Hutchison Street

by Abla Farhoud

  Montreal is her home. Hutchison Street, which connects Mile End and Outremont, is her favourite spot. In her mind, Hutchison does not separate Outremont from Mile End, as you might think; it brings them together. Willa likes to bring people together and to say good morning to her neighbours. She remembers their first names and calls out “Comment ça va aujourd’hui” to the franco-

  phones, or “Hello” with a smile, which never did anybody any harm. For Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, she hangs a fleur-de-lys flag from her balcony and carries a smaller one to the festivities on Saint-Viateur Street. On the first of July, she gets out her Canadian flag. When there are Jewish parades and festivals, she is the first to step out onto her balcony and perhaps the only one to tap out the rhythm in time to the religious chants. She never misses a chance to celebrate, sing, or dance. Life is too short. People die young in her family, her father and mother didn’t even reach the age of sixty.

  It would be an understatement to say that Willa loves life. Willa is life. The heart, passion and smiling side of life.

  She has never had enough money to go to Jamaica, although she wishes she could. Not to see the land of her ancestors, as might be expected, but because it is a country where people dance the night away. Since the Keur Samba closed its doors, she almost never goes dancing anymore. From time to time, there are parties at her church, the Church of the Apostles of Jesus Christ, but people don’t dance all night.

  Sometimes, on her way home from work, she hears music and sees men dancing, three houses over from hers. She stops to listen, then walks slowly up to her house, where she goes out onto the balcony. She sits outside for part of the evening, reading her Bible and listening to the chanting. On Hutchison Street, there are lots of Jewish festivals, during which people sing and dance all night.

  If there were the slightest chance that they would let her in, Willa would be thrilled to go dance with her neighbours. But at the rate things are going, there is no way that will happen. Her dream of Jamaican nights is far more likely to come true than having a Hasidic family open its doors to her. She knows this, but she continues to have hope.

  Benoît Fortin

  Benoît Fortin had rented his first apartment with his first girlfriend. It was his girlfriend who had landed the place: a 5½ she had heard about from a friend of a friend who had a friend who was leaving her cheap apartment before the lease was up because she was going on a trip. It was a real bargain, because the rent had not been increased for years. His girlfriend had convinced the landlord to let them have it without breaking the lease and jacking up the rent – as is – that way, he wouldn’t need to repaint or do any repairs, which the place badly needed, because her boyfriend, who was very handy and a really good guy, was going to take care of everything, which he actually never did. She was super sweet, she smiled a lot. Tongue-tied and gesticulating, she finally won over the old man, whose broken English was just as bad as hers, only he had a Greek accent that was typical of the neighbourhood.

  That particular girlfriend left him long ago, and others came and went like she did. But Benoît wouldn’t have left his apartment for anything in the world. It was dear to his heart. It gave him stability, it was like an ID card. From one year to the next, with or without a girlfriend, he managed to cough up the rent money, which remained well below anything he could’ve found downtown. The landlord, who was even older now and also sick, quite simply forgot to raise the rent, and even forgot that he had a tenant who lived on the third floor.

  It took Benoît fifteen minutes to get downtown by bus, on the number 80 or 160, but he was just a stone’s throw from the Taverna, which had just changed its name. He lived minutes away from the Futembule, which had turned into Helm, and from all the coffee shops on Bernard, east of Park Avenue, which had sprung up overnight. It didn’t take long to get to Romolo, the first café in the neighbourhood, which had grown to three times its original size, and he was one block away from Saint-Viateur Street. Ah, Saint-Viateur, on a Sunday when the sun is shining, when Café Olimpico and the Club Social are packed inside and out, with people babbling in all sorts of languages, with the aroma of coffee, crêpes and bagels in the air. Whenever he can tear himself away from his computer, Benoît likes to go there to grab a coffee, and go scouting for any pretty girls looking for guys on a sunny day made especially for chatting one another up.

  From a distance, Benoît Fortin looks like a teenager. Ripped jeans, faded T-shirt, beat-up backpack, unkempt hair. He runs down the outside staircase lickety-split and walks as if he always has someone to catch up to or something pressing to do. Up close, you can see his furrowed eyebrows as he stares pleadingly from behind his patched-together eyeglasses. Without a care about his age or

  existential questions like “what have I done with my life?” he has reached the age of forty almost without noticing it. He is neither happy nor unhappy, and it never even occurs to him to wonder whether he is or not.

  He is ecstatic just sitting at his computer, especially when he’s grappling with a big problem. One day when he had just solved a gigantic problem and sent his findings to the company that hired him from time to time, he turned off his computer – it happened so rarely – and spun around in his swivel chair. He looked around the room in which he worked, he got up, he walked around the other rooms in the apartment, and he felt lonely. With his computer shut down, he felt disconnected, like the machine. Nothing, no one, had ever made him feel this way. He had never felt this empty, not even when his umpteenth girlfriend had dumped him. Not the same kind of emptiness, in any case.

  Whenever one of his girlfriends left him, he had mixed feelings. He felt hurt, of course he was hurt, but, at the same time, he felt liberated. He liked living alone. According to his own rhythm, without having to worry about anyone else, without being forced to do anything he didn’t want to do. That way, he could work fourteen hours in a row without having his live-in say to him, “We never do anything together, you’re always working, the house is a real pigsty, and I’m pretty fed up living with a ghost.”

  If he knew how to resist the fairer sex, he would never live with anyone. He attracted women like flies, and he surrendered to them. He was easy prey, up to a certain point. Women could do whatever they wanted with him, but only until his work got the upper hand, until the next unsolved problem became the focus of his passion. In the days when women were less enterprising, he would have been a solitary researcher, a mad scientist whose discoveries would have come to light after his death.

  He was not meant to be in a relationship. It wasn’t that he didn’t love women, but it was more difficult for him to find out how to make them happy, or at least content and not crabby, than it was for him to discover a hidden defect in software that someone had sent him in an emergency because they knew that he would find it. And find it he did. But he had not yet found a way to detect the flaws in his personal relationships.

  Although he wasn’t capable of becoming an acceptable partner, he was a generous, kind and considerate friend. When they were no longer his girlfriends, all of his exes could depend on him. Anyone could count on him to help out with any kind of problem. An aunt, brother or even cousin of one of his ex-girlfriends would have no qualms about turning to him for help. He had a very sensitive way of doing someone a favour, as if it were no trouble, and some people shamelessly took advantage of him. By getting him to fix a computer bug, to repair a bicycle, car or fridge on the blink, to babysit, or to paint a balcony.

  Believe it or not, Benoît had no sense of his own value, his true value, and even if he had been aware of it, he would not have paid any attention to what he was doing or to who he was.

  Benoît Fortin came from a dreary family for whom every minute of life was a burden. “A drab family,” Benoît had said one day to his second girlfriend, “can we change the subject?” They weren’t rich, and they weren’t poor. His father worked as a foreman in a shoe factory and his mother as a nurse’s aide
in an old folks’ home. Both of them hated their jobs, but neither would have changed jobs unless they were forced to do so. They didn’t quarrel with one another, but they didn’t love each other either. They lived side by side, in a lacklustre life without incident. Their three children, a girl and two boys, were docile. They didn’t fight, they each had their own room, and they didn’t have close ties with their parents or with one another. They would all sit down to eat at the table or in front of the television whenever their mother or father allowed them to, that was about all they did together. Around the age of fourteen or so, Benoît, the youngest, discovered computers at school. To say he felt joy or happiness would be an understatement. It was a kind of redemption. He was saved.

  No one in his family had visited him in the twenty years he had lived on Hutchinson Street. No one knew where Benoît lived or even wanted to know. On several occasions, he had gone back to the suburbs where his parents lived. His brother and sister had already left home. He never thought about his childhood or teenage years, but sometimes he thought about his first computer, which miraculously appeared as a Christmas present. He was fifteen at the time.

  He never had anything to say to his girlfriends or to his pals. He never said a word about the suburban neighbourhood where he had lived for more than twenty years, and he never talked about his family. But as surprising as it might seem, he would never have left of his own accord. If it hadn’t been for his girlfriend, who was more bold and daring than he was and who wanted to go live in the big city at all costs, he would have stayed in that “rotten suburb,” as he called it, without ever naming the exact place, when he wanted to avoid talking about it.

  When he got to the city, he had the very distinct feeling of being saved for the second time in his life, this time from his past. Having found his place, and being free to live his own life. He was grateful to his first girlfriend, for whom he felt a special affection. She was the one, after all, who had served up the city to him on a silver platter, who had found this dilapidated apartment, which he loved, where he felt so much at home. Home, finally.

  And to this day, even if someone gave him a castle, all expenses paid, far away from Mile End, his neighbourhood, he would never leave his 5½-room apartment on Hutchison Street.

  Françoise Camirand

  After dreaming about the young Hasidic girl for several nights in a row, the subject of her next book came to her in a flash. She didn’t have to make a conscious decision to delve into the subject. She wouldn’t just put up with her dreams; instead, she would turn them to full advantage.

  One morning, she got up, opened a new file and typed: Portraits of People on my Street (Tentative Title). And away she went! She always made important decisions in the morning.

  Since then, she has carried out her investigations in a different way. For one of her novels in which the main character was a dancer, she had read a pile of books on dance and had attended as many dance performances as she could. But now, she doesn’t know what to read or where to look. So she looks at everything. She goes for walks with her eyes and ears wide open. She goes into stores, she listens to people, she engages the shopkeepers in conversation more than she did before, and she eavesdrops on people chatting in cafés. She sits down in different parks with a book and a little notebook in her hands, waiting for something that might tickle her fancy.

  She walks past the synagogue at the corner of Saint-Viateur again and again, trying to understand. She would like to slip inside through the women’s entrance and attend a service. She wonders whether they would let her in, although she already knows the answer.

  She reads everything she can lay her hands on about the Jewish religion, about Hasidism. She looks for works of fiction written by Hasidim, but she doesn’t find much. She reads and rereads Disobedience by Naomi Alderman, Lekhaim!, the French translation of stories by Malka Zipora, Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander, which a friend gave her, The Street by Mordecai Richler, and all the novels she can find by Éliette Abécassis. She consults reference books, but she keeps on looking for fiction, which will give her a better sense, she feels, of people’s inner lives.

  It will not be easy, she knows, to penetrate the lives of Hasidic Jews, but she will never be able to speak to the people on her street if she doesn’t try to take a peek into their world. They now make up the majority of the population on Hutchison Street. In thirty-nine years, she has never crossed the threshold of a Hasidic home and she has never exchanged a single word with any of them. She has seen them. From the outside only. They are a total mystery to her.

  Sometimes, the challenge she faces looms like a mountain before her. She tells herself, “They are humans, after all. Like me, like anyone, they were born and they are going to die, with obstacles between the two events. There has to be a way to catch them off guard, the way the young Hasidic girl caught me in my dream … ”

  When she goes out walking, she counts the trees on the street, just for fun. She soon loses track. At the beginning of the 1980s, the sidewalk on the Mile End side of the street was widened to twice its size, and the City of Montreal planted trees all along. Some have died, but others have thrived and are still going strong. As she walks along, she hums snippets of Pendant que, a song by Gilles Vigneault that evokes hopes and dreams coming together and fading away again.2 She forgets what made her start counting trees in the first place. Why not count the mezuzot on the doorposts of the Jewish homes instead?

  In thirty-nine years, both the trees and the Hasidim have proliferated on Hutchison. Trees grow tall and mezuzot in flesh-coloured plastic multiply. The weather is nice today and walking has done her good. She is anxious to return to her writing. As she climbs the first few steps of her staircase, a young Hasidic boy, whom she has seen a hundred times, dashes past her.

  The Diary of Hinda Rochel

  When I was little, my mother always combed my hair. I was the only girl in the family and my mother didn’t have as many children as she does now. There was just my brother Yehuda and me and my mother was expecting. I had long hair. My mother brushed my hair, which she braided or sometimes tied up in a ponytail, and I liked that a lot. My brother didn’t get as much attention. From time to time, my mother would shave his head and curl his sidelocks at night with a special pin, and the next morning in a split second she would unroll the payos. She spent a lot more time with me. My mother used to wear a white headscarf around the house, tied up in front with a knot at her forehead. When I was little, I thought that my mother had no hair. One day, I asked her, “Why don’t you have hair like me, Mama?” “Because I shaved it off. A married woman must shave her head. Her husband must never see her hair, and no other men should either. When you grow up, you too will shave your head.” “No, Mama,” I exclaimed, “I don’t want to cut off my hair, I don’t want to look like Yehuda. I love it when you spend a long time combing my hair.” I don’t remember what my mother’s answer was.

  Tamara

  She was tall but she thought she was short, she was beautiful but she thought she was ugly, she was slim but she thought she was fat, she was good at school but she thought it was too easy. She was very talented, in a lot of ways. She had tried her hand at everything, but she had not followed through with anything. She was interested in politics, which was rare for someone of her age. Like her father did, back then, she read newspapers and anything else she could lay her hands on to keep up with current events and understand what was going on. She could carry on a conversation about the state of the world, she could analyse things, understand what worked and what didn’t, but she didn’t know much about her own personal state, and didn’t want to know either. She attributed her malaise to the “rough patch” she was going through. She thought she would get over it, as they say, but she didn’t. It persisted and even got worse.

  She didn’t know who she was, what she wanted, or what she was doing in this world. Life eluded her more and more. She floated between heaven an
d earth while waiting for someone – anyone – to tell her how to find herself and how to find some meaning in her life.

  To her friends, she was the kind of person who was always on top of things, the one who had boys falling all over her, and she was the envy of all the girls. To her family, she was a distant, capricious and overly sensitive princess, hard to figure out. Anyone seeing her for the first time would be impressed by her waif-like sex appeal, her intelligence and her sense of humour, as well as the very special way she had of just scratching the surface of things, of attracting people and at the same time keeping them at a distance.

  Just when her identity was the most fragile, her father disappeared without a trace. His departure was a blow to her self-esteem. She had precious little self-confidence as it was, and this event shook it to its foundation. She did not understand; she could not understand. It was a betrayal. It was beyond comprehension. Her father had abandoned her, his only daughter, his favourite child, his “little princess” as he used to call her. She realized that his love for her was nothing but a lie. My little princess, my eye! Go fuck yourself, you liar, you bastard! Her life – which had been shaped by her father’s gaze – turned out to be a mere illusion. He had left without even telling her. Perhaps she would have understood why if she had known in advance. Instead, he had taken a blank sheet of paper and scribbled the words, “I can’t go on living here. I am suffocating. I love you all.” He had left the note on the kitchen table, addressed to no one – the coward – and signed it with his full name, first and last.

  An official farewell from a traitor and gutless deserter, whom she had called Papa, Daddy, and whom she had loved and adored! She doesn’t remember having cried that day, or on the days that followed. She was so hurt that the pain would have crushed her if she had not remained outside her body. Dark circles formed around her magnificent eyes. Unbeknownst to her, her home base had just been blown to bits.