Young blond with dictionary in hand.
Wer sind Sie?
I am a Pole.
Do you speak English.
A little.
Sind Sie ein Pole?
Ya.
Wohnen Sie in Warsaw?
Yes.
Come in.
Everybody was drunk singing “Hurrah Konrad.” I meet my best friend. You need suit. What do you need? Here drink, and took from his blouse a bottle. Ah Konrad, freedom. Drink. Let’s get drunk. British soldiers give whisky, cigarettes, everybody drinking, kissing, eating, all cans of petrol filled with spirits. Sometimes German planes come and machine gun. All women drunk. All suits given away free. Fifteen nationalities in camp. No organization. Everybody drinking, dancing.
“Who is drunk can’t leave camp.”
Good, now I’m imprisoned by the British. That is fine. Das ist liberation. Good. Let’s drink. Germans in barns. DPs in house. Germans cook for us. All DP camps drunk. Fifteen nationalities, fifteen camp leaders, fifteen committees. Loudspeakers going all day from five until twelve at night.
Viva holiday.
We have revolvers. We shoot. Ping. A place is cleared. We throw grenades. Give prizes.
He liked the “Konrad” sketch and the other early ones. “Jerome,” the debt collector who looked like a professor. He met him in Lyons in the Strand. He worked for a firm that bought up old debts at a discount then employed “Jerome” to collect them. The third sketch was “Doris.” He met her at Waterloo Station. She was pushing a tea trolley. She told him how she made her money by bringing her own packages of tea and putting these into the tea urn and selling them, instead of British Rail . . .
“Obituary notices,” he said to himself. “That’s what I was writing.”
He knew he would not have a sketch ready that week. The editor said nothing, and reprinted an early one. But after it happened twice he received a telegram asking if he was ill. He replied that he was but he would try to send him something soon.
Weeks passed. The cheques stopped arriving. He tried to write of places he had never seen. But he knew that they were not right. He had always used the notebook and these attempts to write imaginative pieces, he knew, were lifeless. When, in desperation, he sent one of these off, the editor promptly returned it, at the same time reminding him that he was one of the best writers “in the naturalistic tradition,” and that was what he wanted.
He believed it would be more humane if he went to people who were already dying. He visited the small hospital. There was one old woman. The doctor told him that she was dying. He looked at her. Her teeth had fallen underneath the bed. She asked him to pick them up for her . . .
Summer passed. He would lie in his bed during the day, not wanting to get up. Sometimes at night he went out and wandered in the back streets worrying what he could possibly write about to bring in some money. He felt certain that what he had done, especially in the village, was wrong. But he did not know why. He wanted to write but not to harm anyone.
I am reluctant to leave my cottage, he wrote on New Year’s Day in the notebook. When I do, I’m afraid of running into someone I know. He will show surprise and say, I thought you were away. And I say, Yes. It stops a lot of questions. I keep away from certain streets because I owe money to two grocers, the paper place, the tobacconist, the butcher, the milkman, the coal merchant. On Christmas Day, as a gesture, I went by the side streets and alleys to the old pier and sat down on the bench by a couple. They must have been in their fifties or sixties. They were on holiday. She took hold of the man’s hand and began clumsily to stroke it. She had a small fattish hand. And there is something desperate about her action. They talk about the far shore fields, of travelling in a car there some time ago.
“What’s the time?” the man says suddenly.
She leaves go the man’s hand to look at her wrist.
“Nearly two.”
“Why is it so early?” he says. “It’s been early all day.”
I get up and quickly walk away from them. I can’t use them, I can’t use them, I can’t use them . . . And I realize I am walking through the streets talking to myself . . .
Late in January, on a particularly cold night, weak from hunger and cold, the old man died. And when they found him, he had burned the leather-bound books in an attempt to keep warm.
IN LOWER TOWN
W hen I was a kid we lived in Lower Town, Ottawa. The first house was on Guigues Street. It was a brick house on a corner. On one side was King Edward Avenue with its boulevard of tall elms, their roots above the ground. And on the other, our neighbour Nadolny. Mr. Nadolny, a nice-looking man in glasses, had been something different in Europe. Here in Ottawa he was, like my father, a fruit peddler. The rest of Guigues Street was French Canadian.
It was a large three-storey house and to help things out, my mother took in boarders. All of them were recent immigrants from Europe.
There was Isaac and his wife, Ethel. He looked like a professor with his monocle, and worked in a jewellery store, uptown, doing watch repairs. She stayed home, as she was pregnant. She looked a bit scatty with her blond fuzzy hair that she had difficulty in combing and her large pale eyes. She also couldn’t speak English. When she started to have labour pains, she called out to me.
“Me hoits. Me hoits.”
They soon left Ottawa for California.
And there was Bobeh and Zaydeh Saslove. They were brought over by their sons when they were in their late sixties. He was short and quiet and had a long beard and not much to do except go to the synagogue. In Poland, when he was younger, he was something in wood. Here he would go to the market and buy, in summer, the wood we needed for the winter. I’d see him come back with the horse and wagon and blocks of wood piled high in the back. He made several trips. Then he spent days building the blocks of wood carefully together along the back fence near where the wild cucumbers were growing. He took care and had the wood meshed evenly—like I tried to do on the table with matches. After he had stacked the couple of cords he would ask us to come out and see how it looked. We all said it looked very nice. A couple of days later he would knock it all down flat. And then start to build it up again, very neatly.
Both he and his wife spoke in whispers. And they ate their meals together out of the same bowl.
My father only knew a few words of English and a few words of French. When I was twelve—and we moved from Guigues to Murray Street, where just about everyone was either a fruit- or a rag-peddler—I decided to help my father with the peddling. When school finished at the end of June, I left the house early in the morning and walked to the market and helped him load the wagon with the fruit and vegetables that he bought from the farmers and the wholesale stores. Then we went out—the white horse pulling the high red wagon over Rideau, along Nicholas Street, by the jail, over Laurier Bridge and across the Rideau Canal, to the first street with my father’s customers—Gloucester.
It was a quiet street with lots of trees and squirrels on the grass lawns and wooden houses with verandas painted green or brown. In the middle of the block there was a greystone convent where someone was always practising the piano.
It was a humid day and our shirts were damp when my father asked me to come along to his first customer—to help break me in.
We walked around the back of the house to the kitchen. He knocked on the screen door. A pretty woman in a black slip appeared. She was in her thirties. She began to ask questions as to the price of the corn, bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes—and she started to squeeze the peach I had, as a sample, in my wicker basket.
“Kvetch, kvetch.” My father began to talk in Yiddish. “I bet you know how to squeeze in bed.”
I looked at the woman’s face, trying to pretend I didn’t hear what my father was saying.
“How much are the spring onions?” she asked.
> “Three bunches for twenty cents,” I said.
“Look at the prostitute,” my father said in Yiddish. (The word he used was curveh, which is much more evocative.) “You can see she’s got nothing on underneath.”
“How much are the cherries?” the woman asked with a nice smile.
“Twenty-five cents a box,” I said, looking at her brown eyes, the dark hair cut short, the even teeth.
I tried to keep a straight face while she gave me her order and my father went on in Yiddish about her likely performance in bed.
As we walked back to the wagon to get her order made up, I felt embarrassed and pleased. I had never heard my father say anything like this before. Without turning my head, I glanced at his face. He was grinning like a kid.
That evening, after he had put the horse in the stable and had his supper, he came outside to sit with my mother and sister on the veranda. He was the same self I had known before, in his chair, in the corner, by the hanging morning glory, drinking Kik. And looking at the families sitting outside on the other verandas doing much the same.
I thought it was only my father who behaved differently away from Lower Town until I happened to be in one of the wealthier west-end streets a couple of days later. By now I knew the route as well as the horse. And I used to go well ahead of the horse and wagon so I could sit on a veranda, in the shade, and rest a bit, while my father served his customers.
I was sitting like this when I saw old man Pleet—our neighbour on one side in Murray Street. He had a broken-down horse pulling a shabby wagon with old mattresses, old bedsprings, bottles, and sacks. But instead of calling out “Rags, rags for sale,” which he did in Lower Town, here he was saying, in a slight singsong, the evening service of the synagogue. He didn’t see me. As the horse and wagon went by I looked at his face. Mr. Pleet was miles and miles away.
Another time, also in a wealthier street, in Rockcliffe, I saw Mr. Slack, another rag-peddler from Murray Street. He too was going through with his horse and wagon, very slowly, on this hot summer’s day, junk piled behind him. And calling out sadly in Yiddish.
“Thieves. Thieves. Nothing but a bunch of thieves live here.”
I guess they knew that once away from Lower Town they might as well have been in a foreign country. And they also knew that they could never become part of it.
But I would.
At school I played not only with the other Lower Town kids but also with kids whose parents only spoke English. Had nice jobs in the government. Some of these kids asked me back to their houses. (It was a very democratic place.) Large houses with maids and with trees and bushes and lots of grass. I remember being asked back by a classmate whose father was an aide-de-camp to the Governor General. And when I arrived there was a garden party on the lawn. Another time a doctor’s son asked me. And after we had nice things to eat in a large gloomy house we went in their white boat along the Rideau Canal. Another time a blond girl in the class asked me back for her birthday party—it was to a large house off the Driveway. We had to take our shoes off because the floors were new.
I couldn’t invite them back to the house in Murray Street. They had made me ashamed of where I lived, of the house that smelled of the stable, and of parents who couldn’t speak English.
I used to go to school daydreaming that I had other parents, pretending I lived somewhere else. And wondering when I could get away from here.
I did get away when I was eighteen and a half. The war was on. I joined up, went overseas. And after the war I went away to university in Montreal. Then moved over to England and thought I had put all this very far behind me.
But what happened.
Now that most of the fruit and rag peddlers are dead and Lower Town has changed—I find I am unable to stay away from it. It’s become like a magnet. Whenever I can, I return.
The last time was this summer. I was supposed to go to Montreal and Toronto. But I only spent a short time in those places. I wanted to be in Ottawa. And though I stayed in a hotel with everything modern and neat, I kept on walking through the streets of Lower Town.
On Rideau, I went into Nate’s Delicatessen. And saw some of the kids I grew up with—children of those men who used to go out with a horse and wagon.
“You’ve really made it,” Moe Slack said, shaking my hand. “Both the Citizen and the Journal gave you a full page. My wife bought your last book when it came out. I tried to read it but gave up halfway. Why don’t you write dirty books? That’s what people want to read.”
Harvey Reinhardt came in. He was the same size as me but had put on more weight.
“How are you?” I asked after he sat down.
“I’m impotent,” he said.
(Except he pronounced it important.)
“Ten years ago I had five dames going at the same time—”
“What do you mean?’’
“I had five mistresses,” he said. “My mother caught me with one at home. She said, If you don’t get that woman out of the house, I’ll cut my throat right here. Do me a favour, I said, go out on the lawn. You’ll spoil the carpet. I was a real bastard,” he said with a grin.
We were sitting around a table in the back of Nate’s. Moe Slack and I were having smoked meat sandwiches and coffee and there was a blown-up informal photograph of Trudeau on the wall. We were now about the same age as those fruit and rag peddlers.
Harvey Reinhardt ordered a kipper.
“I like an English breakfast,” he said. “The English girls—do they like to screw? What is it?” he asked me.
“It must be the damp climate,” I said.
“You think so.”
The kipper came.
“Have you ever gone to these group things?” Harvey Reinhardt said.
“No,” I said eager to hear more.
“Very high-class people,” said Harvey. “They only let you come with your wife or your girlfriend. It starts off like a real party. They give you a drink. Then you start dancing. And you go off to a room. I had this beautiful twenty-five-year-old. And I couldn’t do a thing.”
“Didn’t she know what to do, to help things along?” I asked.
“She knew what to do,” Harvey said. “But it was no good. She said she worked at some agricultural place with boars. And when some boars overdid it they were no good after that. I think this has happened to me. Later I saw her go off with some other fellow into a bedroom. I don’t think I’ll go again. There’s no fun in it for me.”
“You’re a millionaire—I hear,” Moe said to Harvey.
Harvey took out a cigar and winced. “Who knows,” he said.
I left them at Nate’s, remembering when they were younger and I was younger, remembering their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. And crossed into Lower Town.
The streets were being altered, the wooden houses demolished, and other houses had doors and windows boarded up waiting to be pulled down.
I walked along York, Clarence, Murray, St. Patrick, Rose, McGee—
Here my father’s horse got loose from the stable and came out into the street one summer evening. And then the whole street came out to watch the men coax him back.
In this courtyard I saw a wedding where the young red-haired bridegroom broke the glass on the ground under the held canopy. And the white bits of fluff from the dandelions, or the trees, were blown across by the summer wind so that it looked like falling snow.
Here in winter we hired two horses and a long sleigh without sides. About ten boys and ten girls. We rode at night to the sound of bells on the harness. The overhead street light showed the hard-packed snow. And in the shadows, on either side, the wooden houses moved slowly by. We pushed one another into the snowbanks, then ran to get back onto the sleigh . . .
I came to the small park at the end of King Edward Avenue, sat on a green bench, and felt strangely timeless.
The white Minto bridges across the hardly moving Rideau River, the swans, the blackbird in the tall grass seemed—like the streets—to be frozen like a photograph. And in an extraordinary stillness.
I went to see my mother.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“I walked along Murray Street and St. Patrick Street and down to King Edward Park.”
“I haven’t been there for over ten years,” she said.
“They’re knocking the wooden houses down,” I said. “And changing the streets. Soon there will be nothing left of the place the way it was.”
“You’ll see how nice they’ll make it,” she said. “All those wooden houses—that’s past. We need high-rises, motorways. It will be a lot better. You can write about that,” she said. “Tell how nice everything is here. Look at that high-rise across the park. At night, when the apartments put on their lights, it looks like a ship . . . You won’t write any more about fruit and rag peddlers?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s the old life—it’s finished.”
She fussed over me, giving me things to eat. And as soon as I finished something on a plate she quickly took the plate away and I could hear her washing it up in the kitchen. Her whole flat was spotless, everything in place. After a while, all this neatness was getting me down. Until I went to look in the drawer of a dresser in the living room for the old photographs. And saw, to my relief, that the neatness, everything in its place, was only on the surface. That in the drawers, in the dresser, things were still jumbled up.
I looked at the faces of people in the Lower Town of not so long ago. There was a photograph of my mother in her early twenties with two friends . . . my father on the veranda . . . a family picture in front of the house . . . a photograph of my sister and me by a large elm on King Edward Avenue when I was five and she was three . . . a gathering at someone’s wedding . . .
My mother watched me. “When I’m gone,” she said, indicating the photographs with her hand and then sweeping her hand downwards. “In the garbage! All in the garbage. You’ll see.”
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