Degas' Dust: Joburg Maverick’s Quest to Regain Nazi Way Booty

By Carnie Matisonn and Charles Cilliers

Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in post-war Johannesburg, Carnie Matisonn learns of a great-uncle in occupied Norway murdered by Nazi soldiers as they looted his prized art collection. He starts a life-long quest to retrieve the art that takes him into the murky waters of apartheid sanctions-busting, Mossad agents, international art dealers and Nazi hunters. Matisonn's enthralling story - told here with journalist Charles Cilliers - embraces courage, wit and wisdom as he shows one man can achieve the impossible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Apr 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780624075158

Carnie Matisonn

Doctor Carnie Matisonn is an attorney, corporate adviser, commercial helicopter and fixed-wing pilot and violinist. He is a guest speaker at numerous chambers of commerce and business forums and, among other business ventures, is the owner of the Midrand Conference Centre and Villa Tuscana Wedding Village in Gauteng. He started supper theatre in South Africa, with The Stage Door in Hillbrow and went on to build its successor, Al Teatro in Melville. Matisonn splits his time between Johannesburg, Cape Town and Miami, where he lives with his family.

Book preview

DEGAS’

DUST

Joburg maverick’s quest to regain

Nazi war booty

By Carnie Matisonn

with Charles Cilliers

TAFELBERG

For my daughters Kiana and Yakira

The secret of life is to have a task,

something you devote your entire life to,

something you bring everything to,

every minute of the day for the rest of your life.

And the most important thing is –

it must be something you cannot possibly do.

Henry Moore – 1956

Prologue

The Norwegian blitzkrieg

Among the millions of large and small tragedies sewn into the bloody tapestry of the worst war to befall the 20th century was the small story of my granduncle Karnielsohn. He lived and died in Oslo, Norway. It was a cold and distant world away from the temperate grasslands in Africa where I would grow up, not long after his murder.

Karnielsohn, after a life as a successful lawyer, in his greyer years became a semi-recluse who found his greatest comfort in art and literature. His collection of art was, by all accounts, something many aspiring artists came to admire. He had been happy enough to spend as much of his time as he could with people whose names and work would survive and ripple through time, thanks to their talent and brilliance. But after his retirement, he avoided contact with friends and family.

And after his city was placed in the cold grip of the Third Reich, all further opportunities for meaningful human interaction went with it.

It’s true that a moment of violence does not just tear through flesh and bone; it does not just spill ordinary, human blood … it can rend space and time and bleed into the present. Something like that happened on the Friday evening my granduncle was murdered.

But during the war, every day must have felt like that to somebody.

There were many victims in Norway following what had happened on April 8, 1940, when German forces attacked Norway by sea and air as part of the ambitious Nazi invasion plan called Operation Weserübung. The ease with which Germany was able to take control of Denmark and Norway is captured in the name of the invasion itself, which translates to Weser exercise, after the Weser River in Germany. Overcoming Scandinavia and its futile efforts to withstand invasion had been little more than an exercise for the Nazis, who knew they had far greater challenges ahead.

The major Norwegian ports from Oslo northward to Narvik were overrun and occupied by advanced detachments of German troops. A single parachute battalion took the Oslo and Stavanger airfields and 800 aircraft overwhelmed the Norwegian army. German troops from the airfield entered the city virtually un­opposed, making a mockery of the country’s plan to try to defend itself using only its navy.

Germany owned the Norwegian skies, the fearsome Luftwaffe’s superiority humbling Norway’s poor fishing folk.

The country and a combination of British and French naval forces were embarrassed by an ineffective and badly managed Allied attempt to regain control in what was one of the first big lessons for the Allies: that sea power without air power was doomed. If Germany and its Luftwaffe were ever to be defeated, the Allies would have to regain their dominance of the skies.

But thoughts such as these – of taking the fight to Germany and the Axis powers – could not even be entertained in the latter months of 1940, when the tall, dark shadow of Nazism was cast over all of Europe and looked all but impossible to clear. The ageing Norwegian king, Haakon VII, after leading the fight to retain control of his country for nearly two months, fled desperately for England on the British cruiser HMS Glasgow, to a government in exile.

Germany found itself in control of the country’s prized ice-free harbours, from which Nazi ships and submarines could extend control over the North Atlantic. To Adolf Hitler, this was an important cog in a plan to compel Britain to surrender or become a grudging ally. Controlling Norway also ensured a steady supply of iron ore from mines in Sweden through the port at Narvik. And as if this were not enough, Norway’s so-called heavy water would become critical to Germany’s attempts to build an atomic bomb.

Hitler garrisoned troops numbering about 300 000 in the country for the remainder of the war. They swiftly set about establishing naval and air bases from which to attack Britain.

During this time, the Scandinavians lost all major trading partners and the Norwegians themselves were soon confronted by the daily scarcity of almost everything they needed, food most of all. Their government was led by its new minister president, Vidkun Quisling – a Norwegian whose name would live in infamy and become a dictionary entry for someone who betrays his country.

Quisling, no doubt delighted at selling the soul of his country to its occupiers, attempted daily to convince his compatriots to love the Nazis with the same fervour he did. But the presence of the Wehrmacht was terrifying, and most ordinary Norwegians did their best to stay out of the German soldiers’ way.

This went hundredfold for anyone unfortunate enough to be Jewish as Quisling’s government was participating, perhaps knowingly, in what were the beginnings of Hitler’s Final Solution.

At the beginning of the occupation, there were at least 2 173 Jews in Norway, representing a tiny sliver of the country’s population. No fewer than 775 Jews were arrested, detained and deported. Of these, 742 were murdered in concentration camps and 23 died by extrajudicial execution, mur­der and suicide, bringing the total number of those killed to 765. At least 230 households were wiped out.

My granduncle was one of those 765.

That final Friday evening in February of 1941 started quietly for him, like any other winter twilight in Oslo, where the sun was by nature little more than a thin orange line on the horizon by mid-afternoon and where night and its chills came early.

The streets of Oslo were covered in snow. The rooftops of the houses in Karnielsohn’s modest neighbourhood were an undulating sea of white snowflakes gathering beneath a black, starless sky. The peaceful scene belied the truth of soldiers’ boot prints being hammered into the snow every day. Nazi storm troopers had already been in the city for ten months.

There was a pounding on Karnielsohn’s apartment door. Before he could dislodge the latch, the hinges on his door relented as the soldiers kicked it down. They had seen a Mezuzah parchment in the shape of a scroll, dutifully affixed to the entrance of his home – all they needed to confirm this was the residence of a Jew.

The officious thugs moved from room to room, ripping paintings off walls and tearing furniture apart. An SS officer drew his pistol and shouted to the others to throw Karnielsohn into the street. They jostled him out and kicked him off the veranda. He crashed down the stairs, only to endure a barrage of kicks from the Nazis’ gumboots.

It ended as abruptly as it had begun, with a single shot to Karnielsohn’s head.

In that apartment they found a portrait painted by one of my uncle’s one-time friends, the celebrated French Impressionist Edgar Degas. One of the founders of Impressionism, the artist had died aged 83 in 1917, leaving that portrait of my granduncle, painted decades earlier, as evidence that they had once known each other.

The Nazis helped themselves to that painting, as well as Karniel­sohn’s other artworks – much as they did in thousands of other homes throughout war-torn Europe. That single artwork became a tantalising piece of evidence of an old crime. Its existence kept the possibility alive that its value and uniqueness would eventually lead to its recovery, along with all the other artworks in Karnielsohn’s home, and perhaps even point out the murderer who had stolen it.

That possibility appeared remote but, all the same, could not be dismissed as unachievable.

Throughout my life, many would tell me its recovery was nothing less than an exercise in futility.

But that only made me more determined to pursue the dream. It was to become my lifelong quest to recover it, along with all the other treasures that had been looted on that pitiful, snowy evening in Oslo.

PART 1

The caravan and the cave

Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation.

Christopher Hitchens

Chapter 1

Neither my siblings nor I knew my grandparents very well. My maternal grandmother, Ester, came from Hull in the UK and was the only one I recall meeting, although only on a few occasions. She was uneducated, but could play almost anything on the piano after hearing it just once. Her genes no doubt played no small part in what later turned out to be my own passion and affinity for music. They were not passed on to me alone – most of my family is musical.

Ester never seemed able to remember the names of her grandchildren. She lived alone in the 1950s in her large house in Pretorius Street in the Jacaranda City, Pretoria. By the time I met her, she was a widow. When we went to visit her, her house had no carpets, nothing much in the way of decoration and only the most essential items of furniture.

My maternal grandfather, Abraham Fasser, was an uneducated tailor who had escaped the pogroms in his native Poland with four of his brothers. His other brothers, all six of them, were murdered in the wave of anti-Semitic purges that followed the expansion of the Russian Empire across Europe in the latter half of the 19th century. The five young surviving brothers initially fled to England, which was where Abraham met Ester.

One brother remained in England. Another moved to Brazil. One made his way to the United States. The two tailors, Solomon and Abraham, with new wife Ester in tow, emigrated to South Africa.

They touched African soil for the first time in 1885.

The brothers found their way to the capital, where they slept in a small shop and plied their trade for fifteen hours a day in the service of Pretoria’s early inhabitants.

The town was only a few decades old at that point, having been purchased by the Voortrekker leader Marthinus Pretorius in 1853, as two farms that became a town in 1855 named after his father, Andries Pretorius. The latter was a man considered a hero of the Great Trek, who had led the defeat of the Zulus in the Battle of Blood River.

By the time my grandfather settled in the capital of the Transvaal Republic, the First Boer War had ended only a few years earlier, in 1881.

Neither man had learnt to read or write, but they managed to earn enough to scrape by, living from month to month. Grand­father Abraham was a tall man with a back as straight as a wall and an equally rigid personality. Ester was cold, polite and indifferent – a walking relic of a stoical time. One made do with what one had in those days and made peace with the fact that there wasn’t much sense in complaining. From what I’ve been told, she was incapable of love and eventually made my grandfather’s life even more of a misery than it had been to start with.

It’s difficult to imagine how he had courted my grandmother. By all accounts, theirs had been a humourless, practical arrangement. She had followed him faithfully to this new country and dutifully bore my grandfather four children – to whom neither parent appeared equipped to dispense much love or affection.

Eva, my mother, was Ester’s second child. Most of the family’s resources were channelled into educating the eldest son, Ellis, who repaid this faith by qualifying as a doctor. He went on to become a paediatrician, musician, artist, hypnotist and scientist. His doctoral thesis on congenital anomalies and rubella led to most of the world’s governments allowing legal abortions to be performed on pregnant women who’d contracted measles.

By contrast, Eva only attended school up to Standard 6 (Grade 8), but educated herself further and became a speech and drama teacher. She learnt to play both the piano and organ. Her playing was always technically competent, but she performed without much feeling. My mother’s renditions of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart and Dvorak were soulless, like someone telling you a story in a language they could read out loud, but not actually understand. She was most comfortable when playing the more technically brilliant but emotionally dry composers: Stravinsky, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov.

When my mother’s father took ill, he drew little sympathy from his wife. In the end, Ester could relate only to herself. She spent her days writing letters to herself and then replying. She died certifiably insane.

Long before that happened though, Abraham had thrown himself off the sixth floor of a general hospital.

* * *

My father’s name was Nathan Matisonn, known to his friends simply as Natie. His mother, Kate, was the daughter of an orphaned Lithuanian immigrant to South Africa. She was one of the 300 000 Jews orphaned by genocide at the hands of Russia’s Red Army. Natie’s father, a Norwegian immigrant named Jacob, was known in South Africa as Jack. Grandmother Kate liked to speak to Natie in Yiddish, but grandfather Jack preferred Afrikaans, which he’d learnt after arriving in South Africa, aged just 21. Born in Østfold, Norway, to a Norwegian father and Russian mother, he’d been forced to leave for South Africa after his uncle banished him for arriving late for dinner at the commencement of the Sabbath as the sun set one Friday night. That was all it took in those days to be forever dismissed.

South Africa and the odd assortment of migrants it played host to seemed to suit Jack. He was politically active and something of an entrepreneur. He resented the English for what he considered their unique brand of racism. He believed there was no place in modern society for class distinction. Those were the days when Afrikaners were the world’s true anarchists, a time when no one calling himself an Afrikaner would dare to think himself above another Afrikaner – though of course they had no such compunctions about the native black communities or the English.

Jack tried his hand at anything he felt might serve this new community of stubborn, frontier folk and earn him an honest living. When he arrived, with no knowledge of either English or Afrikaans, he initially worked as a smous (peddler) moving between the farms.

He decided to become an Afrikaner. There are many similarities between Afrikaans and Norwegian, so learning the language and the shift to becoming one of the volk was probably not as big a jump for him as the English route may have proven.

As his courage and connections improved, so too did the value of his inventory. Jack began to trade in farm implements and tractors, attended political rallies and established himself as an outspoken member of the farming community in and around Koster, about 160km west of Pretoria. Koster was eventually proclaimed a town in 1913. Good fortune and loyal friends afforded Jack an opportunity to acquire a piece of land in the area, where he tilled the field and provided for his family.

So it was that my father was born on this maize farm and spent his early productive years working for his parents – until the day a black cloud of locusts descended and, within thirty minutes, thousands of acres of crops nearly ready for harvest were erased by hundreds of thousands of greedy mandibles in a relentless living storm.

My grandparents faced financial ruin. The banks, inevitably, foreclosed on the farm.

It also meant Natie never attended university, though, given half a chance, my father would have excelled. He had matriculated with distinctions in mathematics, English and Latin, but after the disaster on the farm, he still considered himself lucky to find a menial job as a blockman in a butcher shop.

Natie initially did make a bit of a name for himself in Yiddish theatre. But making a name for yourself in Yiddish theatre back then was a bit like making a name for yourself as a fixer of typewriters in the early 1990s. Yiddish was a dying language in South Africa and, when its last few syllables were finally put to pasture as an everyday language in the Jewish community, he tried to find work as an English-speaking actor. But this never brought him nearly the same success.

He was a wonderful entertainer, though – merely in the wrong time and place.

These were the parents I was born to, Eva and Natie Matisonn, seven months after the end of World War Two, on Boxing Day of 1945, in a ramshackle, badly constructed farmhouse, still some way beyond the rapidly expanding municipal boundaries of the mining boomtown of Johannesburg.

They named me Carnie, which – it was explained to me – comes partially from the Hebrew word kern, which means both a ray of light and a ram’s horn. Eva was fluent in Hebrew, but Natie wanted a reference to his Nordic origins. As Jews do not take the names of their fathers, he adapted the name from Karnielsohn, the name of his uncle. So it was that I was named both for hard-­headedness and the lost family member whose story would come to possess me later.

My entry into the world brought little joy to Eva, who was already taking strain from life with the moody Natie. He was always unpredictable and full of contradictions. At times charming, dapper, kind and generous, my father could get so wrapped up in himself that the suffering of those closest to him failed to move him in any way. When I was born, Natie still had dreams of becoming a famous lawyer, no doubt thinking he could redirect his frustrated theatrical talents to the legal stage. If not for the recession of the 1930s and the world’s all-out mobilisation for war in its aftermath, he might even have lived his dream. He was an avid reader of the spellbinding court cases of Clarence Darrow, one of America’s most famous lawyers and libertarians. The 1924 case of Leopold and Loeb – who were convicted for murdering fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks – so interested Natie that he bought all the books he could about the bizarre and tragic sequence of events that culminated in the brilliant and deprived young teenagers avoiding the death sentence and receiving life plus ninety-­nine years.

My father was inspired by Darrow’s opposition to the death penalty, agreeing with him that it was something fundamentally in conflict with human progress. But it was not only legal books that gripped him. Natie never hesitated to spend our food money on literature of all kinds.

While our fridge and the pantry cupboards were almost always bare, the latest nonfiction bestseller was guaranteed to appear some­how at Natie’s bedside whenever he was home – before alcohol later became his primary pastime of choice.

His books covered a wide range of subjects. Many had to be purchased on the black market, because of the oppressive apartheid censorship legislation at the time. The list of banned items in our house included ANC symbols, buttons, T-shirts and lighters and, of course, all literature deemed objectionable, including posters and films. As with Prohibition in 1920s America, the banning itself proved to stimulate interest and excitement and a raging desire for any and all forbidden goods. There was a roaring trade on the black market.

The two major organisations banned under apartheid laws were the Communist Party of South Africa and the African National Congress. Natie was a communist at heart, and the books he bought made that clear. There was row upon row of books in the entrance hall, along the passageway, in the dining room, even in the toilet, that would have marked out our little home as a hotbed of sedition.

An apartheid censor would have been appalled to encounter, on brazen display, Das Kapital by Karl Marx, sitting unashamedly alongside that mammoth work of human sexual exploration, The Kinsey Report. I doubt even the mollifying sight of more noble and acceptable works, such as Churchill’s twelve volumes on World War Two, would have placated the authorities.

Natie’s shelves were graced by venerable historical, scientific and political tomes sitting alongside historical books like The Scourge of the Swastika, Hitler: A Study In Tyranny and the famous treatise of sociopolitical hatred by the Führer himself, Mein Kampf.

My father, like many other Jewish intellectuals, had always tried to understand the madness that could take hold of an entire continent, to allow the genocide of our people. I, too, in time devoured every shred of writing I could find on what had allowed Hitler’s Final Solution – or even any of his interim solutions.

We lived in what was then still a periurban area outside Johannesburg, surrounded by cattle and peach farms at the foot of Aasvoëlkop, which would later become known as Northcliff. Back then it was a far cry from the sought-after suburb it is today – with its rare views across the city.

We would eventually become a family of seven in our small, three-bedroomed home. I spent the early part of my childhood sleeping on a makeshift bed in the dining room, where I had to contend with the regular sounds of my mother’s typewriter or sewing machine, clacking or grinding into the early hours. Whatever she turned her hands to, the typewriter, piano or sewing machine, Eva worked like a slave. Her fingers were tireless. And they must have drummed the spirit of a strong work ethic into me too.

From my father I inherited the soul of a dreamer.

Every so often, my mother would mount shopping expeditions to the city, which started with a 6am visit to the Newtown Market.

Many of the buildings in the precinct were an eclectic mix of architectural styles – Victorian, Edwardian, even Art Nouveau. As a child, I remember standing there each weekend, admiring the beauty of the buildings and the hustle and bustle of a busy, growing city.

The massive Newtown Market building, completed in 1913, was the largest of its kind in South Africa. Supported by elegant steel trusses, it attracted thousands of people on Saturday mornings. It was where farmers sent their produce, predominantly by rail, to the Kazerne goods depot, to be sold by auction at the sprawling extension to the central business district. One could either bid for a box of vegetables or negotiate for one or two items. It was also where many of Johannesburg’s leading entrepreneurs acquired their skills, in what everyone called the University of Newtown. It was an easy place to start a business, but extremely difficult to remain in business. The noise would grow as competition heated up between traders attempting to outmanoeuvre each other.

During the Second World War, manufacturers in Newtown had produced goods to support the war effort. Its proximity to the railway sidings had made it an ideal location for light industry and manufacturing, and signs of this remained. The inner city was mostly occupied by black and white men, with the former squeezed into uncomfortable and overcrowded compounds run by the mines, the latter in more well-catered-for boarding houses, all of it stretching from Jeppe in the east to Fordsburg in the west.

The continual shortage of accommodation and the endless influx of rural migrants looking for a better life led to various slums mushrooming around the Fordsburg area.

Competition among the Litvak (Lithuanian Jew) wholesale and retail merchants kept the idiosyncratic subculture and jokes about the University alive and flourishing. Fictitious certificates were even periodically awarded to brave entrepreneurs and millers.

On the occasions we visited Eva’s uncle in his semi-detached house in Doornfontein, we would alternate between walking and travelling by tram. The sound of electric dynamos, street lighting and double-decker electric trams radiated from the city hall outwards – an image of old Johannesburg that exists only in history books now.

A favourite venue for us was Wachenheimer’s, a butcher’s shop in Doornfontein that operated a restaurant in the style of a nosh bar in a room behind the counter. For little more than a few cents one could enjoy a bowl of chicken soup and a knaidl (matzah ball) as an optional extra for those less financially constrained.

* * *

My first encounter with anti-Semitism was when I was about seven, years before either of my sisters was born. A group of neigh­bourhood kids ambushed me while I was walking home from school. They called me a Christ killer and shot me eleven times with a pellet gun. I was powerless to retaliate and ran from them as fast as I could.

I asked my father why they thought I had killed Christ. And who, for that matter, was Christ?

He shook his head. There are few fellow Jews at school with you and many parents who have taught their children to hate Jews. It starts with their potty training and becomes a feature of life. ‘Hate the Jew. Kill the Jew.’ Through the ages, Jews have been hard-working, industrious and conscientious. This has made them disproportionately successful in relation to their numbers.

And this is a reason to hate us? I asked.

No, of course not, he said. But the hatred comes from resentment and envy and a total inability to understand what motivates Jews to work so hard.

In my naivety, I told him: So then I will explain I don’t want anything from these boys. I want to be left alone.

I wish it were so simple, he warned me. You can’t reason with anti-Semites. They are taught to hate. You will learn that, in the eyes of the anti-Semite, the only good Jew is a dead Jew. You will grow up and become a man. You may well be kind and loving to your fellow human beings. But none of those things will matter. The neo-Nazis will hate you anyway. To them you are simply the enemy.

As a child, this was an almost impossible fact to understand and deal with. But I was being given the truth as directly and plainly as almost all Jewish children are.

All the same, he finished. Continue to do your best to be a good man.

But for now … what should I do?

"It’s not only what you will do, but how all Jews in South Africa must deal with these Nazis, sons of Nazis, anti-Semites, skinheads and racists.

Take a stand. It will take courage to stand alone and defend yourself against older groups of boys. You will lose some fights; you will get hurt – but you must stand your ground.

He paused for while before adding: They must learn the Jew they despise has a strong heart and a tradition of survival against the odds, because it is in your blood. For you it will be better to come home with pellets in your skin and bruises – but with your pride and self-respect intact. Many of us have died for our principles, so we can never live a life without our principles, our self-­­respect and our traditions. Without these, we will become nothing.

He peered at me over his small spectacles and I was afraid to blink.

If you find you are afraid, Carnie, look at what Hitler did to the Jews. There are pictures in my books of the starving, emaciated, diseased, dying inmates of concentration camps. Those are our people. It can never happen again.

I was trying hard to understand. But these were not words a child can deal with easily or even begin to comprehend.

But what do I do if I am attacked at school?

Hit first; speak later. If you get expelled – know you left with your principles intact.

I continued to pepper my father with questions, none of which he didn’t answer meticulously and comprehensively.

It was the kind of conversation he and I would become incapable of later.

My relationship with my mother, in turn, oscillated wildly between cordial and resentful, for reasons I was never quite capable of understanding. It struck me as odd that other children being collected from school were embraced by their parents, whereas I was unfailingly ordered into the rear seat with barely a look or hello.

I always felt like an irritant to Eva, from the time I had been a colicky infant stubbornly rejecting her notion of the well-behaved baby. Her disdain for my idiosyncrasies endured throughout my preschool years, during which she avoided almost all physical contact with me.

She occasionally made comments about what she thought of as my less than attractive physical appearance. So I chalked up her antipathy towards me to her thinking I was a somewhat disgusting creature she regretted bringing into the world.

But I got used to it and eventually learnt to brush it off. I came to realise her behaviour had everything to do with her own background and little to do with me. Ester, her own ultimately certifiably insane mother, had persecuted Eva in ways far worse than anything she ever inflicted on me.

I did my best to stay out of Eva’s way. Almost as soon as I made friends at primary school, I refused to return home until after dark, if only to reduce the opportunities for Eva to dish out her various punishments to me. They mostly took the form of beatings with wooden coat hangers, which she always seemed fixated on breaking over my head.

I would often walk on my own to the end of Albert and Herder Drives in Berario and cross Muldersdrift Road into the area that later came to be known as the Cresta Centre and Windsor. It was, back then, almost completely rural, densely populated with trees and shrubs.

The short gravel road, running from west to east, ended at a circle with equally heavy vegetation in the middle. The road seemed to have no discernible purpose to me and merely circumnavigated the circle and allowed vehicles to retreat back to Muldersdrift Road – which has since been renamed, as an important part of the expanded city, Malibongwe Drive.

It was late in the afternoon and I had endured yet another of my miserable encounters with my mother and her coat hangers. So, like a bear with a sore head, I set out towards Muldersdrift Road, merely looking for a spot to settle and lick my wounds. The trees, something like a small forest near the road, represented seclusion, tranquillity and a place where I might evaporate without trace.

As I walked towards the circle, I spotted a white rabbit jumping out of the underbrush into the road. It had beauty, grace and elegance as it pranced about across the deserted farm track. It was little more than a carefree, everyday rabbit, but as it disappeared into the foliage I imagined it to be an English Angora with fur covering its ears, face, nose and front feet. In my mind’s eye, I thought of its dense wool and teddy bear features – much like those I had seen in a pet shop not much earlier in the city with my mother.

Fluffy, lovable Angora rabbits were believed to have originated in Turkey and bred for their soft, silky wool – kept as pets due to their friendly dispositions. I had held one in my hands in the pet shop and remembered feeling its little heart racing as it lay motionless, trusting me completely.

As any child would, I’d wanted my mother to buy it for me, but she had merely pulled me out of the pet shop by my ear and frogmarched me away. She was not about to introduce another mouth to feed into our desperate little home.

Overcome by the need for a pet, I ran after the little creature – but by the time I reached the perimeter of the forest, it was nowhere to be seen. I was deeply disappointed. I wanted the wild rabbit to know it had a friend in me, that I would protect, feed and care for it. But it was not to be. I returned many times in search of it and, on a few occasions, saw it again. Each time, the story was re-enacted.

That was where the encounter should have ended, but that small creature found a way to hop straight into the deepest reaches of my unconscious.

I started having recurring dreams about the rabbit. As I slept, I would watch it jump from the edge of the circle into the road and pause, its little nose twitching, to make sure I was there. As soon as I tried to pursue it, the animal would disappear into the forest. This simple sequence of thwarted longing would reoccur night after night.

I would wake each time, taunted by the thought of the rabbit and its inexplicable fear of me. I deeply regretted that it seemed not to recognise me as a kind person.

That dream would continue to haunt me regularly for almost two decades.

Chapter 2

As a boy, I had great difficulty sleeping, so I frequently wandered into the kitchen. On most nights Natie would be sitting at the old wooden table, reading. The faded linoleum floor had large vacant sections through which the even older Canadian maple wood appeared. The steel cupboards were sparse and struggled to conceal rust. The ageing stove, oven, refrigerator and kettle made up the balance of the furniture. A single light bulb dangled from a cord in the centre of the room. The kitchen table had a smooth wooden top with traces of paint that had survived years of attrition from endless cups of coffee, magazines and plates. Natie would sit in a maroon dressing gown and barely acknowledge my presence. I would cast an occasional eye over the titles of whatever books he was reading. His interest in World War Two was all-pervasive, his appetite for nonfiction on the topic insatiable.

I often found him looking at pictures and documents, but he offered no explanation for his obsession. He concentrated 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