The Devil's Playground (7 page)

sometimes and say things, things that no longer came out in

his voice, but that of his father’s. He hated how he could

trace his most hidden prejudices and gripes directly to him.

It scared him how strong the influence was, how biological,

how inescapable.

‘My father gave up on me when the magazine folded. I

think in some way he thought I’d failed him.’ He felt the

need to say it, to make at least this clear. ‘He thought I was

being too sensitive. Didn’t see any place for that.’

‘Sounds very much like my father,’ Jake replied and they

both laughed, releasing the tension in the room, feeling

closer, at least in Jon’s mind, than since the wet handshake

on that first day.

‘What was your father like?‘Jon asked after a few minutes

of silence had elapsed punctuated only by the hiss of slowly

burning tobacco. Now that Jake had begun, he didn’t want

him to stop. And he wanted to know who this person

was. Sleeping in his flat. Making strange sounds at night.

Accepting everything with a weary shrug.

‘One monster father is pretty much the same as another.

Your comments were very familiar.‘Jake smiled and it was a

smile of revelation and conspiracy. Jon found it vaguely

threatening.

“You see,’ Jake continued, ‘the interesting story about my

father takes place only after he’s dead.’

Jon poured the last of the scotch into Jake’s glass and

went to the kitchen to fetch some more. It felt good to be

making drinks for someone else, good to have to ask them,

how many sugars do you take, how strong do you want it?

All the little inanities that he’d thought he could live without.

Stupidly thought that until, in an empty flat, one night, he .

realized that it was those very things that made life worth

living.

In the next room, Jake put on a CD and Jon heard the

first notes of Coltrane’s ‘Ascension’ squawk their way out of

his speakers. The room filled with a dense, tight-knit caterwaul,

seven or eight instruments screaming and wailing simultaneously,

circling around an empty chord, a missing centre,

like a flock of lost birds, frenzied and furious, smashing into

each other in the massive sky.

‘My father had a lot of money. He’d worked in food

importation, made his fortune, floated the company and

retired to the country.’ Jake’s voice settled, the terse clip of

his phrasing evened out. Jon leaned forward on the sofa,

wanting to show his attention, even in this most obvious and

empty of gestures, but he also felt the need to at least try to

close the physical space between them, the gulf of carpet

and air.

‘He died of stomach cancer last spring. I can’t say I was

sad. I’d lost my mother many years before. I hadn’t seen him

in years. We were not close nor had we ever been. I got a call

from the family solicitor. I was the director of a consultancy

company. What sum my father might have left me was of

no concern but the lawyer said that the main part of my

father’s testament consisted of a letter. That intrigued me. It

wasn’t like him to put things in writing. He always believed

the spoken word superior, more trustworthy than that which

was written.

‘I went to see the lawyer. This was about six months ago.

He handed me an undistinguished brown envelope, said it

was my father’s last wish that I should have it. I thanked him

and left, not knowing that what I carried under my arm that

day would turn my life upside down. I didn’t even read it

until the next morning.’

‘What was in it?’ Jon asked, caught up in the old man’s

tale, the lull and roil of his voice. That special feeling of being told something privileged, intimate, that comes across in the

whispered end of sentences and the outbreath of thoughtful

pauses. He wondered how something that could fit into an

envelope could also ruin a man’s life.

‘Ten badly typed pages. That’s all there was. The old man

must have done it himself. It started with an apology. Before

the fact. That was just like him. He then wrote of his business

interests in 1940, importing food from the continent into

England, how he’d set the company up five years earlier with

an old colleague from Oxford, a Dutch Jew by the name of

Kuper. The two of them had developed the business into a

considerable success by the time that Kuper’s wife, Martha,

gave birth to a son in September 1940.

‘The war was on. Disturbing news was leaking from

Germany and Austria about the mistreatment of Jews. In

Austria they had hounded them down, taken away their

businesses, their passports, and paraded them through the

streets of Vienna. You must have heard about what happened

there?’

‘Not really. I was never that interested in history,’ Jon

replied.

The old man gave him a brief look of such disdain that,

for a moment, Jon saw the man Jake must have once been.

It was fleeting, only a glimpse, but it scared him. Jon wanted

to say something, to make up for his ignorance but he could

tell that it would be wasted, that the old man wouldn’t fall

for cheap platitudes, tawdry excuses or feigned apologies.

He felt totally stripped in front of Jake as if each lie he told

would come cascading out, trilled with neon and noise, as

obvious as a waterfall in the desert.

Jake seemed to be assessing something privately. He stared

at a point two inches above Jon’s head, then his eyes dropped

on to Jon’s and he continued. ‘They stripped the old people

naked and made them do callisthenics in the middle of the

streets while the good citizenry threw eggs and shit at them.

They forced them to clean the Vienna pavements with toothbrushes

and tongues and urinated on them while they did it.

These weren’t the exceptions, this was the norm. Unlike

many other Jews of that period, Raphael Kuper heeded these

early warning signs and, when the first deportation of Jews

from Amsterdam took place in February 1941, he arranged

for his English partner, John Colby, to take his newborn

son, Jakob, away from all this horror. He knew that he would

probably never see his son again and that he was giving him

up for ever, but the alternative was even worse.

‘Colby managed to escape on a fishing boat with his wife

and landed in England where they claimed the small baby as

their own.’

Jake took another cigarette, seemed to draw on it for ever

before he resumed as if the story had somehow depleted

him. ‘So his letter ended. At first, and I think for at least a

couple of days after having read it, I believed it was a joke.

One last cruelty delivered by him before his death. That

would have been just like him, dying and passing on this

disinheritance to me.’

‘You didn’t know you were adopted?’ Jon blurted out.

It was so strange. He could not imagine what that would

do to a person. To suddenly have their history torn apart

like that.

‘No, it was never mentioned nor alluded to. I always

sensed that I was different but I never knew that I really was.

The realization was, at first, like the feeling of being sucked

in by this incredibly powerful drug. My whole sense of

identity had been built around my father, my position in

English society; Cambridge, where I laughed at Jew jokes

along with all the other British anti-Semites. My past had

been irrevocably wiped. Worse than that, it had been shown

up as a lie.

‘I never went back to my work. It wasn’t me any more,

that suit, that office. Actually, it never was, but somehow I’d

tricked myself into believing that it was my heritage, my

rightful destiny and so I did it. But that no longer worked. I

was nearly sixty, my colleagues were thinking about retirement

villages and all-day golf but I felt as if my life had just

started. I sat in my office and stared out of the window. I

delayed calls and cancelled conferences. I couldn’t reconcile

who I now knew I was with the person I had grown up as.

There was a gap between the two that threatened everything.

I sat and stared at my office walls. Counted the lines on the

wallpaper. It was as if the things that had mattered before I

read the letter meant nothing now, as if it had all been levelled

by some massive explosion which killed Jake Mk 1, leaving

only the scattered pieces of Jakob in its wake.

‘I went to Amsterdam. To the Jewish Museum there, the

JHM. Almost lived in that place. I spent four months in

those rooms trying to find out if it was true and when I knew

it was, I came back here. I spent days walking this city that

I’d grown up in, finding it totally unfamiliar now, as if I was

a tourist, here for the first time, untethered and afloat. I

couldn’t go back to the world, Jon. I don’t know if you

understand … but that was no longer possible. The streets

were a different world. An easier place to hide, to not care,

to give up on things. I felt as if my whole life had been a

practice run for this moment, a long-winded dress rehearsal

with no real purpose or end.’

‘How long had you been on the streets?’

‘Three weeks.’

‘Why did you agree to come here?’ Jon asked. It confused

him. He wanted to know what had driven him to this, though

he understood how easy it was to let go, to disappear, how

seductive its promise was.

‘Because I’m weak.‘Jake rubbed his hand on his forehead,

his wrists poking through the thick ring of shirt. ‘Because

there’s a story that needs to be told. That only I can tell.’

‘What story?‘Jon asked.

‘You’re not ready yet.’ Jake shook his head, smiled. ‘Not

yet.’

That was the last time he had seen him.

No, it wasn’t.

He just didn’t want to think about the other.

Later that evening, after they’d both gone to bed, Jon had

awoken with a tight pain in his stomach, as if it was shrinking,

clenching in on itself like a fist. He’d pulled himself out of

bed and stumbled to the toilet. He opened the door. Jake

stood with his back to him, head down, shirt off. His back

was covered in scars. White breaks in the pink folds of skin,

zigzagged and broken. Jon took a deep breath. Saw the dark

stained tissues on the floor.

‘Jake,’ he cried out. ‘What’s wrong?’

But the old man ignored him or hadn’t heard. He stood

immobile. Jon could hear a low droning sound coming from

his mouth and his head was swaying slightly from side to

side. He stared at the scars. The separate lines touching and

interlocking like fingers. He turned and closed the door. His

heart pumping hard. The pain in his stomach gone. And

when he went back to his room he made sure to lock the

door.

By the time Jon awoke the next morning Jake was gone,

his bedding neatly tidied in the corner and the CDs and books

that he’d used back in their proper places. The computer on,

the day’s news glaring at the empty room. There was no note

but Jon knew that Jake had gone for good. The arrangement

of the linen had a finality to it that made him catch his breath.

He feared that the previous night’s intrusion had caused the

old man’s flight, cursed himself for not having knocked.

He turned the computer off. Picked up the pillowcases

and sheets and put them in the washing machine. He didn’t

want to look at them, but couldn’t help himself and when

dark, cracked patches confirmed his fears he shoved them

into the machine and slammed the door shut. He rushed to

the toilet. Washed his hands. Used soap, shampoo and body

lotion until the smell was totally gone, only pine fresh and

morning azure now.

That had been only a week ago, he thought, as he turned

the car around at the far end of the Western Avenue and

headed back towards the city. One short week. And what

had happened in that time? What had happened to Jake?

Had he found some new clue to his real inheritance? Or

something else?

He felt a deep unrest in his stomach. A clawing and tearing

that made him feel nauseous. He’d wanted Jake to stay. He

was relieved that he’d gone. Jake’s presence had been difficult

and yet that had somehow made it feel more worthwhile,

this whim, this whatever you wanted to call it that he was

doing. He wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t

walked in on him. What the hell was the old man doing,

those scars? The story had been only a beginning. And he

wanted to know more than ever, now that it was too late.

There was something about Jake. Something about the

old man’s silences, his words ‘it’s a botch’, his tired and

unrested hands. He reminded him of his mother in some

way but there was also a darker resemblance there, the

shadow of his father, somehow tempered beneath the beard

and borrowed clothes.

He tried to understand the chain of events. It was easier

than thinking of what was gone. Had Jake known he was

going to Amsterdam the morning he left? Before that? How