“I think it’s a warning,” Marino says.
And where’s Rocky these days? I almost ask him.
“Your dear son Rocky,” Berger says it for me.
Marino takes a slug of beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn’t respond. Berger glances at her watch and looks up at us. “Well,” she says, “Merry Christmas, I guess.”[“_Toc37098932”]
CHAPTER 30
ANNA’S HOUSE ISDARK AND STILL WHEN ICOML IN at nearly three A.M. She has thoughtfully left on a light in the hallway and one in the kitchen near a crystal tumbler and the bottle of Glenmorangie, just in case I need a sedative. At this hour, I decline. A part of me wishes Anna were awake. I am halfway tempted to rattle around in hopes she will wander in and sit down with me. I have become oddly addicted to our sessions even if I am now supposed to wish they had never taken place. I make my way to the guest wing and start thinking about transference and wonder if I am experiencing this with Anna. Or maybe I just feel lonely and gloomy because it is Christmas and I am wide awake and frazzled in someone else’s house after investigating violent death all day, including one I am accused of committing.
Anna has left a note on my bed. I pick up the elegant creamy envelope and can tell by its weight and thickness that whatever she has written is lengthy. I leave my clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and imagine the ugliness that must linger in their very fabrics because of where I have been and what 1 have done the past twenty hours. 1 do not realize until 1 am out of the shower that the clothes carry with them the dirty fire smell of the motel room. Now I ball them up in a towel so I can forget about them until they can go to the dry cleaner. I wear one of Anna’s thick robes to bed and am edgy as I pick up the letter again. I open it and unfold six stiff pages of watermarked engraved stationery. I begin to read, willing myself not to go too fast. Anna is deliberate and wants me to take in every word, because she does not waste words.
Dearest Kay,
As a child of the war, I learned that truth is not always what is right or good or best. If the SS came to your door and asked if you had Jews inside, you did not tell the truth if you were hiding Jews. When members of the Totenkopf SS occupied my family home in Austria, I could not tell the truth about how much I hated them. When the SS commander of Mauthausen came into my bed so many nights and asked me if I enjoyed what he did to me, I did not tell the truth.
He would tell vile jokes and hiss in my ear, imitating the sound of the Jews being gassed, and I laughed because I was afraid. He would get very drunk sometimes when he came back from the camp, and once he bragged he had killed a 12-year-old village boy in nearby Langenstein during an SS hunting raid. Later I learned this was not so, that the LeitstelleChief of Staatspolizei in Linzwas the one who shot the boy, but I believed what I was told at the time and my fear was indescribable. I, too, was a civilian child. No one was safe. (In 1945 that same commander died in Gusen and his body was displayed to the public for days. I saw it and spat. That was the truth about how I felta truth I could not tell earlier!)
Truth is relative, then. It is about timing. It is about what is safe. Truth is the luxury of the privileged, of people who have plenty of food and are not forced to hide because they are Jews. Truth can destroy, and therefore it is not always wise or even healthy to be truthful. A strange thing for a psychiatrist to admit,yes? I give you this lesson for a reason, Kay. After you read my letter, you must destroy it and never admit it existed. I know you well Such a small covert act will be hard for you. If you are asked, you must say nothing about what I am telling you here.