The Devil's Playground (15 page)

looked at him as if he didn’t understand. Jon described

Jake, his beard and purpose. The old man’s face betrayed

nothing.

‘He came here a lot. I was wondering if you remember

him,’ Jon said, disappointment making his voice sound thin

and desperate.

The old man shook his head. ‘People come and go all the

time,’ he said in a wheezy, old-century accent.

‘I know that he came here quite regularly. He was looking

for his family, his history.’

We all are at some level or another.’ The old man refused

to be drawn.

‘Is there anyone else who might have seen him?‘Jon asked,

hope slipping.

‘No.’

Jon didn’t believe him. He must have seen Jake. Unless

Jake’s whole story was a lie. Unless there was no revelation,

no Raphael Kuper, no history.

The old man looked at him, stoic as a rock —Jon knew he

would never tell him anything he didn’t want to and he

felt himself go weak. Another failed attempt, another bust.

Perhaps the detective had been right. Perhaps it would be

better if he just went home. He smiled, gave the old man the

entrance fee and set off into the cool, high-vaulted spaces of

the museum.

He walked by the Torahs and scriptures as if they were

alien relics, the strange backward language and tradition into

which he had been only partly initiated. Nineteenth-century

Passover tables, neat, exact and somehow sad, ensconced in

their glass cages. The sun slanting in from above, illuminating

great, huge, frazzled Bibles, mysterious marks etched into

the parchment. He wondered how the old man had felt

walking into this cool, reverent space, through the corridors

and rooms of a history that he’d only recently discovered

was his. Of course Jon saw the parallels but he’d always

known he was a Jew, even when he was desperately trying

to hide it — more so then — and Jake, well, Jake had suddenly

been drowned in the knowledge at such a late date. He

wondered if Jake had felt Jewish or only an impostor while

gliding through these rich and detailed rooms. Jon felt

stranded between the two.

He slowly and painstakingly read every piece of printed

literature tacked up to explain the exhibits. He stared at the

black ribbed shofars, like artefacts from an alien civilization,

the gold menorahs, elegant and out of time. He knew that in

this place he was a gentile, someone who needed interpretive

guides for the objects on display, a stranger with no sense of

God or belief, only a nagging curiosity as to what the objects

were, their material meaning and function. He stared at the

Tefillin, the small black boxes containing Bible verses that

the reverent fastened to their left arm and forehead, straps

of leather going round the skin like snakes. He understood little of the ritualistic artefacts on display, not having participated in such ceremonies, not knowing even what they

^^

signified in the minds of believers. He felt a little ashamed at

his ignorance and was glad that he hadn’t told the old man

at the counter that he was Jewish. What if he’d asked him

some innocent question? He would have been shown to be

the impostor he now felt, someone who’d lost their right to

claim their hidden heritage.

In the next room were ancient, gloomy canvases filled

with huddled men from previous centuries. Even the bright

halogens of the modern age were not enough to illuminate

the darkness that surrounded them like soup, enclosing them

in some terrible secret, so dark that it was hard to make out

individual figures. Next to them lay fake Torah scrolls, made

out of plastic, with a video monitor at their centre where the

text should be. He stopped and stared, watching on the

screen the old, liver-spotted hands of a man painstakingly

scratching the strange figures that populated the scrolls, that

mysterious writing, the dead traditions.

In the next room he saw the photos of people herded out

of their houses and into the streets. Saw the misery and fear

in their faces and knew he’d reached the Holocaust section.

He’d never really thought about the Holocaust, not until

Jake had told him his story, had always seen it as just another

chapter in the book about the Second World War. Of course

he’d studied it at A level along with everyone else, watched

the Laurence Olivier-narrated documentary and felt sad,

perhaps even a little thrilled and disgusted at the same time,

as did every young boy of his age. But that was all just

‘history’, something to be learned, something gone, the

elusive past.

He wondered how Jake had felt, walking through these

rooms. Had he cried? Had to leave? Jon didn’t know, would

never know, and that made him feel sad as he looked at the

faded sepia photograph, tired black and white faces lined up

against a wall, the words ‘fuden’ and ‘Schwein’ scrawled in

primitive graffiti behind them. He stared at their faces and

wondered whether Jake had done that too, maybe trying to

see some facial resemblance, some signifier of himself.

There were countless documents on display here, letters of

transit, faked postcards from Auschwitz, children’s identity

cards, different types of yellow stars and bills of receipt for

human cargo. The neat handwriting on the latter made him

feel queasy. He wondered what it would be like to see your

own name on one of those bills, a record of your slaughtered

family, up for display now to anyone who paid the entrance

fee. There was a certain intrusion of privacy inherent in such

exhibitions, even if the people were all dead.

He came back to the first photo he’d seen, the one of the

men lined up against the wall, and it seemed especially cruel

to have fixed their images as such, their faces smeared with

fear and anxiety. Surely these were once proud citizens who

would have been aghast at the idea of being displayed in

their moment of weakness.

The photograph had its own narrative thrust beyond and

across the scene that it presented. The look on their faces

and the abject way in which they stood against the paint

splattered wall told a story beyond that moment, no less

horrifying than if they had chosen the next shot, the inevitable

mound of bodies and smiling officers. These men died

in their best suits, Jon thought, in the middle of the day and

in front of a camera. In front of a fucking camera.

When he had seen all he could, he walked back into the

enclosure that held the Torah and sat on the stool staring up

at the impossibly delicate object, suspended in a room by

itself, a quiet place to get away from the densely displayed

horrors of the other hall. He tried to focus on the fine detail

of the finials with their ornamental bells like tiny Venetian

spires, the gilded, etched mantles and crowns, but all he

could see were the faces.

There were so many sad faces in those photos, in that

history, so much injustice, hate and cruelty. Any one face

displayed the whole terrible fate; of a people, for sure, his

people even, if he could let himself think in that way — but

more than that, the fate of those that perpetrated those

actions and also the fate of those who viewed these artefacts.

The beauty and exquisite silence of the room could not

temper the anger which he felt burning itself through his

body, as his chest got tighter and his palms began to sweat.

He took three deep breaths, felt giddy and then got up and

went straight through the Holocaust hall and into a small

adjoinment that was filled with colour and hope.

He looked at the series of gouaches, the portraits of the

woman and the man, the long discursive rambles that were

superimposed on to the images, the bright and ebullient

vivacity of it. He’d never heard of Charlotte Salomon before

and he spent a long time going from one gouache to another,

letting their colour and space soak into him and burn away

the image of the men. Some of them were so funny, a sharp

and focused irony at work in the tension between what was

shown and what was said; in the words that dwelt in the

empty spaces of paint. Others spoke of a terrible loneliness,

inherent in the minimalism and nuance of the composition,

but even here, there was something, this awful past transformed

through art into something else. Something that

existed now.

It was a good way to finish, he thought, a good way to

leave the place. The paintings had made the image of the

men fade slightly. His anger too had subsided. He didn’t

know what the paintings had to do with the Holocaust, only

that Salomon had been Jewish; perhaps the curators had put

up these works as a necessary adjunct to what came before, a way of dissipating the ugly information that had soaked in.

He hoped it was so at least, feeling that the paintings had

indeed refreshed him, put that other photo in context, though

in context of what he didn’t know.

At the end of the exhibit, on a small table, was an old

leather-bound book of comments. Jon stepped up to it,

wanting to write something, to make concrete his feelings

but nothing came and instead he began flicking through the

previous pages, reading the comments of other men and

women who had passed through here. He deciphered handwriting

that would flummox a cryptographer, skimmed

through messages of hope and fear, and that was when he

saw it.

The old man’s name, Jake Kuper, and above, a small

paragraph.

He could hear his heart ricochet inside his chest.

Jake had been here.

The story must be true. The trail alive.

He read the three short sentences that his friend had

written about Charlotte. He’d hoped they would cast some

light on Jake’s own history but they were pithy and dry as

dust. Terse descriptions of the beauty of her colours. The

sadness of her life.

Instinctively Jon reached down and ran his finger along

the rough edges of the paper, feeling the indentations that

Jake had pressed into the book. Everything left a trail, from

the most insignificant life to the most famous. We cannot

erase our history, like snails we only manage to smear it

behind us, leaving others to follow, make sense of, come to

terms with. Jon’s finger rested on the word Jake. Everything

was there and he felt a sudden understanding that it was left

to him to follow the trail, to recreate Jake from his leavings.

He closed the book and checked his watch. He had just

enough time to make it back to the hotel, pack and get to

the airport. He took out his ticket. Checked the flight schedule.

Yes, plenty of time.

He looked once more at the paintings, sadness burning

his heart, then walked out into the street, the sun all dazzle

and glitter. He threw his plane ticket into the first bin he

came across, watching it flutter and spin to the bottom. All

around him couples embraced and kissed, the darkness of

the past conveniently hidden behind the grand old walls of

the synagogue, like Amsterdam’s Jewry, a petrified relic from

another time.

The sun streamed all over her face. Suze felt its warmth and

almost cried. It reminded her of home, that wild, unbroken

country that now seemed not merely a continent but a whole

world away. Another place and time.

She checked her watch. Dominic was late.

He was always late. Fashionable or otherwise, he never

made it on time. She’d arrived at the cafe half an hour after

they’d arranged and now she thought maybe she’d missed

him, maybe he’d actually got there on time, waited and

despaired. But that was not like Dominic, he would wait he’d

wait for her until the city crumbled around them, until

the land sank under the water and the last boats left.

But maybe, just maybe, the urgency in her voice had made

him come on time, wait, get pissed off, wait another five

minutes and finally leave.

She lit a cigarette and watched the sun hide behind the tall

buildings that marked off this area from the enclosure of the

District with its medieval proportions. She felt better here in

this old continent, buttressed by leaning walls and serpentine

streets, than in the great oceanic swells of desert in which

she’d been raised. To her left the city rushed on; yellow

streaking trams, bicycles, so old-fashioned and somehow

definitively European, rolled by, threading through the

accumulating crowds, shaking off the night.

But the sun made her feel uneasy, refusing to be an

unambiguous delight, taking her back to those mesas and

plains, the drenched daylight of her youth, lived in the

unblinking heat. The priest at her mother’s funeral collapsing,

sun-stroked and heavy, on to the ground, the silence that he

seemed to draw with him, as if his fall had sucked all the

words and emotions out of the mourners’ mouths. It had

been so hot that day. Trust Mother to die in August. First