The Prosperous Thief (35 page)

A blast of wind blew her hair across her face as she left the main city precinct. She twisted her hair into a rope and tucked it down the collar of her jacket. Once in the park she slackened her pace, and at last she felt the tangle of an impossible week start to loosen. Night had now fallen, but with a clear sky and a near-complete moon, not darkly, and Laura was not at all nervous. She knew this park, the well-lit paths littered with the first autumn leaves, the open spaces, the shadowy alcoves, recognised the old-fashioned drunks who lingered here, as opposed to the jittery young junkies in the other park a block away. The most dangerous creatures were the feuding possums. So a sense of unease which seemed to grow as the noise of the day subsided struck her as odd. It did not concern her parents, nor politicians who would do anything to stay in power; it was the American, Raphe Carter.
I could start with you
, he had said. And in the cool of the evening, as she walked beneath the yellowing canopy of elms, her skin sparked and prickled as if someone had scratched her.

‘He sounds like your standard quick-fix American,’ Nell said as she topped up their drinks.‘I should know, the university’s full of them.’

Nell launched into the latest idiocy of her head of department, Don from Oregon, whose memory had rotted after years of dedicated dope smoking. But Laura interrupted.

‘There was something else about this Raphe Carter. He was so sure of himself and so sure of his right to be in my office. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing.’

Nell brought the drinks over and sat next to her on the couch. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the Seinfeld lookalike,’ she said putting her arm around Laura.‘It’s these bloody politicians, not a humane heartbeat between them. They’re threatening everything you’ve ever worked for.’

This was exactly what Laura wanted to hear. As a source for her current unease, the known danger of reactionary politicians was far preferable to the unknown Raphe Carter. And yet those last words of his with their whiff of threat,
I could start with you
,would not go away. With her anxiety again on the rise, Laura decided to do a search on Raphe Carter, easy enough to discover if he really was who he said he was, and was already on her feet when she stopped. It had been a shocker of a week, dinner was in the oven, and as a cause for doing anything, anxiety was rarely productive.

She returned to the couch, nudged Wystan aside and stretched herself out. ‘Play me something soppy and romantic,’ she said.

Nell settled at the piano and played some Schubert, then a little Schumann and finally Chopin, playing with the same vigour as she did everything else. Laura lay back on the couch, content just to watch. Even after all these years, more than a decade now, just the presence of this woman could mollify her. She watched and listened and floated on waves of Chopin, found herself thinking that Raphe Carter had the same physical appeal as Nell, the same smooth, androgynous features. Disaster with the face of an angel. Can you see it coming? And wondered at this voice, these strange words.

She turned on her side, away from the piano, away from her lover, and forced herself to shift back to the last American. Such an effort it took, as if her mind were an ageing gearbox. Back she went, back to the woman who had turned up not long before her father died, the woman who had laced up Henry and held him captive, the woman whose name had until this minute not connected. The woman who was Alice Carter.

A moment later Laura was on her feet and ringing her brother. Alice Carter and now Raphe Carter, surely too much of a coincidence. Daniel met the American woman, Daniel would surely remember if she had a son. She dialled a wrong number, then dialled again. The phone rang and rang, eventually an answering machine. Of course, Friday night, Shabbat, and Daniel as likely to answer the telephone as convert to Christianity. Laura blurted out a confused account of the meeting with Raphe Carter and was cut off mid-tale. She rang again, an engaged signal while the answering machine reset. Then she remembered Nell had met the American woman. But Nell couldn’t recall whether she had a son. Laura pleaded with her to try and remember.

‘I expect you’ll never hear from this Raphe Carter again,’ Nell said in an attempt to calm her.

Laura shook her off. She returned to the phone and left a short and what she hoped was a coherent message on Daniel’s machine. Then she excused herself and went for a walk. She moved briskly through the dark streets, pacing off her anxiety, and felt considerably better when she returned. She poured herself a fresh glass of wine and tried to settle into the evening. But half an hour later she knew it was hopeless. She pleaded a headache, swallowed some painkillers and went to bed. When next she awoke it was 1.50 a.m. and Nell was fast asleep beside her. Laura lay in the dark for almost an hour, eyes wide open to the blackness. Finally she lifted herself from the bed, wrapped a rug around her and went to the couch. There she worried about the two Carters until dawn.

It was nearly aweek before Laura spoke to Daniel as he was away on business, a difficult week made even more so with Nell curiously absent even when she was present. Nell assured her there was nothing to worry about, rather she was flat out at work and simply didn’t have time or energy for what she termed the ‘Carter fantasy’.

As it happened, the whole Carter issue fizzled. When finally Laura did speak to her brother, he remembered the woman but little else, and certainly not whether she had a son.

‘Leave it alone, Laura,’ he said in a voice uncharacteristically gentle. ‘Leave the past alone.’ And after a pause, ‘There are other ways of filling up silences.’

Raphe was full of the past when he returned home to San Francisco, and charged with a new energy. He’d faced his worst enemy and found her not the least bit terrifying. And it helped to have a real and tangible target for his sometimes out-of-control imaginings. But with a clamour of modern-day problems awaiting him, he had absolutely no time to dwell on the past. He spent his first week back in student selection, interviewing a stream of eighteen year olds with brains like music videos. Juno said he had only himself to blame, given he was the instigator of the selection process. He disagreed: there was nothing wrong with his system, it was the applicants who were at fault.

The system involved a short interview for all prospective students of Holocaust studies. Raphe had designed it a couple of years earlier to weed out the lazy sentimentalists who had been signing up for his courses expecting a Hollywood guide to atrocity. And while it demanded a lot of time initially, it paid off in much more rewarding classes throughout the year.

‘You’re crazy,’ Juno said. ‘What teacher in their right mind would lose a week, lose even a day of valuable research time if they didn’t have to?’

But he wanted only committed students, young people who were struggling to understand the long shadow of the Holocaust, people who would approach the material with the sensitivity and respect it deserved. A few years earlier one of his students had written Holocaust blasphemy for her final assignment, an odious short story about a modern-day trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, during which a couple had sex in the wooded area alongside crematoria four and five. A couple having sex on the very spot where Jewish women and children had waited their turn at death. It was outrageous, and Raphe wanted no more students like this, thus the mandatory interview. But the new system was powerless against the crop which greeted him on his return from Australia. Only a handful made the grade, yet if he didn’t meet his quota, his budget would be cut.

‘Forget your principles, Raphe, just take the lot of them,’ Juno said.‘They’re students, for God’s sake, and you’re treating them like little scholars. Deal with them as quickly and with as little effort as possible, and get down to the real business of your own research.’

Juno’s argument was less than judicious given that research was not a happy topic in their household at present. Or rather Raphe’s research. Juno was well satisfied. Through arcane and devious methods known only to academics, the money donated for Holocaust studies which Raphe had hoped would buy him out of teaching while he wrote his next book had miraculously appeared in the black studies’ budget. And Juno, his own beloved, was using it to write her next book. His money, her book.

He had tried to be fair, he had tried to be understanding, but it was clear that yet again the importance and specificity of the Holocaust was being eroded. Juno not surprisingly disagreed. She was very sorry about his grant, but if he were to miss out, then better she benefit than some of their colleagues.

She was, however, less understanding on the larger issue.

‘We can all learn from each other. Putting the Holocaust, or rather your Holocaust, the Jewish Holocaust, in a class of its own, is dangerous. For a start it has you siding with those who suggest that homosexuals and gypsies were lesser victims.’

In fact he did have some opinions about this but it was not the time to admit to them. He watched Juno as she tried to persuade him out of his misery, watched rather than listened, and what he saw was a movie stretching into the not-too-distant future. Juno, whom he had believed to be the love of his life, would soon, he feared, be the most recent in a long line of failed relationships.

What sort of man reaches forty without at least one child and one marriage? What sort of man has a track record with women that is at best hideously untidy and at worst grounds for long-term therapy? Yet it should have worked with Juno. She was beautiful, she was intelligent and they’d managed well together for five years. But as he focused more closely on what she was saying he realised there was little hope. She was lambasting him about ‘his’ Holocaust, how without it he would lose his primary reason for living, and referring to his ‘damned grandfather’ who, according to her, wouldn’t thank his grandson for his obsessive attention.

‘Just leave him in peace,’ she said. ‘And the Australian girl too. She’s done nothing wrong.’

It was ludicrous to have ever thought Juno would understand. Juno, the love of his life. Juno, exotic right down to her name.

‘What sort of name is that?’ he had asked when she first took over black studies at the centre.

‘The sort of name you’d choose if you had scholarly aspirations and your parents had saddled you with Jill,’ she had replied.

Raphe had fallen in love with her before the week was out. She was so vibrant, she seemed to spill her very own edges.‘You’re so
big
,’ he would tell her later. Everything she said was fascinating and new, everything about her was so passionate.

Five years, five good years, but with her now pocketing his research money and slandering the Holocaust as some sort of personal pathology, it was easy to regret the merging of his private life with his professional. He had arrived home from Australia full of Laura Lewin and the wonderful life she had gained courtesy of the murder of his grandfather. And while he may have presumed a little too much on Juno’s interest, he was nonetheless shocked when out of the blue she said she refused to countenance his madness any longer. She went on to accuse him of some sort of bizarre appropriation of the Holocaust.

‘You’d be as slight as air without it,’ she said.

He went berserk. But whatever he could dish up she could always dish up better. In the end he decided she would certainly achieve higher billing than him in the madness stakes.‘I’ve had your Holocaust,’ she said as she cut his Armani shirt into neat hexagonal patches.‘I’ve absolutely had your Holocaust,’ she said when she tried to cut him into neat hexagonal patches. She said she’d prefer to tear him into slender strips, but given he was nothing more than a huge lump of gristle, she was not about to waste her energy.

Juno had a wonderful turn of phrase even when angry.Particularly when angry.

The Armani shirt, as it happened, was just the beginning. They made up, but a few days later it was on again.

‘At times you act as if you are your dead grandfather,’ she said. ‘The rest of the time you’re perfectly happy just to play God.’

Attack after attack, but it took the destruction of his Mies van der Rohe chair to break him. They were having another argument, she was attacking the memory of his grandfather and Raphe was attacking her in return, and suddenly she was spreading the contents of the pantry over his Mies van der Rohe chair. The chair was so new that before the onslaught it still smelled of the store. As he attempted to remove jelly and horseradish, peanut butter and a trattoria’s worth of virgin olive oil, he told her he wanted her out by morning.

Always a step ahead of him, she left the same night. The door shut behind her and immediately he regretted it. She was the love of his life. They had their differences, but they were not irreconcilable. And given she was a black American and he the son of a German-born Holocaust survivor, they had done remarkably well.

He did not go to work the next day, instead he spent it in front of the computer writing her a mammoth email. He sent it off during the afternoon. The following morning, a Saturday, when there was still no reply, he sent it again, together with a long but eloquent footnote: he loved her and would always love her being the general gist. Two more chapter-length emails were sent off before he learned from a colleague she had moved in with the professor of German.