The Mascot (17 page)

“I felt so sorry for him. I knew what it was like, the pit in your belly that gnawed away at you. I passed him another chocolate, which he accepted more graciously this time. Then I passed him another chocolate and yet another one, pacing them, so that his stomach would accept the chocolates and he didn't become sick. Then I noticed something that had escaped my attention up until then—the boy was wearing a yellow star on his jacket. By then I knew what that meant: he was Jewish. He was even more like me than I had imagined. He could have been my little brother. I was tormented. ‘Should I feed him more?' I said to myself. ‘Or should I ignore him?' If I showed him any kindness, the soldiers might become suspicious of me.

“‘Or should I help him to escape?' I turned away from him in anguish. Instinctively, I looked toward the fence to see if there was a gap in it. For a moment, I imagined that we could both escape together, through the gap in the fence, as I had done by myself, in my village. But I knew that this time it would be impossible. I remained with my back to the boy.

“That moment has overshadowed my entire life,” my father said in a low voice. “I don't want to sound dramatic, but I carry his image with me, like it's been imprinted on my retina. Frequently I wonder if he survived, if he grew into a man. I wonder if he remembers that day when I turned my back on him. It was as if I had turned my back on my own reflection at that moment. The questions always come down to that in the end.”

My father was subdued. I felt helpless to console him.

“I noticed that one of the German officers was looking at me. He'd observed what had gone on between the boy and me. He flashed a big smile at me, and at the same time he began to speak with the other officers, who all nodded.

“They, too, stared across at me, confronting me with their smiles. At that moment I noticed Uncle standing at the rear door of the factory. He looked worried and disapproving.

“Then I heard the German officer call out my name loudly above the din. Snapping his fingers at me, he ordered me to join him. I pretended that I couldn't hear him and stayed where I was. Instead, I glanced across at Uncle. He, too, had seen the officer summon me. I hoped that he would rescue me from this situation, but he only indicated with his eyes that I shouldn't resist the soldiers.

“I went over to the German officer. I still had no idea what he wanted. He snapped his fingers yet again, and this time one of the soldiers stepped forward with a big paper bag. The chief officer thrust it into my hand. It was full of Laima chocolates. I was surprised. I thought that I'd been mistaken about his intentions and that the chocolates were a gift for me. I began to bite into one of them, but he gave me such a slap that it shot out of my mouth.

“‘Not for you, idiot,' he said harshly. Then he led me over to the rear of one of the trucks and had me stand at attention there. He gave an order for the crowd to form a line leading to the truck. Immediately I grasped what was required of me: I was to hand out a chocolate to each person in the queue as they climbed onto the truck.

“Commander Lobe joined us, and he told me that I should make sure to give every person a big smile as I presented their chocolate. It seemed that my job was to pacify them before their journey, especially the children, who loved the chocolates.

“So that's what I did—on and on throughout the afternoon. My jaw ached from smiling.

“I didn't notice Uncle's presence again until the end of the afternoon when he reappeared on the steps. He still seemed very disturbed, not only by what was happening generally but at what I was doing. He signaled angrily for me to join him and took my hand firmly. Without a word to anybody, we walked back into the factory.

“However, as we climbed the stairs to Uncle's office, the commander's voice boomed out from behind us, ordering us to stop. He was seething with anger and told Uncle to release me. Uncle refused, and I felt his grip tighten on my hand.

“Commander Lobe tried to break Uncle's grip, but Uncle pushed me behind him. Both men were keyed up, and there was a tense exchange of words. It was a terrifying standoff. Then Uncle uttered something—I didn't hear what—to the commander, who drew back, visibly shocked. The commander retreated down the stairs, and Uncle strode to his office, dragging me in his wake. For the moment at least, Uncle had won.

“When we reached his office, he told me sharply to get back to my books and to keep my head down, even if the officers and Commander Lobe returned.

“Before long, the sound of the trucks leaving reached my ears, and shortly after that Commander Lobe and the other officers came in. They made themselves comfortable wherever they could find a place. The commander ordered Uncle to get beer and schnapps for everybody. Uncle ordered it but refused to join them in their celebrations. As the men became drunk, their attitude toward Uncle harshened. They criticized him for protecting me. The German officer warned Uncle in no uncertain terms that his behavior wouldn't be tolerated a second time. With that, the party came to an abrupt end. As he was about to leave, the German officer turned to me and said,
‘Morgens'
—tomorrow. I realized that my job was not yet over.

“Uncle was subdued that evening as we headed home. He remained silent and preoccupied over dinner, too. Later, I lay awake all night, worried about my terrible duty, although I hadn't any idea of what lay in store for those people.

“The next morning I was bleary-eyed. My senses were dull from lack of sleep. It was probably better that way. One of the officers came to collect me from Uncle's office. But I had no choice. I knew what was in store for me, and I wanted nothing at all to do with it.”

“How many times did this take place?” I asked.

“Three times, perhaps. There were no more trucks after that.” My father paused. He appeared relieved to have finally spoken of the incident. The tightness around his mouth loosened slightly.

“That must have been the idea that Lobe hit upon in Uncle's office—the presence of a child would calm the crowd—and then the chocolates became an added touch after I'd been noticed with the boy.” My father looked guilt-ridden. “At least the chocolates seemed to make it easier for them.” My father was speaking through the eyes of the boy he had once been.

In the next breath he suddenly turned against himself. “A chocolate for their journey!” he exclaimed. “What idiocy am I talking? I did sense that something dark was going on, but Commander Lobe had told me that they were being relocated to another part of the country. But they killed them, didn't they?” He struggled to control his hysteria.

“Little children. Younger even than me or my brother and sister. They took them away to concentration camps or to forests—to isolated forests—to be massacred—to be robbed of their lives—their dignity—that was their final destination!”

My father flinched involuntarily, as if trying to dodge a blow. He took several deep breaths, trying to calm himself.

“The women and children and old people at Laima were innocent. Their only crime was to be born Jewish. Somewhere inside me I must have registered what their fate, as Jews, would be. After all, Sergeant Kulis had warned me to hide my Jewishness because it meant death. That was my only crime, too.”

My father was ashen-faced and drawn. “Or am I guilty?” he asked. “Am I responsible, like the soldiers, for what went on? I don't know what to think. Those people in the yard at Laima were murdered, and I eased them on their way, not with a gun but with those damned chocolates.”

My father withdrew further into himself. He seemed beaten: not a shred of his usual animation remained. “Even though I was only a child, I should have known. I must have blocked it out. It was only later that I understood what I had been party to.” My father bowed his head so that I could no longer see his face.

“But at that time I didn't understand,” my father pleaded meekly in his own defense. “I was shell-shocked. Frozen,” he said in a weak voice. “I didn't understand the adults around me, or the world I was living in. I just went from moment to moment—what child doesn't?—grateful for food and shelter and warmth. Even more than that, I was so terrified that my true identity would be discovered. I just kept my antennae up and my head down.”

After several moments of silence, a gasp of grief came from him as he struggled to gain control of his emotions. He looked up at me.

“Let's stop, son,” he pleaded.

I was thankful to do so. I didn't know how much more I could endure.

But I was more worried about my father's emotional state. It seemed as if he were driving himself to the gallows to be hanged by his past. I was overwhelmed at the thought of the toll—the inner terror—his silence must have taken on him. It was not only his physical survival that had been at stake.

I sighed, suddenly exhausted by all I had just learned and all that was still likely to come.

“It's almost five o'clock,” my father said. “You get some sleep, son.”

“What about you, Dad?” I asked. I found myself fretting also about my father's physical state. He suffered at times from high blood pressure, and I prayed that it would remain stable under the burden of this night.

“I'll be fine,” he replied. “I'll just wash the teacups and then get some rest myself.”

I left him to it, suddenly embarrassed by our intimacy. I sensed my father felt the same way, as he rose without another word, crossed to the sink, and turned his back on me.

I dropped off to sleep just before dawn but not before scrawling a few notes on a scrap of paper. The rest I had was fitful, and in the few moments that I was able to doze off I had disturbing dreams: at one point I was standing knee-deep in a swamp, paralyzed by blood-red, glutinous mud. I struggled to raise myself out of it but was hopelessly trapped in the quagmire.

My inner life had been churned up in ways that I was not yet able to fully understand. Soon wide awake again, I lay in bed feeling drained. Outside I could hear the dawn chorus and the sound of my mother rising and moving through the house to the kitchen.

T
he sound of the front door slamming woke me. I must have drifted off into a light sleep again. I drew my arm out from under the blankets and looked at my watch. It was nearly 11:00 a.m. I'd slept about five hours, but I was instantly alert. I sprang out of bed and drew back the curtain. Immediately the light blinded me: it was a bright winter's day in Melbourne. The sky was a thin cloudless blue.

The house seemed deserted as I headed for the kitchen. There was no sign of life. Then I remembered that it was Friday. This time every week my mother met her close friend Maria in town for lunch, a film, and some window-shopping, returning at about six in the evening.

Just as I went to the kitchen window to get a view of my father's workshop, I heard the sound of his car pulling up in the drive. A few moments later the rear gate clicked open, and I saw him cross to his bolt-hole. I opened the window slightly and called out to him: “Dad! Coffee?” He gave a slight start and turned to face me.

I'd expected him to be tired and subdued. I was mistaken. He seemed to have regained his composure completely. There was no sign of what had taken place only hours ago. He looked positively robust. He headed toward the house, warning me in advance not to forget his three sugars.

I took his coffee over to the table where he'd just sat down.

“It's after eleven,” he teased me. “You should've been up hours ago. I've been working since nine.”

“You're superhuman, aren't you,” I tossed back, before it occurred to me that my choice of words might have been an unconscious response to what I had learned about him earlier that morning. I joined my father at the table. In the harsh light of day the kitchen no longer seemed like the confessional from the night before.

My father sipped his coffee in silence. Then I heard him clear his throat nervously, and unexpectedly he began to speak in a lively and confident voice.

“I never finished telling you what happened,” he said, searching my face for a response. “Are you still interested?”

His naïveté stunned me.

“I've thought of nothing else,” I answered. His face registered relief and shyness in equal measures.

“After the incident with the chocolates at Laima,” he began, “Commander Lobe partly surrendered me back to Uncle. I've no idea why this happened. On occasion I still visited hospitals and other institutions with the commander, but these were interspersed with days in Uncle's office when I simply got on with my old routine of study.

“Until one particular day,” my father said, “when the commander arrived in an exuberant mood. He didn't bother to greet Uncle, and before I could even stand to attention, he'd snatched me up and then sat down on the sofa with his arms around my waist so I couldn't escape him. ‘How is my little corporal today?' he asked. ‘Have you been working hard at your lessons?' I nodded, and he looked at Uncle. ‘Has he, Mr. Dzenis?' It was no longer Jekabs, as he used to call Uncle. Uncle nodded but remained silent.

“‘In that case I think you deserve a treat,' Commander Lobe said, squeezing me so tightly I could barely breathe. My ears pricked up at the mention of ‘treat.' I thought that with a bit of luck he might take me out to a fancy café for ice cream the way he used to do.

“But it was even better than I'd hoped for. He offered me a break in Carnikava. ‘It's a special holiday, only for important children of the Reich,' he said. ‘You'll have a wonderful time. A whole week there with boys and girls of your own age. Playing on the beach, dancing, exercises every day.'

“I nodded, excited by the prospect.

“Commander Lobe explained that I'd have to leave almost immediately, and Uncle insisted that he and Auntie accompany me. Uncle had been wary of the commander's attitude toward me ever since the chocolates affair.

“The commander shrugged as if he didn't care either way. Then he sprang an even bigger surprise on me. ‘And you, Corporal,' he said slowly and with gravity, ‘will have a special part to play at Carnikava. Berlin is sending a crew to film you.'

“He lifted me off his knee and began to pace up and down, smoking his cigar. ‘Every single person throughout the German empire, even the Führer himself, will learn about the life of Latvia's great mascot,' he said, waving his hand in the air extravagantly. ‘It is a great honor for you to be chosen. You must make all Latvians proud of you.'”

My father went on to recount his patchy memories of the filming. It had actually taken place in two locations—sections were filmed both at Carnikava and Dzintari, a town on the Riga coast, whose scenery was more appealing than that at Carnikava.

He remembered clearly one scene in which he was filmed doing handstands and running on the beach with the other children. In a second scene, he recalled what may have been a kind of maypole dancing with a few of the young girls, who were dressed in traditional Latvian folk costumes. His other memories, he said, were too vague. “They are like shadows moving across a screen,” he complained, screwing up his face in frustration.

One thing he knew for certain was that the material had been included in a German newsreel, which the commander later told him had been shown in movie theaters across the German Reich. He himself had seen it play in a cinema in Riga.

I was intrigued by talk of the newsreel. Even these scant memories were more than I'd heard during my childhood when my father had mentioned the film. He would boast that he'd become such a celebrity in Latvia that they'd—we never asked who “they” were—made a film about him. But whenever my brothers and I would pester him about the film's content, he'd always claim to be unable to recall any details.

My father told me now that he didn't know what had become of the film. It had occurred to him when he was younger to find it, but he'd had no idea how to locate it. As time passed, and he'd gone on to raise a family, he'd put it at the back of his mind. “I decided that the film belonged to a previous life,” he said. In any case, he suspected that the footage hadn't survived the war.

I suggested that we contact various film archives in Russia, Latvia, and Germany. My father seemed genuinely excited by this. His mood was buoyant, and he perched on the edge of his seat, apparently eager to talk more.

Before he began, however, I was compelled to ask him something we had not yet touched on directly. My father and I had never discussed our emotions with each other, but I decided to take the plunge.

“How did you feel about all of this, Dad?” I asked. Mere mention of the word “feel” made me awkward and self-conscious.

My father was taken aback by my question and seemed perplexed. “What do you mean,
feel
?” He put stress on the word.

“Well…did you feel close to the Latvians?” I blustered, not quite able to say what I meant after all. “Did you feel like one of them when you made this film?”

The vehemence of his response surprised me. “Don't be absurd,” he said. “I never felt part of them. I had to cooperate, that's all.”

My father shrank back into his seat. He seemed both annoyed and dismayed by my question and began to shake his head. “You don't understand the way it was,” he murmured. “I just made the best of my situation. I stayed as silent as possible, all my time with them. I was never one of them. Ever! Deep down I knew they were not my people. They were strangers to me. All the time, strangers. They loved me, cared for me, treated me as one of their own. But I always knew what I was, even if I didn't know who I was. I was a Jewish boy. That meant I had to be on guard every moment I was with them. I couldn't risk being discovered. I would have been killed. I feared for my life all the time. The fear was ingrained in me. Can you imagine how it would be for a child to live like that every waking moment? And even when sleeping—I never slept well—I had nightmares about it. I always worried that I would talk in my sleep and somehow someone would overhear me.”

My father's features tensed and he stared bleakly in front of him. “I realize now, speaking for the first time,” he said, “that I have been frightened all my life.”

This seemed to be an explanation for my father's silence: his persistent fear of discovery.

“It's not like I could've run away or something. Besides, where would I have run to? Back to my village? I didn't know where my village was. I couldn't even remember its name. I still can't. And even if I had, what would I have found there? The pit where my family was buried?

“There was nobody else to care for me,” my father said with grim finality. “This was the card that fate had dealt me.”

My father seemed lost for words. Then he leaned forward in his seat, staring intently at me. “Absurd!” he muttered under his breath. It was the first time in my life that my father had reacted so intensely to something I said.

I tried to steer him onto another topic. “Why didn't you speak of your experiences when the war had ended?” I asked.

My father shrugged evasively. “I wasn't protecting the Latvians, if that's what you're getting at,” he said defensively.

Our discussion had taken a turn for the worse, and I worried my father felt trusting me had been a mistake.

My father took a deep breath. “Who wanted to hear about the horrors I witnessed? In those days everybody in Australia just wanted to get on with their life, forget their past, and I learned to want the same thing. I just focused on Mum and you boys and the future. I wanted to protect you from my past. Just think of the shadow that would have cast over your lives.”

I let that go. “Do you think Mum even suspected anything?” I asked.

My father shook his head.

“I hope not. And that's how I wanted it to be. I didn't want to burden your mother. You know how she is. She'd grown up here shielded from the war and things like that. She has a kind nature, and she doesn't understand cruelty at all. To expose her to what I'd been through—I feared that it would be too much for her.”

“That's terrible, Dad,” I said. “To live alone with this. Nobody you could confide in.”

My father gave a nervous cough. Then he spoke again.

“I did tell somebody once,” he said, “completely on the spur of the moment, in early 1960. I was in the center of Melbourne. I saw a nameplate on the door of a lawyer's office. I could tell the name was Jewish. I thought to myself, ‘This man might be able to steer me in the right direction.' I don't know what came over me—I went in. It was a small office—a one-man show. The lawyer himself was sitting there behind a desk.

“I asked if I could talk to him. He invited me to sit down, I began to tell him what had happened to me. He was spellbound. He let me talk on and on. When I'd finished, he asked what I wanted to do, and I told him then what I have told you now—I want to know who I am, who my family was, and where I come from.

“The lawyer was silent for some time. Finally, he spoke: ‘Forget it, young man!' he said. ‘If what you say is true, there is nobody left for you. And even if someone did survive, then they would believe that you had died with your family. Nobody would come looking for you, and in any case, how would they know where to find you?' He said that the best thing was to look to the future. ‘You have a family, build a life with them. Your past is a lost cause!' I was dejected, but there was nothing else for it. I resolved to follow his advice. ‘He's an educated man,' I said to myself. ‘He knows about these things.' I thanked him and left. That was that—I buried my past.”

“Do you regret that, Dad?” I ventured.

My father seemed momentarily thrown by the question. He moved uncomfortably in his seat. “To be honest,” he replied, “I feel guilty now about keeping my secret from all of you. Perhaps it seems to you that I didn't trust any of you. That I betrayed you somehow.”

My father's words struck a raw nerve in me. As I had sat with him through the early hours of that morning, I had occasionally felt toward him an anger that I'd only gradually been able to acknowledge. He was correct: I'd felt that he'd betrayed me and the entire family. Though he may have protected us from the horrors of his secret, I could not escape my growing sense that his secretiveness would, in the long term, make him a stranger to us all.

My father shook his head, ashamed of himself. There was a momentary silence between us.

“I've lied to you all, haven't I?” my father said. “People outside the family assumed that I was Latvian, and I didn't bother to correct them.” His regret was palpable, and I wanted to spare him any further self-accusation.

“No you didn't,” I replied. “You didn't lie.” I hesitated, struggling to find the right way to describe what had gone on. “You simply didn't tell us everything,” I said. “It was a sort of half-truth.”

“A half-truth?” my father observed wryly. “How can anything be a half-truth?” He understood all too well what I was trying to do. I was trying to make excuses for what he'd done.

“It's like a truth not fully revealed,” I offered.

“There's no such thing,” he challenged me perversely.