The Devil's Playground (12 page)

the tempting phone, from the pull of the ringback, the

last-minute apology, the hopeless pleading.

‘It is our New Year tomorrow. My daughter still cooks

me the traditional things, things her mother once taught

her.’

They walked past the tourists stuck in their seats in coffee

shops and cafes, past the businessmen hurding through the

city on their way to another appointment, past the canals

and streets that were now so familiar to her. She held his

tired hand as they walked, half the speed she was used to,

and tried not to think about Wouter.

When they reached his place, he unlocked the door and

let them in. A typically small Amsterdam room, heavy with

the smell of dusty books and papers and the old man’s

unfiltered cigarettes. He brushed away some magazines he’d

been reading and placed the small dumplings of minced fish

into the microwave as Suze sat down in one of his tattered

armchairs.

‘You ever eat gefilte fish before?’ he asked her as he laid

out two paper plates on the table.

‘No. Just another gap in my life’s education, I guess. There

weren’t too many Jews in Phoenix, not where I grew up

anyway.’ She was glad for the talk, the disruption, the

emphasis on the small and banal. The room she worked in sometimes

felt like a glove, slowly shrinking.

Well you’re in for a real treat, young lady,’ he said as he

piled the little grey patties on to her plate, his bony, brittle

fingers laying out the fork and spoon. She watched the

precise way he put everything in its proper place and she

began to cry, turning away at first, not wanting him to see.

But she was unable to hold it in. He slowly stood up, moved

towards her and placed his thin arms around hers and held

her, like that, until she was done.

‘Not something you want to talk about with an old man,

I suppose?’ he said as he sat back down.

She looked up at him. She wished he hadn’t seen her like

that. She wanted to appear strong, independent. ‘Nothing

much to say.’

‘But enough to cry?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll get over it.’

‘A boy?’

Nodded again. ‘Nothing serious,’ she added, more to

herself now.

‘But you wanted it to be.’

‘No. He did. I enjoyed being with him but I couldn’t really see us living the rest of our lives together and I thought, if not that, then what’s the point in pretending, wasting time

like that.’

Moshe looked at her. Hard. Unbelievable to think he was

so old.

‘But sometimes people change,’ he offered. ‘Things grow. The perfect man will never come. He will only flower from the less perfect one; if you give him the chance, that is.’

They ate silently, perhaps in respect for the history in

those fish cakes. The long nights and empty days that were filled only by the remainders of a religion, the small things that were left when the synagogues were burned and the

Torahs spat and shat upon in the main streets and squares

of Europe.

She liked the foreign taste on her tongue, the slightly salty

acidity that greeted her as she chewed. She liked Moshe too

— out of all the volunteers who worked in the museum, he

was the one she felt most at ease with. The only one who

didn’t treat her differently because she was a gentile. Some

days when she couldn’t look at Charlotte’s art any more, she

would pack up her notebooks and pens and sit for a

while with Moshe, listening to his stories of Berlin before

the war.

She remembered him telling her how he’d been a professor

of music at the university until the Nuremberg laws came

into effect. How he’d fought in the trenches during the First

World War. An eighteen-year-old Jewish boy, drafted in

1917, sent in a train to the Western Front, where he spent a

year dodging shrapnel, burrowing and hiding like an insect

and watching his comrades die. After the war he studied,

eventually taking up the teaching post, thinking all the horror

was now behind him, happy to spend the rest of his life

crouching over books and scores, trying to forget what he

saw and felt that year when he had been posted in France.

In 1942 Moshe, his wife and their three daughters, were

put on to another train, with sealed-up windows and the

smell of death lurking in every joint of the metal, every

railroad tie they crossed — heading East this time; to a small

Polish village which the Nazis, having problems with the

native spelling, renamed Auschwitz, easier to pronounce, the

two syllables rolling like honey over German tongues.

They were separated when they got off the train and

stepped into the freezing Polish winter: Moshe and his eldest

daughter were sent to another line, tattooed with a number

and taken to what would be their home for the next two

years; his wife and two youngest went straight to the other

part of the camp, the one named for the birch forest which

surrounded the chimneys that spewed smoke into the sky,

day and night, saturating the air with the smell of history.

He’d told Suze how he and his daughter had settled in

Amsterdam after the liberation with an uncle of his. There

was no blood left in Germany. No house. No university

post. Nothing but bombed-out buildings and bitter people

scavenging through the once great streets of Berlin.

Eating the minced fishcakes, she wondered how he could

live like that. How he could carry on after his wife and two

of his children had been murdered. She was sure that in the

same situation she would have just folded, crushed by hate

and thoughts of retribution. She wanted to understand how

one puts a life back together and the difference between that

life and the one that preceded it.

‘You think about them every day?’ she’d asked him.

‘Most days,’ he’d answered. ‘And even when I don’t, it’s

still here.’ Pointing to his chest. ‘Still with me. It’s always

with us. Not something we can forget or put away.’

He’d celebrated his hundredth birthday earlier that year

and Suze remembered seeing him at the party, his battered

face aglow again like a child’s. It was as if someone had

suddenly wiped the last sixty years from his memory. She’d

asked him then why he looked so happy and he’d replied

that back in Auschwitz there was a game the prisoners played

at night. One man would say ‘I will live to a hundred’ and

men someone else down the block would say ‘I will live to a

hundred and one’ and so on until the Kapos eventually heard

diem and would come steaming in with blackjacks and pliers,

quieting the place back down again.

‘Of course we all knew that we would never live to be a

hundred. Maybe you call it Jewish humour, I don’t know,

but we found it funny back then, saying things like that.

Words were all we had left, everything else had been

stripped away from us, but we always knew that with words

we could beat the Nazis, they couldn’t steal our language like

they stole everything else from us. Our words were inviolable

and that was why we didn’t mind risking a beating or two

for them. I thought about those times and I am so happy to

have reached this age, this symbolic age. For me, it means I

beat them, whatever they did to my family, to my culture

and my people, those words spoken late at night in our

crowded bunks, those words survived and became the truth,

whereas the words they spoke, their language, crumbled with

their armies and is now nothing but lies.

‘The fish is good, no?’ He brought her back to the present,

back to the small smoke-filled room.

‘Yes,’ she replied and meant it. There was something in

the foreignness of the food, in its alien texture and colour

that took her away from herself. She had a crazy feeling that

if she stayed in this room nothing could harm her. ‘I guess

. I’m just another uneducated American, but hell, I don’t mind

you know, Moshe. It means there are still things for me to

discover, new things.’

‘Yes, you are right again, dear, you taste too much too

early you become jaded, I think. You believe you have tasted

everything, know everything. They were like kids in a sweet

shop.’ He always referred to the Nazis as ‘they’. ‘A sweet

shop with no adults in sight. They could do what they wanted,

try everything. I guess the world was theirs, but it was not

our world, not even the world they had been brought into

but a totally new world, where subtlety and patience were no

longer virtues and where appetites could not be satisfied, no

matter how much food was on the table.’

He lit one of his cigarettes — unfiltered, an old-time cigarette, Suze thought to herself, smoked in a world before lung

cancer and radiotherapy. A survivor’s cigarette perhaps, a

statement of sorts — if the weight of the Nazi hammer could

not crush him then no cigarette could, no cancer to whisk

away the world, no Alzheimer’s to return to an earlier time,

a time when the world was still the right way up.

She helped him clear up the food, throw the plates into

the bin, wanting to give him a hug, but she was too embarrassed,

as always. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Moshe.’

‘Yes, I believe you will.’ He smiled at her and though it

was a warm smile it was filled with a horribly imaginable

sadness that made Suze feel very close to him, feel as though

her own little problems were nothing. She almost broke

down again but managed to make it out of the flat and into

the street where she knew the rain would hide her tears.

The room he took him to was brightly lit and painted hospital

white. A spear of sunlight spilled through the third-floor

window illuminating specks of dust and smoke that twisted

through the still air. Along the far wall, Jon saw the bright,

gleaming doors with their silver handles, ordered in rows of

five, four storeys high, serenely stacked like ovens in a busy

pizzeria. He wondered how many dead men and women lay

behind those doors as the air-con sputtered like a cracked

and collapsed lung and the detective motioned for him to

step forward.

‘I hope this will not distress you too much,’ Van Hijn said.

We get used to such things in this business, used to them

much too quickly, it’s easy to forget the effect of seeing a

dead body for the first time. Is this your … ?’

‘Yes,‘Jon replied, thinking the detective’s question almost

funny in these circumstances, ‘my first time.’

Well…’ He trailed off, lost in his own train of thought,

as they neared the wall of slabs. They stopped by the second

column and the detective motioned to the third door from

the bottom. Jon wondered whether they moved the bodies

for viewings, he couldn’t imagine anyone having to lean

down to identify someone from the bottom slab. How awful

it must be for those who came here to identify their blood,

the people closest to them, all the time hoping that the face

on the slab would be one they didn’t recognize, hoping for

another chance.

‘Ready?’

‘Yes,‘Jon answered, though he had no idea if he really was

or what that word constituted in such circumstances. The

whole adventure seemed very prosaic now, brought into

stark focus by the sparse white light of the room. The

detective wheeled out the slab, exposing the shrouded body.

He looked at Jon, who nodded, and carefully pulled back the

sheet to reveal the white hair, then the beard of what was

once, and in some way still was, Jake Colby.

‘Fuck,‘Jon murmured under his breath, immediately feeling

embarrassed by the outburst. The sliver of hope he’d

been clinging to, even after seeing the book, was brutally

erased by the old man’s face, no different now from when

Jon had seen him sleeping.

“Yes, that’s him,’ he said, trying to compose himself. Feeling

his legs sinking into the floor. The warmth of the room

enclosing him like a mitten.

‘You sure?’

Jon nodded.

‘I’ll leave you alone for a couple of minutes.’

‘Thanks,’ Jon said and stared at Jake. He tried not to

cry, not in front of the detective, the morgue attendant,

all these professionals, but he couldn’t help it, he felt his

eyes stinging and tried, as surreptitiously as possible, to

wipe the tears from his face. This is where it ends up, he

thought, dead and on display. He remembered how Jake

would always wash his plates and cutlery after every

meal, the way he showered regularly now that he could.

The tissues on the floor. The night they talked about the

Dead. That means nothing, Jon thought, all of that means

nothing now, it’s just memories and soon it won’t even

be that.

The detective moved back towards him, handed him a

small plastic cup of water. Jon took a sip.

What are those?’ Jon asked, pointing to the old man’s

cheeks.

Above the boundary of his beard there were three small

vertical cuts, about two inches long on both sides. They