I was surprised that, not long after we told them of our plan to go through Amsterdam rather than London on our way back to Canada, the others—all of them—decided to come with us.
“I can’t stand the idea of you being in Amsterdam by yourselves,” Gloria said when she came by to give us the news. “The place is full of so many reminders of Dad, and even Mom—I’m sure that one or more of us have been there with them twenty times over the years. We’re not about to leave Bethany in the house by herself, and Fritz says he and Carmen have business to conduct in Amsterdam. I can just imagine what he means by ‘business.’ The two of them will wind up in jail for life if they’re ever caught bringing drugs into South Africa.”
Some shopping had to be done before the seven of us left. I had promised my parents and brothers and sisters that I would bring them back souvenirs. Rachel and Bethany each wanted a neck pillow to help them sleep on the flight. Gloria and Max were in search of things to give to Max’s many relatives in Amsterdam. As Max was out of town and Rachel was spending most of every day with Bethany at the Apostles house and Fritz and Carmen, who wore only used clothes, had more or less sworn an oath to never be caught dead in a mall, Gloria and I were left to do the shopping.
Gloria picked me up in Max’s BMW in mid-afternoon. She didn’t come in but merely blew the horn and waited for me. She shifted over to the passenger side as I came down the driveway. “It’s an automatic,” she said when I got in.
“I’ve never driven on the left side of the road,” I said, but she dismissed me with a wave of her hand. “I’ll guide you. It doesn’t look right, a woman driving a man around.”
“Rachel doesn’t mind,” I said. “Neither do I.”
“How do you know she doesn’t mind?” Gloria said. “And you should mind.”
I was wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans and a pair of leather sandals. “Someone should teach Rachel how to dress you,” Gloria said. “After someone teaches her how to dress herself.” She wore a low-cut, lavender-coloured number that rode up her legs when she crossed them.
I had feared that I would have to run a gauntlet of flirtation but, except to tell me where to drive and warn me that I was drifting into oncoming traffic, she said almost nothing. We made it to the mall, which was so busy I had to park on the lowest, least-used level of the underground lot after navigating a series of sharply winding and steeply descending ramps.
I picked up some things for my family first, and then Gloria shopped in a frenzy, never bothering to tell me which way she was headed or when she was leaving one store and making for another. I felt like I was ten years old, all but chasing her to keep up lest I be left behind and have to ask directions from a grown-up.
At last, we carried our bags back to the car in the underground parking. I drove the BMW back up the winding, steep ramps. I had no sooner stopped the car at an automatic pay booth a few feet short of the exit when two men in black fatigues and toting machine guns appeared from out of nowhere, flanking the car. At the sound of a thud against the window, I turned my head and looked into the barrel of a gun.
My mind and body braced pointlessly for a bullet that would have killed me so fast I wouldn’t have had time to hear the shot or the breaking of the glass. “Jesus,” I heard myself shout. Gloria grabbed my hand and cried out, “Don’t shoot,” over and over.
The two men slowly moved around to the front of the car, their guns trained on us all the while. I put my hands up and Gloria did too. “What do they want?” I managed to say.
Gloria began to stamp her foot over and over, hissing, “That bastard Fritz, that bastard Fritz,” each time she made contact with the car mat.
“What about Fritz?” I whispered.
“I knew he’d screw it up somehow,” she said. “How could he have been so stupid? Jesus.”
Abruptly, the two men lowered their guns as if some third person we couldn’t see had told them to, then backed away from each other until they no longer blocked our way. With a loud bang, the metal door in front of us lurched into motion, rising, slowly opening, admitting daylight until I was blinded by the sun.
“Get us out of here,” Gloria said. “Just drive. Go, go.”
I drew in a deep breath and slowly released it as I managed to pull out of the parking garage and onto the ramp that led to the street. As I merged into traffic, Gloria began to sob uncontrollably.
“I have to pull over,” I said. “We’re both too upset, and I don’t know the way. And what was that about Fritz?”
“You’re not pulling over until we’re out of the city. I won’t have people gawking at me while I’m trying to explain myself to someone who will never understand and whose opinion of me I do not give a shit about. There is a place out by the house that overlooks the sea. You’ll drive but you won’t say a word until we get there.”
She stood with her back to the water, the offshore wind turning her hair into a black pennant. I looked at the road, which wound halfway up the cliff that faced the sea, then at her house in the distance, the glass walls of its upper storey glinting in the sun.
Arms still folded, eyes on the ground, she walked in her high heels back to the car, turned and leaned back against the hood. The red dust of South Africa fanned out across the water, casting faint and fleeting shadows on the sea.
Seagulls used the offshore wind to hover above the water, rising and dipping like kites. They eyed us, hoping perhaps that we had stopped to have some food that we might share with them or leave behind.
“What happened back there, Gloria?” I said. “Why did you say those things about Fritz?”
“They were only mall cops,” she said. “They must have mistaken us for someone else. There must have been a robbery or something. This doesn’t happen to me every day, Wade.” Sniffling, she wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I was terrified. No one has ever aimed a gun at me before. And all I could think was that it could just as easily have been Fritz who was driving, because he does nothing all day but lie around that house with Carmen and get stoned. Fritz could have taken you there. If I wound up hurt or worse, it would be Fritz’s fault.”
“Gloria, when that gun was pointed at my face, the first thing that came to my mind was not Fritz. I don’t believe he’s the first thing that came to your mind. Fritz and me shopping together? That’s almost as unlikely as you and Fritz shopping together.”
She struck the hood of the car with the heel of her hand. “All right,” she said. “All right, just give me a second.”
“You didn’t think they mistook us for someone else,” I said. “You thought they knew exactly who we were.”
She leaned on the car, eyes downcast as I moved to stand in front of her. She was waiting to see if I could guess.
“Your parents,” I said. “You thought Fritz had turned on you, or slipped up. I can’t believe—”
She laughed. “Fritz knows more about it than you or I will ever know.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Jesus—”
“You can’t believe it. You can’t believe this; you can’t believe that. Ever since you came to South Africa, you’ve had a look of disbelief on your face, or a look of disapproval, or sometimes a smug look. I know what you think of me. But I’m not some vapid twit who always dreamed of being a stewardess. I left home as soon as I could, the best way I knew how. I don’t care what you think of me, but I know. I’d rather live here than anywhere else because, if you’re white, you can do almost anything and people will either pretend not to notice or explain it away. The police have no proof, though they may have suspicions, which they’ll keep to themselves unless Fritz does what the sight of that gun pointed at me made me think he’d already done.”
“Which was what?”
“Something like you just said. I thought he messed it up, somehow, maybe tried to keep all the money for himself, or shot off his mouth to someone while he was stoned. I’ll explain it all if you give me a chance. I panicked at the mall. If I had had the time to think it through…”
I moved even closer to her but she turned her head away.
“Rachel…,” I said.
“She had absolutely nothing to do with it. Fritz and I agreed that the fewer who knew the better. She didn’t, she doesn’t, know anything about it. Bethany and Carmen don’t know either, or Max. I wouldn’t trust any of them to keep a secret like that. Fritz is the only one I needed, anyway.”
“But not Rachel.”
“Not your precious Rachel. Rachel…for a long time, I assumed that Dad had done to her what he did to Bethany and me, and maybe Carmen. Seeing you and her together, I think that, maybe, for some reason that no one will ever guess, he never laid a hand on her.”
“But—”
“Listen. LISTEN. And don’t interrupt until I’m finished. Don’t you judge me until you know.”
“I don’t know what to say, Gloria,” I said, barely able to keep from breaking into tears.
I turned away from her and took a few steps toward the sea. The tide was coming in, the waves exploding in white froth upon the rocks just as the waves below our house in Petty Harbour did when the tide was on the rise. “Come back and sit beside me,” she called. I returned to the car and leaned with her against the grille of the BMW.
“For a while, I lived two lives,” she said. “The two of them ran side by side, and I moved back and forth between them pretty easily. Family outings, picnics on the beach, visits to the zoo, birthday parties, school trips. We sang the South African national anthem two or three times a day. I knew it by heart and I loved every word of it, and believed every word of it. But my other life was always there, at night, mostly behind closed doors. Secrets. Promises. Warnings. ‘Don’t tell your mother what you did. She’ll be very upset with you. You know how sad your mother gets when you misbehave. Don’t tell your sisters.’ I was convinced that Dad did what he did because of something I did. I tried to think of what it was so that I could stop doing it, but…Sometimes he told me to tell him I was sorry, and I did.”
I couldn’t credit the things she was saying. Nor could I look her in the eye, for I knew I was wearing the look of disbelief that so offended her.
“I soon had a reputation among the boys and girls at school. Especially the boys. A reputation that I earned and lived up to. Glory Hole van Hout. I didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs like my sisters did. I wasn’t invited to parties. But I knew things that other girls my age didn’t know. Things that some of them probably still don’t know.
“Then we moved to Canada.” She folded her arms and tightly hugged herself. The wind blew her hair over her face but she didn’t bother with it.
“The others, maybe even Carmen, thought we were going somewhere where everything would be different, where everything unpleasant would just go away. Me, I was leaving a boyfriend I knew I would never see again, a handful of friends I knew I would never see again. And I was leaving the one place on earth that, in spite of everything, was home to me. I have a lot of good childhood memories. Children can enjoy themselves in spite of almost anything. I did. The bad, as bad as it was, didn’t spoil the good, not entirely, not at first, at least. But it did more and more as I got older. I knew we were not setting sail to a new life. I knew that we were bringing with us more bad than good. And I felt, believe it or not, that what we were leaving behind was more good than bad.
“I got engaged. I got married. I got divorced. A few times. I wound up back here with Max. When I heard that Dad was retiring and the two of them were moving back here…For so long, I had thought the most I would have to deal with was a visit every year. I thought I could handle that.
“Max loves it here. He often says that there is nowhere else that he would live, not even Amsterdam. I’m going to have children, Wade. Girls, maybe. If Max goes on insisting he doesn’t want children, he’ll have to get used to not having me. And I know how this sounds but, if Dad was alive, I can’t say for certain that I would be able to shield a baby girl from him, or a ten-year-old, or a teenager. I can’t say for certain that I wouldn’t go on pretending that everything was fine and looking the other way, that I wouldn’t leave my children alone with him or them, because that’s what daughters do—they leave their children with their grandparents, the last people who would ever harm them. I don’t know for certain what happened to Carmen and Rachel. I should know, but I don’t. Like Mom, I covered up for him because I didn’t want anyone to know about me, because I thought I was to blame.
“The thing is…it never stopped, Wade. Do you know what I mean? I can’t explain it. Maybe someone can, but I can’t. I’m afraid that, if I tell Max any of this, he won’t want me anymore, in part because I lied to him and in part because he’ll be sickened by the sight of me. My father once said to me, ‘A woman belongs forever to the first man who has her. And he should be the only man who has her. But even if he’s not, she’ll be his forever. I was the first man to have you, Gloria. You will always be mine.’ ”
She looked sideways at me.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Since they moved back, every night that Max was away, I stood at the window that faced that road. If, by nine, Dad hadn’t shown up, I knew he wasn’t coming. I felt relieved, but there was always the next night to think about.
“Dad would tell Mom he couldn’t sleep knowing I was out there by myself in that big house on the coast—even though the house is guarded by a man with a machine gun. And she’d say, ‘Well, you know I don’t sleep well in any bed but my own.’ So he came out to the house by himself. It even made sense to Max. ‘Dad slept over every night while you were away,’ I’d tell him, and all Max would do was smile as if he was amused, or even charmed, by Dad’s concern for me. Sometimes, I think that even Max was pretending not to know, especially after Bethany made her accusations.
“I didn’t accuse them, disown them, tell them I never wanted to see them again. To move away from them was one thing, but to disown them was something that I simply couldn’t bring myself to do. I couldn’t accuse him. Where did doing that get Bethany? I couldn’t defy him or resist him. Or her. It was easier, in a way, to pretend, to let everyone go on pretending that the van Houts were what they seemed to be.
“When I opened the door, Dad didn’t push past me. He merely waited for me to step aside, as he knew I would, as I always have.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I can imagine what it was like for Bethany. Mom goes out from time to time in the middle of the afternoon. I don’t know where she goes and she isn’t gone for long, but long enough. And then there’s Carmen. I have no idea. My guess is yes, but I have no idea.
“I would have handled the whole thing myself if I could, but I had no money, so I told Max that Rachel and you were nearly broke. He never asks questions when I ask him for money. All he said was ‘How much?’ I told him not to mention it to either of you because you’d be embarrassed. And then I got in touch with Fritz.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“This was the only way I could think of to stop it. The point of all this, Wade—I say it again—is that he never stopped and he never would have. If there was any other way to stop him, they’d be alive today. Mom—she wasn’t supposed to be there. She was supposed to be at that reunion.
“Fritz has been keeping his eyes on me ever since, looking for signs that I’ve told Max or someone else what we did. He’s always watching me. But he did everything he was supposed to. I have to give him that much credit.
“Fritz and I, we did our parts. Max did his, too, though he doesn’t know it. I’m begging you, don’t tell him, and don’t tell Fritz that you know what happened. And please, please don’t tell Bethany, Carmen or Rachel. They had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
“I think Rachel loves me,” I said. “She says she does. I think she does. And I’m not sure I could take it if she didn’t, or even if she loved me less, which she would after she found out that I’d been keeping such a secret from her. I couldn’t take it if she left me again. I wish that Hans had done nothing to any of you, but I’m also sure that what happened to you and Bethany didn’t happen to Rachel. I don’t understand why it didn’t, but I’m sure it didn’t. I’d feel it, wouldn’t I?”
“You should stop trying to understand a man like Dad. Tornadoes have been known to rip apart an entire town but leave one or two houses unmarked. No one is running this show called life. Anything is possible.”
I felt that she was patronizing me. “Well,” I said, “I can’t keep something like this from Rachel. There would always be this thing between us, for however long we last.”
“Telling her won’t make any of it go away. You think that couples shouldn’t keep secrets from each other. That might be true for some secrets, but it’s not true for this one. There are no secrets like this one.”
“If I don’t tell her, I will lose her, if not right away, then months or years from now. Imagine our kids asking why they only have two grandparents and me thinking, Well, there used to be four, but your aunt did away with two of them.”
“Don’t joke about it,” she said, pointing her finger. “Don’t you dare make fun of me. Just listen to me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry.”
“It will only hurt Rachel if you tell her what I did.”
I was leaning on a car in a seaside parking lot in Cape Town, South Africa, with my girlfriend’s sister, who had just told me that, with the help of her brother-in-law, she had had her parents killed. I wasn’t as certain as I’d let on to Gloria that Hans had kept his hands off Rachel. Only a tiny measure of certainty had been erased, and yet its erasure made me feel infinitely worse. It was as if I had been monitoring the progress of an egg whose shell had been reduced to a transparent skin, allowing me to see the shadow of the thing inside. I fought down the urge to be sick and struggled to focus on the moment’s primary revelation: the van Houts had been murdered by their oldest daughter.
Murdered. Was that the right word? The police had said they were killed execution-style. Executed ? Something about the word seemed wrong, in spite of everything I knew.
Gloria had been watching me struggle. “You don’t understand and you never will,” she said. “No one it hasn’t happened to can understand. If Rachel really can’t remember, or has nothing to remember, then she won’t understand. Maybe Carmen wouldn’t. I don’t know what they’d do. I know almost nothing about Carmen. In a way, I was the odd one out among my sisters. I never got along with them. Half the time, we were at each other’s throats. The other half, we avoided each other.
“People often say that nothing has been the same for them since this or that. For me, there was no before this and after that. There was always this. Only this. Nothing else.”
“Gloria,” I said, “all of this just seems insane to me.”
“It is. It is insane. And now that you’ve been caught up in it, nothing will ever seem the same to you. The world made sense to you for twenty-something years. It has never made sense to me. Even if you broke up with Rachel now, nothing would ever seem the same.”
“I’m never going to break up with Rachel,” I said, but Gloria went on as if she hadn’t heard me.
“Do you understand what could result from telling Rachel? Believe me, she is not sorry they are gone. None of us is. If that seems heartless, your imagination is not what you think it is. I don’t know the guy that Fritz hired, what he might think he had to do if word got out about this. That’s why I was so freaked out in the parking lot: I thought we were going to be killed. Don’t you understand, Wade? If you tell Rachel, we could all end up as loose ends that need to be tied.”
She was crying again. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching but, as far as I could tell, no one was. She gathered herself and turned to me. “I’m asking you, not as a favour to me, but as a favour to them, don’t tell Rachel or Carmen or Bethany or Max. Don’t tell them what I did, and don’t tell them who helped me. And for God’s sake, don’t tell Fritz that you know what he did. More people could get killed. What my sisters don’t know would hurt them even more than they’ve been hurt already. It was my responsibility to do what I did. As the oldest daughter, I owed it to Bethany, to myself, and, if all the truth were known, I suspect, to a number of others whose last names are not van Hout.”
“All right, Gloria,” I said, won over more by her fear of what Fritz and the man who had killed her parents might do than anything else. “But I am going to tell Rachel about the mall cops because, when she sees me, she’ll know that something happened. I’m not expecting to get much sleep tonight.”
“Promise me,” she said. “Promise me that we’ll keep this secret between us.”
I looked her in the eye. “I promise,” I said. And I meant it.
“Thank God.” She covered her face with her hands and began to cry so hard her shoulders were heaving. I put my arm around her and she turned and put her arms around my neck and pressed her head sideways against my chest just as Rachel often did. After a few seconds, she pulled away and patted me with both hands.
“I’ll drop you off at your apartment but I won’t come in. Tell Rachel I said I wanted to get back home and get a swim in before dinner.”
We got back in the car. She pulled the sun visor down to reveal the small mirror on the back of it. She opened her purse, took out an assortment of cosmetics and arranged them in a row on the dashboard. Then she took a brush from the glove compartment and went to work on her hair, tilting her head away from me, stroking savagely, grimacing. “I should have stayed in the car, out of the wind,” she said through clenched teeth. Then she fixed her face.
Rachel had once told me that Gloria believed that the people who ran the world deserved to run it, that she trusted authority to do the right thing, the best thing, for everyone. How she could maintain such a belief given what her father had done to her, I couldn’t imagine. She had made it sound as if, by arranging the murder of her parents, she had done what any sensible person would do to restore good order to its usual infallibility. But I couldn’t know what Gloria actually thought. She may not have been as remorseless as she seemed. In my worst moments, I would dwell on the fact that his blood ran in her veins, as it did in Rachel’s, and Carmen’s and Bethany’s too. Perhaps it was that portion of Gloria’s blood that was his that made it possible for her to rid the world of him without letting the act destroy her.
These murders were the kinds of things that happened in potboilers and thrillers, in supermarket tabloids. I had an overwhelming sense of unreality when I thought about what must have happened on Liesbeek Road that night. Gloria and Fritz had negotiated a fee for the murder of her parents. What sum of money was involved? They must have had several conversations over a significant period of time during which one or both of them could have changed their minds but didn’t. They could have stopped short of doing something that would alter them forever—assuming that, when it came to murder, Fritz was as much of a novice as Gloria. Was it as simple as him knowing a guy who knew a guy, or had he known right away who to contact? And who was that person and what did he do, and how did he live between phone calls from people like Fritz?
The killer had parked in the driveway. The door of the house had been unlocked. He knew the layout. I pictured him moving about like a handyman. He did what he was paid to do. He shot Myra and Hans in the forehead once, left the house and drove away, the spinning of his tires on gravel the only indication of urgency or panic.
I knew that, in the days that followed, every time I looked at Gloria or someone said her name, I would think of Hans and Myra lying in the darkness of their room. And every moment I spent with Rachel, I would debate telling her what happened to her parents. To keep such a thing hidden from her seemed like an unthinkable betrayal. Gloria paid to have them killed. I couldn’t imagine the effect that sentence would have on Rachel. What if Gloria, soon or years from now, had a change of heart and admitted everything, including her confession to me? Rachel might not forgive me. Out by the Apostles, with her house in sight, Gloria had warned me about the effect of the truth on her and her sisters, and its effect on me. She had spoken as if I was one of them now, one of the van Houts, marred for life for a reason that no one but Gloria might ever know.
I also wondered what Gloria would be like if Hans had never laid a hand on her. Bethany had been telling the truth about Hans, about her parents, all along. What would Bethany have been like if Hans had never laid a hand on her? What would Rachel and Carmen have been like?
When I told Rachel about the close call Gloria and I had had at the shopping mall, she began to cry and hugged me fiercely. She told me how glad she was that we hadn’t been hurt, how precious I was to her and how guilty she felt for having persuaded me to come to South Africa. I was so happy we were leaving, I didn’t think to tell her she had no reason to feel guilty.
Two nights before our departure, I woke to find Rachel sitting on the side of the bed, her hands on the mattress on either side of her. She sounded as if she was talking in her sleep: “We have to keep away from the windows, Papa says, or someone will see us. We have to keep them closed or someone will hear us. He says that one cough could give us away. We mustn’t drop things. We must walk about like mice. I can’t remember all the rules. I hope we don’t get caught but, if we do, I hope it’s not my fault. I hope it’s no one’s fault.”
She turned and looked at me. “I’m awake,” she said. “Those were my words, not Anne Frank’s. Sometimes I write what I imagine I would have written if I was in her shoes. I should write about myself instead of paraphrasing her.” I turned on my side and rubbed her shoulder.
She nodded, not in appreciation but as if in agreement with some inner voice. “I hope they died in their sleep,” she said. “I hope they weren’t afraid.”
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
MANIFESTO (1977)
(Read only to my Rachel Lee,
who still has time for poetry,
if not for other things that she
withholds, unlike the other three.)
So many people say it’s wrong
(but many more just play along).
They could have caught me long ago
but they pretended not to know.
How well I know that knowing look—
they seem to read me like a book,
but then, I read them just as well:
we tell each other we won’t tell.
They know the signs, I know them too,
I’ll look the other way if you
will look the other way for me;
faced with the opportunity,
most men would do what I have done.
Am I supposed to be a monster
when other men have had their daughters?
So I have mine, they have theirs too—
these are the things that real men do.
The ones who don’t, don’t have the nerve,
but they’re the ones who disapprove.
They can’t admit how much they’d like
what they don’t have the nerve to take,
so they say, “abomination,”
and predict the ruination
of the father and the daughter
(and the uncle and the brother).
They’re on the outside, looking in;
they lack the stomach of most men.
The streets are full of married women
who’ve never come to any harm
though they were loved by their “old man.”
Those who object don’t know their wives
were often left unsupervised
when they were young and pretty things
who, taken underneath the wings
of older men, forgot the boys
who really didn’t have a clue,
who didn’t know what they should do
with girls who really wanted to.
Who says that I’m too old for them?
What’s old today was young back when
the Rooster played among the Hens.
Love that happens in the shadows
was long ago the status quo,
the commonly accepted thing—
no one had to bother hiding.
The rules are endlessly revised,
hypocrisy must always thrive;
nature has to be repressed
or we’ll be beasts like all the rest.
The things the Bible says are right
become forbidden overnight.
Where love’s concerned, there’s no right age;
I love my girls—is that depraved?
In ancient Rome, it was the norm
to sleep with boys the age of Carm.
How does what’s right become what’s wrong,
unless it was so all along,
in which case, nothing is allowed
by the new enlightened crowd?
A vice was virtue yesterday—
it never goes the other way.
The truth will change while you’re asleep
and be a lie when you wake up.
That fellow Darwin was no fool;
he knew that nature makes the rules.
You cannot deny a notion
that survived by evolution
or by natural selection.
The survival of the fittest
should be the one and only test.
A need, a want, an urge, a drive
must never go unsatisfied
or else the race will not survive.
I know they’d say that I’m to blame
for how my girls behave today;
of course they overlook the drugs—
they are such prigs, they are so smug.
They overlook society
and all of its hypocrisies;
they overrate psychiatry:
it can’t explain my Bethany
or even little Rachel Lee.
For proof, I know enough to know
that almost any proof will do
to prove the thing you want it to.
The testimony experts give
(they need their fees, they have to live)
won’t hold up for very long
when each side proves the other wrong.
How much worse would my girls be
had I not loved them specially?
Did they get sick because of me,
or is it that I saved all three?
How would some expert doctor choose
if those he almost lost were his?
Who knows what causes this or that?
How can they be so sure of it?
The things my girls watch on TV,
the violence and sex they see,
the drugs they get so easily,
the lyrics of these modern songs—
no wonder girls like mine go wrong.
I lie awake in bed sometimes;
the night goes by in quarter chimes.
The house is empty but for me;
the girls are out and so is She.
The man the cops look for is me—
She tells Herself: “It cannot be;
the man who left the house tonight,
the one for whom the bright porch light
is always on above the door
can’t be the one they’re searching for.
He’ll be Hans when he comes home;
when he comes home, the four of them
will still be them, their names the same
as yesterday, when they stayed in
and no one waited up for him.
There is this and only this;
it has to be this way for us.
It’s lonely in the house these days:
I dread the night, I miss the noise,
the children playing with their toys.
I stay up late because their dad
is out there somewhere, on those roads,
or parked somewhere; he sits and broods
about the war, about the past,
about how time goes by so fast.
I’d like to keep him company
but he prefers his thoughts to me;
he misses Glormenethalee.
He won’t say so but I can tell—
when it gets dark, he can’t keep still.
Sometimes I think I might go mad;
I fret about the years ahead.
How will he deal with growing old
when he is forced to stay at home?
The house will seem more silent still
when he is here against his will,
avoiding me from room to room,
wide-eyed and still remembering
his boyhood years in Amsterdam,
the things they must have done to him,
the things they said they saw him do,
the things that they accused him of,
some girl, perhaps, that he once loved…
I’ll never know what it was like
to be that boy who rode his bike
along the streets of Amsterdam
before the war made him a man.”
There is nothing in creation
that defies all explanation.
You’ve never lived as I’ve had to;
you think there is a thing called You
that will not change no matter what,
your heart, your soul, inviolate.
You call it this, you call it that,
it really doesn’t matter what
you call a thing you haven’t got.
What is this thing that makes you You?
It doesn’t matter what you do,
you’ll never find it anywhere—
and yet you’re certain that it’s there.
You think no matter what you do,
no matter what is done to you,
it cannot change what you call You.
We’re all the same when we start out,
each one of us a clean blank slate
(who was the fool who first said that?)
on which the world writes God knows what.
We share the same environment
(don’t be absurd—of course we don’t),
have equal opportunity
(except for things like family,
geography, intelligence,
random events, coincidence),
and even if you doubt all that
it’s easy to make up for it—
just pull free will out of your hat:
free will is free, no matter what
(the one such thing on planet Earth);
free will can conquer anything
(so you’re to blame for everything).
You could have used what God gave you,
you could have done what others do
whose every cell is just like yours
(except for the above, of course).
As for free will, the magic pill,
they’ll go on preaching it until
they find something to take its place—
a phantom with a human face.
How can anything be free,
affected by no agency?
It’s something that the church contrived
to keep belief in guilt alive
when science showed that God was dead,
the bogeyman beneath the bed
who wasn’t really there at all
but seemed so big when we were small.
You only have to look about
to see the reason things turn out
the way they do, the way they must:
it’s nature that determines us.
This is not a dress rehearsal—
there is this and no reversal,
no chance to do it all again;
there is, at best, “remember when,”
perhaps the game of might have been.
The world to come makes nothing right
if nothing follows day but night,
no second chance, no change of mind,
no past-perfecting afterlife,
no cure-all of eternity,
no never-ending history,
no soul but merely flesh and blood.
No kiss and make it better God,
with iodine, Mercurochrome,
is waiting for us to come Home.
From The Arelliad
DEAR ANNE (1985)
It may be that, one day, I’ll be
the last one of the family,
the last van Hout still left alive,
the last of some forgotten tribe
whose native tongue will die with her,
untranslated—who would bother?
It could have been like that for you—
Anne Frank, the last remaining Jew.
I know every word of The Ballad that he recited to me, still hear the words inside my head and always will. I hear that voice of his until I close my eyes and I can see the five of us—but where is She? She must be somewhere in the house. She listens and she waits for us.
I wish we’d had our minders too, not that I envy the Franks and the others, but it would have meant so much to my sisters and me to know that we were not alone, that someone knew about us and cared enough to intervene, our personal Resistance. It may seem ridiculous that I compare us with the Jews, that I equate what four girls lost with the murder of six million, but tell me, Anne, what do you do when he who should be hiding you is he that you are hiding from and his lieutenant is your mom?
The two of us are kindred souls, for we had a common enemy, a member of my family whom no one but my mother really knew. He hated you for being famous, even though your fame came at the cost of your life and because of a book that he swore that others wrote for you.
I wish I could forget the night we put an end to her, the also-Anne. We struck a deal without ever saying so: “I’ll let you go, if you pretend…”
We didn’t use those words or any others. I gave her and my sisters up. Was there nothing else I could have done? My sisters think I got the worst of it, alone with him so many years, the only daughter in the house. I think they feel the same guilt that I feel, something I could relieve them of if I had the courage.
He told me what he did to you, how much he got for just eight Jews. He made his gloating, boasting confession. Now I’m flaying myself with new guilt because it was your blood he spilled, even though it was not my fault. Yet it seems to me that I’m to blame for his every crime, even those he committed before I was born. No one accuses me but me, and also-Anne, my Shadow She.
The yellow light is long since passed. You’re here with Margot and the Shadow She. Von Snout will have his way with all of you unless I intervene. You look as if you think the same thing, stare at me as if to say there must be something I can do, the deal-making daughter whose deal with Dad saved only me and let him have the rest.
The stream of time flows but one way,
it has to carry you away,
it has to carry me away.
The trick is to remember how
you saw when you were just a child
and see that way when you are old
in spite of everything you’re told.
All things are what they were again;
time is an illusionist,
a charlatan, a sorceress.
You must look forward to the past
and make the future what it was.
No one, no thing is ever lost,
no moment is the uppermost
because it seems it happened last.
Time streams in all directions;
dismiss all the contradictions.
Don’t try so hard to understand—
the truth will get the upper hand.
Death is neither near nor far—
it simply isn’t anywhere.
You are not gone, you never were—
just know that you are always here
and you will never know despair.
Wise words I wrote when I got better
are nothing now but rows of letters,
a mere recasting of the Curse
that’s always written in reverse.
The night persists, as do all the things of night. Von Snout, who lacks the courage of a boy, must destroy the things he fears.
What I wouldn’t give for one night’s sleep. I’d give my gift with words to sleep and never dream again. To sleep and never wake again.
The west wind rocks my mind from side to side. Perhaps, the more often you choose it, the easier the ultimate alternative becomes.
The yellow sky may not return. The rhymes that used to scare him off, the words I used to save my life, will soon be of no use to me. He’ll call my bluff and revoke our deal. Should I give in or should I fight? Fight. A euphemism for what I have in mind. I can’t go back; I’d rather fight him to the death, his death or mine. I hear him pacing back and forth, weighing the odds, remembering what it was like when I was young and he would bounce me on his knee.
“She’s crazier than her sisters. She’s been taking me for granted for ten years, ten years I have to make up for. I’ve had enough of it. I’ll never have enough of her. Parading around the house half-dressed in front of me since she was thirteen and we happened upon that stupid girl.
For nights on end, I lay awake,
I listened to the sounds she’d make
as she lay awake in bed,
reminding me of what we did
and what we could be doing now—
she won’t say no, she won’t know how.
She’s back to where she used to be:
she’s holding nothing over me.
One vanished then, she’ll vanish when
The wind blows from the west again.”
Von Snout is almost sure of me.
He paws the dust and mauls the trees
and thrashes through the underbrush
as if I might grant him his wish
if he destroys Arellia.
He’s roaring with frustration now,
but he’ll work up the nerve somehow.
It won’t be long, he’ll come for you,
for Margot, Anne and You Know Who.
It won’t be long, he’ll come for me,
but not tonight—for now, we’re free.