My Father - An Episode from the First Voldemort War

My Father - An Episode from the First Voldemort War

When I passed the Special Exam for Fast-Tracking to the higher level of the Ministry, nobody applauded harder than my father. My father; the puzzling, sometimes agonizing presence in my life, never easy, never clearly understood, sometimes odious, sometimes a friend - if I had been asked what he was to me, I doubt I could have answered.

It all began with a lie. My mother is a Muggle, but my father resolved to pass her for a Pureblood. As she was Afghan, it was rather easier to make the lie stick: the number of English or Western wizards who could be held expert on Afghan pureblood bloodlines could be counted on the fingers of one hand. We certainly never met one.

My poor mother was caught in a trap from the start. She was one of the last of the Kafir Bashgul of Kafiristan, and marriage to a lordly English foreigner with all the trappings of wealth and power - all her tribe, naturally enough, thought that all the English were rich and powerful - offered an escape from an increasingly insecure and threatening reality.

Goodness knows when my mother began to be undeceived. My father is a convincing scoundrel, who always has an excuse for why his Ministry wage is not coming in that month; but having to carry on the business of a housewife and mother has a certain way of bringing you up slap bang against reality. If the house wand has to be patched up because there is no money to buy her one at Ollivander's, or if the cauldron has more patches than copper, there is not much that can be done to convince her that everything is all right. But she came from a background where the wife did not leave her husband and family, and for a very long time it did not occur her to.

My youth was a whirlwind of changes. While managing to keep his fragile and essential link to the Ministry, my father moved home almost every year, ducking and dodging from Muggle debt collectors (he took care never to stiff wizards) and angry landlords. I spent time in Beauxbatons, in Salem, in Durmstrang, in Hogwarts - even part of my sixth year in the Mercedarian Academy in the Vatican. I graduated from Hogwarts during Albus Dumbledore's first year as Headmaster. On a CV, especially when mixed up by my father's master deceiver hand, all this looked brilliant - not the evidence of a deracinated and bewildered youth, but of a rich and brilliant background. That I had no idea how normal wizards lived, that I was shy and incompetent and under my father's thumb, did not occur to anyone.

I passed the Special Exam, as I said; and my parents were happy. Of course, my thought was that my father was glad that I would now have access to a good, high-paying job, from which I could support my family with no more uncertainty. But a month had not passed when he managed to slip my pay into his own pocket, and after that I had a hard time keeping control of my own money, let alone my own life. The more I proceeded towards adulthood and responsibility, the more my father was like an incubus, getting in my way, practicing emotional blackmail, even spreading rumours to be sure that I could not develop an independent social life.

It is fatal to see a person in two different environments. At home, or at work, he can keep one; but if once the person who has seen his attitudes, his excuses, the views he expresses, the poses he strikes, at home, gets to see how he behaves with colleagues and superiors, then the falsity cannot be hidden.

Looking back, I don't think my father was even very intelligent. While he got in the way of my developing my own life, at the same time he tried to get me to develop links with people with whom he wanted to ingratiate himself; and these were invariably people such as Albus Dumbledore (yes, sir, you), Alastor Moody or Barthemius Crouch and his wife, who had already seen through him. He should have had the sense of know that these people would never believe in him or take him seriously again; yet he sent me to them as the tethered goat to catch the big game, without any concern for my life or even for my feelings. As time went on, his moral blackmail became more brutal, his interference more cynical, his subtlety less and less.

For several months now I have felt that things were coming to a head. When Marlene McKinnon showed up with an overdue I.O.U. bearing my father's signature, it was clear that some sort of line had been crossed; for the first time, my father had made a debt, not with a Muggle, but with a wizard. And the funny thing is that it seemed unnecessary. He could have gone on with his old routine of deceiving Muggles: there still were plenty to be rooked, after all. But to deceive a wizard was another matter: given how well known and prominent my father was in the sorcerous community, it beat me how he thought he could get away with each other. It seemed (from his point of view) altogether too good to be true, that only a week later the whole McKinnon family were hideously murdered by the rising power of Lord Voldemort.

As far as I was concerned, that was a gamble too far. If my father was placing himself in untenable situations with wizards, I decided it was time to take matters in my own hands, and put in a legal action in the ministry to have my wages paid to me rather than to my father.

That evening my father came to me. He was not even angry: he was smug. He said that my legal action had landed on the desk of young Lucius Malfoy, a friend of his, who had "very properly" let him know about it. He informed me that it would be stuck there for as long as Lucius cared; and that at any rate I would not have a penny back. "It has gone towards the Cause," he said, his eyes glittering.

"What Cause?" I answered, already nearly angry enough to choke him.

"The Cause. The Dark Lord's cause, son. So I would suggest you make no claims, for we are at war and the treasury of the Good Cause will not consider with sympathy anyone who tries to make claims on needed resources."

He looked at me straight in the eye and said with the tone of calm conviction: "Nothing is more important for the future of magic than to preserve and expand the reach of pure blood. I think the Dark Lord is right in all his claims. I have been thinking about this for long, and I can say that he has my complete support. I am now an officer in his army. I have his permission to inform you, but you are of course aware that membership - or knowledge - of the Hidden Army is a matter of life and death."

Bumptious old fraud, I thought. For the first time in my life, I was quite clear about my father. The doubts, the incomprehensions, the - let's call things by their names - plain unwillingness to see him as he was, had fled. He was a fraud, a man with neither brain nor heart, without the sense of seeing where his addictive spending and gambling and sponging would get him, and without any feeling for his wife and his son except as tools for his stupid schemes.

My father does not believe in pure blood. How could he, if he did, have married my mother or begot me? It is an excuse. It is the last throw of the ruined gambler's dice: align himself with the rising, the dreaded power of you-know-who, and recoup all his losses in spades; and who cares about who has to die on the way. I wonder whether his new owner sees through him? I know my father can be very convincing; but I doubt that he can altogether circumvent someone with the powers you-know-who is said to have. And that means that things are a lot worse: you-know-who knows exactly what kind of person my father is - and still he has admitted him in his inner circle (or so my father says). That means that my father has already proved himself utterly reliable - that he has committed some crime so enormous that you-know-who knows he can trust him. What he did, I do not want to know, even if you find out. I prefer to think that he just made his debt with Marlene McKinnon in the knowledge that they soon would be killed, than that he had anything directly to do with their deaths. He is my father; I know he is a fraud and a thief; I know that he is lying to his new owner as fully as he ever lied to his wife and to me; but I don't want to believe that he is a murderer.

And that is why I am writing this note, Professor Dumbledore, Minister Bagnold. For one thing, it is to set my thoughts in order and clear my head; to make clear to myself what it is that I think and feel. I feel sure that, if I did not take this approach, tomorrow, when we meet, I should stammer, repeat myself, and be altogether unconvincing. For another, I

[Note at the bottom, written in a different hand:]

The note ended here. The stains you see are his blood, so I think it's clear that the quill fell from his hand as they killed him. The manuscript fell under his body and they did not notice it. I thought you should see it straight away.

Signed:

MILLICENT BAGNOLD, Minister of Magic

.....................................................................................................

From the highest window of his tower in his enchanted castle, the old man's eyes sought and sought. The agony, the grief that seized him every time that another young man found his death at the hands of the evil that he was forced to fight, was this time compounded with a terrible haunting doubt: did his own father know, did the man who gave him life plot with those who were to take it? Did he perhaps even tell them - there is my son, see if he is trustworthy? Did he point them to him, knowing that their way with anyone suspect was death? So the old man's eyes sought and sought; over the land they went, hiding place by hiding place, base by power base, corrupt house by house, until he reached the greatest and proudest of them all - a great country house in Wiltshire, whose accumulated evils, if they could speak, would scream. And then the old man's head fell, and he sat back in his chair as if his bones could no longer carry the weight. He had seen him: Wilhelm Travers, champagne in hand, smiling and animated, exchanging jokes with Macnair and Lucius Malfoy and Goyle Senior and Narcissa and Avery; Wilhelm Travers, openly flirting with an excited and flushed Bellatrix Lestrange as his son lay dead in the charred ruins of his house, his mother's corpse in the next room - dead at her hands.