Once Upon a Time (19 page)

Sidney Green was sitting in his brown tub chair watching a rerun of
The Red Green Show
when Green let himself in. The sound was very loud, because Sid was slightly deaf, so he didn't hear his son until Green walked into the middle of the living room and stood in front of him. Sid peered up at him in confusion, as if he were out of time and place. His rheumy eyes blinked into focus to see his son holding out a large paper bag in his hand.

“I brought smoked meat and french fries. You hungry?”

“I ate already, in the cafeteria.”

“So keep me company.”

Sid's eyes had strayed to the television, but now they flicked back to his son with sudden alarm. “What's wrong? Sharon? The baby?”

Green shook his head, set the bag down and headed for the kitchenette, where he kept a modest store of beer in his father's fridge for his own use. A moment later he emerged with a bottle, as well as a glass of ginger ale for Sid.

“I just dropped by to say hi. I have to do some shopping for the baby tonight.”

Sid's eyes lit up. “One year old! Oy, I can't believe it!” He laughed and clapped his hands. His father's laughter was such a rarity that Green felt his own spirits lift. Sid appeared to have forgotten Bernie Mendelsohn and the depressing rate at which his friends were dropping dead around him.

Green sank into a chair and propped his stockinged feet on the scarred coffee table. He held out a smoked meat sandwich to his father, who shook his head.

“Come on, it's Lester's. None of that synthetic stuff.”

Still Sid shook his head. “Now I have a grandson, I want to stay alive.” Unconsciously, he patted his chest. The reference to his heart condition reminded Green of Eugene Walker and of the past the two men might have shared. Deliberately he leaned forward and switched off the television.

“Dad, do you know anyone who comes from Ozorkow?”

“Ozorkow?” Sid stared at the blank TV, as if wondering where Green had got the idea. “In Poland?”

Green nodded. “Western Poland.”

“I know where it is.” There was a peevish rebuke in his tone. “Why do you want to know about Ozorkow?”

“I'm investigating the death of an old man who might have come from there.”

“What does it matter where an old man comes from?”

“Dad,” Green exclaimed in exasperation, “just answer me, okay? It might matter.”

“Give me part of that sandwich. I don't know anyone from Ozorkow. Bernie, Marv and me, we're all from little villages. But no one is from Ozorkow.”

“What happened to all of you during the war?”

“Happened? We survived.”

Green put down his beer and frowned at his father, who busied himself picking the peppercorns off his smoked meat. Eventually, Sid sighed. “Marv was hidden by a Polish family for a while. Bernie was in three camps, the last one Mauthausen.”

“Labour camps?”

“Labour camps, death camps, ghettoes—they were all the same. People died.”

“Were any of you sent to Ozorkow or Lodz?”

Sid raised his eyes from his peppercorns in astonishment. “Lodz, Ozorkow! What have you been reading, Mishka?”

Green held his eyes. “I've been reading about the Holocaust, Dad. I'm trying to figure out what role this old man played in it.”

“Why?” Then Sid clucked his tongue as if at his own stupidity. “Why should I ask why? Since when does my son need a reason to solve a puzzle? It's enough it's a puzzle.”

Green grinned. “You got it close enough.”

Sid's eyes lit with affection as they met his son's, then gradually the light faded. “So,” he said softly, “you've been reading about the Holocaust.”

Green nodded. A strange electric silence fell, as if they stood at the edge of the chasm which had yawned between them all these years. But Green was not sure how far he dared venture to bridge it.

“Dad?” he began cautiously. “Can we talk about this old man?”

Sid studied the carpet, his breathing rapid in the silence. “I don't know anything about Western Poland. I was in the East.”

“But you know about the labour camps.”

“There was lots of labour camps, Michael.”

“I only want to know about what they did to a man. And I want to know about the kind of young men who became Nazi collaborators.”

“You can't find this in your books?”

“Not the human part. Not the soul of the man and how it would have changed him.”

Sid's voice was barely audible. “And that, of course, is the most important part.”

Green set his sandwich aside and leaned forward, fearing to breathe lest he break the fragile bridge being built. As carefully as he could, he sketched what he knew of Eugene Walker's story, ending in the mystery of his death. Sid Green said nothing, but he listened intently, his gaze fixed on his hands. When Green finished, Sid shook his head slowly back and forth.

“Every man is different, Michael. In the camps, some people found God, some lost him. Some found purpose, some lost it. Some felt shame, others anger. I don't know what made the difference. And after the war, you had to live with what you had been through. Not only what was done to you, but what you had done. Some could not. Some kept the guilt and the shame for a lifetime. Shame that they are alive even, when their children are dead. Shame that they played music while the people were being selected—” Sid broke off, devoting his full attention to the straw in his drink. When he resumed, his voice was flat.

“I know it is not an answer to your question about this man, Mishka. And I don't know about a non-Jew put in a camp. Would he go through the same things? His people were not all being murdered—his children, his mother and father. He would not be living with this fear that they want us all dead. I don't know, Mishka.”

“What about collaborators? The camp guards, the local Fascists?”

Sid's eyes hardened. “The collaborators—how can I know what was in their heads? I can tell you the ones I knew, they hated Jews. That was the most important reason they joined the Nazis—because Hitler was killing Jews, and they wanted to help. Oh sure, it gave them better food and a fancy uniform and made them feel like big men pushing us around—these were important, but not so important as getting rid of Jews.”

“But later, Dad, when they had seen the killing and they'd matured, didn't any of them regret it?”

Sid shrugged. “Some of the young bullies from the town— the little men who wanted to be big men—when they saw the blood, maybe they regretted it. But not for long. They got used to it.”

“But today, Dad. Years later. As old men, don't you think they'd look back on the cruelty of their youth and feel ashamed? They killed thousands of people!”

As the memories came back, Sid had become animated. His eyes darted around the room and his colour rose.

“Eichmann, Demjanjuk, Barbie—do you think they feel bad? Not at all. They think they did nothing wrong. It was war, they were strong, they did the difficult things. For the good of the Fatherland. They are proud of this, Mishka.”

“So a war criminal would not be living on a small country farm, hiding from people and drinking himself to death.”

His father wiped his hand across his balding head on which a thin sheen of perspiration had broken out. His breathing was erratic. “I don't know, Mishka. There may be some of those monsters with a little soul left.” He fixed his rheumy eyes on his son. “You think this man was a collaborator?”

“I don't know. He was hiding something. And surely a collaborator has more to hide than a victim.”

Sid gave him a strange look. “Maybe not. Maybe the thing you want to hide from most is yourself.”

*    *    *

More mysteries, Green thought wryly as he left his father's apartment. The more light I try to shine into the past, the more shadowed pathways I uncover. “Hiding from yourself.” Thanks for that cryptic morsel, Dad. More shadows. You couldn't shed a little light, Dad, instead of that classic Yiddish shrug of yours before you changed the subject?

Back on the street, the light snow was tapering off in the darkness and, remembering his promise to Sharon, Green glanced at his watch. It was past eight o'clock. The stores closed at nine, so he had barely an hour to duck into a store, find a gift for Tony and get out to the airport before Brian Sullivan's plane touched down.

The Rideau Centre was five minutes away, and Green dashed through its empty halls towards The Bay, which had been his source of one-stop shopping for years when he lived downtown. Usually he could be in and out in ten minutes. The toy department, however, felt like an alien planet to him as he stood in the middle staring at aisles upon aisles of brightly coloured boxes and plastic toys. He wandered down a pink and purple aisle full of Barbie dolls and impossibly pink furniture. Sharon's feminist sensibilities would be appalled, but his first wife Ashley, being something of a bubble-head herself, probably had no such philosophical qualms about their daughter's identity. In fact, considering the size of the cheque he sent out to Vancouver every month, Hannah had probably acquired an entire room full of pink plastic.

He turned the corner and the colours changed to black, grey and camouflage green. The male domain, full of bulging biceps and weapons that would frighten the guys on the Tactical Unit. He sighed. Where in this combat zone were the toys for a one year-old? Dump trucks and sand pails and big wooden building blocks.

“Yeah, sure we got blocks,” the harried clerk told him without even glancing up from tallying her cash. “Last aisle on the right.”

He made his way past a pile of plastic bowling pins to Lego land, where he simply stood and stared. An entire wall of boxes confronted him—police stations, battle ships, space stations, western saloons, vehicles and boats of every conceivable variety. What happened to simple blocks? The kind you piled any which way to make things, and chewed when you got tired?

Green wandered along the aisle looking for something Tony might be able to manage before he got his PhD. But time was running out. The clerk was rattling her cash drawer, and the store was dimming the lights. Shaking his head in an admission of defeat, Green headed for the exit. Get me back to my world of mysteries and bad guys, he thought, and let's hope Brian Sullivan has had more luck tracking down the story of an eighty-year-old man than I've had finding a present for a one year-old.

But Sullivan's face as he came through the passenger lounge and caught sight of Green was anything but triumphant. He looked tired and harassed, and before Green could even open his mouth, he cut him off.

“You and your crazy ideas, sending me to Hamilton! Three hours in line-ups in airports. Stale peanuts, lousy coffee and a kid kicking my seat all the way on the flight back. And the guy wasn't even there!”

“Mr. G. wasn't there?”

“Flew the coop, vanished, poof.”

“What the hell happened!”

Green's dismay must have shown on his face, together with outrage, because unexpectedly Sullivan grinned. “But I got something. You and your instincts. I got something.”

“What?”

“Buy me a beer and a decent steak, and maybe I'll tell you.”

Ten

January 15th, 1942

Refugees fill every corner of the room
with their stink, their complaints and their soft flesh.

Rations shrink, and yesterday the last of the chairs was burned.

Winter, thief of hope, steals into the room and into our flesh,
battling hunger for possession of our thoughts.

In our corner, the babies sleep while Sonya roams the streets.

An abandoned string, a cast-off rag, all carted home in triumph,
with magic fingers turned to sweaters, bonnets, embroidery for sale.

Through the thin wall drifts a beggar's cry, a child's wail for soup,
A single gunshot from the wire.

She's late tonight and when she staggers in,
laden with fur-trimmed coat and red satin dress,
there is no triumph.

Don't ask, she says, but I do.

I found a body in the street.

Then a look, to chase away conscience.

We have mouths to feed.

Sullivan had arrived
in Hamilton shortly before noon, rented a car and, after paying a courtesy call to the Hamilton Police and procuring a city map, he'd set off into the suburbs. Gryszkiewicz's cousin Karl Dubroskie had begrudgingly provided an address and no further details on his cousin's life, but Sullivan had pictured a modest home in an older, blue-collar neighbourhood. He was surprised when the map led him deeper and deeper into a wealthy suburban landscape sporting double garages and expensive brick facades.

Josef Gryszkiewicz's house had flamboyant red trim and cascades of withered vines, which suggested life and energy, but when Sullivan rang the doorbell, no one came. He thought he heard feet shuffling in the stillness, so he rang again. The shuffling stopped. Sullivan stepped back to peer up at the house, and a brief flick of the front curtain caught his eye. Someone was watching him, wary and reluctant to answer the door. He cursed his own stupidity. Of course, an elderly person would be afraid to open the door to an unexpected stranger, especially one built like a linebacker. As he turned to go back down the steps, he heard a rush of footsteps and the click of the bolt behind him.

Returning to the car on the street, he pulled out his cell phone and dialled. He heard the distant ringing within the house, and through the glass he saw the hazy shadow of a woman lurking in the corner of the window. The phone rang again, but the figure didn't move. Four rings, five, six. Sullivan cursed again. He'd flown all the way to Hamilton only to be stymied by a frightened old woman! Just as he was trying to work out his next move, a car pulled into the drive, and a stout woman jumped out. Her face had a pinched, preoccupied look, and she barely gave his car a glance before turning her attention to the pile of notebooks and the dog in the back seat. By the time Sullivan drew near with his badge, she had the stack of books balanced in one arm and was struggling to tow the dog out. It was an aging Lab retriever which barely lifted its head, let alone mustered any objection to Sullivan's approach.