The Mascot Read online

“Please, son,” he said, as if he needed to convince me.

  While I was thrown by his request, unable to recall a time when he’d asked me so directly for my help, it went without saying that I would help him, even if what he wanted still seemed so vague. I pulled out a piece of paper. “Tell me how to spell the words—”

  We were interrupted by the waitress who arrived with our meals and slapped the plates down on the table. We ate in silence, my father bent forward, as was his habit, with one arm curled around his plate, protecting the steaming cabbage rolls as he devoured them greedily.

  I had lost my appetite, however, and thought about his brown case again. It was true that I saw the case, despite its battered exterior, as something filled with riches, and all the stories it contained, especially all the tales of my father’s life since his arrival in Australia, as my inheritance. They were the kind of enchanting stories of human bravado that would make any child proud of his father. I felt more ambivalent about the stories of his childhood in Europe during the war. I could never get a clear picture of what had gone on because my father painted that time in the broadest of brushstrokes.

  We enjoyed one particular story my father often told us more than the others, about the time he spent wandering alone in a dark, overgrown forest at the age of five or six when he had become separated from his parents, who were Russian pigherds. He could never remember how this had actually occurred, he said, but he always believed that the trauma of it, together with his time alone in the forest in the freezing winter—for weeks and perhaps even months—caused him to forget both his name and his origins.

  My father told us that at night he would tie himself inside the forks of trees to survive the wolves, whose howling he could hear in the distance. As he sat high above the ground, shaking with cold, swinging his tiny legs, and waiting for the first light of dawn, he sometimes imagined that he could hear his mother’s voice calling out to him. But he could never remember her words. This part of the story prompted our avid inquiries.

  “Weren’t you afraid, Daddy?” we would ask. “Could you see the wolves’ eyes glowing in the dark?” He would dismiss any questions that suggested he’d been at all vulnerable and respond as if he’d always been brave, confident, and readily equipped for any contingency. “Nah, boys,” he’d say, “I’d just make sure that I’d tied the knot tight enough.”

  As if by an agreed-upon formula, one of us would usually exclaim insistently, “But, Daddy, you must know where you come from. Everyone does!”

  When he would deny that he did, it only made us more insistent. “You must know, Daddy!”

  My mother was always very protective of my father, and she would usually step in at moments like these, when our naïveté made us ruthless and we pressed him too much. “Boys! Leave your father alone,” she would insist gently. “Settle down now and let him get on with his story.”

  As the years passed and he retold this story, my mother, my brothers, and I all came to accept the ground rules he set: sit in silence and ask nothing. But in my imagination I would create my own childlike images of my father as a little boy, a Mowgli-like creature wide-eyed with fear, despite what he’d said about his courage, being chased down dark, twisting forest trails by some large, shadowy figure, possibly half-human, half-beast.

  My father told us that the turning point in his life came when he was found by Latvian soldiers in a forest on the outskirts of a deserted village somewhere near the Russian border in 1942. They had fed him and tidied him up. It was then that two figures surfaced who would play important roles in his future. The first was Krlis Lobe.

  Lobe was the commander of the Latvian police brigade whose soldiers had discovered my father and taken it upon themselves to give the boy a new name. They called him Uldis Kurzemnieks. Uldis was a common Latvian first name, much like John, and Kurzemnieks literally meant “one from Kurzeme.” Kurzeme was a region in the west of Latvia from which many of the soldiers had come. (My father would abbreviate Uldis Kurzemnieks to Alex Kurzem to spare his fellow Australians the pain of pronouncing the tongue-twisting foreign name.)

  Lobe later gave my father a false birthday, November 18, chosen for him because it commemorated Latvian National Day. Eventually he made another key decision about my father’s life, arranging for him to be removed from the potential dangers of armed conflict at the front and taken to the safety of Riga and the home of a Latvian family called Dzenis, who ran a chocolate factory.

  I looked around at the other tables in the Daquise, and the sight of many elderly European gentlemen of a certain bearing led me to reflect on my father’s account of his life with Lobe. My father was always circumspect, even evasive, whenever I asked him about Lobe. His response never varied: “He was a good soldier. He was firm with me, but always fair.” When I would try to draw him out further on Lobe’s appearance in those days, he became dismissive: “He looked like a soldier. That’s all. Nothing special.” I could never get my father to say anything more than that, so over the years I came to picture Lobe as tall and upright, with an aristocratic, almost Prussian, manner. I formed a mental snapshot of Lobe holding my wildly laughing father, then a small boy, aloft in the air. Somehow this image became my own private expression of gratitude to the man who had “rescued” my father from the wolves. Now, having just learned of a new element to my father’s past, I began to wonder what other revelations might follow.

  After we left the Daquise we wandered the streets of South Kensington, slightly disoriented. It was just as well that we had no special plans for the remainder of the afternoon. It seemed as if the little crack that had appeared in the surface of my father’s demeanor less than an hour ago had now somehow resealed itself. He was content to walk in silence, as was I.

  Eventually we came to the underground tunnel that took us beneath Exhibition Road. Its tiles provided cool relief from the unusually stifling humidity of this late May afternoon. The tunnel was deserted, and as we moved into its deepest section, the sound of the overhead traffic became muted. In the stillness our footsteps echoed back at us. This had a disquieting effect on my father. The rat-a-tat of our steps made his body stiffen as if he’d heard something I could not.

  Suddenly he stopped and stared at me.

  “Something terrible happened,” he said. I waited for what he was going to say next. He studied my face but then turned away from me and faced the wall. “No. Forget it,” he said. “It’s nothing, really.”

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing’? You just said something terrible happened. What was terrible, Dad?”

  He turned to face me again. “Forget it, son. You wouldn’t understand.”

  I could see only his silhouette against the light from the other end of the tunnel. I moved closer to him. His face was pale and his features had become inexplicably gaunt. He breathed more heavily than usual, as if trying to expel some inner tension.

  “It was terrible what they asked me to do!”

  “Who are ‘they’? What did they make you do?”

  He was distracted by the sound of someone else entering the tunnel and stiffened again at the echo of approaching steps. I was baffled by his response and instinctively reached out to grasp his arm in an attempt to soothe his nerves. I was surprised by my own gesture: neither my father nor I were physically demonstrative with each other.

  A man in a suit hurried past us, with his head down. My father gave him an embarrassed smile. We must have made a strange scene—two men standing in silence in the dark center of the tunnel.

  By the time the figure had faded into the distance, my father seemed calmer. I could almost feel his heart slowing down. “Tell me, Dad,” I said gently. “Are you in trouble? Is something the matter in Melbourne?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, son. It’s not worth worrying about. Just something that came into my mind. Out of nowhere.” He repeated the words “out of nowhere” and then seemed genuinely perturbed by what he’d just blurted out, as if he’d given too much away.

 
“I won’t force you, Dad,” I persisted, “but if you feel like telling me…”

  He stared at me with a blank face. Finally, he spoke. “C’mon, Marky, I feel like an ice cream. Where can we get one?”

  He loved sweets and desserts, especially chocolate and ice cream, but I knew immediately that this abrupt change of topic was nothing more than a ploy to try to make light of what he had just said. Yet such was the force of his personality that I felt compelled to go along with the diversion.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, taking charge. “This place makes me feel”—he clicked his fingers as he habitually did when he was trying to search for a word in English—“claustrophobic.” He chuckled lightly at finding the right word so quickly. He put his arm around my shoulder affectionately—again uncharacteristically—and began to move us both toward the light at the far end of the tunnel.

  We surfaced into the hubbub of the street above. My father, who had always had keen eyesight, spotted a gaudy, pink-striped ice-cream van farther down the road, and after queuing for his favorite—“Strawberry. I love strawberry”—we made our way to a park nearby. As we walked along I cast a furtive glance at him. His face lit up with childlike pleasure in his ice cream.

  A small crowd had gathered in the park, enjoying the late-afternoon sun. We found a bench and silently observed the children playing on the grass nearby. My father must have quietly drawn his case onto his lap because suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he was fumbling in his pocket for something. He pulled out the well-worn key and inserted it into the case’s lock. As always, he opened the case just wide enough for his hand to slip inside. He pulled out a flat envelope and carefully closed the lid of the case before passing the envelope to me.

  “What’s this?” I asked in a low voice.

  “Something you should see, son.”

  I felt a sense of trepidation and hesitated to open it. As I made a move to do so, he suddenly snatched it back.

  “On second thought, let me do it!” He opened the envelope and slowly withdrew a small photograph. He gripped it firmly, grimacing as if in pain.

  I drew closer to him and gazed down at the photo. Although the image had discolored with age, it was relatively sharp. I saw a small boy no more than six or seven years old. Dressed in a military uniform that must have been made especially for him, he was posing proudly in front of a gaily decorated Christmas tree.

  My eyes focused on the uniform, and for a moment I caught my breath. On the lapels and sleeves of the high-necked jacket the uniform bore the lightning insignia that identified the SS. The boy was a miniature version of the stereotypical Nazi one sees in war movies. It was my father.

  I scanned the image of the boy-soldier, my father, beaming at the camera. What was my father doing dressed like this? What sort of people would let a child dress in this fashion? Who took this photograph? When was it taken? And why take a photograph like this? Myriad questions ran through my mind at once. Where was it taken? In Russia? In Latvia? Was it connected to Koidanov or Panok? It didn’t make sense. My father had never mentioned being a soldier. Only a Boy Scout of sorts.

  I began to move even closer to my father in order to scrutinize the details. But before I could, he abruptly shoved the photograph back into its innocent white envelope. He slid the envelope back into the brown case. “It’s awful, son,” was all he managed to say.

  “Is this why you’re here?” I asked. “Is that what you’ve been hedging around all week?”

  He avoided my eyes. “It’s a complicated story. We’ll talk another time.”

  “Where did it come from, Dad?”

  “It’s from the war.” He said nothing else.

  The photograph my father showed me in London in 1997.

  At that moment my feelings about the case, my so-called inheritance, shifted. I resented it and felt an inexplicable disgust toward it and even toward my father. I shrank away, wanting to escape from both. I wondered what else the case might contain. Was there something even darker, if that was possible, than what I had just seen? I found myself questioning how much he’d left out of the stories he’d been telling us all our lives. What hadn’t he told me, or my mother, or my brothers about his childhood? I began to see the battered case as a Pandora’s box: now that it had been truly opened, it might never be shut again. I couldn’t help wondering whether he’d be quite as protective of it now that he had intimated what secrets it might contain.

  It seems absurd now, but instead of pressing him further I looked around me, worried that someone nearby might have caught sight of the photograph and identified my father as the boy in it—or indeed observed any resemblance to me. But nobody had noticed anything. The family on the neighboring bench were chatting happily among themselves. I began to act as if nothing had happened. I glanced at my watch. The afternoon was almost gone. “C’mon, Dad, you’ve got a plane to catch. I’ll take you to the subway.”

  I grasped his free hand and rose, barely giving him time to secure his case, and headed off in the direction of South Kensington station.

  The platform was crowded with commuters. The train appeared suddenly.

  The doors opened directly where we were standing and passengers began to pile out. I eased my father out of their way and to one side of the carriage doors. By now, his head had dropped forward, making him seem even more dispirited than before, almost lifeless. I feared saying anything at all to him, even a simple good-bye or a bland “Safe journey, Dad.”

  In a flash, however, his listlessness evaporated. Above the din of the platform he shouted at me breathlessly, “It was Lobe and Dzenis—something they wanted me to do years ago—Dzenis made me do it—Dzenis said, ‘Tell everyone you saw nothing—that Lobe did nothing.’ But it’s not true! It’s not true! I did see things.”

  The words spilled out of him in a torrent, as if some old scar tissue had burst open to reveal a festering wound.

  “Dzenis told me that they had saved my life and now it was my turn to repay them. I didn’t want to, but I felt that I had no choice. Dzenis had already written it, so I just signed it. I did wrong.”

  He was beside himself in a paroxysm of fear, anxiety, and shame, and yet he seemed driven by the need to speak.

  A voice over the loudspeaker warned us to mind the closing doors.

  “Dad, step back!” I shouted. But before I realized what was happening, he had grabbed his bags and squeezed through the doors as they slammed shut. We stood facing each other, separated by glass. My father’s eyes were wide open, almost bulbous, as if he’d been starved of oxygen. He seemed to be in shock, astonished by his own involuntary outburst. I was appalled by his transformation but could do nothing. A railway guard’s whistle warned me to back off for safety.

  The train began to move away. I followed the carriage, breaking into a jog to keep pace with it. Through its window I saw my father find a seat and settle down, delicately nursing his case. As the train gathered speed, his carriage moved away from me. He raised his hand in a tentative farewell. For just an instant I glimpsed in him the boy in the uniform. Then the train was gone, swallowed up by the tunnel, leaving only the rattling of the tracks.

  I remember very little of my return journey to Oxford. The train soon left behind the outer suburbs of London and began to weave its way through the countryside that I normally found so comforting. Now as the certainties of my life fell by the wayside, it seemed quite alien.

  What had my father seen that he had not mentioned to our family before? What had the chocolate-factory manager Dzenis wanted my father to lie about? He had mentioned Lobe, but what was the lie about Lobe? It seemed from his sudden emotional convulsion that the roles Dzenis and Lobe played in my father’s life were far more complex than I’d ever been led to believe. And, as much as I tried, I could not erase the image of that photograph from my mind’s eye. I regretted that I hadn’t had the presence of mind either to pull him back out of the carriage or to jump onto the train with him. And now
, of course, there was no way that I could persuade my father to explain himself.

  When I reached home, I headed straight to bed, curling up fetuslike under the covers, feeling vulnerable and exposed by the bewildering events of the afternoon. Yet sleep eluded me as I imagined my father at this moment. He would be airborne by now. I pictured him perched upright in his cramped airplane seat, still nursing his case, many of whose secrets I now suspected had tormented him for most of his life.

  It dawned on me that I was losing my father and would never have him back again in the same way that I had always known him. As Dad. The comfort and safety that this term of affection had supplied throughout my life had suddenly been undermined, as if the family nest with its familiar twigs and eggs had been scattered to the four winds.

  CHAPTER THREE

  EARTH TREMORS

  After my father had returned to Australia, I held back from calling him until he’d been home for nearly a week.

  As I dialed my parents’ number, I wondered if by now he would have confessed to my mother where he’d really been and imagined he might now explain to me his cryptic outbursts. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  When he answered the phone, my father greeted me in his usual fashion, almost immediately turning on the speakerphone so that my mother could listen in. Jovial and relaxed, he asked me what I had been up to and how my week had been, careful not to indicate that he had been with me only days earlier. Clearly he’d been maintaining the charade with my mother.

  When I put the phone down, I realized that he hadn’t imparted a single piece of information, certainly nothing that related to the dramatic climax of his visit.

  Two weeks after my father’s visit, I had spoken with him two or three times, yet he still acted as if nothing had happened. On one occasion he even affectionately echoed my mother’s oft-repeated question: “When are you coming home for a visit, Marky? It’s been ages since we’ve seen you.”