The Mascot (29 page)

“When I summoned the courage, or stupidity—I don't know what you'd call it—and went to the Holocaust center, I'd imagined that the shame would lift. But it didn't. Somehow within myself I didn't feel comfortable there, as if I'd betrayed my Jewishness. I was somehow unworthy of being Jewish, even though I'd been born Jewish, and had no right to speak about who I was. By the time I'd left the center, I realized that I was completely and utterly trapped by who I was. I felt doubly cursed by my fate.”

I felt almost uncontrollable anger rising at what a child living with a hidden identity must have gone through. Over fifty years later, it seemed that he was still struggling with himself to reclaim it.

“What about the interviewers?” I asked. “Did they understand what you'd been through?”

“They had their questions to ask,” my father said.

I realized that he was staring at me intently.

“Perhaps, after all,” he said, “it's been wise to have stayed silent all these years…”

“I understand, Dad. At quite a few moments my instinct was to tell you to get up and leave the interview.”

“You felt that, son?” My father's face became more animated. He seemed relieved that I'd wanted to support him. He looked down at his hands.

“I couldn't bear it,” he said. “I felt like I couldn't breathe. I just fled. I can't remember clearly what happened after that. I didn't black out, but it is a blur.

“The next thing I
do
remember clearly was being on the street. I had enough sense to make it to my car parked on the other side. I got in and locked the doors, but I wasn't capable of driving anywhere. And that's when somebody knocked on the car window. A woman. She introduced herself as Alice Prosser.

“Will you meet her?” my father asked. “She's a Ukrainian Jew from Odessa. She came to Australia in the early 1970s as a political refugee. She won't go into much about what happened to her. All that she was willing to tell me was that she'd been arrested there, declared an undesirable, and quickly deported. After being shunted from country to country, she finally found asylum here.”

My father paused. “I'm sure they tortured her,” he said quietly. “Anyway, Alice is a volunteer at the Holocaust center, and that's where I met her. You know what she told me?” he asked and didn't wait for my response. “That I have the ‘true spirit of a survivor.'

“Those were her exact words. I've never thought of myself in that way. Imagine her saying that to me after all that she'd been through herself!”

“Too bad those interviewers didn't seem more sympathetic,” I couldn't restrain myself from commenting.

“They had their questions to ask,” my father repeated.

I remained unconvinced.

“They've been made bitter by their suffering,” my father said gently. “You can't blame them.”

I found his generosity of spirit hard to accept—even though I was not surprised by it. I only wished that he was more forgiving toward himself.

“I told her about you,” my father said. “She wants to meet you.”

I sensed that he had already set the wheels in motion for a meeting with Alice, and I was annoyed.

“Go on,” he cajoled me. “You won't regret it.”

I felt cautious about meeting Alice. Since his brief visit to Oxford months earlier, I'd been slowly drawn into a world dominated solely by my father's quest. I had a brief vision of this Alice as an usher checking my ticket before escorting me to the seat where I would watch the rest of my father's story play out.

“Make the arrangements,” I sighed.

“I'll call her in the morning,” he said, pleased.

My father glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall.

“Look! It's almost two in the morning. Get to bed, you rascal,” he whispered with affection. “Keeping me up this late!”

W
hen I got up late the next morning, my father was in the kitchen drinking coffee. He looked up when he heard me come in. “Get dressed, Mark,” he said. “Alice wants to meet you this afternoon.” He told me that she'd wait for me on Acland Street in St. Kilda, a beachside inner suburb of Melbourne that was his old stomping ground.

“Two o'clock at Café Scheherazade,” my father said. “I usually meet her there. She loves it. ‘It's very kosher,' she says.”

The Scheherazade was renowned for both its Jewish food and its atmosphere, which was redolent of prewar eastern Europe—members of the Jewish community would congregate there for coffee and cake. When I was small, Scheherazade's front window attracted me more than any other on Acland Street. We would pass it on the way to the Monarch cake shop to buy what my father maintained was the best cheesecake he had ever eaten. I would dawdle in front of Scheherazade's window and stare in, instantly hypnotized by the vivacious ladies inside.

It was just before two when I stepped into the Scheherazade. The interior had been modernized since I was a child, but it somehow seemed shabbier than I had remembered. As the last of the lunchtime crowd cleared, I found a table at the rear of the main room and ordered coffee with the inevitable piece of cheesecake.

A few moments later, a stocky woman in her late sixties entered. She was tiny, almost dwarfish, and used a walking stick to steady her lopsided gait. On one arm, she nursed a shopping bag that appeared to be stuffed with clothing, books, newspapers, and tins of soup, as if she carried all her belongings with her.

“God, no!” was my initial, uncharitable reaction. “Another one of my father's crackpot friends.”

She headed directly across the room toward me, smiling broadly, her hand outstretched.

“I'm Alice Prosser,” she said. “You're Mark. I recognize you from your photo.”

I must have looked surprised.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Your father carries a photo of you with him. He's so proud. His son who studied at Oxford.”

I laughed, embarrassed. Oxford seemed far removed from my life at this moment.

I exchanged a few pleasantries with Alice about the weather and the like, in an effort to break the ice, but she didn't seem to have much time for idle chitchat, so I jumped right in. “So you know my father from the Holocaust center?”

Alice nodded. “But sadly not under the best of circumstances,” she said heavily.

I stared at her, waiting for her to continue.

“Your father's told you about what went on there?”

I shrugged.

“What did happen, Alice?”

Our coffees arrived at that moment. Alice took a long sip and rummaged in her bag for something. She pulled out a small leather pouch, plucked out some tobacco and papers, rolled a cigarette, and lit it.

The waitress who had just served us approached tentatively. She looked down at Alice, giving an apologetic smile. Alice looked up at her. “Is something the matter?” she asked.

“The cigarette, madam. I'm sorry,” the young woman said. “This is a no-smoking café.”

Alice nodded, contorting her lips into a tight grimace. She stubbed out the cigarette on my empty cheesecake plate.

The waitress removed the plate, holding it at a distance as if it still gave off noxious fumes, and disappeared.

Alice remained slightly hunched over her part of the table.

“You know,” she said, shaking her head in disgust, “every time I come here they say the same thing to me—no smoking. It's worse than the old Soviet Union. At least there you could smoke wherever you wanted.”

I watched her as she returned her tobacco pouch to her bag and wondered at her stubbornness.

“It just wasn't a place that suited your father's character,” she said cryptically, finally responding to my question.

She fell silent for a few moments and then continued much more quietly. “I was working in the back near the interview room when I saw your father come in with one of the interviewers,” she said. “I couldn't help but notice him because of his face. You must know what I mean…he looks like a sad clown, and those expressive blue eyes.”

I knew exactly what Alice meant. It was not the first time I had heard my father described in this way. I recalled when he had taken my brother and me to visit his old friends at the traveling circus he'd worked with, how fond he was of the clown act—the Zakkini Brothers. To me they were the saddest people I'd ever laid eyes on—four Italian Jewish émigrés from the war. My brothers and I would always tease my father, telling him that he should quit his job and become Zakkini Number Five. He would always laugh and nod in agreement. “That's me, boys,” he'd say, “a sad clown, too.”

“I guessed that he'd come to give his testimony,” Alice said. “That's where they usually did them. Anyway, because I am a volunteer at the center, I do all sorts of jobs around the place. That day, I couldn't help but overhear parts of your father's testimony. And the parts I heard astonished me. An amazing story, one of the most remarkable I have ever heard. Imagine! A child could survive like that. As I listened I could hear him struggling to explain things clearly to the interviewer. I felt terribly sorry for your father.”

At that moment Alice set down her coffee cup with such a clatter that some of the other customers in the Scheherazade stopped what they were doing and glanced in our direction. She was oblivious to their stares.

“But it was your father's destiny to live to tell the story,” she declared, opening her eyes wide to reveal her yellowish eyeballs. Despite the seriousness of what Alice was describing, I didn't know how long I could suppress a smile at her theatrics.

“Tell me,” I said, “why wasn't the visit to the center”—I searched for the right word—“successful?”

“Put it this way,” Alice replied, “in my opinion I think your father felt uncomfortable at the center, that he believed that somehow he didn't fit in. Perhaps he felt that because he was not after all raised a Jew that he didn't belong there. Who knows? Even though I am a volunteer there I don't think it was the most appropriate place for him. I'm not saying more than that.”

I reflected on how Alice's words resonated with my father's. Then she spoke again.

“In the short time I've known your father,” she said, “I can see that he is an exceptional man. He embraces life, I could tell that immediately. But it doesn't mean that he hasn't suffered—he's been exposed to things that a child should never be—or still suffering. But your father isn't the type of man who wants or needs to dwell on it. He simply wants to tell his story, and even then not just for his own benefit. He told me later that his story was a lesson for everybody, Jewish or not, about cruelty.”

Alice lit another cigarette, taking a long drag on it, and then quickly put it out.

“At one point I noticed that the interview room was empty. The testimony had come to an end, only a few minutes earlier according to the interviewer whom I'd come across in the corridor. I felt very sorry for your father after hearing his story. I decided to look for him. With a bit of luck, I thought, he might not have left the premises.

“I was right. I found him in the museum. He was wandering among the exhibits, taking in their horror. They must have reminded him of things he'd seen as a boy. Even the images of life in the prewar shtetl must have upset him—what a terrible sense of loss he must have felt looking at the world fate denied him—because as I approached him I could see that he was shaking slightly.

“I touched him gently on the shoulder. I didn't want to alarm him. ‘Do you remember me?' I asked. ‘I was the one working back there.'

“Your father nodded. I extended my hand to him.

“There was an awkward silence. Your father was lost for words but it didn't matter. I knew what he was going through. Then, before I knew it, he gave a weak smile and turned away from me, blank-eyed, in a daze.”

Alice became agitated and breathless as she related this to me.

“Alice, are you okay?” I asked.

“Of course I'm not,” she answered heavily.

Alice was then silent for several moments as she gathered her breath. Then she continued. “I watched your father slip out the exit, and I decided to follow him to make sure he was okay. He was on the doorstep outside the museum entrance. Then he walked back to his car, which was parked on the opposite side of the road. He climbed in and started the car, but after several minutes the car hadn't moved, so I decided to check on him.”

I pictured Alice hobbling across the street, her walking stick in one hand and shopping bag in the other.

“I reached the driver's side. Your father seemed to be in a state of shock.

“He stared straight ahead, oblivious to the world around him. He didn't even seem aware of me. I tapped lightly on the window. He snapped out of his state and wound it down, giving me a questioning look as if he didn't recognize me.

“‘I'm Alice Prosser,' I said, introducing myself properly. ‘Can I join you?'

“After a moment's hesitation, he simply nodded.

“I climbed into the car, and we sat there together in silence, your father still unable to drive off.

“In the end I had to tap on his arm a number of times before he turned toward me. I sensed that your father wanted to talk and suggested we move on to somewhere else. Within minutes we pulled into a parking lot that looked out at the sea. It was a bleak afternoon, and the place was deserted. We sat in silence, watching the waves. I had to say something to break their spell, so I told your father that I'd overheard some of his story. It was unavoidable: the walls at the center are paper-thin.

“I believe your father's story and I told him so. He was so taken aback that he asked me two or three times, ‘You believe me?' and then added, ‘Even though my memories are patchy?'

“‘Memory is a strange thing, Alex,' I said.

“‘I know,' he said. ‘Do you know, I can still taste the
kes
my mother would make for the family, as if it were yesterday, but something important, like my mother's face, I cannot remember at all.'

“Your father had used a Yiddish word, and when I told him so, he was baffled.

“‘I don't know where the word came from,' he said. ‘Maybe I heard it as a child.' Your father repeated the word over and over—
‘kes kes kes,'
he said, as if he were relishing the cheese itself.

“‘Do you remember the taste, too?' he asked me excitedly. His eyes were moist with nostalgia for its taste.

“I nodded. Your father was overwhelmed that I shared an experience from his past. Perhaps he realized that he was no longer alone, as he had been in his silence.”

Alice shifted slightly in her seat, taking the weight off her bad hip.

“At that moment,” she said, “I lost any doubt that your father was telling the truth about his past. The task was only to uncover it.

“I've met your father here a couple of times since then. I tell him little things about being Jewish, life in the shtetl and Jewish ceremonies, and he is always fascinated. Who knows, we might make a good Jew out of him yet, and turn you into a good Jewish boy as well!”

I laughed.

She seemed disconcerted, as if she'd misunderstood my response.

I leaned forward. “My father and I,” I joked, “we're a couple of old dogs. Too old for any new tricks!”

For a moment I feared that she was going to pinch my cheek.

“We'll see about that.” She smiled, as if she knew me better than I knew myself.

Alice took a sip of her cold coffee and made a sour face.

We sat in silence for several minutes.

Finally she rose and gathered her bag, suggesting that we meet again soon.

“I'd like to come to the house,” she said, “and meet your mother.”

I said nothing.

“Your father's still not told her then?”

I shook my head.

Alice made a tutting sound.

“I must go,” she said.

I watched as she hobbled across the café, and out the door.

I remained in Scheherazade for some time, drinking another coffee and reflecting on my meeting with Alice. I felt that I'd been in the presence of a magical dwarf who'd appeared from somewhere deep in the forests of eastern Europe. I tried to make sense of what she had told me.

Through the window I could see that Acland Street was busy with early-evening crowds. I could understand my father's lifelong attraction to Acland Street with its vibrant street life—it must have reminded him of the mood and communality of the shtetl of his early years. It was utterly unlike the atmosphere of the suburb where he lived now.

It struck me then that my position in Acland Street had diametrically shifted. I was no longer a little boy peering into the Scheherazade. Now I was a man, still my father's son, but I was inside looking out.