Once Upon a Time (22 page)

“What kind of superstitions?”

“He'd act as if he didn't want to tempt fate. He hated to talk about unpleasant things, as if talking might bring them about. For instance, if I'd say that I didn't think a particular item would sell, he'd tell me to bite my tongue. Not the least a Protestant sort of thing.”

“Did he cross himself on these occasions? Or at other times?”

She shook her head. “No, he never went that far. Nor did he ever seem to invoke any of the saints or the Holy Family.”

“What about the cross you told me he was wearing when he was found? Did he keep it?”

“That disappeared in one of his earlier fits of rage at the hospital. He tore it off and hurled it out the window.”

He drank the last drops of his tea in silence as he debated how to proceed. For now he was sure. Eugene Walker was neither the Polish camp survivor nor the Nazi collaborator he had earlier suspected.

“Mrs. Walker, did you ever ask your husband why he was circumcised?”

She choked on her tea, her cheeks flooding with red and her cup rattling in her hand. He waited patiently while she mopped up the spilt tea with a napkin and rolled it into a tight ball.

“Surely the question occurred to you. In your work with the wounded, you must have seen a lot of men's bodies. Circumcision wasn't common in Europe eighty years ago.”

“It did happen, though. If there'd been an infection or…”

“Or if you happened to be Jewish.” His voice was very soft and she looked across at him, wide-eyed and pink. “That possibility did occur to you, didn't it?”

Very faintly, she nodded.

“Did it occur to you that maybe he himself was Joseph Kressman?”

“Why do you think I wrote to Poland to get information on him?”

“When you found out none of the Kressman family had returned after the war, what did you do?”

“Joseph Kressman would have been older, and they said he was a blacksmith and tool maker. Eugene didn't seem to know much about tools, beyond how to sell them. He certainly didn't know how to make them or use them. My experts said that amnesiacs don't usually forget the little habits and the physical skills. And it seemed…” She faltered. “It seemed obvious Eugene wanted to leave that part of him behind. If he was Jewish, he had already suffered so much. I thought it would be kinder.”

“Do you think Eugene knew he was Jewish?”

She was beginning to rally with the relief of unburdening her fears. She sat up straighter, no longer defensive, fully involved as she considered the question. “You mean he was pretending to remember nothing, perhaps to hide the fact he was Jewish?”

“There are a number of possibilities,” Green replied. “He could have known from the minute he was picked up by the Red Cross and chosen to disguise himself. That's why he wore the cross. Or he could have remembered at some point in his new life and decided to keep it to himself, perhaps for fear of the upheaval it might cause. Or he might never have remembered.”

She weighed the alternatives carefully. “It's hard for me to imagine that he was capable of any kind of conscious dissimulation when he came to England. He was barely alive, psychologically. To have had the presence of mind to wear a cross…” She cocked her head as a thought struck her. “He tore that cross off when he'd been at the hospital a bit, as if it were repugnant to him. Perhaps then he had an inkling…” She shook her head. “But on the other hand, he was still so confused. Eugene has always had flashes of torment, as if hidden things were rising up. I can't imagine he knew everything.”

“Was his reaction to your son's engagement a surprise to you?”

“Yes and no. Eugene was never pleased with what Howard did, and I already knew he wasn't particularly fond of Jews.” She flushed with shame at the memory. “But the intensity of his reaction did surprise me. That's the thing that puzzles me.”

“Can you describe the scene? It may give us some clues about his state of mind.”

She sighed, as if Eugene's state of mind had always been beyond comprehension. Before she spoke, she poured herself a second cup of tea and took a delicate bite of her biscuit. She looked very frail wrapped in the heavy woollens and curled in the overstuffed chair across from him.

“Howard told us you're Jewish. I hope you don't find this unsettling.”

He smiled at her graciousness. “I've been a major crimes detective for fifteen years. I don't unsettle easily.”

She nodded in acknowledgement of his point. “Howard came home at Christmas time. He had written us about his girlfriend Rachel, but he hadn't told us she was Jewish. He took me aside one evening shortly before Christmas and told me he was converting to Judaism, and they were going to be married in March. He asked for my help with Eugene.” She paused, groping to put her idea into words. “I guess even beforehand we had a feeling Eugene would be upset. It was odd, because he was actually a strong admirer of Israel; he always wanted her to drop an atomic bomb on the Arabs. But he had little admiration for the ordinary Jew—the businessmen, the doctors. He called them rich, cliquey, spineless parasites.” She broke off in dismay and he realized that, despite his vaunted equanimity, a flash of anger must have shown. He forced a smile to defuse the tension.

“A lot of people lost themselves in the Holocaust, Mrs. Walker. Don't feel bad, these were not your feelings. Please go on.”

“Howard and I chose a moment when we thought Eugene was at his most relaxed. Right after Christmas dinner. Usually Eugene lit up a cigar and had a brandy with his coffee. When Howard told him, straight out, I must admit that even I was surprised at Eugene's reaction. He turned purple, I thought he was going to have a stroke. He said ‘no, never'. Howard said ‘Yes, I love her'. Eugene was shaking all over and shouting at him, and then all of a sudden he left the house. He came back several hours later, very—” She broke off, crimson with shame.

“Very drunk?” he prompted gently.

She nodded wretchedly. “He said a lot of nasty things about Howard killing him, and how could he turn his back on us like this, and there was no way he was bringing that girl into the house. He was weeping, and he kept saying ‘How can you do this to me' over and over. Howard walked out in tears, and he hasn't spoken to his father since.”

“Never?”

She shook her head. “He'd write to me here at Margaret's, but he refused to see or communicate with his father. He never even called me at home for fear Eugene might pick up the phone.”

“Did you ever try to talk to your son about his father possibly being Jewish?”

“Oh, no! In fact, when Eugene reacted as he did to Rachel, I was more afraid than ever that he was a Nazi. I was certain he couldn't be Jewish. Even if he'd been keeping it a secret, don't you think he'd be happy deep down that his son was marrying a Jewish girl? It didn't make any sense.”

It didn't on first analysis, Green thought as he headed back to the station. But perhaps, deep down in the tangled undergrowth of the human psyche, there was a logic to it.

Walker's son was not marrying just any Jewish girl, but the daughter of Ben Lowenstein, whose life was dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism and whose condemnation of spiritual and moral cowardice would be swift and sure. In Eugene Walker's life, after all he'd been through, nothing could ever be swift and sure.

Perhaps the prospect of moral condemnation by Ben Lowenstein was more than Walker could bear, or perhaps it was something even more convoluted. Green was not an expert in torture, but he'd read of the “Stockholm Syndrome” in which victims identify with their oppressors and adopt the same monstrous beliefs and actions. Although he'd known several Holocaust victims and lived with his parents' scars all his life, he realized with a pang how little effort he had made to understand the fear and secrecy that cloaked their lives.

However, he had worked for ten years with the brutal outcome of everyday deprivation and abuse. He had seen the way it twisted the psyche, withered love and nurtured rage, giving birth to the psychopath. How much more fertile the ground of the concentration camp!

Somewhere in the labyrinth of his tormented mind, had Eugene Walker locked his Jewish soul away, forgetting its existence and living in terror of anything that brought him close to the locked door? Was it humanly possible to keep the door locked and the terror alive for fifty years? Or had he unlocked it years ago, recoiled at the contents within, and slammed it shut again in revulsion? What would be so repulsive? Why was being a Jew so intolerable to him?

Green didn't have the answers. He was out of his depth and suspected even most psychologists would be, except perhaps those who dealt with torture victims. He didn't know Walker's past, but he doubted an old-world Jewish family could be so corrupt and loveless that he would turn against them. To reject his identity under the degradation of a concentration camp was possible, but to maintain that rejection over a lifetime with such ferocity that he cast out his son for marrying a Jew seemed unfathomable.

As Green navigated the Queensway, little facts which had previously seemed random began to coalesce. Walker's antipathy towards his son, who unlike himself was slight and dark. He recalled Jeff Tillsbury saying “Howard's father seemed to despise everything that made Howard so special— his gentleness, his compassion, his moral sense.” All traits of
Yiddishkeit
, the Jewish soul. Walker's admiration of Israel, seemingly a contradiction but not so within this new context. Israel represented the new Jew—the Jew who fought back against extraordinary odds and crushed her enemies. The antithesis of the gentle Eastern European Jew whom Hitler had slaughtered by the millions. Stereotypes, Green knew, but widely perceived ones, even among Jews.

He needed someone who could get inside Walker's head. He was comfortable enough with his Jewish identity but had always left it on the periphery of his daily life. In fact, Sharon was fond of suggesting that his choices in life—his anti-authority nature, his decision to become a police officer, his rejection of, indeed, deliberate reaction against material success—represented his own small rebellion against Jewish immigrant expectations. He had not been the dutiful son who fulfilled the aspirations of his immigrant parents. His career and his women had brought them pain and bewilderment over the years. At times, before Sharon had reeled him back in, he had come close to abandoning all semblance of being Jewish, but he had never rejected it. Never would he have turned against his own, and he would certainly fight anyone else who did. This was the crucial difference between himself and Eugene Walker.

But then, he had not lived through the Holocaust.

Eleven

September 1st, 1942

I am sick
I am numb
I have no words.

First refugees, then train by train the old, the sick.

Resettled, they said.

Now babies thrown from windows
Parents walking into guns
Nazis making sport.

What madmen are they to want our children?

What madmen are we to give them?

Stay still, my babies.

Stay quiet.

What have we become?

Where have we gone?

Or are we no more.

“Dad, we need to talk
about the Holocaust.”

Sid was sitting in his brown tub chair, where he spent most of the day, and he looked up in astonishment at his son's appearance for the second day in a row. The television was tuned to a 1940's Bob Hope comedy, but Green had caught his father dozing. At his elbow were the remains of lunch—a glass of ginger ale and a piece of cheese on a hard chunk of pumpernickel. Sid eyed his son reproachfully, perhaps for raising the topic of the Holocaust again, perhaps for simply being where Sid didn't expect him. Green poured himself a coke and came to sit opposite his father.

“The man we talked about yesterday, it turns out he was Jewish, and he was a survivor. I need to understand what made him act the way he did.”

“Every man is different, Mishka,” Sid protested. “It does no good to ask why.”

Green ignored the obvious evasion. “He would have been a young man of barely eighteen when the war started, well-educated, probably from a privileged family. But after the war he never admitted he was Jewish. Worse, he was actually anti-Semitic.” Green went on to delineate carefully the facts as he knew them, as well as the extent of his own theorizing. Afterwards, his father sat in silence, chewing his straw. When he was under stress, he chewed straws to combat the urge for a cigar, which he'd given up when his grandson was born.

“Could that happen to a man?” Green prompted gently. “That he would turn against his fellow Jews?”

Sid nodded, his face twisting at the memories. “What do you think? That we Jews were saints? Even in the camps, some turned against their own.”

“But that was to survive, to protect themselves. Deep inside, they would not feel that way. But this guy Walker, even after the danger was passed, even sixty years later, he hated Jews.”

“After the war, most of us wanted only to forget. You cannot live with that on your mind, Mishka. We could not talk about it, we could not feel like other men, we had only to pretend that we were like other men. I cannot make you understand this.”

“Try.”

“I do not want to make you understand it. It is like building yourself a new house, a nice fancy house that looks like everybody else's.” Sid paused, and Green sensed he was searching for unreachable words. “But it is built on sand, and it doesn't stand. I cannot understand either what would make this man hate his own people. For me, only our people understand. I feel I belong somewhere only because other Jews have suffered what I did. This man has made himself alone. Maybe he feels he doesn't belong, he did not suffer like they did. Some survivors that were hidden by Gentiles or passed as Christians, they feel shame because they had an easier time. And sometimes…” Sid faltered, caught in a distant time. “Sometimes a thing that you love, but that reminds you of those times, like your mother loved the violin… Then the feeling is too strong to face. But it's not hate. Never hate.”