The Devil's Playground (56 page)

keep fighting the disease of International Jewry?

‘I began to detest our little meetings and yet I still went, even after I’d seen the video of the girl and knew that, among his collection, the previous seven would be present, entombed in those plastic

graves. I can’t explain that to you, perhaps it was just that he made me more aware of myself, I don’t know. After a night with the Doctor I often found myself, the next day, spending prolonged periods in

the basement of the museum watching through the endless hours

of survivor testimony. I clicked the tapes into place and watched

them tell their story. I would sit all day among their faces, listening to their tales and remembering that no matter how horrible those

stories were, these people were the lucky ones. These people could come and sit before a video camera and speak. These people could

find what tatters remained of their families, and the videos began to stand for something else, for the millions missing, the black hole in Mitteleuropathat will never be filled.

‘Every day I said to myself that this would be the last time I would see the Doctor but every night I went over to his small flat and played chess and listened to him talk.

‘He made me a Jew. And for that I both admired and hated him.

When I’d read my father’s last testament, when I’d found out about my family, when I’d gone through the briefcase full of faded documents and yellow stars - I had known I was Jewish. The evidence

was clear to see but I did not feel it until I felt like killing the old man.

Our identities are formed from oppositions that are there despite

ourselves, despite our trembling efforts to escape them. I hated him for that, for being the one to make me see, and when I finally let myself accept this fact-I had been in denial for weeks. I immediately went and bought a ticket to London, knowing that I had to get away from him.

‘London seemed mean and ugly. I walked through streets I’d

known all my life and they felt different. I tried to escape the Doctor, but, even in London, the sound of his finely clipped accent kept

swirling through my brain. At that point, I had no idea of my future.

No desire to go back to my old life, that just seemed like a child’s game to me now, one that you discover many years later in the attic and wonder what the hell made it so fascinating all those years ago.

Amsterdam was out of the question. Amsterdam was a city of ghosts

for me.

‘I had made the journey to Westerbork one day in the summer.

Caught the train from Amsterdam and arrived there in the early

afternoon. The sun was shining on the fields and windmills spun

picturesquely in the background. There were few visitors and I

walked through the small museum and over the fields where once

the Jews of Amsterdam had been housed, waiting to be squeezed

on to cattlecars for the great migration east. I stood on the ground where my whole family had been. It was just a piece of countryside now, an empty green field, innocent and ignorant of itself, and I

began crying, standing there alone, my tears splashing hot on the

soft grass below. The knowledge that they had all once been here,

all once been alive, shaking on this very ground, was too much, too much for me to bear.

‘I went back to Amsterdam and on the train I picked up an old

copy of an English newspaper that someone had left folded on the

seat opposite me. I saw the photo on the front. The trains carrying another race of people to their deaths. The lines of misery stretched out waiting to board. Dogs and soldiers and guns. And the Kosovans looked just like the Jews had fifty years ago, full of fear and resignation, boarding the trains with that goodbye look in their eyes. And

then I began reading. And my heart choked with anger. So-called

liberals, the intelligentsia, the people I always thought of as my people, were decrying the American intervention. They preferred

rape camps and genocide to anything American. The Kosovans didn’t

give a shit about ideology, they just wanted to sleep at night without the knock that drags you into a hell of black cells, they just wanted their missing back. We were living in a world that had been turned upside down. This was the shape of the future, the New Nationalism born out of impotent unheated flats and age-old hatred, a Socialist Nationalism, equal parts Marx and Hitler. Politics, like everything else, at the end of the century, had become merely fashion.

‘Once in London I thought I would never go back to Amsterdam.

Until I read about her on the news page, dead, unidentified but I

knew exactly who she was and where she’d ended up. And though

it was her choice, it was I who had run, who had left her to these dogs. I stared at the screen for a few minutes and I knew that I had to go back. That I hadn’t managed to escape anything. That there

is no escaping. No place to hide from yourself. I read and reread

the small fifty-word piece on Beatrice’s death and I knew what I had to do.

The night I arrived back in the city, I called the Doctor. He told me to come round, that he could do with a game of chess, he hadn’t been feeling too well. I walked through the rain and climbed the

stairs to his apartment. After all those weeks of sleeping rough my body was not what it had been and I strained and struggled that last floor, catching my breath before I knocked on his door.

‘His flat smelled of sickness, that clotted, heavy smell that seems to reside in your nostrils for days afterwards. He was lying in bed and looked older than I had ever seen him. His face was white and

his eyes, milky and uncertain. I was almost disappointed, I had

wanted him strong.

‘We played a little chess though I could see his heart wasn’t really in it. He apologized. Told me he’d be back to normal in a few days.

It was just a cold but he was an old man and his body weak.

‘I looked at him lying there in bed, pathetic and grizzled, and I saw Beatrice’s face as she stared terrified at his video camera. I heard her scream and I thought about the other girls the police knew

about. Their screams. And the ones they didn’t, the ones who slipped the net. That would for ever go unremembered and unmourned. I

leaned over the Doctor and he saw the look on my face and I think

he knew then.

‘I put my hands around his throat and began to squeeze. I looked

at him and he stared back at me. Our eyeballs locked. I squeezed

tighter, feeling the loose skin of his neck fold under my hands and, when he grabbed my wrists, I steadied myself for the impending

struggle but he didn’t try to prise my hands off. He held them tightly, pressing them down on to his neck until they relaxed completely

and I looked into his eyes and saw nothing. I took the films, the

videos, some drugs from his medicine cabinet, and locked the door

behind me, locked it shut on everything.

‘That happened twelve hours ago and I can still smell his death on my hands. It is slowly creeping up my arms and heading for my

chest. I can feel it like little breaths of air sliding up my arm. It’s almost sensual but it also freezes my blood.

‘I burnt the videos. There were eight of them. All neatly labelled and filed. Beatrice’s smile - still nervous, still there. So I set them on fire.

Made them sublimate into smoke. If they got into the wrong hands

… there was too much at stake. Those women had been abused

enough, and while justice was perhaps not done, a certain closure

was at least effected. I can only hope he never made copies.

‘I left his body where it was. I ran all the way to Dominic’s flat. I told him what had happened. How the Doctor had told me it was

filmed at Quirk’s piercing parlour. An old friend from the war. A real Jew, he said, a survivor. I’d been shocked. The Doctor had introduced me to Quirk a few weeks earlier. He’d bumped into him ten years

previously. Quirk recognized him but instead of blabbing and going to the police, the piercer had collapsed at the Doctor’s feet, weeping with gratitude. He’d been a small child in Auschwitz and the Doctor was the closest thing to a father he’d known. They gradually found they had certain things in common, certain lusts, and their friendship grew from there. I could see that it was as much of a surprise to

Dominic as it had been to me. I gave him the films. He assured me

that he would clean up the mess. We talked about disposal and we

both agreed that the Doctor would find peace at the bottom of a

canal, among the mud and ooze and broken glass. He left an hour

ago. I will not be here when he gets back.

These are my last words. These are the final things I have left.

‘I lost. I fucked up. I blew it. I let the Doctor get inside me. I let him corrupt me. I thought he was making me a Jew but he made me

a Nazi. He passed on his inheritance of hate and anger to me. I was his son, and he, my only real father. And so this is my inheritance to you, Jon. Don’t make the same mistakes I made. Pull your head out

of the fucking sand …

‘And now I can see what the real tragedy of the Holocaust was.

Not the millions dead and the conveyor-belt executions, not the bars of soap or the rotting bodies in pits. Not the dead, but the living, those who would come afterwards to sit in classrooms and watch

jerky black-and-white newsreels trying to comprehend, so full of

anger, hate and despair that they could never really live again, never open themselves up to another person or laugh at a stupid thing.

The millions of men and women for ever folded into themselves,

used up and useless. And I’m not talking about Jews. I’m talking

about anyone who ever heard the word Holocaust, whose mind was

immediately beset with those flash-frame images of barbed wire and jutting bone. You see, it wasn’t us who were the swelling, infected appendix, but them. And when it burst, it sent bits of their disease all across the world. Escaped Nazis taught South African police how to kill blacks. They trained the South American military dictatorships of the 1970s, taught them how to extract information. They ended

up in Damascus and Tripoli, explaining how bombs can be made,

terror spread, the fight continued. But they also affected us on much deeper levels, they infected our consciousness, set it on a different track, launching us into a new kind ofcentury. Their garden of earthly delights came crashing down, exploding and fracturing, sending its fragments across the oceans and over the mountains, a new kind of

rain, a new kind of world.’

Jon and Suze watched as Jake took the syringe off the

table next to him. Jon leapt forward as if to shout, ‘No, don’t

do it’ - then, realizing his stupidity, leaned back into the sofa.

Watched transfixed as the old man held the needle to his

skin.

‘I am going out for a short walk now. Find myself a park, somewhere to lay myself down. I need to sleep in the air.

Let there be no mistake about this, no speculation of murder or

accident. That would be a betrayal. My body is not mine any more.

It rides a carriage made of bones through a dark and terrible place and my riding companion is the Doctor - now I finally give it over.’

The image cut to blue and then back to the start-up screen.

‘Christ!’ Jon said as he got up and looked at the monitor,

shaking uncontrollably, his knees buckling and swerving,

steadying himself, hand placed on the table.

‘Come here,’ Suze called out to him but he didn’t make

any move towards her, just kept shaking his head.

‘I can’t fucking believe it.’

‘At least it was his choice.’

‘That’s what makes it even more terrible. That and the

fact that he wanted me to fall into this. The way he planned

it so meticulously.’

Wanted you?’ She tried to get closer to him but it was as

if a force of electromagnetic energy surrounded him, making

the air between them unstable.

Jon looked up at her. ‘My phone number in the book that

stupid code that he knew only I’d get. The CDs. From

the start he planned this all out.’

She wanted to tell him that if it hadn’t been for Jake, they

would never have met, but it was such a trite thing to say,

especially at a moment like this. It was what she felt but she

could not say it. ‘Why, Jon?’

‘I don’t know. He wanted me to wake up. He thought I

was asleep. He wanted me to realize where I came from but

all I realize is that it doesn’t matter. That it’s only surface

now. Those times are gone.’

‘He was really fucked up.’

‘Yes,’ he replied, only fully acknowledging it now. ‘Yes, he

was.’

Jon stared out of the window at the dense layers of rain

that peppered the street outside and remembered the days

when he’d sunk deep into the arms of suicide, the dark days

of the failure of the magazine and of his hopes and dreams,

and he remembered the beautiful temptation of it, its promise

and allure. He cursed himself for having thought like that

and most of all he cursed himself because he knew that, like Jake, it had taken murder and genocide to make him see.

‘Jon,’ she cried out, startling him. ‘Oh my God! There’s

something else on the CD.’

He turned around and looked at her. ‘What are you talking

about?’

But the answer was obvious in her face. He moved towards

her so that he could see.

They stood there in silence. Unable to quite believe it:

a simple zipped contents file on screen, divided into 49

segments.

She moved the mouse until it highlighted the first segment.

Pressed Play.

They sat there, both knowing what was on this last hour