty-three years of age Raphe finds himself a psychiatrist’s delight, when all he wants is to do his duty by his grandfather and get on with his life.

Longing is such an effective gauge of a person’s value and how Raphe has longed for his grandfather. If only, he used to think, longing were sufficient to disinter the dead. But now, high above a lethal coast, sitting with the daughter of his enemy in a car buffeted by stiff southern winds, he wishes there were someone else to take on his grandfather, just for a short time, to give Raphe a break: a trouble-shooter for the psyche, a Freud in the field.

He starts with a touch, her hand on his shoulder. Feels it through his clothes. A touch which pulls him into the present and spirals clean through him, a touch which spills onto his skin in a flood of hot prickles. A touch which, whether he likes it or not, blots out the old pains.

‘Look,’ she says.‘Take a look at this magnificent view.’

He gazes through the windscreen and sees where he is. Not simply a lethal coastline, nor a succession of threatening cliffs, but a brazenly beautiful stretch of clay-coloured crags and broad bleached sand. A coastline ringed with a wide collar of whitest foam, and beyond that the endless green of a wintry sea.

Her hand is still on his shoulder. He looks at her, she is not his Holocaust, she simply cannot be his Holocaust.

He makes himself smile, ‘It’s almost as good as Big Sur,’ and notes the relief in his voice.

Laura stifles her laughter. Raphe Carter: academic, writer, volcano lover, Jew, American, and of them all the American clearly dominates. She smiles back at him, and the tensions of a moment ago are fortunately gone and in their place a ferocious hunger.

She starts the car and follows the coast a little further where the road dips to sea level. Within a few minutes she and Raphe are propped on a rug in the shelter of some low dunes just a few metres from the breaking waves. They had stopped at the Victoria Market before leaving Melbourne – food heaven, Laura had promised – but with Raphe clearly more interested in hygiene than food (‘Nothing’s covered in plastic,’ he kept saying) she’d gone ahead with a selection to suit herself. And it’s a veritable feast, she decides, as she spreads out the food.

‘Not too cold?’ Laura asks, and seeing he is, pulls off her scarf and gives it to him.

For the next hour or so, and despite the cold, they sit together on the wintry beach, dipping into the food, talking, laughing, arguing, and now and then retreating into their own thoughts.

At one point Raphe asks about Daniel and the religious choices he has made. Laura says she feels his loss much like an amputation, that she’s aware of a shadow, an echo of how he used to be at the same time as she mourns his absence. She talks about feeling so powerless. He’s the one who’s deserted, she says, he’s the one who’s rejecting her, and she hates it, hates what he has taken from her.

She slurps a fat oyster from its shell.‘He’s lucky it’s not pork.’

Yet even as she speaks she realises how ridiculous she sounds. Just as Daniel’s dietary laws will not make one iota of difference to his rewards from God, neither will her denial of those same laws have any effect on her brother’s behaviour. It’s just that she misses him so much.

‘I see him passing his life in a capsule, like those bubble babies you read about. So safe and sterile, but the outside world will get him in the end.’ She adds some smoked salmon and dill cucumber to a crust of rye and takes a hefty bite. She chews long and slowly. ‘I’ve as much in common with a Jewish fundamentalist like my brother as I have with a Muslim fundamentalist, and each of them, incidentally, would have far more in common with each other than either would have with me. In fact, throw in a Christian fundamentalist, and you’d have the ultimate triumvirate, one with a nasty penchant for violence.’

Raphe’s response surprises her. While he agrees with everything she says, he also believes that if she wants a brother she’ll have to accept his choices,‘As he has accepted yours. I’m sure a lesbian sister was not on his agenda.’

And while it’s true, Daniel has always accepted her lesbianism, it’s now tainted by his lack of acceptance of the non-Jewishness of her partner. Although her brother’s acceptance is not the main issue.

‘Daniel’s religious cohorts wouldn’t accept me,’ she says.

‘But that’s no reason to sink to their level.’

And the two of them burst out laughing. Something quite humorous about secular Jewish Laura being morally superior to the extreme orthodox.

And yet it isn’t humorous, nothing about her brother’s religious choices is humorous. ‘His choices are downright dangerous, and not just for him but for all Jews,’ Laura says.‘Observance has never saved anyone, it just makes you more obvious. More vulnerable too. All that communication exclusively with your own kind and the group never takes a critical view of itself, never tries to understand itself in relation to anyone else.’ She slurps down another oyster. ‘My brother and his mates are making it impossible for diverse people to live together.’

Raphe is quick to respond. ‘But these sort of orthodox don’t want to live with people who are different from themselves. They don’t want diversity and pluralism. And they certainly don’t want the likes of you.’ He leans forward and touches the side of her face, a fleeting moment and then he is sitting back again leaving her with his touch on her cheek. ‘But this doesn’t alter the fact that Daniel’s your brother, and if you want a brother then you’ll have to make some concessions for him.’

A short time later they start for home. They have only travelled a few kilometres when Raphe indicates an uncleared area stretching inland from the road.

‘I can’t visit Australia and not experience the bush,’ he says.

Laura pulls in at a narrow opening near a walking track and the two of them rug up and head off. She is happy for a walk, happy to slough off the familiar conflicts of her brother and enjoy the unexpected comforts of this new friend. The trees shelter them from the wind; she takes in the fresh, wet smell and the rustling of branches, the squelching of their boots and the crash of distant waves.And she takes in Raphe, his presence so strong that the side of her nearest to him is scratchy and hot. He has such a strange effect on her. There have been times during the past few days when she has felt so close to him that if someone were to prod him she would know the pressure, so close that when he has begun a sentence she could finish it. Indeed, the connection has been so pronounced that if she believed in reincarnation she would think they had met in a previous life. Then in a moment the harmony will disappear and there’ll be the sharp bite of his interrogation about her father. And in another moment, the knowing empathy about her brother. So many moods, yet invariably intense. And exciting too, in a strangely charged yet strangely disturbing way, like being back in high school with a secret crush on one of the boys. She finds it all rather peculiar.

If there were something feminine about him she might better understand, but there is not. He is much the same height as she, shortish for a man, tallish for a woman, a neat, caramel-coloured man. She likes his compactness, his firmness, or at least she thinks he would feel firm, is tempted to touch and stops herself just in time. It’s odd to be so aware of him physically and certainly not her usual response to a man, not her usual response to a woman come to that, and moves ever so slightly away.

Such a careful distance now between them, and is he aware of it too? Again she is reminded of high school ditherings: does he like me as much as I like him? And a flickering through her like wings she has not felt since the early days with Nell. He seems happy to walk in silence, and while he looks to be quite composed, perhaps he, too, is experiencing the same jangling as she is. She hopes so. And quickly stifles the thought, all these peculiar thoughts. Not what she wants to be thinking, a self-respecting, permanently partnered lesbian who has happily left her heterosexual days far in the past. She manoeuvres her attention to the bush, the slender, blue-grey eucalypts, the dripping ferns, the wombat hollows, but her body tugs her back to less environmentally sensitive topics. It’s their conversation, she decides. They talk so closely, so intensely, and not the first time she has experienced the arousal of words. For there is something indisputably erotic bridging that careful distance between them. It was there on the beach as well; in fact, several times this past week she’s been aware of it. And a pleasure in watching him, in hearing the soft nasality of his speech, even in his smell, a faintly herbal aroma.