The Devil's Playground (34 page)

‘I sat in my dead father’s flat and read everything I could about

Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. I had Foyle’s deliver all the books they had about the period and I immersed myself in them.

‘I knew my family name. ItwasKuper. I’d gone through my father’s

documents and found out who his partner had been before the war.

I scoured through indexes and compendiums of the dead and the

surviving. I didn’t find anything and I knew that the next step was to go to Amsterdam. To be once again in the city of my birth and of my first death.

‘I had been reborn an Englishman, the son of a wealthy businessman and a trusted part of the Establishment. My father’s testament

proved only what I had intuited ever since I was thirteen. My

difference, the way my parents always seemed so alien to me, the

way the rest of the world seemed strange. These were things I knew as a child, knew them so deeply inside myself that I never doubted them.

‘I found a new freedom when I lost my father. I was no longer part of anything, I was anything I wanted to be and I felt a glorious

relief that I could never communicate to anyone else - a delightful, unimagined awakening of freedom.

‘I went to Amsterdam. I visited the places of the past. I began my search. There was a website on which you could look for survivors

of the Holocaust. I tried. It came up empty.

‘I watched hours of testimony in the basement of the Jewish

Historical Museum. Hundreds of hours of videos and scratchy celluloid filled with survivors telling their own stories. I learned all the things that I had shamefully avoided during my life. We weren’t

taught about it in school back then; the idea of Holocaust Studies had not even crept into historical academia.

‘I had caught up on my ignorance in London, had read everything,

the building mountain of horror and fact getting higher with each

book. But it wasn’t until Amsterdam - when I really came face to

face, so to speak, with the victims - that I felt it personally and unbearably.

‘When I had read my father’s testament, the fact that I’d been born a Jew had meant nothing compared to the liberating force of the knowledge that my father wasn’t really my father. Here in

Amsterdam I felt it all hit and tear through me like a slow and jagged piece of glass.

‘I watched the footage of the deportations from Amsterdam to

Westerbork on the small, constantly running TV set at the Hollandse Schouwburg. Black-and-white flickers of another time. Families dressed in their best suits looking around dazed, waving to people on the trains, wondering where the windows are. A lazy Sunday afternoon feel about the whole thing that could have been created only through a massed tissue of lies. The soldiers indolently lolling by as if park rangers and there, in the corner of the screen, a last handshake, a partial awareness in a drooping mouth quivering, while soldiers walk by chatting so unconcerned by the meaning of this whole scene and finally the train bucks and glides into the horizon, diminishing, till only a speck and then, not even that. I watched it endlessly and I scrutinized the faces of those being deported. I

wondered whether I would see my father, a face I would recognize,

some genealogical signifier. Of course no such thing happened but

I was entranced by the footage and I sat, all day sometimes, watching it as it looped its way through, forward and back again, and each

time I looked at someone else in the crowd, focused on another

fear-filled face climbing into a railway car. I was born into this, I thought, this was a part of me.

‘When I had read the books, I had been shocked and moved by

the numbers, the organizational wizardry of the Nazis, their cruel and demonic bureaucracy - but when I stared at the black-and-white faces I saw myself in the sluggish movements of dead men and

women, in the pieces of film that outlasted the lives that had been burnt on them.

‘I had been in Amsterdam for two months and had found nothing

but other people’s deaths. Then one day I got an email. An American professor who was writing a book on Dutch Jewry had uncovered

some documents relating to my family. He had seen my posting on

the net and wanted to meet.

‘He was tall and suitably professorial, a voluminous mane of hair

balancing gently on his head, and he brought with him one of

those large, wide black briefcases that salesmen use to carry their merchandise in. We had coffee opposite the Stedelijk and he showed me photos of my mother and father, sepia-drenched prints from the

thirties, a wedding photo with a swastika hanging in the distance.

There were family trees and pages from the backs of Torahs listing the dead.

‘I stared entranced at a photo of my father. A thin, hooded-eyed

man, who looked not at all like me, standing proud by a large store, his clothes impeccable and his hair greased down smooth in the

fashion of the time. I would not have recognized him. It was strange to look at that photo, to think that this was once him, for a split second of time he had been caught and that was practically all that had remained.

‘The American professor gave me the briefcase. “It belongs to you

anyway,” he said and handed me his card. He promised he would

send me a copy of the book when it was finished.

‘There had been approximately 127 members of my branch of the

Kuper family in 1939. It was the year of a golden jubilee and the

whole family had gathered together in a country house, outside

Amsterdam, to celebrate. There were photos of kids playing in

the river and adults sitting on old-fashioned deck chairs, smoking cigarettes and reading the German papers for news of the imminent

war. It was the last time the family was together.

‘By 1943 they had all been sent East, died of hunger or were living like rats, hidden in some occlusion in a house somewhere, in constant fear of the inevitability of being exposed. A Holocaust census report from the fifties shows that none of them survived.

‘One hundred and twenty-seven people. I could not believe it. I

looked at the numbers for Amsterdam Jews. Over 105,000 deported,

under 5,000 came back. A bad percentage even by wartime

standards.

‘Things become hazy here. I started drinking. I smoked drugs,

snorted them, never cared what they were as long as they were

strong. I felt fuzzy and undefined most of the time, felt like I was fighting the very clothes that kept me warm. I woke up screaming

every night. I tried not to sleep and then the demons came in the

daytime. They followed me around the city. I could feel their festering breath on my neck, hear their mechanical footsteps and insect shrieks as I passed by the canals. The city became drenched in evil, in

history, in all that had happened on its streets, and I realized then that the past does not exist. Because to call it past is to betray its touch. Everything that has happened is still with us, some of us, one of us, all of us, and together we are the past, carrying it on our shoulders, imprinted in our psyches, the personal parental hells and the ones that take place in the dark, in disused fields and pits and crematoria. A wiser man once said, if all time is eternally present, then all time is unredeemable. And maybe he was right. And maybe

he was wrong. Maybe we can escape the clutch and clamour only

by sinking ourselves further into it, accepting it as part of our eternal and terrible present.

‘But I was telling you a story. Forgive me. Yet it all comes to

the same end. I was stuck in hell. I could literally feel the spin of the planet below my feet, the onrush of people and buildings, the terrifying speed of the present, dissolving into past. It was only in alcohol and drugs that the world stopped for the briefest of moments.

Soon four months had passed and I hadn’t even realized. I would

wake up and drag myself to a bar, sit there and read survivor

testimonies until they closed, or snort some Ketamine and spend all day going through the films at the JHM. Even my body was no

refuge and, though I still practised the routines and modifications that I had all my life, they were now drained of pleasure, no more useful to take me away than an out-of-date travelcard. I tried more extreme forms but they too yielded nothing but blood. The people I was staying with tried their best and without them I would never

have made it past that terrible summer.

‘One evening I was sober enough to understand them when

they spoke to me. They said they wanted me to meet someone.

They wouldn’t let me demur and they took me to their meeting

hall. They called themselves the Revised Council of Blood. Just

another bunch of kids desperately trying to make their reality more romantic. I understood them. That night they introduced me to their new member, a frail old man, older than me. He was extremely

gracious and well spoken and he introduced himself as Dr Chaim

Kaplan.’

Jon paused the CD. Scanned back through the last few

seconds. Played them again. Jake had definitely said what

Jon had thought he’d said.

The Revised Council of Blood.

Jon looked at the flickering, paused image of the old man,

thinking, she hadn’t told him anything.

Not a fucking thing.

He’d told her enough about Jake, even shown her the

photo. She must have known. And he felt betrayed, deeply

betrayed — not only by Suze’s silence but by the old man as well. He felt resentful that Jake hadn’t told him this while he was still alive. Why had he gone through the whole charade

of hiding the CDs? And what for? So he could detail his life?

Spew street philosophy and garbled autobiography? Perhaps that was all Jake had meant to leave, a testimony of survival not too far removed from the survivors’ testimonies that he’d viewed in Amsterdam. Either way Jon felt cheated. It didn’t explain anything.

He lit a cigarette and wheeled his chair back from the

computer screen. The body stuff had disturbed him, or, more

accurately, it had disturbed his image of Jake, his memories and perceptions of the old man. Even though he’d seen the body that day in the morgue, and before that in the bathroom, he’d still refused to assimilate fully the information that he’d been given. Now that it came direcdy from Jake’s mouth, it was a deluge, unstoppable in its implications. Was this really the same man who’d stayed with him? It made his skin crawl.

And, of course, he thought about Suze too.

He should have guessed there was a connection, that pain

freaks huddle together. There was something about the city,

its subconscious, the dark alleys of its most forbidden

dreams. Something like a kind of psychological gravity that

pulled all these people together. And what about him?

He hadn’t wanted to upset what they had by talking to

Suze about it, not that day, and then they’d had that argument

and he never had a chance to ask her about Beatrice. But

now he knew, there were no doubts left, only questions as

to how deep her involvement was and whether she had

assisted in Jake’s murder. Perhaps the detective had been

right from the start. Jake could have been the killer. He had

a fondness for pain, that was obvious — had Suze and Beatrice

stumbled on to this fact, plotted to kill the old man? Succeeded

maybe, but only after Beatrice had been silenced?

No, that couldn’t be right, Jon reminded himself, Beatrice

had been killed while Jake was staying in his flat. But maybe

he’d had an accomplice.

It was all too much, too much to think about, to digest

and assimilate. He wished that they hadn’t had that argument,

it would make things more difficult when he saw her again.

And he wanted to. That was the damndest thing. He wanted

to so much.

Despite all the problems which now seemed as far away

as that enchanted city itself, despite the words they’d bounced

off the walls of her apartment, despite all that, he still wanted

her. And now there would be this between them too. Another

barrier, another obstacle.

There was a certain dangerous disassociation in what Jake

had done, and in what Suze was doing. Pain was perhaps the

most basic reflex and to be able to withstand it, to take

pleasure from it, showed a strong capability for disassociation

— the same capability that Jon had seen in the faces of

SS men as they killed babies with rifle butts to save on

ammunition.

His car was still there, unticketed, undamped and untowed

— a modern-day miracle in central London. He needed to

drive. He had no desire to get back to the computer even

though he knew there was still a lot of footage left. It had

made him feel sick and depressed. It had made the old man’s

death even more poignant and poindess, almost unbearable.

Jake had been killed twice in his mind. Once when the

detective had called him and again now, for he had to accept

that everything he’d thought he’d known about Jake was a

lie, or if not that, then only the smallest fragment of a hidden

whole. The Jake on the video was not the man he’d known

in those two weeks and it was like suddenly finding that a

stranger has been occupying your bed — a cold sweat and

short breath kind of feeling. He stuck an Uncle Tupelo tape

into the machine and turned it up to the max to drown out

the sounds of life around him and the questions inside him.

It felt strange to be driving again. The early-evening rush

hour had dwindled down to a few cars and the motorway

was clear. He drove up and down the Westway for a couple