The Reader from Thetford was inexorable: the review ran for at least a thousand indignant words, detailing the family farm, how the boy had been taken in, and his ingratitude after the war, when a Latvian aid society had found him a permanent foster home in Braintree, Essex, and he’d never responded to the many affectionate postcards sent to him by the reviewer’s family.
If true, this was the Wilkomirski story all over again. Lucy forced her mind into a state of numb agnostic cool as she clicked back through the later reviews to see if anyone had picked up on these revelations, if they were revelations. Nobody had. The preponderance of comments echoed the American ones, though many had that sniffy old-boy air of self-important judiciousness. She then went back to Reader from Thetford and clicked on See more about me.
Marjorie Tillman of Thetford, Norfolk: she liked books on history and travel, and her Favourites list included A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Mountbatten: A Biography. Lucy dialed Qwest for international directory assistance and got the number for an M. Tillman, 3, The Broadwalk, Thetford. It was midnight, eight in the morning in England, and too early to roust Ms. Tillman from her bed with a call out of the blue. Lucy made coffee to keep herself awake for another hour.
If true. She had to see that photograph. As a piece of writing, the Amazon.co.uk review was itself suspect — its rankling, aggrieved tone sometimes verged on the crazy. People’s obsessions with the famous led them into all sorts of delusions, and this woman might turn out to be on a par with the cranks who sighted Elvis in their local supermarket. Interesting, too, that no one had followed up her accusations; maybe habitués of the British site knew her to be a nutcase. Lucy checked out a dozen of her other reviews, which were all peevish but not noticeably insane. On travel books, she sounded like a New Yorker fact-checker, forever putting people to rights on trifling mistakes, so presumably she had money to spend on globe-trotting.
By the light of the architect’s halogen lamp on her desk, Lucy pored over the book jacket. Until this moment the picture had said “refugee camp” in stark, unambiguous terms: the skeletal boy with his feet in grass, the closely spaced lines of barbed wire, the bare dirt beyond. Now that she was reading it as “chicken farm,” it made equal but unsatisfactory sense, for there were no other clues — no human figures, and no chickens, either. It could as easily be a refugee farm or a chicken camp.
At 1:03 A.M. Lucy dialed the fourteen-digit number in after-breakfast England.
“Hello?”
For a millisecond, Lucy thought she’d accidentally got her mother on the line, for the voice was hers — or rather, it was the voice her mother liked to affect when she was feeling grand, one often heard on PBS but never, in Lucy’s experience, in real life. She asked if she was talking to Marjorie Tillman, and the voice said, half bray, half bark, “Yarse?”
Stating her business, Lucy talked up the reputation of GQ, though she doubted if it would mean much in Thetford, Norfolk. But the woman, far from treating her as a rude intruder on her morning, sounded as if she’d been waiting for years for Lucy to call her, though she was practically shouting, as if conveying her voice across an ocean and a continent via satellite required an extraordinary effort of the lungs.
“But of course I remember. I was ten when the war ended, four when it started, so the whole period’s very vivid to me! He was rather a dim, moony sort of child, always wandering round the garden picking flarze. We had to take him in. Either one took in refugee children or one got billeted with evacuees!”
These, Lucy gathered, were an even lower form of life than refugees.
“I mean, it was the shock, you see — seeing that picture on the cover. I have to say I’m glad my mother’s not alive. It would’ve killed her, the sheer ingratitude! And he never wrote back, not once. Then this…atrocity! We had to drive him to the hospital in Norwich.” Norritch. “Week after week, with petrol desperately short in those days. For his ruddy coeliac. And this is what we get for thanks, these barefaced lies about having survived the war in concentration camps and God knows what. Poland, my foot! Thetford was where he was, two miles outside Thetford. We used to have a hundred and fifty acres there.”
It didn’t sound like much to Lucy. Even the wretched Lewis Olson had twelve sections at 640 acres to a section, but of course English farmland was exceptionally wet and rich, so perhaps such a negligible acreage might go with Marjorie Tillman’s very upstairs accent.
“He had to be fed on bananas, you know? Bananas were incredibly scarce during the war, but they were one of the few things that child could keep down. They were specially flown in, in RAF transports, for the likes of him.”
“But you have the same photograph as the one on the b-b-b-book jacket?”
“I’m looking at it right now! It’s in a frame, on the Welsh dresser, on the knickknack shelf, where my mother used to keep her mementos. Even though he never wrote, she kept his picture to remind herself of the war years. ‘Our little refugee’ was what Mummy used to call him. I can’t tell you how this ridiculous book would have hurt her. It would’ve cut her to the core.”
“And you’re sure it’s the same one?”
“I’m not blind!” That shout again. “Of course the printers have done things to the one on the book, touched it up and so forth. But it’s him, all right, by the old chicken run.”
Frantic to see Augie publicly exposed as an ingrate and a liar, Marjorie Tillman was Lucy’s eager collaborator. She checked her local phone book for the nearest Federal Express office, which turned out to be in “Norritch,” agreed to have the picture copied later that morning, and wrote down Lucy’s FedEx account number and her address at the Acropolis.
“And you’re going to show him up in your magazine? In America?”
“If it really is the same p-p-picture.”
“There’s no if about it. You’ll see — and I hope your magazine has an extremely large circulation. It’s about time someone put a stop to that man’s dreadful nonsense.”
As Lucy was thanking her for her help and about to say good-bye, Marjorie Tillman said, “Of course he didn’t call himself August Vanags then; he called himself Juris Abeltins.”
“Could you spell that?” Lucy said.
UP LATE after dinner with Gilda Hahn — at which she’d spent the dessert course, followed by two Courvoisiers, in tears — Tad was web surfing the world’s news. He read a long glum article in the Guardian, by an English jurist who was cataloging the erosion of civil liberties in the UK since the London bombings in July 2005. The Brits were playing Simon Says, slavishly following every move dictated by the U.S. administration — imprisoning people without trial, battening down on free speech, giving the police and secret services unprecedented powers to mine private data and tap phones of legislators, to harass and arrest citizens, to deport aliens…the usual story. Apparently in Britain there were even more spy cameras than here, with motorists followed around the country by the hidden eyes of government. According to this guy, the Brits — with no written constitution — were pretty much screwed. Canada was beginning to look like the last place in the English-speaking world where civil liberties were still relatively unscathed. It was always at the back of Tad’s mind that one day the time would come when he, Lucy, and Alida might have to cross the 49th parallel as political refugees — if the Canadians would let them in, which was a big if, for half of Canada’s neighbors to the south must be harboring similar thoughts. And of course Lucy would have to be dragged up there by her hair. Until the undercover agents were actually at her door, she’d go on living in her bubble of delusion that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.