by Abla Farhoud
His friend, Mr. Moneybags, had the clever idea of hiring a designer, someone who had turned a dark, dilapidated space on Saint-Laurent Boulevard into a scintillating boutique where passersby, himself included, would step in just to take a peek at the decor and then end up buying something. Hershey barely knew what the word “designer” meant, but he trusted his friend, and telephoned the designer, who turned out to be Lebanese. Everyone says that the Arabs and Jews don’t get along, but it is not necessarily so. In this case, the Jew and the Lebanese got on like a house on fire.
The bakery was so beautiful that it caught the eye of all the passersby. A celestial light shining through a domed skylight attracted customers and had a soothing effect on them once they were inside. Everything looked good, and everything tasted good. It was the only kosher store in the neighbourhood where Jews and non-Jews congregated comfortably. The bakery was always full of satisfied customers, who could grab a coffee while waiting their turn. Friday afternoons were hectic, as families prepared for Shabbat. According to custom, Hershey closed the store before sundown on Friday and reopened on Sunday morning.
It was just like a Hasidic or Arabic folk tale. All of the people who had made fun of Hershey, who had ridiculed him and ostracized him, came in one after the other to buy his bread and his cakes, all the while bowing and scraping and addressing him as Mister Rozenfeld, if you please.
He had not become the most devout nor the best person, but in the eyes of his people, he had become richer and thus more respectable. As people used to say in the olden days, and it still holds true today:
Magically,
Money
Slips a silken shawl
Onto the beggar’s shoulders
Erasing the traces
Of his failings and flaws.
The Diary of Hinda Rochel
I said to Mama, “All the neighbours plant flowers in front of their houses. We never do.” My mother looked at me strangely. She said, “We do things that they don’t do. And they do things that we don’t do. That’s the way it is and it’s not going to change.” I asked her, “Is it part of our religion not to plant flowers? Does God like flowers?” She replied, “I don’t know whether God likes flowers or not, but I don’t have time for that kind of thing. Have you ever seen me sitting around with nothing to do?” “No, you are always working.” “There, that’s your answer. Watch out! Moishy is going to fall. I asked you to look after your brother.”
My mother was busy washing the kitchen walls. The walls have always looked clean to me, but not to her. I have never seen her sitting down in an armchair. Even when we are eating, she gets up from the table twenty times. She likes to work more than anything else in the world, that’s what I think. On Shabbat she HAS to rest. But it’s very hard for her to rest.
“Go fill up the big pot with fresh water.”
Commanders in the Israeli army must have the same kind of voice as my mother, even though they speak Hebrew and not Yiddish. You can never say no. You just obey. I’m tired of obeying. There’s always someone I have to look after, always something I have to dust, wash, peel, stir, iron. I never get a break. Thank goodness there’s school. Yehuda does nothing. Nothing. His royal highness has become a bocher. He’s thirteen. That gives him all kinds of rights and privileges. Since his bar mitzvah, it’s gotten worse. He even acts like a king. He’s one year older than I am. It’s not fair. What’s more, there are only boys in my family. I’m really unlucky.
Antonella Rossetti
Every year she felt the same impatience, the same joy and the same anticipation. On the days when the bags of topsoil were delivered, the weather was always nice on Hutchison. Without fail. She was delighted, of course. She took full advantage of every fine day, more than anyone else. During the warm weather, she relived her childhood, spent in a small village in southern Italy where she had walked around barefoot, carefree and happy. Her little postage-stamp garden to the left of her front staircase was the same. It was her own little Italy. It was her very own. Even when her husband was still alive, she, Antonella Rossetti, was the one who looked after the front garden. Marco was in charge of the vegetable garden in the backyard. She had since taken that one over too, but her undying pleasure lay in cultivating the one out front.
It wasn’t just the way the earth felt on her hands and feet, and knees as well, not just the tomatoes that she pampered continually in good weather and bad, not just the basil that she grew amongst the few flowers she planted – a new variety every year. What she liked most of all were the looks she got from people as they walked past her house.
She had a full head of hair, which shone as if she had coloured it the day before, and she was always artfully coiffed with superb French twists or elaborate chignons. Antonella was beautiful, stylish and proud of the good looks she still had in her seventies. She specially liked the slightly envious way people stared at her. What a beautiful garden, the smiling passersby seemed to be thinking, what beautiful tomatoes you have there! They would slow down and take a good look, and once a woman even stopped and asked her outright if she could taste one of them. “Not ready yet,” Antonella replied. “Two days. You come back, two days.” The woman had indeed come back, and to Antonella’s amusement, she had held the sun-soaked red tomato in her hands; she stroked it, sniffed it, and then bit into it with her eyes shut tight. It reminded Antonella of taking holy communion, and perhaps that’s what the woman was thinking too.
With money handy to pay for the delivery of the topsoil, Antonella waited, visibly impatient, for the driver to leave. In the cardboard box on her balcony, her rakes, shovels and buckets were already waiting as anxiously as she was to touch the earth after such a long winter. For Antonella, each year brought the same sense of wonder. As if the long winters almost made her forget that spring would come on time, and that she could once again grow the most beautiful tomatoes on Hutchison Street. “Would you like me to spread it?” the driver asked. She understood the meaning of the sentence, but not the word “spread.” It was the first time that a delivery man had offered to help her. Did she look that old, madre mia? As ever, she didn’t want anyone else touching her garden. “No, no, grazie. I like very much …” She made the motion of spreading earth. The driver understood that it was time to ask her to sign the papers, take her money and leave.
Her garden was at a higher level than all the other gardens on the street and, from year to year, picking up earth made it overflow onto the sidewalk. Last year she even had to build a kind of box with high sides to keep the dirt from spilling outside of the wrought iron fence. A handwritten sign hung on her fence in winter and summer, on which she had written, in misspelled French, “Pas bicicle icite.”
There were several Italian families living on Hutchison when Antonella first moved in with her husband and children forty years ago. Back then, people tried to keep up with one another as far as gardens were concerned, and tomatoes and grapevines were a favourite. They constructed vine-covered arbours, and would try to coax the vines into producing not only tender leaves that could be stuffed – the envy of the Lebanese – but also black, red or green grapes, which were delicious to eat and so mouth-watering that they made the other neighbours jealous. Between Bernard and Saint-Viateur, there was only one arbour left, worthy of the name, which belonged to Antonella’s second neighbours, the Marconis. Gradually the families had become better off. They had moved to Laval or elsewhere, and the vines had dried up from lack of care or know-how. The Jewish mothers had too many children and not enough time to look after vines, let alone gardens.
When Antonella was not busy digging, hoeing, propagating, thinning out, pruning and weeding, or just admiring her own garden, she like to get all spruced up. She would spray herself with perfume, put on her high-heeled shoes – not too high, though – and then go out for a walk around the neighbourhood. She would take the time to go shopping and sit on a bench on the street or in the park in the summertime.
In preparation for Sunday dinner with her children, she would shop at Four Brothers and then have her order delivered, picking up a few other items that she bought at Latina. Sunday night dinner took place every week without fail even if one or two of her children were missing. Too bad for the ones who didn’t come because Antonella’s meals were delicious, and good for the ones who showed up, because there would be even more left over for them to take home.
Ever since she retired, her meals had become feasts. She put in all the time and attention that was needed, and she watched cooking shows religiously. Even if she didn’t understand everything people were saying, she got ideas just from watching. She really liked the little di Stasio woman, perhaps because she was of Italian background, and Antonella was very touched the time she went on a trip to Italy. Her Italian accent left something to be desired, but still, it was better than nothing, and Antonella liked her anyway because she was cheerful and loved food. In the afternoon, she watched Pour le plaisir on French television, because she found both the hosts funny and always in a good mood. She also watched Italian programs when she could pick them up on cable.
Antonella Rossetti definitely had a knack for looking on the bright side of things all of the time. She had understood once and for all that it’s not worth taking things the wrong way, or going against the tide. Naturally, she had been a bit down when her husband died, just as they were about to retire. They could have had a few more good years together. She loved her Marco so much, but crying wouldn’t bring him back. Of course, when she arrived in Canada at the age of sixteen without her family, she had felt homesick. She had been nostalgic for her childhood, she was lonesome for her parents, and she missed the year-round hot weather, the feel of the ground under her bare feet, and the scent of the orange trees. But she liked the work that they found for her as a seamstress in a factory on Castelnau Street. The noise was irritating, but you got used to it. She had girlfriends who were fun to be with, and they all worked hard and laughed a lot.
Antonella liked to laugh. To get dolled up, do her hair and step out. She liked it when people looked at her and suggested, with a little smile, that she was not bad for an old girl! She loved the smell of earth and the feel of her hands in the earth. She loved her children. She loved them even when they didn’t come for dinner, when they found excuses not to come at the last minute, even after she had cooked up a lot of good food, especially for them, making it exactly the way they liked it. Antonella was just like that, she had a gift for taking life as it comes, and never looking back.
The Diary of Hinda Rochel
I would like to be someone else. Not me, Hinda Rochel, the daughter of Sholem and Chevda. It’s not that I don’t love my father and mother and my brothers. It’s just that I am tired of my life. Sometimes I’m . . . I don’t know how to say this. Pure, impure, it’s as if there were only two words in my mother’s language. Rules to follow and things to do. That’s it. Pure, impure, permitted, forbidden. Many more things are forbidden than permitted. Like the French language. There are way too many grammar rules in French. It’s the same thing in our religion. It’s so hard. In French, there are exceptions to the rules, but not in our religion. There are no exceptions. Everything is by the book. I can never tell anyone what I’m writing about in my journal, not even my best friend. That’s what my life is like. I’m looking forward to having my own home, with no one to tell me what to do. To having a bit of peace. When I’m at home, I often feel like crying. But where can I cry without having someone scold me for crying? I don’t even have my own room. Two of my little brothers sleep in my room. In the winter, it’s even worse. The bathroom? I have never been able to lock myself in the bathroom for more than three minutes at a time. When I feel like crying there’s always someone who has to do something you can’t write about in a diary. May the Creator forgive me, I hate life, and I hate MY life even MORE.
Sylvain Tremblay
He had always hated seeing his mother with her eyes brimming with tears. Tears that never flowed. She must have been about fifty-five or fifty-six years old when he noticed it, suddenly, and it began to get on his nerves, and then to horrify him. Every time she told a little story about the past, no matter whether it was happy or unhappy, her eyes would mist over, covered in a layer of tears that she never shed. He wanted to tell her: have a good cry so we can get it over with. But even before he could blurt out the words, his mother’s tears would disappear. And then appear again when she got the least bit emotional. It would only take some innocuous anecdote, sad, happy or full of tenderness. You never knew when hidden feelings would well up and when her heart would spill over into her eyes.
The frequency of these episodes drove him crazy. Where had she been hiding her pain for all those years? She had seemed so happy.
Around the same age, Sylvain Tremblay began to experience the same terrible affliction as his mother. He had just turned fifty-five. To his great dismay, he could not keep his feelings from bubbling up to his eyes, making his eyelids and entire face puffy, and filling his eyes with fluid that couldn’t find the exit valve. He had picked up his mother’s revolting condition. His fits of emotion were unpredictable, he would become agitated more and more often, but tears never flowed from his eyes.
Many years ago, Sylvain Tremblay was a popular singer. He couldn’t walk down the street without being recognized by someone. People would sometimes come up to him and talk. Some would ask him for his autograph, while others pretended not to recognize him, although it showed anyway. He liked his profession, but he didn’t really like to be recognized. It even irritated him sometimes. Being well known goes hand in hand with being recognized, and he had no idea that one day he would miss both.
His career had begun with a bang, without any particular effort on his part, and he coasted on his success. Shows, television, going on the road – it worked well for some years, until he felt the urge to compose his own songs. One or two of them were played on the radio. He was thrilled to hear his fans singing his very own words, to a tune he had composed. But it was short-lived. You can’t change styles without impunity, people in the entertainment business would say. The pop singer had lost sight of his niche, and the composer-songwriter was not able to carve out one of his own. His audiences, those greedy, nameless people, as fickle as the wind, had not stuck by him. “My dear audience,” Marc Labrèche so affectionately repeated every week, to butter up his spectators and win their loyalty, because, to be honest, a performer is nobody without his audience. In Sylvain Tremblay’s case, the people who had fallen in love with him on a whim forgot him just as quickly, without so much as a goodbye.
The more time went by the less hope he held out.
Revival, resurrection. He had tried many times, of course. He had written a bunch of new songs. But these efforts never paid off. There was no reaction from audiences or from the entertainment world. Too many excellent young songwriters were popping up – young women and men who had something to say and a new way of making music. There were too many good songs on the air. He felt old, obsolete and decrepit. Frustrated and defeated, he buried his self-confidence ten feet underground.
And time passed. No one recognized him anymore, no one talked about him. There wasn’t the slightest reference to him on the radio, even in jest. Nothing. He was working as a car salesman and earning a good living at it, incognito. None of the people he worked with knew he had once had his moment of glory, that he had been on television so many times, or that he had performed in the biggest concert halls in Montreal and beyond. He didn’t ever talk about it. Why would he? There was no point in making himself feel more ashamed.
And still, when he was not dragged down by his urge to sing again, Sylvain Tremblay wasn’t what you would call a happy man – that would be a stretch – but he wasn’t unhappy either, even though sporadic surges of ambition were constantly ruining his life. He wanted to plan a comeback. “But what am I going to revive?” he asked himself one da
y. “What am I going to revive?” It triggered such strong emotion that tears began to flow. He thought of his mother, and sobbed until he was exhausted.
One day, as he was still grappling with the decision to give up his now-defunct past, another nail was hammered into its coffin. He received a mysterious phone call from a woman he didn’t know. She was a researcher for a television show on “has-beens,” looking for old stars who were willing to talk about what they were now up to.
It could not have been more humiliating for him. As he talked to the researcher, he remembered a saying he had read somewhere, about an old hero who does not want to talk about his glorious past. She bombarded him with references to his past as a pop singer. He blushed and his eyes brimmed with tears. He wanted to tell her about his recent songs, which were ready to be recorded, if only he could find a record company.
It was humiliating, but he couldn’t refuse. You never know, this was perhaps a way to kick start his career again. A producer might be watching, or a far-sighted manager, or a record company. You never know.
When he saw the television guys arrive at his place, he shuddered with fear but still felt vaguely happy. It was now or never. He had to go ahead with it. With all his heart.
In the blink of an eye, a crew armed with cameras, cables, spotlights, lapel-mics, make-up – the whole kit and caboodle – set up their gear in the nicest room in his apartment, his living room which overlooked Hutchison. He had cleaned house, tidied up, rearranged the living room to make it look spiffy, but on orders from the producer, they turned everything topsy-turvy in the space of a few minutes. Witnessing this commotion made Sylvain relive the excitement of his early years. Tears welled up in his eyes. Too many emotions at once, a mix of old and new ones. He had more stage fright than he’d ever had. He had to get through it at all costs. He took refuge in his bathroom, where he tried to relax and perk himself up by splashing cold water on his face.