Degas' Dust. Carnie Matisonn
on the pages of whatever book he was absorbing, the ever-present cup of coffee in his right hand.
Occasionally, he would glance at an old letter. He never uttered a word or raised his head. This silent scenario repeated itself almost every night.
I could not have been more than ten years old when, one night, I walked into the kitchen at about 2am. Natie’s posture, the coffee, the cracks in the walls above the sink, the rain dripping through a hole in the ceiling into a bucket behind him, a cigarette burning in an ashtray to his right and the sound of thunder cast a pall of gloom over the kitchen. The letter I’d seen him reading so often was again open in front of him. It was clearly old, the paper brown and cracked along the folds and the writing a faded blue that may once have been navy or black.
I had to ask about it.
“Natie, what’s in the letter?” But he didn’t reply. I repeated the question and he responded by turning his head and raising his eyebrows. This was his way of telling me he wanted nothing to do with me or my sudden curiosity.
As I opened the fridge, he stood up, book in hand and walked out of the kitchen. I could hear him opening and closing the bathroom door. I took the chance to look at the letter. It was written in Yiddish, in the hand of what was obviously an educated writer. It was addressed to his mother, Kate, and the depth of feeling in many of the words troubled me deeply.
“Fur kine vert sine” (from envy grows hate), I began to read. The author, whose name I could not make out, spoke of the persecution of the Jews in Norway. “Margot hot moireh; far far mentchen, nuz nen sikhhiten” (fear God, but be wary of men). “People have feared imminent death and helplessness,” it went on.
In reference to Hitler, the mysterious letter writer said: “God should visit upon him the best of the ten plagues. It will never be redeemed. It will only be through the merit of children, because the deeds of their fathers can never be forgiven.”
Natie returned to the kitchen and retrieved his seat at the table. I told him I had read the sad letter. He didn’t seem to mind.
“Who wrote it?” I asked.
There was a long pause as Natie pondered the page and the prospect of our discussion. Finally, he lifted his head and gazed blankly at the wall above my head. He spoke about a brother of his father’s whom he had never met and never would.
“Perhaps it was written by a childhood friend or a relative. I do not know, as the events of the war were too painful for him to discuss with me. His name was Karnielsohn and my father was deeply saddened when he learnt of his brother’s death.”
Natie appeared to be talking to himself and was almost oblivious to my presence.
It’s hard to say what it was about the mystery of the letter and the tragic events it hinted at that so captured my imagination, but I knew, somehow, even as a mere child of ten, that there was something of great significance behind it.
“I want to know about it,” I told him. “You have to tell me. I want to know about the author of the letter,” I demanded.
Natie turned to face me while placing the letter in the pocket of his dressing gown.
“I cannot talk about those dark times simply because you want me to,” he replied, tears welling from his eyes. My father slowly stood up, fidgeting with the contents of his dressing gown pocket. At that moment, I was certain I would never see the letter again. He left the room with the weight of his emotions clearly heavy on his shoulders. His heart had reasons for concealing the answers his mind refused to allow him to articulate.
But that only made me want to understand it more.
There were numerous tantalising notes, letters, scraps of information in English and Yiddish in Natie’s drawer. There were even small artworks. Whenever Natie was not home, I would pore over those papers, trying to understand the stories, secrets and mysteries they seemed to hold.
My young eyes came across stories containing names of artist after artist. Gauguin, Cézanne, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cassatt, Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Moore, Degas … the names were sprinkled on every page, with details about their lives and artworks that meant nothing to me. But I read each piece of paper hungrily, and eventually committed all of it to memory. To me, the immediate reason was to try to understand some of the secrets about my father, but I also knew this was important for deeper reasons I did not fully grasp, but hoped to some day understand.
In Natie’s drawer I came upon a sketch signed by Paul Cézanne with the following inscription on the left-hand side: “Harry Abbot, Paris, ’99”. With it was a somewhat damaged and torn piece of paper with a sketch of Paul Gauguin and a handwritten note addressed to my granduncle Karnielsohn, which read: “Xmas 1889 … To my esteemed sponsor, patron and friend …
“Greetings! May you be blessed with health, wealth and the goodwill of all men (and women) this festive time and always!
Yours
Harry HA”
That name, Harry Abbot, like all the other names and stories from my father’s drawer, stuck in my head. I don’t know what happened to the sketch and the letter – both are probably long gone – but I remembered them for the rest of my life.
I did not know Natie to be either an art connoisseur or sentimentalist. The papers had lain beneath the liners at the bottom of one of his drawers, as though placed there and forgotten.
The first time I asked Natie about them I recall he was standing up, leaning over the boudoir grand piano, reading the newspaper. He had his usual glass of whisky in his right hand. “Where did you get that sketch and what does it mean?”
When he failed to answer, I tried again. “Natie, can you tell me anything about it and what it means?”
Still nothing was forthcoming. Either my father really didn’t know, had no interest in telling me or simply did not care.
My small discovery became part of the intriguing and incomplete puzzle of what I knew about Karnielsohn.
After he started becoming a heavy drinker, I always had difficulty engaging Natie in discussions. Questions I put to him merited little more than a dismissive retort. Perhaps this was because I posed these questions when he was reading or tired. Or perhaps he didn’t want to be bothered with my persistence. Publicly, Natie had often been a wonderful actor and raconteur, but I was rarely his chosen audience.
There were times when Natie set out on visits to his Freemason’s lodge wearing a dark suit and bowtie. When I asked him what it meant to be a Freemason, what was in his black bag and what took place at the meetings, his reply was always that he had taken an oath of confidentiality – and that was that.
To the extent that I came to know my father, it was through being present at discussions he had with friends who shared his interest in theatre, journalism or literature. One of his closest friends, Raymond Matuson, was a well-known actor and producer who Natie would visit on many a Sunday morning. I accompanied my father on a number of these visits and was privy to his conversations with Raymond. We would arrive at his avuncular friend’s small, conservative middle-class home in Greenside to an always-warm smile and ebullient hospitality. Raymond never failed to take a keen interest in whichever one of Natie’s children came along and, naturally, I loved these visits. I would listen to Raymond regaling Natie with stories about whichever current book, play or film he was working on. Not to be outdone, Natie would reciprocate with a considered response and ideas of his own about a storyline they could collaborate on. I was able to witness the best version of my father here, shorn for a time of the self-conscious weight of failure that grew heavier about his shoulders with every passing year.
It was during these discussions that I came to learn more about Karnielsohn. On one occasion, Natie and Raymond were discussing books about the rise and fall of the Third Reich. A book by William Shearer by that name was part of Natie’s collection.
Raymond asked: “Natie, with all your interest and knowledge about how the Third Reich prospered and became history’s worst human killing