Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  Then, one afternoon in June, feeling feverish, he came home directly from school, only to find himself locked out of the house. Across the street, Euclid was simonizing Mr. Ryan’s black Buick.

  “Hey, kid, how would you like to go for a drive?”

  “Why, sure,” Joshua said, his smile ingratiating, slipping close enough to heave a rock, shattering the Buick’s windshield, a startled Euclid taking off after him.

  Drawing him into the lane, losing him easily, Joshua scrambled over the Zippers’ rotting backyard fence, landing in the old man’s tomato patch. He bolted up their rear stairs to the shed, grabbing a hammer and nails, and darted through the unlocked empty house, emerging on St. Urbain again, where he began to drive nails into the Buick’s tires. He was working on the third one when he looked up to see a winded Euclid running toward him. Dodging him, Joshua took off again, running as far as Fletcher’s Field, collapsing on the grass, his heart pounding. He declined an offer to join a pick-up Softball game and crossed the street to the “Y,” settling down in the gym to watch a basketball game. When he came home again, the Buick was gone. His front door was unlocked. “This isn’t a house,” Joshua shouted at his mother without warning, “it’s a fucken stable. Why don’t you clean up around here anymore?”

  His mother didn’t slap his face. Instead, she stared at him, astonished.

  “It’s only a month to my bar-mitzvah,” he continued, emboldened, “and nothing’s been done. Am I going to have one or not?”

  “Why is it so important to you to have a bar-mitzvah?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Well, you’ve got to if you’re Jewish. Don’t you believe in God and all that stuff?”

  “Feh.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I could have made a better world myself.”

  “I’m going to have a bar-mitzvah.”

  “O.K., O.K., if it’s that important to you, you can have one,” she said, getting up to confront the stack of dishes in the sink.

  “Well, yeah. Right. And there’s going to be a party for my friends.”

  “Who would come here?” she asked, amused.

  “The boys.”

  “Oh, yeah, their mothers wouldn’t let.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my tits don’t hang down to my ankles and your father doesn’t work at a regular job.”

  The other mothers wouldn’t speak to her any more, clutching their children by the hand as she passed. Some even crossed the street if they saw her approaching. Mrs. Sivak from downstairs complained to the landlord about her tap-dancing at 2 a.m., Louis Armstrong blasting away on the gramophone, but when old Dworkin shuffled round to the flat Esther sent him flying with a flow of obscenities. She had also very promptly dispatched the social worker sent by the Baron de Hirsch Society to inquire about Joshua’s welfare. And the more she was socially scorned, the greater was her defiance, the backyard laundry line serving as her banner of rebellion. While immense cotton bloomers and outsized bras flapped worthily in the wind on other clotheslines, sassy little black bras and lacy black panties with unbelievably narrow waist lines danced wickedly on theirs. Right out there in the back lane, where husbands setting out the garbage could look up and swallow hard. Where growing children could see.

  Joshua told her about the other parties. The movies. The doubleheader at Delorimier Downs. “What are you going to do for mine?” he asked.

  “I’ll fly in Mr. Teagarden. And I’ll bake a marble cake.”

  Shit.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo. You’re going to have a party. Oh boy, are you ever going to have a party!”

  8

  ARE YOU A MAN OR A MOUSE, MUELLER DEMANDED, BITING into that ivory cigarette holder. A man or a mouse, he taunted. Man, mouse. And Joshua, wakening, discovered that he was sliding in sweat.

  Ibiza, Ibiza.

  But he wasn’t back on the island again, he was on an airplane. Air Canada flight 274. Flying home from yet another television assignment on a June morning in 1976.

  “Isn’t that Joshua Shapiro?” a passenger asked his wife.

  “Everybody looks sick in this light,” she replied.

  Joshua began to order double Scotches from the stewardess, wondering how, once a promising thief sprung out of St. Urbain, he had ever become a television personality, a husband and a father of three, charged with contradictions. He sent his children to private schools and complained in other people’s houses about being the father of children who attended private schools. Anybody good on camera was an abomination to him, yet he owed his reputation to television.

  Ibiza.

  Monique didn’t matter. He certainly didn’t want to see her again. But, increasingly, he felt a need to confront Mueller one more time and to make a final effort to find the Freibergs. The mousy Freibergs, whom he had most assuredly ruined.

  One night in London, 1953 it must have been, maybe a year after he had been obliged to flee the island, he had worked up sufficient courage to put through a long-distance call to the Hotel Casa del Sol in San Antonio. “I would like to speak with Mr. Freiberg, please,” he had said, his heart thudding.

  A pause. Crackling. “We have no Mr. Freiberg registered here.”

  “He’s not a guest,” Joshua had cried, outraged. “He owns the hotel.”

  “You must be mistaken. The proprietor here is a Señor Delgado.”

  “Then where in the hell can I reach the Freibergs?”

  “I know of no Freibergs.”

  From the airport, Joshua hurried right out to Selwyn House, late for the graduation ceremonies. Teddy, only eight years old then, was certainly not graduating, but he was to be presented with a certificate of distinction for his work in grade two, and Joshua edged into a folding chair beside Pauline just in time to watch him climb up to the platform, his curly-topped head bobbing. I ran once, Joshua thought. Me, your father. Leaving a couple of mice behind.

  The gym was already choked with parents. Mostly stockbrokers, corporation lawyers, or accountants who specialized in tax work. The news they were getting from the platform was bad. Should the Parti Québécois ever come to power, nobody could say with any certainty what would be the future of private English-language schools in the province; but diminishing subsidies, and a consequently hefty hike in fees, were most likely. Then the speaker was before them. Stout, clear-eyed, ruddy-faced. A trust company executive who had served with a good regiment during World War II and now sat on the boards of a hospital, a charitable foundation and McGill University. Stitching bromides deftly together, he finally turned to the graduating class, offering solemn advice born of the school of experience. In these days of rampaging trade unions, he told them, learn to be handy about the house, to paint and do carpentry work, because it will serve you well once you venture into the wide world. Beyond Westmount. Where kids still wear itchy sweaters from Knit-to-Fit.

  What in the hell am I doing here? Joshua thought.

  Once, he had obliged Alex, Susy, and Teddy to watch a TV documentary about World War II, and as Hitler did his notorious victory jig in the Compiègne forest after accepting the French surrender, they began to fall about, giggling. Unforgivably, Joshua lost his temper. “It isn’t funny. Now you be quiet and watch.”

  He burdened the kids boorishly with his own past, he felt. He couldn’t help himself. So when Alex, once a model airplane enthusiast, innocently brought home a Messerschmitt to construct, he made him take it back to the shop at once. He wouldn’t have it in the house. Embarrassed because he had made Alex cry, he sat down with him afterwards and told him what he could remember about Guernica. About the famous oak tree before which the parliament of Basque senators had used to convene. About the air raid on April 26, 1937, when the small town was crowded with refugees and retreating soldiers. He tried to explain that at their age he had sat in a St. Urbain Street flat, his father fiddling with the shortwave band of their radio until they caught Hitler addressing the Reichstag, Hitler in a rage, cresting wav
es of sieg heil’s and static. He told them how the war in Spain had begun, and about Dr. Norman Bethune of the International Brigades, and the unit he had formed, Servicio Canadiensi de Transfusion de Sangre, which introduced transfusions to the actual battlefront.

  If he still worshipped any heroes whatsoever, he explained, they were the men who had served in the International Brigades.

  Spain.

  On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

  Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe,

  On that tableland scored by rivers,

  Our fever’s menacing shapes are precise and alive.

  His education, begun in the pages of Life, continued through high school, his obligatory stint at The Boys’ Farm after he had been nabbed for stealing a car, and all the jobs of his adolescence. He applied himself to learning a political alphabet, acquiring an ideological Dr. Seuss kit for Beginning Left-wingers. Combing through second-hand bookshops for anything on the Spanish Civil War. Reading Alvah Bessie, the Duchess of Atholl, Barea, Orwell, Gustav Regler, Malraux, and Geoffrey Cox. A map of Guadalajara, with the March 1937 battle lines, was pinned to a wall of his room, some lines by Charles Donnelly, an Irish volunteer, penciled in underneath.

  There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama

  It’s a place that we all know too well,

  For ’tis there that we wasted our manhood.

  And most of our old age as well.

  In Casablanca, which he saw three times, it was a veritable guarantee of Bogart’s integrity and eventual redemption that he had once run guns for the republicans. Devouring Hemingway, especially For Whom the Bell Tolls, he never necked with a girl without wondering, if never daring to ask, O Riva Mandelbaum, O Hanna Steinberg, “But did thee feel the earth move?”

  “Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please.”

  “No. I have thy hand. Thy hand is enough.”

  Like Seymour Kaplan, who shared his obsession with Spain, Joshua drifted to sleep dreaming not, as James Thurber once suggested, of striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees, but of Gary Cooper as Robert Jordan, his leg smashed, taking his place behind a machine gun to cover the retreat of Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff, and the other partisans.

  “Roberto, what hast thou?”

  “The leg is broken, guapa.”

  Seymour and Max, Izzy, Al and Eli were all at McGill now wearing red-and-white sweaters, but Joshua, without so much as a high school leaving certificate, already determined to get to Spain, disappeared into a mining camp in the northern bush for a season, emerging with his neck riddled with black-fly bites but his bankroll fat. At the time, Reuben had already walked out on Esther. He was roistering in Havana with Colucci, and she was bumping-and-grinding her way through a circuit in New Jersey. Joshua rented a room on Dorchester Boulevard. Teaching himself Pitman’s shorthand at night, he also began to attend a number of McGill lectures on the sly, slipping into a Spanish-language course and another on the history of Iberia. McGill was, as far as he could make out, an incredible scene. Lanky boys on an allowance, at ease with themselves, wearing white cardigans and tooting the horns of their convertibles as they geared down to pass through the Roddick Gates. Golden girls in cashmere twin sets, pleated tartan skirts, bobbysox, and scuffed loafers. He made the mistake of crashing something called the Harvest Moon Dance and picking up one of the girls. Fat Sheldon espied him on the dance floor.

  “Hey, Joshua, what are you doing here?”

  He tried to thrust the girl toward the far end of the crowded floor, but Sheldon was already in malicious pursuit.

  “You’re not supposed to be here unless you’re a student.”

  Suddenly, it seemed that everybody was grinning at him, the interloper. Westmount faces. Outremont faces. He abandoned the girl, fleeing. Humiliated. And the next morning, charged with rage, he smashed open a locker, found a hockey uniform that fit him, and bluffed his way onto the ice to practice with candidates for the university hockey team. The better-bred boys were justifiably startled by his manner with a stick. Flying into corners, he was all elbows and spear. In crazed pursuit of faster skaters with the puck, he slipped his stick between their skates, upending them. Between times, he lined up innocent wingers, trailing the play, and sent them bouncing into the boards. The other players were not amused by his loutish behavior. In the dressing room, they began to whisper among themselves, and finally one of them challenged him. “Who in the hell are you?” he asked.

  Joshua, elated, replied, “Well, I’m not sure yet. I’m working on it.” And, brandishing his stick, he retreated from the dressing room.

  In the afternoon, he acquired his first white-collar job, one that came with a title: field worker. And early the next morning he was out banging on doors. “Hello, hello. I’m an interviewer with CMC Limited, a national opinion organization, and you have been carefully selected to –”

  “No,” the lady said, slamming the door.

  He was no more successful with his second bell or the third, but the fourth time out he managed to squeeze into the apartment of a Mrs. Burns and told her that he was conducting a bread survey. “Why do you use bread?” he asked.

  “To fill out a meal.”

  “Why don’t you use something else instead?”

  “What would you use instead?”

  “When you use bread at a meal,” he asked, “how is it served?”

  “I put it on the table and everybody grabs a slice.”

  “I’d like you to think back to the last time you bought bread. Think about it for a while, and tell me exactly what happened from the time you approached the bread counter. Ready. Steady. Go.”

  “I walked into the store, bought a loaf, and walked out.”

  “Right. Now I have one more question for you. It’s sort of a game question. Mind association.”

  “I’m a high school graduate,” she allowed.

  “Good. Now when I say ‘staff of life,’ what do you think of?”

  “If you don’t get out of here this minute,” Mrs. Burns said, sweeping a heavy glass ashtray off the table, “I’m going to call the police.”

  Joshua shot out of his chair and made for the door.

  “I’m writing down the name of your firm,” she called after him, “and you’ll be hearing from my husband.”

  “I love you,” he called back, blowing her a kiss.

  “Filth!”

  A news photograph of El Campesino was tacked over his sink. There were also some lines by the murdered García Lorca.

  ¿Qué sientes en tu boca

  roja y sedienta?

  El sabor de los huesos

  de mi gran calavera.

  Although it had never occurred to him that he might be able to write, really write, he figured out that if he was going to get to Spain he would need a craft to sustain him, and he settled on journalism. But he grasped that his grammar was shaky, his prose trite. So he acquired a Fowler, a thesaurus, other books on style, and he studied them in bed at night until the print danced before his eyes. He bought the New York Times, the Post, Collier’s, and, taking the stories apart, he made notes on structure. He picked up a rickety but still functional portable typewriter in a pawnshop on Craig Street. With a card pinched from a student locker, he gained access to the McGill library. He read Mencken, all the journalism anthologies available, the New Statesman, and, above all, A. J. Liebling. Then, applying himself to Montreal newspapers, he realized that he had taken the wrong models. He turned to the New York tabloids, the News and the Mirror; he subscribed to Reader’s Digest. Six months later, Joshua wrote a hard-hitting first-person exposé of the market research business, and how it manipulated the minds of innocent housewives for profit. He took the article to the managing editor of the city’s only tabloid, the Montreal Herald. Fortunately, CMC was not an advertiser, and the editor, a gruff-spoken man, was willing to buy it at five cents a printed column line, if the details checked out. But Joshua, swallowing hard, said
no, if he wanted the article, he had to hire him.

  Had Joshua any experience?

  Damn right, he said, with the Sudbury Nugget, and he produced a letter of reference from the editor typewritten on a letterhead that he had swiped from the old boozer.

  “How old are you, kid?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Like fuck. But I’ll give you a trial.”

  “What will you pay me?”

  “Twenty-five dollars a week to start.”

  “I speak Spanish. I know French. I’m an expert on boxing lore.”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  1949 that was, and, living frugally, he began to set aside money for his trip to Spain. Madrid. The Ebro. Teruel. Guernica. But he would visit Paris first.

  Paris, France.

  Where Hemingway had gone.

  Where one Josip Broz, later known as Marshal Tito, had once been ensconced in a Left Bank hotel organizing a flow of recruits through his so-called “secret railway.” The first contingent of volunteers for the International Brigades, some five hundred men, had arrived in Albacete on October 14, 1936. Their leader was “General” Emilio Kléber, a Romanian whose real name was Lazar, and who was described in propaganda releases as “a soldier of fortune of naturalized Canadian nationality.” And, Joshua remembered, grinning, they were already saying that Yiddish was the Internationals’ lingua franca.

  Once in Paris, Joshua brought his scrapbook of clippings to the Herald-Tribune and the managing editor sighed and asked him to please fill out a form.

  “I thought you might be interested in a series on Spain now. I majored in Spanish history at McGill. I speak the language fluently.”

  “So does the guy we’ve got in Madrid.”

  Joshua rented a room in a small hotel on rue Mouffetard, not far from the outdoor food market, and most afternoons he read in the garden of the Church of St.-Ménard, where Jean Valjean had once accidentally encountered Javert. Where, in 1727, the Jansenist François Paris was buried, young girls flocking to eat the dirt off his grave. Flogging themselves there, having their tongues pierced, or their breasts and thighs trampled on until they passed out. Five years later the government was obliged to have the cemetery walled and guarded, a rhyme mysteriously appearing on the locked gate: