“Okay, I’ll do that. It’s hard, though. Despite my family’s liberal-bordering-on-radical attitudes, we’re not a family with open communication. I know what my parents want, and if I deliver, I get the goodies. I don’t rock the boat, I sail on smooth waters. So here it goes.”
Decker nodded encouragement.
“When you asked me if my family is Jewish, and I said way back when, I wasn’t being snide. But I wasn’t being entirely truthful, and that’s the problem. My last name is Golding. My father’s father … my paternal grandfather … was Jewish. My paternal grandmother was Catholic. My mother’s mother is Dutch Lutheran, her dad was Irish Catholic. I’m a real mutt as far as any faith goes. So my parents—like the good liberals they are—raised me with no organized religion and just a concept of justice for all. Not that I’m putting my parents down … Do you know what they do?”
“Golding Recycling.”
“Yeah. Did you know that they are among L.A.’s top one hundred industrialists?”
“Your parents are an entity.”
“I’ve got to give them credit. They’re sincere. Everything they do has the environment or civil rights or the homeless or AIDS or some other cause behind it. They are the consummate fund-raisers. Sometimes it got in the way at home—it’s just my brother and me—but at least fifty percent of the time, one parent was there for me or for Karl. That’s Karl with a K.”
“As in Marx. And you’re named after Che.”
“You got it. My parents weren’t masters of subtlety. They’ve become more sophisticated since the naming days, but even in their most radical days, they talked the talk, but they never crossed the line. That’s why they’re living in a seven-thousand-square-foot house in Canoga Estates instead of creating false identities and running from the law.”
“You like your parents.”
“Yeah … yeah, I do. I … admire them although I’m aware of their faults. That’s why this is all so screwed up.”
“What’s screwed up?”
“Me. I’ll tell you my part in the mess, but that’s as far as I’ll take it. I’m not a rat, I don’t name names.”
“So there are others?”
“I didn’t say that. For your purposes, I was the sole perpetrator.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“That’s my story. Should I go on?”
“I’m still here,” Decker said. The boy didn’t seem to know how to start. Decker helped him out. “Why did you vandalize the synagogue?”
“That’s a good question. I have nothing against Jews.” He looked away. “It has more to do with my personal problems. I’ve always been obsessive-compulsive, and I’m not just throwing out psych terms. I’ve always had weird rituals. Some of them I’ve outgrown. But some … I can’t help it. We don’t have to go into specifics, but my obsessions are relevant because once I get a thought into my head, I can’t let go. And that’s the problem. I have these dreams … more like fantasies because I’m awake when I think about them. It has to do with my Jewish grandfather—Isaac Golding. Well, it turns out that he wasn’t Jewish. Matter of fact, I think he was a Nazi.”
Decker kept his face flat. “Isaac’s a strange name for a Nazi.”
“That’s because it wasn’t a real name. I found this all out about six months ago. Remember I told you the honors civics assignment?”
“The family tree. Dr. Ramparts.”
“Yeah. Exactly. It’s a semester project. Dr. Ramparts wants it done in detail and correctly. So I’ve been working on this for a while, mostly getting oral history down from my parents because all my grandparents are dead. But then I figure I should do paper research for the sake of completion. So I started going through trunks of old documents that my dad has buried in the attic.”
“An attic?” Decker asked.
“Yeah. I know that’s weird for L.A. homes. But like I said, we have a big home.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Go on. You’re digging through old documents.”
“Yeah, right. I think my dad didn’t even know about the shit. It was given to him after his mother died.” Ernesto hesitated, then drank some water. “Anyway, my grandfather supposedly escaped the Nazis and moved to Argentina in 1937. Except old papers showed me that Grandpa’s account was off by ten years. From what I could tell, Grandpa actually came to South America in 1946 or 1947 under the name of Yitzchak Golding. Yitzchak is Isaac in Hebrew. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”
Decker nodded. Yitzchak was the name of Rina’s late husband—the father of his stepsons.
Ernesto took a breather and went on. “So I figure okay … so Grandpa came after the war. He made a mistake. When I knew him, he was old and a little senile, so his absentmindedness is completely within context. So, I point out this little discrepancy to my dad, expecting a logical explanation. Instead, Dad freezes up, then accuses me of trying to stir up trouble … which was totally ridiculous. Usually, if Dad doesn’t want to talk about it, he just kind of gets this condescending smile and says something like ‘another time, Che.’ Dad calls me Che when he’s trying to prove a point. But this time he gets mad. He gets red in the face. He stomps off. I’m shocked. This means, you know, I hit a nerve.”
Silence.
Decker said, “So what happened?”
“Nothing. I never brought it up, and certainly Dad never brought it up again.”
“So now you’re curious and you have no logical explanation and no one to talk to.”
“Exactly! I technically dropped it, but it’s been plaguing me. It’s on my mind all the time. Because I get to thinking that if Grandpa did come over in ’47, that must have meant that he was in Europe at the time of the war. And being a Jew during the war, he must have suffered somehow. Because I have a couple of friends whose grandparents were European and Jewish, and they have war stories. But I never remember hearing any war stories. Nothing about the … the Holocaust … the death camps. No survival tales, either.”
“I understand.”
“And furthermore, my grandfather’s family was intact—his parents and a sister—which would make sense if they all had come to South America in 1937. The camps weren’t in full operation until later on. But it wouldn’t make any sense for all of them to be alive if Grandpa came over in 1947. You get my drift?”
“Your grandfather was an imposter.”
“That was my conclusion. My dad told me that I got the dates mixed up. But I don’t think so.”
“Do you have your grandfather’s birth certificate?”
“No, and that’s a problem. Just some old papers. I did some further probing … a little of this and that. Called up some resources. I did find a Yitzchak Golding who was sent to Treblinka, a camp in Poland, in 1940. He never came back. His brothers and sisters were also sent to the death camps. So were his parents. None of them came back. No aunts, uncles, cousins … all of them gone. Dead. The family is as extinct as dinosaurs. I’m carrying the name for a bunch of Jewish ghosts. They’re haunting me, Lieutenant Decker. Day in and day out, they’re haunting me. Their faces and their corpses.” Golding looked up, his stormy eyes wild and wet. “I had to get rid of them. So I did what I had to do.”
“You vandalized the synagogue.”
He nodded.
“Are the ghosts gone now?”
He shook his head. “Of course not. They’ll never be gone unless I make peace with them.