Apu, too, contributed to our meals, and not just with the foodstuffs he picked up on St. Lawrence. He could turn an incident at the office into a slowly building drama, sustained through countless interruptions about what the rest of us had seen or heard at school or in the neighbourhood. Last night, Apu had put down his knife finally, and, looking up from his plate, which he had cleared with appetite while we hijacked the conversation, asked in a flat, reproachless tone that never failed to arouse our curiosity, “Does anyone want to know what Mrs. Black said when she came back from the stockroom, and discovered, as I knew she would all along, that indeed there were a hundred and thirty-eight lots of green shirts, as I said there would be, and not the one hundred and fifty Manny the salesman had promised to ship immediately to the buyer?” And yes, of course we all did, even Mummy, who couldn’t help but slip in one more invective against the aptly named office manager who tried in vain but with mulish persistence to catch Apu out in a fault. We wanted to know, because, over three courses and despite our interjections, Apu had managed to draw out a drama that depended on this punch line.
“Mrs. Black came out of the stockroom, and I could see she wasn’t happy. She stopped by my desk, and I waited, knowing she couldn’t turn this against me as I had warned her three days ago that the shipment was short.” Apu’s thin mouth twitched mischievously while Mummy unleashed a tirade against that stuck-up harpy who, if she wasn’t the sister-in-law of Mr. Bernstein the owner, would have nothing much—certainly not looks, Mummy’s supreme dismissal—to crow about.
“If your mother has finished,” Apu continued blandly, “I will tell you what Mrs. Black said. ‘Mr. Weisz, this weekend Manny will have some sewing to do!’” Apu’s dour face broke into a shy, puckish smile as he relished the joke of Manny the big shot bent over a Singer.
Finally, I saw my father round the corner from Yves Prévost. Even at a distance, Apu couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else. He had an odd gait, leading with his head, a residual effect of his childhood illness. When he turned the corner onto de la Loire, my world of bungalows, carports and duplexes shrank, looking toylike and fake. And he was out of place, weighted by his fifty-seven years and the jacket and tie he wore even in this hot weather. Head foremost, Apu plodded single-mindedly down de la Loire, bent to the purpose of erasing the last bit of distance that kept him from his family. Watching him come down the street reminded me that the other suburban fathers didn’t walk; they drove, instead, in long cars, bare elbows thrust from sports shirts and jutting out the window. I sped up to meet Apu, hoping my appearance in pedal pushers and runners and on a pair of wheels mitigated, in a small way, his dislocation.
When the Shabbas candles were lit, the blessings chanted over wine and bread, and the curtains drawn for privacy opened again to the summer light, we settled down to the full bowls of soup I carried teeteringly to the table. Mummy topped them up before anyone took a mouthful. Apu cleared his throat. Instead of beginning his story of the day, he addressed Lillian, who had changed into shorts and a halter top. She looked more herself now, a fifteen-year-old girl with a guarded sulk on her full-lipped mouth. Apu fixed his eyes on her from under his bushy, high-arched ancestral brows, and asked meaningfully, “Lili, why do you think each Shabbas we light the candles and say the brochas over the bread and wine as have our ancestors from generation to generation?”
“Now what?” Lillian bridled.
“Lilikém,” Apu remonstrated matter-of-factly, “no need to be so edgy. I wish to point out only one thing. Hitler killed my family, your mother’s family; he took six million Jewish people. He tried to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. Do we continue to be Jewish, observe our traditions, raise our children in the faith of our ancestors? Or do we help finish what Hitler started?”
Lillian’s chair slammed back into the wall as she jumped up from the table. Down the hall, her bedroom door echoed the bang.
“Na—that was good work,” Mummy said drily. Clearly, she concluded, she had done better. At least she had managed to get in those key words, “suitable Jewish boys.”
* * *
Uncle André had assumed, on meeting the train that had brought us to Montreal from the dockyards at Halifax five years previously, that Mummy and Apu would follow his example about how to make a successful start in Canada. When he and Cimi-néni took us from Windsor Station to their Mountview bungalow, we gazed at the walls of snow banked on the sides of the streets, and the stark, rectangular buildings and the sleek, stretched cars, the high arched lampposts, the puny trees, recognizing nothing. Where we had come from was the past. This was the landscape of the future.
Arguments had flared almost immediately in the modernly furnished house Cimi-néni and Uncle André had already paid off. A few weeks after our arrival, I walked in on what was already an ongoing debate interrupted only by the days between our visits. I had wandered upstairs from the basement where my sister and cousins were laughing at a program but I couldn’t catch all the jokes. I heard Uncle André’s nasal insistence, speaking a French-accented English to discourage my parents from reverting to Hungarian.
What good had it brought any of them being Jewish? Forget about Hitler; afterwards, too, Apu had had to change his Jewish name to protect himself from Stalin. Show him one time it had ever proved an advantage to be Jewish.
Apu looked at my uncle pityingly, but with sufferance. “Do you remember, Brother-in-law,” he said in Hungarian because he wasn’t easily diverted from his purpose, “what Abraham said to Lot: ‘Let there be no strife between me and thee, for are we not brethren?’ Let’s do the same. If you take the left hand, I will go to the right; if you choose right, I will go to the left. ‘Is not the whole land before us?’”
Uncle André snorted dismissively and leaned forward, hands on his knees, about to launch the next sally. He hated having the old scriptures thrown at him. He knew plenty of those too, but preferred new terms of reference.
Cimi-néni fluttered around the living room, not able to tolerate discord. She had expected a joyful reunion with her sister whom she hadn’t seen since the end of the war, not such unreasonable resistance. In England, their brother Larry lived like a gentile too; Mummy and Apu should be used to it. So what if Cimi-néni and Uncle André had converted? It was a safeguard for the future.
“Gábor,” she importuned, “think of tes enfants.”
“Yes,” said Apu weightily, “it is the children I am thinking of. The children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is because of the children that we are here.”
Unable to sit down, Cim-néni brought more tea from the kitchen. Her hand shook as she sliced the nut-filled baigli she’d learned to make at her Mamuka’s elbow, and the first slice crumbled.
“Chic-alors,” she cursed.
Mummy took the knife from her sister and ran it under hot water. Then she turned a plate upside down and drew the blade zinging across the porcelain. She tested its sharpness with sangfroid, against her little finger. Then, back in the living room where stillness had lowered, she pierced the toasted flesh of the perfectly rolled pastry. The knife slit cleanly to the bottom. She handed a slice first to Uncle André and then to Apu.
“I have one sister,” she said, her voice hard and sharp in her native tongue, brooking no more nonsense. “One sister left out of four. Call up the children for dessert.”
* * *
Before Mummy got her job teaching for the public school system, she worked at a Jewish nursery school in the heart of what is now called the Plateau, but in 1959 was simply referred to as beside the Mountain or the Mount Royal area. The neighbourhood was working class, Jewish, as close as we got in Canada to a dense, ghetto-like atmosphere. Double- and triple-flatted walkups built in the last century leaned into each other across narrow, heavy-trafficked lanes.
Mummy hated it. It reminded her of Europe. She hadn’t come all this way just to arrive into the same old smells, same old faces, same old reminders of disaster. But despite her aversion to the distric
t, jobs for my parents were initially available in the Jewish community. Uncle André used his connections in the garment business to get Apu work on St. Lawrence Boulevard among the Jewish delis, clothiers and textile wholesalers. My uncle did this grudgingly. Apu was an agronomist. Uncle André would have been happier to help Apu find employment with a government agency. All my father had to do was brush up his English and learn a little French. But Apu was too rapt in testing his new-found wings of religious freedom to try. The openly Jewish trade on St. Lawrence Boulevard gave him the justification he needed for having left his homeland. The Jewish shop names—Schwartzes, Moishe’s, Finkel’s Hardware—warmed him in a way he had missed from his brother-in-law’s welcome. Uncle André shrugged when Apu told him that the modest position of bookkeeper at Bernstein Imports was good enough for an old immigrant. My uncle had discharged his obligation. If his brother-in-law was going to be such a big Jew, let him stew in it.
But Apu didn’t stew; first, he revelled. He had not seen caftaned Jews on public streets since before the war. What had been expunged from Europe seemed to him restored on St. Lawrence. One evening Mummy tied a scarf under her chin, then smoothed her caramel-coloured gloves over her fingers. Apu fussed, still folding and refolding more to his satisfaction the prayer shawl he usually took out only on the High Holy Days.
“Are the children prepared?” he asked.
“Don’t be absurd. What do you want from them, they’re just children. No one said they had to become rebetzin. Let’s just go if we’re going.”
The street felt different in the dark than it did in the mornings when I came to nursery school here with my mother. Cars were parked on both sides of the narrow road instead of tooting their horns up the middle, and the walkups formed two solid embankments. Jewish people hurried through the fall air, the women wearing what Cimi-néni would call “un vrai chapeau” and the men in dark suits and hats, and clutching silk or velvet pouches like the one Apu had finally folded his prayer shawl into, but which he had tucked out of sight into his trench coat so no one on the buses we had taken from the east end would see. The children skipped along beside their parents, in their hands little white flags with blue Stars of David.
“Hurry,” said Apu, “the service will start when the first star comes out.” Lili and I scuttled to keep up with him, my hand in his.
Behind us, dragging her heels, Mummy answered sourly, “Don’t worry. We won’t miss anything the children won’t be thoroughly sick of by the end.”
It wasn’t her idea to come back here at nightfall, but Apu had got it into his head that Lili and I could use a little yidisch-keit, and Simchas Torah was just the right holiday for our first exposure to real tradition; this service was more lively than most.
“Ya, ya, a lot of old men dancing around.” Mummy didn’t relish sitting up in the gallery with a bunch of strange bewigged women while Apu took us children into the men’s section that would get all the action.
The Clark Street synagogue was a small dark box with narrow slits in its side filled with thick multicoloured glass. In the arch at the top of each slit was a white, six-pointed star. “A mausoleum,” muttered Mummy before we went inside.
The crush of bodies was intense, hot and sudden. I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to Mummy; she was swallowed by the crowd. Lili clutched the back of my coat. A strange bearded man noticed my empty hand and gave me a flag. Turning around, I saw him push one at Lili too. Apu looked for a space on the pews, but Lili hung back, so we remained standing. So many people in such a small building. Such a tumult. Even when the praying started, people nudged past others who rocked back and forth on their heels. But it was a spectacle, all the flags and Torahs wrapped in silver, others in different-coloured silk—white, blue, gold. It was lovely. The old men carried the Torahs around the room, chanting and dancing like Mummy said, while we waved our flags.
“Why do we dance, Danuska, with the Torah? Why are we Jews so happy today?” quizzed Apu.
Who knew, and who cared? We Jews were so rarely glad. Wasn’t that enough? I must have shrugged, because Apu persisted.
“Why is always important. There has to be a reason. Why is what matters,” he instructed. “On this day four thousand years ago, God gave Moses the Tablets. The Ten Commandments we read now in the Torah.”
But the gladness seemed to me to have as much to do with the waving flags, the flag of Israel, a nation, a joy that made old men make fools of themselves. The crowd jostled and pushed together more closely as the leaders of the service paraded around the room, holding high the beautiful Books of Moses. Apu picked me up so I could see better. He held me aloft, and I felt presented, too, like the silver-crowned Torahs.
“You couldn’t pay me to go through that again,” Mummy exploded when we met her outside. “I thought I would faint, the sweat of all those women’s bodies. Phuy. I don’t know what you were thinking of, Gábor. We came for this? In the second half of the twentieth century we want our children to be in the Dark Ages? I couldn’t understand a word of that mumbo jumbo! And it wasn’t sanitary. It didn’t even feel respectable, all that rubbing against strangers! Phuy,” she spewed as though cleaning her mouth.
Apu was silent. I pulled on his hand. “I liked it, Apu, especially the dancing.”
“And you, Lilikém, what did you think?” he asked, brushing Lili’s cheek with his finger.
Why should Lili’s ballot decide the vote? I thought. Two to two was an even split. Just because I was younger shouldn’t mean my opinion counted for less.
Lili didn’t look at him directly. “Here, Dana, you want my flag?”
I was delighted. Mine had torn from too much flapping, but Lili’s was still like new. Waving my fresh flag at Apu, I saw him tuck his shawl pouch back into the inside pocket under the lapels of his trench coat. Disappointed by his capitulation, I judged that it hadn’t taken much to clip my father’s wings.
* * *
Lillian came home in the dark fall evenings from the Redpath Library, sometimes on the same bus as Apu, and after supper she didn’t come out of her room until after I’d gone to bed. There was a Latin requirement at McGill, but Latin hadn’t been offered at Mountview High. The compulsory phys. ed. course included swimming. Lillian couldn’t float. The sea of bodies at McGill threatened to engulf her. One or two of her old high school friends had gone on to university, but on the campus spread over downtown streets and a colony of buildings each the size of Mountview or larger, Lillian and her friends didn’t catch sight of each other in passing. They met at prearranged times for lunch, then had to fend for themselves.
My sister’s difficulties didn’t touch me deeply. I believed she could manage anything, as she always had. Skipping grades. Hungarian, English, French, now Latin. She was so much older than me, so smart, and so ahead of her age, I was sure she could do anything. She was just fifteen, after all, when she started university. Repeatedly assuring us, our parents would say, “With your brains and opportunities, there is nothing you can’t do.” They made it sound easy. Of course, if your standard was being gassed, tortured or stripped of everything you held dear, the rest would seem a breeze.
Lillian’s days were long. By the time she came home, I had already finished my homework. Stamping her feet outside the door, she let in a rush of cold autumn air when she shoved her overladen bookbag across the threshold. Red fingers tugged at the scarf knotted beneath her chin.
Hearing her at the door, Mummy called, “Did you go to the B’nai B’rith meeting today?” before Lillian had even unbuttoned her jacket.
“No time,” Lillian muttered, heading to the bathroom. “Maybe next week.”
“Next week?” protested Mummy, following her and talking through the closed door. “Next month, next year, will be too late. By then all the nice boys will be taken.”
This recent obsession of my parents to throw Lillian together with boys, Jewish boys, wasn’t consistent. Until now they had jealously guarded her from all social events. Lilli
an and I knew very well what we were, and she didn’t need a Jewish boyfriend to prove it.
I was in grade five, a dull year enlivened by a few changes in routine, like the strange name of a new arrival—Samra—more exotic than Dana. But she was a quiet child. Her strangeness, ultimately, didn’t rival mine. Her hand wasn’t always waving to show off that she was different, or special, or that she knew more about the world than the provincial children in our suburb. I looked down on my classmates for having no grasp of geography or sense of the events that had shaped our era. I could rattle off the names of world leaders, and, because my older sister was an anglophile, recite the kings and queens of England like a creed. I read avidly about those who had been noteworthy and were dead. All the greats seemed to have come from Europe: Madame Curie, Anna Pavlova, Louis Pasteur, Beethoven.
Hymns each morning followed the national anthem. The singing held off tedium briefly. But by October they too grew stale, always the same ones: “Jesus Loves Me,” “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The slim green hymn book was replaced in late November by a red one. It felt like a blessed rain after drought. Christmas carols. Oh, why couldn’t we have them all year? None of this conflicted with being Jewish. Hymns and carols were just songs, more interesting than what we sang in music class: “Home on the Range,” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in double and triple rounds as if once wasn’t mind-numbing already. Being Jewish was hard, clear and private, although sometimes it rushed heart-poundingly to the surface.
The County of Birches Page 13