I, Dreyfus Read online

  ‘I’ll put a contract in the post,’ he said miserably. ‘You drive a hard bargain, Mr Temple.’

  Sam smiled. He left the Jubilee office with no sense of triumph. Simply with satisfaction. He reckoned he had made a fair deal.

  Though Wallworthy would have wished to keep his surrender quiet, he doubted that Temple would hold his tongue. But he was wrong. Temple was well aware of the envy rampant in his profession and he did not want to nurture it. Nevertheless, within hours, the news crept and then sprinted along the grapevine. Its provenance was that of a whisper of a simple secretary whose eyes bulged as she typed nought after nought in the signature payment of the contract. It was murmured in the coffee break and passed on to the first outside visitor, a freelance editor, who, in his turn, took it to his club and bounced it on to the snooker table. Thereafter it was a free-for-all, and before the day was out it was sensationalised across the London evening paper without Wallworthy or Temple having uttered a single word.

  In her kitchen in Pimlico Mrs Lucy Dreyfus read the news. And it did not please her. She did not see it as a bonus. On the contrary, it offered yet another source of anger and envy to her husband’s persecutors, and even those who silently sympathised might well now find their sympathy turning sour. She hid the paper in a drawer in the vain hope that the news could be kept from the children.

  Chapter 3

  I see no point in waiting for the contract to arrive. I have made my decision to write my side of the story and it is not dependent on legal clauses, fees or royalties. Moreover I am anxious to make a start. Excited almost. It will be like a voyage of discovery. Besides, it will give me something to do.

  Since it is my name that I seek in these pages, I shall begin with my baptism. It’s not what the publishers want, I know. They will fail, and rightly so, to see the relevance of my baptism to the events that led to my trial. But it is relevant to me. My baptism is the very source of that elusive label I seek in these pages. Let them skip them if they will, or read with patience until I get to the trial, the heart of the matter. For that is what they are after. The heart. But I seek the soul. Bear with me.

  I have read sundry autobiographies in my time. At one point it was my favourite form of reading. I was fascinated not so much by the matter itself, but by the simple fact that anyone on earth would wish to frame himself in pen and ink, and moreover to presume that anybody else would be curious enough to read it. Autobiography is confession. But it is more than that. It is an act of arrogance. I need the first, it is true, and if the former entails the latter, I make no apology. I am by nature, with or without writing, an arrogant man. You will have relished that titbit from the journals. And now I thank God for it, for arrogance is what one needs in a hell-hole like this. It is a means of survival. But I digress. I was writing about my baptism. I don’t remember it. I know from my reading that many writers claim total recall. I suspect they lie. Births, christenings, first words, and sundry childish pearls of wisdom are learnt by hearsay or told in hindsight. This latter by its very nature is a lie, for all events told in hindsight are far from the truth. They are misted over by acquired wisdom. So I will be honest with you. It was my mother who told me about my baptism. It is her point of view, for mine was no doubt blurred by holy water. But whosoever’s view it was, my baptism was undoubtedly the first lie of my life. Some years later my brother Matthew was subject to the same deception. But that lie was not of our doing. It was thrust upon us and neither Matthew nor I can be held responsible. It was a lie because we are Jewish, and responsible Jews are never baptised.

  But in my early years it did not worry me. I did not know that I was Jewish. Occasionally we went to church en famille, and we celebrated Christmas and Easter along with our neighbours. Until one day at school I accidentally broke a pencil belonging to another boy, who turned on me with a ten-year-old’s spitting fury and called me a bloody Jew. I didn’t understand him, but I understood even less the hurt inside me. I couldn’t fathom the tears that welled to the rim of my eyes, nor the twisted offended knot in my stomach, and I suspected with fear and trembling that perhaps I was a Jew after all. I did not tell my parents of the incident for I feared their confirmation. I wanted to be like everybody else and no target for anyone’s abuse. So for many many years I was a closet Jew, even though I grew to understand that being Jewish is in the eye of the beholder, no matter how I paraded myself. My trial convinced me of that. But I resented the lie my parents had thrust upon me and it was only in later life that I began to understand it and was able to forgive them.

  You see, my parents were children born of fear. Fear was their nursemaid and tutor, and so schooled were they in terror that they felt shadowed all their lives. In 1933, they were just starting school. It was an ominous year for European Jews. In that year in Germany the bell tolled the first chime of the impending genocide. Their parents were neighbours and close friends. When in 1940 Paris fell and the German occupation began, it became clear that there was no advantage to be reaped from being a French Jew. But they could not escape. So my mother’s family moved into their neighbours’ apartment. Together they felt safer. They rarely risked the streets. My grandfather bribed the concierge to keep our residence quiet. She accepted the hush money with pleasure as in those days did many of her kind. But her son was more to be feared. Fourteen-year-old Émile knew how to turn a pretty franc. The Germans paid informers well. Émile would have sold his own grandmother for the twenty francs they paid him. Instead, he sold mine.

  Life was difficult and food was in short supply. One day in July 1942 my mother craved a cup of milk and both my grandmothers went to the dairy in the hope of finding some. They never returned. Since that time my mother never touched a drop of milk. The taste and even the look of it soured her heart. It was an aversion she passed on to me, a survivor’s inherited guilt. That night when it grew dark, their husbands, both our grandfathers, defying the curfew, went to search for them and they too were never seen again. It was later known that they were all spirited away to Drancy, that site of the round-up of French Jews, and from there they had been railroaded to Auschwitz. They had gone the way of much French-Jewish flesh at the time. Melted to the bone.

  After the grown-ups’ disappearances, my parents were somehow gathered into a miraculous children’s transport which risked the Channel to Dover, and thence into the surrounding countryside and an orphanage. Since their births, my parents have never been separated. I know little more about them. They spoke rarely about their childhood and something forbidding in their manner withheld my questioning. But I do remember a frightened reference to the name of Émile. Like most of those who got away, my parents’ tongues were stilled by survivors’ guilt.

  In the fullness of time, each at the age of nineteen, they married each other and after I was born, they took me, uncircumcised, to the church, where I was baptised. That is the lie that I have now forgiven, for I realised that, in the light of their history, they had had enough. Now they wanted peace, both for themselves and for their children. So as I grew up, despite other people’s labellings, I joined them in their silence, out of respect for and understanding of my parents’ denial. It might even have been the reason why I chose to teach in a Church of England established school as a way of underwriting their disavowal of the past. I make no apology for it although now I see how vain was that pursuit, how futile, and finally, how lacking in self-esteem. Perhaps during this exploration of myself, I shall find my beginnings and happily acknowledge them, and learn to walk with my grandparents who, like six million others of their kind, walked alone.

  Chapter 4

  I must stop now. My supper has been delivered, though outside these walls it is only tea-time. I imagine that my two children, Peter and Jean, will be sitting around the kitchen table. My wife, Lucy, would insist on the kitchen. The dining-room, if there is one, would be too painful for all of them, with my patently vacant chair at the head of the table. The kitchen has no special seating arrangements. They are r
andom and it is safer there.

  Here I eat alone in my cell. With the exception of breakfast I usually manage to dine alone. That is my choice and the governor has not objected. There is little to say about the quality of the food except that I have eaten better in my time. But I do not complain. The food is ample, if not tasty. Tonight I am glad of its respite. This writing business is entirely new to me and the sudden introspection it requires. Such is not my nature, but in my present circumstances, such reflection is forced upon one. In my days of freedom, the notion of self-confrontation never occurred to me. I had no interest in such examination. I loved life and all aspects of it and I simply got on with the living of it. But nowadays I am strangely unbusy, and I find myself thinking of my childhood and of my parents, which is surely the first step into a reconnaissance of one’s past. And this writing business promotes such reflection, and in such a pursuit I am green and unpractised. So tonight I am glad of my supper. It is a diversion of sorts and may help to take my mind off my mind.

  Chapter 5

  If only my mother had not had a craving for milk that day, my grandparents might have survived. Or might not. They could of course, through the accident of history, have been born in Austria in which case they would have been second in line in the Auschwitz queue. Their French provenance gave them a slightly longer lease on fear, longer than a Dutch, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish or Czech mortgage on the terror of capture. But in the end it made no difference. All joined the multilingual line, bewildered, enraged, and full of futile prayer. All of them. Milk or no milk.

  My parents were haunted by their grievous orphanhood until the day they died. They rarely talked about their private secret. They died three years ago, each within a month of the other, as if the burden of that secret, even in death, was too heavy to bear alone. Mercifully they were gone before all my troubles began. Had they lived to witness them, they could hardly have survived. For my situation gave the lie once and for all to their years of denial, and irrefutably demonstrated its futility. I loved them, both of them, yet I have to confess to a certain measure of solace when they died. In my weeping and my mourning I could not suppress a sigh of relief that they had at last been freed from a lifestyle of denial and painful deception.

  As a child I was unaware of all this subterfuge. My parents had been fortunate in their fostering procedures. As refugees, they had landed on the Kentish coast and for the rest of their lives they remained in that county. It became their natural habitat. They had not been separated and were able to continue a joint childhood in the care of a kindly village schoolmaster, John Percy, and his wife, Elaine, who themselves were childless, although their days were filled with children. Mr Percy was the headmaster of the village school and they lived in the school house itself, in a small village near Canterbury. Few Jews lived in the region – cathedral cities have never been the flavour of the month for Jewish settlement – and the nearest synagogue, if ever needed, was some twenty-five miles away. The village church was a few steps down the road from the school, a far more veiled venue, and it was there that my parents were married and where Matthew and I were baptised.

  I never knew the Percys. They had both died before I was born. But my parents never tired of talking about them. Their verbal memories made up for the strict silence they kept in respect of their natural parents, a silence that was never broken. The Percys had raised them as their own and both were taught at the village school in which they lived. At eighteen, my father was sent to a teacher’s training-college in Canterbury and my mother to a domestic science school. When qualified, they were able to slowly relieve them of their school duties, and eventually they cared for them in their retirement. Before their deaths some years later, the Percys requested my parents to take over the running of the school, and they lived and worked in that village until they died. Then the local vicar buried them in the village churchyard and a Jesus tomb leant over them both, the final confirmation of the lie that they had lived.

  Now, in the confines of this cell, it sickens my heart to think of it. They lay within comfortable earshot of the Canterbury Cathedral bells, a million miles from the oven-tombs of their parents. But I understand them and, because I will no longer walk in their vagrant path, I forgive them. But unlike them, I can afford to keep the memory of my mother and father alive, and from time to time I took my children back to that school house where I spent such a happy childhood. And yes, we visited their grandparents’ graves in the churchyard and they did not question the Jesus that protects them. For they too have never seen the inside of a synagogue, and although they know about the ovens, they are unaware of any personal connection. And this I swear, that if ever my innocence is proved, and I am once again a free man, I shall tell them how Drancy, the freight-trains, the multilingual lines and the ovens are their own personal legacy.

  It occurs to me now that possibly Wallworthy will be getting rather fed up with this Jew bit of mine. But I don’t care. It is after all, the core of my tale. It is what I, Dreyfus, am all about. It was what the trial was about, it was the nourishment of the accusation, it was the sickness of the whole society that condemned me. So bear with me, Mr Wallworthy. There could be no book without it.

  Matthew and I were village children, and though we were only two hours’ journey from London, it was not until my eighteenth year that I first saw the capital. And it frightened me. My parents too. Mostly village-orientated, they were as uncertain as I. And as for Matthew, he couldn’t understand it at all. The London visit was a treat, my reward for having gained a scholarship to Oxford to read English. My parents were overjoyed, for to them Oxford spelt the English establishment, and my admittance to its historic and revered portals annulled once and for all their alien provenance. Their son had arrived, and by osmosis, so had they. A year later Matthew would be in Manchester in his first year of an engineering degree. And my parents were very proud of him. They had not been ambitious for either of us. They were happy for us to fade into an accepting background, as they had done, and to earn a decent living. And that is exactly what we did. Both of us. Until my fall, of course, which they did not live to see.

  My years at Oxford were pleasant ones. I encountered no hostility and I mixed easily with my fellow students. I joined a number of societies but I gave a wide, almost anti-Semitic berth to the Jewish Students Club. And I admit to being ashamed. But I did not wish to draw attention to myself. To do so would have been to let my parents down. Though I did make one Jewish friend, Tobias Gould. He was reading law and we saw much of each other. He went to work in Canada and for many years we lost touch. Until my trial, when he flew over to give me his support. Of all the friends I made during my Oxford sojourn, Tobias was the only one who acknowledged and backed me during my trial. Most of the others claimed not to have known me. After all, when the prosecution is part of that very establishment to which they belong, they could hardly be expected to take the side of the defence, especially when the accused was not of their kind. On his last visit to my cell, Tobias told me that he had made a nostalgic visit to his alma mater, and he had heard ‘Dreyfus’ whispered in the common room. ‘Well, what d’you expect, after all,’ a Fellow had said. ‘He’s one of “those”.’ Tobias was eavesdropping, so he could not argue with the man. In any case, what was the point? Scapegoating is a compulsive neurosis and you don’t argue with bedlam. We laughed about it, Tobias and I, and when he had gone I relished that proof of his friendship.

  Every Christmas Matthew and I would come together again in the village school house. My parents made a big production of Christmas. It was their annual plea of ‘count us in’ to the village community. And so our Christmas tree was bigger than anybody else’s, and the presents more lavish. The holly wreath covered half our front door and our many visitors had to search for the doorbell. During the holiday my parents entertained on a large and generous scale. One Christmas especially stays in my memory. The village had a new resident. I thought he was from foreign parts, though he professed that
he was English-born. But he spoke the language rather too well, with that perfection that a foreigner often cultivates. Did he too want to be ‘counted in’? His name was John Coleman. He was an engineer and he had secured a post with an industrial plant near Canterbury. He had chosen to live in our village, similar, he said, to the one where he had spent his boyhood. He was a bachelor, in his twenties, and my parents thought he might be lonely. Especially over Christmas. So the newcomer was shortly invited to take tea in our drawing-room. From our front window, I watched as he searched for the doorbell. I let him look. I did not like his appearance. It was stiff and obedient. At last he found the bell and rang it triumphantly. Matthew answered the door and led him into the drawing-room. He shook hands with my parents and introduced himself to Matthew, who passed him on to me.

  Now that I know exactly who John Coleman was, and the evil that attended him, I find it difficult to find words to describe him. In any case I am tired, and bewildered at my fatigue. All I have done today is to move my pen across the page. Yet I am physically exhausted. It seems that the price of every word I have written has been a press-up, a knee-bend or a toe-touch. I shall sleep well tonight. I know it. And even maybe, for the first time in my cell-life, with a modicum of pleasure.

  Chapter 6

  Sam Temple was an agent who strove to know his clients ‘in the round’. And, to this end he needed to meet with Mrs Dreyfus. He sensed she would not receive him without permission from her husband and he was not too confident of Dreyfus’s consent. He rang the prison governor to make another appointment, but this time he stressed that Dreyfus should first be asked whether he would receive him. Later that afternoon a call came from the prison saying that Dreyfus would welcome him, but only for a little while, since he was seriously occupied. Sam Temple smiled at the response. ‘Seriously occupied’ was a writer’s phrase. He did not doubt that Dreyfus had started on his story.