QB VII (11 page)

“Maybe I felt so strongly about our relationship I never felt the need to explain all of it to you. I suppose I was wrong.” Adam went to the bookcase across the room, unlocked a bottom cupboard drawer, and took out three large cardboard boxes filled with volumes of papers, files, press clippings, letters. “I think it’s time you know everything.”

Adam started from the beginning.

“I think it is impossible to explain to someone exactly what a concentration camp is like or for them to comprehend such a thing could really exist. I still think of it in gray. We never saw a tree or flower for four years and I don’t remember the sun. I dream of it. I see a stadium with hundreds of rows and each row filled with lifeless faces, dull eyes, shaved heads and striped uniforms. And beyond the last row the silhouettes of the crematorium ovens, and I can smell the smoke of human flesh. There was never enough food or medicine. I looked from my clinic day and night to an endless line of prisoners dragging themselves to me.”

“Doctor, I just don’t know what to say.”

Adam recounted the conspiracy against him, the torment of Brixton Prison, of not seeing his own son Stephan for the first two years of his life, the flight to Sarawak, the nightmares, the drunken stupors, all of it. Tears fell freely down both their cheeks as he continued in monotone until the first light of day cast a gray pall into the room and the first sounds of movement of the city could be heard. The wet tires sung off the pavement and they were silent and motionless.

Terry shook his head. “I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand it. Why would the Jews hate you so much?”

“You are naïve, Terry. Before the war there were several million Jews in Poland. We had only gained our own liberation at the end of the First World War. The Jews were always strangers in our midst, always attempting to overthrow us again. They were the soul of the Communist Party and the ones guilty of giving Poland back to Russia. From the beginning it was always a life and death struggle.”

“But why?”

He shrugged. “In my village all of us owed money to the Jew. Do you know how poor I was when I got to Warsaw? For my first two years my room was a large closet, and my bed was of rags. I had to lock myself in the bathroom in order to have a place to study. I waited and waited to gain admittance to the university but there was no room because the Jews lied about themselves to find ways around the quota system. You think a quota system is wrong. If there hadn’t been one they would have bought every seat in every classroom. They are cunning beyond imagination. The Jewish professors and teachers tried to control every facet of university life. Always pushing their way in. I joined the Nationalist Students Movement, proudly, because it was a way to combat them. And afterwards, it was always a Jewish doctor getting the prime positions. Well, my father drank himself to death and my mother worked her way to an early grave paying off the Jewish money-lender. All the way to the end, I stood for my Polish nationalism and because of it I have been driven to hell.”

The boy looked at his mentor. Terry was disgusted with himself. He could see Adam Kelno tenderly calming a frightened Ulu child and reassuring the mother. Dear Lord, it wasn’t possible for Dr. Kelno to use medicine wrongly.

The Holocaust
lay on the desk. A thick gray-covered volume with the lettering of the title and the author’s name in red portraying devouring flames.

“No doubt the author is a Jew,” Adam said.

“Yes.”

“Well, no matter. I’ve been mentioned in other books by them.”

“But this is different. It has hardly been published and already a half a dozen people have asked me about it. It’s only a matter of time until some journalist digs it up. With you knighted it will make a hell of a story.”

Angela appeared in a dowdy bathrobe.

“What am I to do,” he said, “flee to some jungle again?”

“No. Stand and fight. Stop the sale of this book and show the world that the author is a liar.”

“You’re young and very innocent, Terry.”

“Along with my father you’re everything to me, Dr. Kelno. Did you spend fifteen years in Sarawak just for the privilege of carrying this mark to your grave?”

“Do you have any idea of what this involves?”

“I must ask you, Doctor, is there any truth to this at all?”

“How dare you!” Angela cried. “How dare you say that!”

“I don’t believe it either. Can I help you fight it?”

“Are you quite ready for the scandal and the barrage of professional liars they’ll parade into the courts? Are you quite certain the honorable thing to do is not to hold our silence with dignity?” Angela said.

Terrence shook his head and walked from the room to hold back the tears.

Much beer and gin were consumed by Terry’s mates and many bawdy songs were sung and many of the world’s consuming issues were argued with a righteous wrath reserved for the young.

Terry had a key to Dr. Kelno’s clinic a few blocks from the house, and after hours his chums dispensed of other frustrations by love-making with numerous young ladies on the examination table and the overnight cots amid the smell of medical disinfectants. A minor discomfort.

Christmas came and turkeys and geese were devoured and each guest opened a modest but well-chosen and humorous gift Dr. Kelno opened a number of worthless but sentimental offerings from his patients.

It all seemed Christmasy enough and the visitors were unable to detect the underlying tension. They returned to Oxford filled with the cheer.

Terry and Adam said good-by with reserve. The train pulled out Angela slipped her arm through her husband’s as they left the Victorian loftiness of Paddington Station.

A week passed, then two and three. The listlessness of the student was matched by the listlessness and short temper of Adam Kelno.

It was the longest period of time the two had ever been out of communication.

And he was filled with the memory of the dugout struggling up the Lemanak with Stephan at the tiller and Terry on the bow chatting to the boatman in the Iban language. How warmly the Ulus greeted the boys. It was during the summer holiday, when Stephan was eleven years old, Bintang presented them with costumes and made them a member of the tribe, and they danced with the chief wearing ceremonial feathers and “painted” tattoo marks.

Terry’s bright eyes watched over the surgical mask as Adam operated. Adam always glanced at him. When the boy was there he always performed a better operation.

The hard days of clinic at the long houses would be over and they would all go to the stream and bathe or sit under a waterfall and they slept near each other, never fearing the sounds of the jungle.

All the rest of it flooded his thoughts day and night until he could no longer bear it. It wasn’t only Terrence who filled his thoughts. What would happen when Stephan learned of this in America?

Sir Adam Kelno walked the narrow Chancery Lane, that artery of British law flanked by the Law Society on one side and Sweet and Maxwell, the legal publishers and booksellers, on the other side. The window of Ede and Ravenscort, Ltd., tailor of the profession, held its usual grim display of academic and black barrister’s robes, unchanged in style since time remembered and garnished with a variety of gray barrister’s wigs.

He stopped at 32B Chancery Lane. It was a narrow four story building, one of the few survivors of the great fires centuries earlier. A warped and misshapen Jacobean relic.

Kelno glanced at the registry. The second and third floor held the law offices of Hobbins, Newton, and Smiddy. He entered and disappeared up the creaking stairs.

ii/the defendants

1

T
HE AUTHOR OF
T
HE
Holocaust
was an American writer named Abraham Cady, one-time journalist, one-time flyer, one-time ballplayer.

At the turn of the century the Zionist movement spread like a forest fire over the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Czarist Russia. Bent under universal suppression and pogroms of centuries standing, the groundswell to leave Russia found direction in the resurrection of the ancient homeland. The little Jewish village of Prodno sponsored the Cadyzynski brothers, Morris and Hyman, to go to Palestine as pioneers.

While working in the swamps of Upper Galilee on land redemption, Morris Cadyzynski fell prey to recurrent attacks of malaria and dysentery until he was taken to the hospital in Jaffa. He was advised to leave Palestine as one of those unable to adapt to the severe conditions. His elder brother, Hyman, remained.

It was usual in those days that a relative in America take on the responsibility of getting as many of the family over from the old country as possible. Uncle Abraham Cadyzynski, after whom the author was later named, had a small Jewish bakery on Church Street in the ghetto in Norfolk, Virginia.

Morris had his name shortened to Cady by a perplexed official trying to separate over a hundred “skis” who immigrated on the same boatload.

Uncle Abraham had two daughters, whose eventual husbands were not interested in the bakery, so it was passed on to Morris when the old man died.

The Jewish community was tiny and close knit, hanging together unable to shake off all the ghetto mentality. Morris met Molly Segal, also an immigrant in the Zionist movement, and they were married in the year of 1909.

Out of deference to his father, the Rabbi of Prodno, they were married in synagogue. The party afterward at the Workman’s Circle Hall was in the Yiddish tradition of an endless parade of food, dancing the hora and
“mazel tovfs”
until the middle of the night

Neither of them were religious, but they were never able to break most of the old country ties of conversing and reading in Yiddish and keeping a mostly kosher kitchen.

Ben was the first born in 1912 and then Sophie came two years later as Europe was going up in flames. During the First World War business prospered. With Norfolk as a major troop and supply shipping point to France, the government gave Morris’s bakery a contract to augment overburdened facilities. The output of the bakery tripled and quadrupled but in doing so it lost most of its Jewish identity. The bread and cakes had come from old family recipes and now they had to conform to government specifications. After the war Morris got some of the old flavor back. He was so popular all over Norfolk that he began to ship out to grocery stores, some in all gentile neighborhoods.

Abraham Cady was born in 1920. Although it was a prosperous family it was difficult to tear away from the little row house with the white porch on Holt Street in which all the children were born.

The Jewish section started in the one hundred block of Church Street at St. Mary’s Church and ran for seven blocks to where the Booker T. Pharmacy started the Negro ghetto. The streets were lined with little shops out of the old country and the children were to remember the smells and sounds of it all their lives. Heated discussion in Yiddish where the two newspapers, the
Freiheit
and New York
Vorwärts
vied for opinion. There was the marvelous odor of leather from Cousin Herschel’s shoe repair shop and the pungent aroma of the cellar of the “pickle” man, where you could have a choice of sixty different kinds of pickles and pickled onions from briny old vats. They cost a penny each, two cents for an extra.

In the back yard behind Finkelstein’s Prime and Fancy Kosher meats the kids liked to watch the
shochet
kill chickens for a nickel each to conform to religious requirements.

There was endless barter at the vegetable stalls and at Max Lipshitz’s Super Stupendous Clothing Mart; Max himself, measuring tape around his neck, pulled potential customers off the street and just a little ways down Sol’s Pawn Shop held a junk yard of tragedy, mostly from colored customers.

Much of what Morris Cady earned went either to the families in the old country or to Palestine. Aside from the black Essex parked before the house there was little to testify to their nominal wealth. Morris did not play the stock market so when the crash came he had enough cash to buy out a couple of sinking bakeries at thirty cents on the dollar.

Despite their simplicity, their affluence caught up with them and after a year of discussion they bought a big shingled ten room house on an acre of land at Gosnold and New Hampshire Streets with a view to the estuary. A few Jewish families, upper-middle class merchants and doctors, had penetrated Colonial Place but further down the line around Colley Street and Thirty-first. The Cadys had moved into an all gentile neighborhood.

Not that the Cadys were black, but they weren’t exactly white. Ben and Abe were “the Jew boys.” The Hebes, Yids, Sheenies, Kikes. Much of this was changed at the big circle at Pennsylvania and Delaware, where they played ball near the pumping station. Ben Cady was handy with his dukes and a definite risk to provoke or attack. After Ben established an understanding to live by with the neighborhood kids they all discovered the never ending delights that came from the oven of Molly’s kitchen.

Abe had to go through it all again in J. E. B. Stuart Grammar School, filled with youngsters from the nearby Turney Boys’ Home, consisting mainly of problem children from broken families. All they seemed to want to do was fight. Abe had to defend some unknown honor until his brother Ben taught him “all the dirty Jew tricks” to acquit himself.

Fists gave way to a different kind of anti-Semitism at Blair Junior High but by the time Abe was a teen-ager he had a running commentary with the unpleasant aspects of his birth.

It was Ben who brought them honor by becoming a three letter athlete at Maury High by bombing baseballs out of sight in the spring, sharpshooting baskets and plunging for hard yardage in the fall and winter.

After a time the neighbors pointed with certain curious pride to the Jewish family. They were good Jews. They knew their place. But the strangeness of entering a gentile home never exactly wore off.

What Abe Cady remembered the most about his father was his devotion to the family in the old country. His restlessness to get them all out of Poland. Morris brought a half dozen cousins to America and paid passage for another half dozen to Palestine. But try as he might, he could never induce his father, the Rabbi of Prodno, and his two younger brothers to leave. One was a doctor and the other a successful merchant, who were to remain in Poland until the tragic end.