Hutchison Street

by Abla Farhoud

  neighbour it backed on to, the Park Avenue YMCA.

  The houses on Hutchison Street have stayed pretty much the same. The occupants have come and gone, although some people have lived there for decades. The gradual increase in the Hasidic population is the most obvious change. It’s crystal clear when you see the number of children playing in the streets, and the synagogues, the yeshivot, the mikvaot and the mezuzot proliferating before your very eyes. That’s what makes Hutchison Street so unique, a street split between Mile End and Outremont. Between Yaveh, God, Allah … or none of the above.

  The Outremont Side

  The Diary of Hinda Rochel

  I said to my mother, “I would like to write a book one day, when I grow up.” I don’t know why I said it. I must have been out of my mind, for sure. She didn’t know what I was talking about. The only book she knows is the Torah. She must have read other books in school. But never secular books like I have. She stopped going to school after fourth grade. When she finally understood what I was saying, she sighed. She raised her eyes to the heavens and looked at me as if I had just landed from another planet. When you have children, she said, you won’t have time for anything else anymore. She didn’t ask me whether I wanted to get married and have children. You don’t ask a question like that in our community. Everyone gets married. The only non-married people I know are my Uncle Shmully, who is crippled, and an aunt of Naomi’s, who is very weird and who set their house on fire. In the end, my mother uttered the same words she always does when I ask her something a little bit different. She said, in an angry tone of voice, “My dear daughter, a woman must get married, she must have children and bring them up, she is NOT supposed to read and write!”

  As if I didn’t know that already. Sometimes I just want to. May Hashem forgive me, I want to. I don’t know what to do about her anymore. She just … no, I can’t write that down in my diary.

  Chawki and Isabelle

  Ever since he had read Andrea Camilleri’s novels in French translation, Chawki had started using the word coucourde instead of tête to refer to his head. Isabelle had read the same books, and when they talked to each other they used expressions like pirsonnellement en pirsonne, and many other mangled forms of French that made them laugh. Coucourde came up the most often in their conversations because Chawki’s own coucourde gave him a lot of trouble. It came unscrewed and then got screwed back together again fifty times a day. Well, not that many times, but Chawki tended to exaggerate – exaggeration was part of his Arabic background – although he actually felt that way, and it was his head.

  His quirky head would shed a dim, gloomy light on something that had seemed crystal clear and cheery only seconds before, turning it into a murky, mushy mess. His mood was like a light bulb that can be switched on and off. Over the course of a day, however, the light bulb would stay switched on longer than it was switched off. But why did it go off so suddenly and turn back on inexplicably when, objectively, nothing around him had changed?

  For a few seemingly endless minutes, everything would be ugly and incomprehensible, and everything in the world that he was most attached to would suddenly appear wishy-washy and worthless. Nothing meant anything anymore. Everything was scrambled in his coucourde, and he would question everything: his life, his decisions, and even his love for Isabelle.

  And then, bang, a cheerful mood would sweep over him in a miraculous and totally random way.

  “How can the same life, on the same day, be either deadly boring or absolutely splendid?” he would ask when he came back to his senses. Sometimes he wondered where the truth lay. Was it in his moments of light? Or in his moments of darkness?

  Since he was unable to answer these agonizing questions with any certainty, he tried not to think about them too much.

  Chawki had met Isabelle when they were both studying in Paris. He loved her from the moment he laid eyes on her. She had begun to love him nearly a month later. Soon after that month, which had seemed like an eternity to him, they promised to love each other forever and set a date to get married. They had to leave enough time for Isabelle’s parents, who had never crossed the ocean before, to make the necessary arrangements to attend their daughter’s wedding. Chawki didn’t have any family left. His relatives had all been killed in brutal tribal warfare. Hate and vengeance had prevailed for generations.

  He was the sole survivor of his immediate family.

  Chawki and Isabelle had been married for twenty years and were still as much in love with one another as they had been at the start. Their love had never stopped growing. In fact, it had deepened and multiplied by three – three children they adored. Their marriage was what would be called a mixed marriage, since he was Tunisian and she Québécoise. But aren’t marriages always mixed, formed as they are of two individuals with different personalities?

  And different they were. She was blond with translucent skin. She was slim and almost as tall as Chawki, who was of average height, rather stocky, with dark skin and curly hair. She wanted Chawki to teach the children Arabic, but he wanted to forget all about his language and culture. She insisted on giving them Arabic names even if they didn’t speak their father’s language, although he didn’t see the point. She wanted to go on a trip to Tunisia, whereas he was far more interested in Mexico.

  Isabelle didn’t understand. She said to him, “Why are you so stubborn? Why are you denying who you are?” “But I’m not,” he replied, “how could I deny who I am? And even if I wanted to … All of that is over. Keeping the past alive is like trying to feed a corpse. Even though I have given the name Fathi to my son, he will never look like his grandfather. His grandfather is dead and I almost died. If I hadn’t fled, I would never have met you. Why pretend? Why try to mumble a few words in a language I know my children will never speak correctly?

  To be “cute,” as the English say, to be exotic? Let’s leave the dead with the dead and take care of the living instead. The past will never come to life again. I prefer to take care of the present. And don’t forget, dear, that for the Buddhists, identity is just another illusion.”

  Words, words, Isabelle would hum to herself … From time to time, she would bring it up again and Chawki would respond in pretty much the same way. But she couldn’t understand. His answers didn’t make sense. It’s one thing not to want to live in the past, but it’s another to completely erase it just to take care of the present, as he claimed. The wheels in your coucourde are not turning well, my love.

  She didn’t dare talk to him about losing his family and his country. The subject was off limits.

  Chawki, as he said himself, wanted to take care of the present, and the day-to-day. And he did a great job. It was part of his charm and it was among the many things she loved about him. He was the only man she knew who was so attached to the little things in life. He knew how to make the most of every minute. He would conjure up these moments, which he did his best to cherish. He was a magician of everyday life. With him, it was impossible to be bored. In this family, you would never hear a child say: oh no, not hamburgers again! He was almost always the one who put the meals together. He could even turn leftovers into a feast. Isabelle was delighted. Cooking was not her strong suit, but when it came to eating, watch out! She could certainly hold her own. She was good-looking, and he adored cooking for her. When he was preparing the meals, he would picture her closing her eyes in order to taste the food better. He imagined her loving eyes opening and gazing at him as he watched her. You could never tell what would happen next. She might gobble her food down, without saying anything, like their favourite character, Montalbano, or she might babble away and ask incessant questions. “Eat, my dear, it’s going to get cold. I’ll tell you how I made it after.” But he never did tell her because afterward he couldn’t remember. The present had already passed.

  His children weren’t always as enthusiastic about his cooking, but when their friends came over and when they all gather
ed around the table to stuff their faces, he would become the coolest father of them all.

  Cooking was the only part of his native Tunisia that he wanted to keep alive. He knew how to make almost all the dishes he had once eaten, and he did so by heart. And he would make up recipes for the ones he had forgotten about. He never opened a cookbook and he would never set foot in a Tunisian or other North African restaurant.

  He wasn’t Tunisian anymore, and he was only Québécois out of love for Isabelle and his children. He loved this country because he loved them. They say that a friend of a friend is also your friend, and he would say – and he really meant it – “the country of my love is my country.” Love had been his gateway to this country and its culture. It had been a red carpet that is not necessarily rolled out for all immigrants.

  He had lost both his family and his homeland in one fell swoop, and he knew that his love for Isabelle, and then for his children, had given him a new lease on life.

  When the light in his coucourde dimmed, and his love for Isabelle and his children shone less brightly, he felt like an orphan. He was unhappy. But it came back, his love always came back even stronger.

  If Isabelle ever fell out of love with him one day – which was unimaginable, unthinkable – he didn’t know whether he would be able to survive another loss.

  We will never know exactly what happened in Chawki’s coucourde for his attitude to change so radically from one day to the next – toward his past, his identity, his culture, and his language. Had he finally come to terms with the tragic events that had dogged him for so long? Was it the impact of 9/11, which made people look at Muslims – and even those who looked like they might be Muslims – as if they were all terrorists? Was it the questions of his children that forced him to think about who he was? “Are we Arabs, Papa? At school, everyone is saying bad things about Arabs. Are we Muslims, Papa, are we terrorists?” He answered them as best he could. “I am a Muslim because of my parents and my upbringing. I was a Muslim for the first twenty-five years of my life. Bless those who are still Muslim, may they live in peace. I’m not a Muslim anymore. I’m not religious. At the moment, you, children, are not Catholic or Muslim. When you’re old enough, you will choose, if you wish. Leave the

  disagreements, disputes and hatred to other people. You are the new citizens of the world. Like so many other people, you come from a mixed family, a broad-minded one without fanaticism, which embraces all difference. But good lord, we are living in Quebec, which is, as far as I know, a free country, open to the world!”

  And so it was that, in the wake of September 11th, without being pressured into it by Isabelle, Chawki began talking to his children about his youth in Tunisia, about the life of the grandparents they had never heard anything about. He also began looking for some way to teach them Arabic. He didn’t really know how to go about it, or where to begin, but he started by browsing through a few bookstores in Ville Saint-Laurent. Then he discovered that the Mile End library, which was just a stone’s throw away from his house, had a shelf full of children’s books in Arabic, along with CDs for learning the language, and CDs of Arabic music. He had all the resources he needed close at hand.

  Isabelle had been waiting for this for a long time. She was overjoyed. The children, on the other hand, were not so thrilled. They loved their father’s stories, and begged for more, but learning the language was another matter. They grumbled at the start of every lesson. And yet, whenever they learned a new word, they were proud of themselves. They went straight to their mother to practise it, until she, too, began to speak a bit of broken Arabic like they did. Chawki found it hard going. Every week, he would spend one hour with the eldest and an hour and a half with the two younger kids, not counting all the time he spent between lessons reviewing the words they had already learned to make sure they were sticking in their coucourdes.

  As for his own head, the coucourde that played so many tricks on him, it sometimes went dark on him, but less and less often. It would leave him alone to horse around with his kids, to tease them. The children struggled to produce the guttural sounds of the sacred Arabic language. They didn’t always manage, but it was fun to try. They laughed a lot. It brought them closer together and was well worth the effort. “Why on earth didn’t I start earlier?”

  When life at the office became too stressful for her, Isabelle would slip away so that she could be at home pirsonnellement en pirsonne for the hilarious shenanigans. She was tickled pink, in seventh heaven, ecstatic – even though she had to do more cooking now that Prof. Chawki had begun to take his role so seriously. Yet, she had never before heard him laugh with as much gusto – a real belly laugh, finally.

  The Diary of Hinda Rochel

  We kids cannot go into our parents’ bedroom. It is forbidden, and we know that. You just never do it. One time, the door was left open and I saw two beds with a small night table between them. In five or six years, I will also have a bed next to a man I don’t know. Sometimes, I look forward to it. Sometimes, I don’t. I know that a man and a woman make babies together. But I don’t know how they do it. “It’s natural,” my mother told me. “You will do what your husband asks. A woman must obey her husband.” I tried to find out what my husband might ask me to do. My little brother began to cry and my mother ran over in a flash to look after him. I saw it on her face. She was happy. My mother doesn’t like to lie, I know her well. When she doesn’t know what to say, she prefers not to say anything.

  Women don’t study the Talmud and that’s why they have to obey, that’s what my cousin Srully told me. I was little then but I have a very good memory. I am beginning to understand. Women have to obey because they cannot study. But when I think about, I am still puzzled. I like to study. I want to study. I don’t understand anything at all. No, I don’t.

  Françoise Camirand

  On the radio someone is introducing the latest book written by a well-known writer. He is telling a bit of the story.

  The host asks, “Is it true, is it about him?”

  The commentator replies, “No, it’s not about him. He never makes himself one of the characters in his own books. But it’s good, very good.”

  The host replies, “But I like to read a true story. It has to be well written, of course, but a true story, you know, it’s something special …”

  The commentator says, “We often tend to confuse actual events and the fictional narrative. In Germani’s novel, we enter into a world that he has created. It’s credible and we believe in it, it’s true because we believe it. And it’s well written, that’s what’s important, basically. It’s amazingly well written, and it exudes truth.”

  The radio discussion she happened to tune into while waiting for the news to come on made her think about what her publisher Jean-Hugues had told her, when he tried to convince her to write her autobiography. “Your readers want to get to know you,” he had told her. “They are waiting impatiently. You know how popular true

  stories are these days. Everyone wants true stories. Literature is crazy at the moment. Just say that it’s a true story and it will sell like hotcakes. Are readers fed up with fiction, or what? Have readers become warped by all the outrageous true confessions they get from the stars and by all the reality shows they see on television? Is fact more thrilling than fiction? Are writers just on an ego trip, forgetting about their readers? Even in the movies, you see the subtitle “true story,” sometimes in bigger letters than the actual film title. I’m flabbergasted by this appetite for true stories. And yet, mysteries sell very well, too, and you couldn’t get more fictional than that.”

  She listens to the news until the end of the broadcast. She turns the radio off and puts on a CD of Corsican music. It takes just a few seconds for her office to be filled with the sounds of singing voices. The plants and cats are happy, and so is she.

  She fills a pot with water and puts it on for tea. She is thinking about the character she is wo
rking on. She imagines the character hunched over an open book, a large book which she is reading zealously, standing up while making tea, just like she is. There’s no noise in the house now, except for the fridge that hums occasionally, but she doesn’t hear it, just as she doesn’t notice the burbling of the water. A strange noise penetrates the silence. She glances up, startled, and looks around. She had forgotten where she was. There is not a drop of water left in the pot and the bottom is burned.

  The first time she saw her was at the bookstore called L’Écume des Jours, on Saint-Viateur. Clearly, this woman is in love with books. At the Olimpico Café, right across the street from the bookstore, she unwraps what she has just bought. She looks at the books from all angles, strokes them and, with a smile, mulls over which one she will dive into first.

  Over the years, Françoise has met her in the bookstore or at the coffee shop from time to time. When she saw her at the drugstore a couple of days ago, Françoise realized that she had not seen her in a long time.

  The person she would end up calling Martine Saint-Amant had changed a lot. Her face was pale and wrinkled and she didn’t look at all well. She looked nothing like the lively woman she had noticed a few months earlier. It was as if she were gripping her book to avoid falling, her hands trembling ever so slightly. She was sitting down, waiting for her prescription to be filled.

  She was so absorbed in reading her book that she didn’t hear her name being called. The pharmacist repeated her name a bit louder. The other customers indicated that they weren’t the ones whose name was being called, and still she didn’t move. Françoise went up to her and gently touched her arm, “Madame, I think it’s your turn.” The detective book addict looked as if she had been woken up from a long sleep. As the woman got up, Françoise glanced over and had the time to note that she was reading Michael Connelly’s The Poet, which is an excellent crime novel.