Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [187]
“Where did he get it?” said Roz.
Uncle George looked at her out of his wizened yellow eyes. “Get what?” he said innocently, craftily.
“The first dollar,” said Roz. “What did the three of you really do, in the war?”
“You don’t need to know that,” said Uncle George.
“I do,” said Roz. “It’s okay, he’s dead now. You can tell me, you’re not going to hurt my feelings.”
Uncle George sighed. “Yeah, well,” he said. “It’s a long time ago.”
“It’s me who’s asking,” said Roz, having heard the uncles use this expression on each other, always with effect.
“Your father was a fixer,” said Uncle George. “He fixed things. He was a fixer before the war, he was a fixer in the war, and after the war he was also a fixer.”
“What did he fix?” said Roz. She took it he didn’t mean broken refrigerators.
“To tell you the truth,” says Uncle George slowly, “your father was a crook. Don’t get me wrong, he was a hero, too. But if he hadn’t of been a crook, he couldn’t of been a hero. That’s how it was.”
“A crook?” said Roz.
“We was all crooks,” said Uncle George patiently. “Everybody was a crook. They was stealing, all kinds of things, you wouldn’t believe – paintings, gold, stuff you could hide and sell later. They could see how it was going, at the end they was grabbing anything. Every time there’s a war, people steal. They steal whatever they can. That’s what a war is – a war is stealing. Why should we be any different? Joe was the inside man, I was the driver, your father, he did the planning. When we would move, who to trust. Without him, nothing.
“So, we’d get it out for them – not legal, with laws like they had I don’t need to tell you – but we’d bribe the guards, everyone was on the take. Hide it somewhere safe, till after the war. But how did they know what was what, how did they know where we were putting it? So we kept some things back, for ourselves. Took it to different places. Picked it up afterwards. Some of them was dead, too, so we got theirs.”
“That’s what he did?” said Roz. “He helped the Nazis?”
“It was dangerous,” said Uncle George reproachfully, as if danger was the main justification. “Sometimes we took out stuff we weren’t supposed to take. We took out Jews. We had to be careful, go through our regulars. They let us do it because if we was caught, it was their neck too. Your father never pushed it too hard though. He knew when it was too dangerous. He knew when to stop.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Roz said.
“Don’t thank me,” Uncle George said. “Like I told you, he was a hero. Only, some wouldn’t understand.” He was tired; he closed his eyes. His eyelids were delicate and crinkled, like wet crepe paper. He raised two thin desiccated fingers, dismissing her.
Roz made her way out through the white tiled maze of the hospital, heading for home and a stiff drink. What was she to conclude from all this, her new, dubious knowledge? That her money is dirty money, or that all money is? It’s not her fault, she didn’t do it, she was just a child. She didn’t make the world. But she still has a sense of hands, bony hands, reaching up from under the earth, tugging at her ankles, wanting back what’s theirs. And how old are those hands? Twenty, thirty years, or a thousand, two thousand? Who knows where money has been? Wash your hands when you touch it, her mother used to say. It’s riddled with germs.
She didn’t tell Mitch, though. She never told Mitch. It would’ve been one up for him, and he was one up already, him and his old-money fastidiousness, his pretence of legal scruples. Clipping coupons yes, smuggling Jews no. Or that’s what Roz would be willing to bet. He sneered discreetly at her money as it was, though she’d noticed he didn’t mind spending it. But old money made a profit from human desperation too, as long as the desperation and the flesh and the blood were at several removes. Where the heck did people like Mitch think those dividends really came from?