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everyone you saw nothing—that Lobe did nothing.’ But it’s not true! It’s not true! I did see things.”
    The words spilled out of him in a torrent, as if some old scar tissue had burst open to reveal a festering wound.
    â€œDzenis told me that they had saved my life and now it was my turn to repay them. I didn’t want to, but I felt that I had no choice. Dzenis had already written it, so I just signed it. I did wrong.”
    He was beside himself in a paroxysm of fear, anxiety, and shame, and yet he seemed driven by the need to speak.
    A voice over the loudspeaker warned us to mind the closing doors.
    â€œDad, step back!” I shouted. But before I realized what was happening, he had grabbed his bags and squeezed through the doors as they slammed shut. We stood facing each other, separated by glass. My father’s eyes were wide open, almost bulbous, as if he’d been starved of oxygen. He seemed to be in shock, astonished by his own involuntary outburst. I was appalled by his transformation but could do nothing. A railway guard’s whistle warned me to back off for safety.
    The train began to move away. I followed the carriage, breaking into a jog to keep pace with it. Through its window I saw my father find a seat and settle down, delicately nursing his case. As the train gathered speed, his carriage moved away from me. He raised his hand in a tentative farewell. For just an instant I glimpsed in him the boy in the uniform. Then the train was gone, swallowed up by the tunnel, leaving only the rattling of the tracks.

    I remember very little of my return journey to Oxford. The train soon left behind the outer suburbs of London and began to weave its way through the countryside that I normally found so comforting. Now as the certainties of my life fell by the wayside, it seemed quite alien.
    What had my father seen that he had not mentioned to our family before? What had the chocolate-factory manager Dzenis wanted my father to lie about? He had mentioned Lobe, but what was the lie about Lobe? It seemed from his sudden emotional convulsion that the roles Dzenis and Lobe played in my father’s life were far more complex than I’d ever been led to believe. And, as much as I tried, I could not erase the image of that photograph from my mind’s eye. I regretted that I hadn’t had the presence of mind either to pull him back out of the carriage or to jump onto the train with him. And now, of course, there was no way that I could persuade my father to explain himself.
    When I reached home, I headed straight to bed, curling up fetuslike under the covers, feeling vulnerable and exposed by the bewildering events of the afternoon. Yet sleep eluded me as I imagined my father at this moment. He would be airborne by now. I pictured him perched upright in his cramped airplane seat, still nursing his case, many of whose secrets I now suspected had tormented him for most of his life.
    It dawned on me that I was losing my father and would never have him back again in the same way that I had always known him. As Dad. The comfort and safety that this term of affection had supplied throughout my life had suddenly been undermined, as if the family nest with its familiar twigs and eggs had been scattered to the four winds.

CHAPTER THREE
EARTH TREMORS
    A fter my father had returned to Australia, I held back from calling him until he’d been home for nearly a week.
    As I dialed my parents’ number, I wondered if by now he would have confessed to my mother where he’d really been and imagined he might now explain to me his cryptic outbursts. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
    When he answered the phone, my father greeted me in his usual fashion, almost immediately turning on the speakerphone so that my mother could listen in. Jovial and relaxed, he asked me what I had been up to and how my week had been, careful not to indicate that he had been with me only days earlier. Clearly