by Edeet Ravel
Temperatures fell and remained locked in the penal zone, day after miserable day. Cars turned to metal ice in the middle of the road and had to be abandoned where they stood because there weren’t enough tow tucks to rescue them all. Hell really was freezing over, the dreaded Mr. Lurie joked dryly. Extreme weather seemed to cheer him up.
In January, in the midst of this meteorological assault, I turned fifteen. I blew out a lone candle on a cinnamon cake, and Bubby handed me the colour-blended wool scarf she’d been knitting all week. To spare my mother a polar expedition, I bought myself the gift I would have asked for: A Treasury of Art Masterpieces.
Each morning I defiantly prepared for battle by layering my clothes: undershirt, T-shirt, vest, jeans, school dress, sweater, scarf, winter headband, hat, hooded coat, gloves under mitts. I felt like a mummy in a horror movie as I lumbered to school—three blocks to the bus stop, the long wait for the bus, then another two blocks to the steaming foyer of Eden. The school reeked of something—no one could figure out what it was. Old bananas, milk gone bad, some small, trapped animal decomposing? The vents were being checked out, but so far the vent-men hadn’t found anything. I opened my locker, peeled off my clothes, and waited for my extremities to thaw out.
It was on one of these arctic mornings, as I was warming up, that the high school secretary asked me to deliver a file to the elementary side. My height, and possibly the fact that I was an outsider who had made a valiant effort to get into Eden, made me a prime candidate for small errands.
The corridors of the elementary school always resurrected, for an electrifying second or two, my first time there—Mr. Lewis, Rosie’s locker, the towers of books in the supply closet. Welcome to the Promised Land.
At first I was drawn merely by curiosity to the noise coming from one of the classrooms. I peeked in through the little square window at the top of the door and saw Mr. Michaeli. He was standing behind the desk, grinning helplessly and shielding his face with his arm.
But the grin was not a grin; it was a grimace, a mask. And the helplessness was not helplessness but a cadaverous frieze. It was as though he had lost all human traits, even the human trait of surrender, and what remained was someone else’s indistinct memory of who he had been.
He was under attack by the children. They threw spitballs and pieces of chalk and paper airplanes at him, they shouted, they pretended to cry. He’d been teaching a song in a minor key, and as they sang they sobbed, wiped their eyes, lay their heads on each other’s shoulders and wailed. By the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept …
I opened the door. Instant silence—amazing how these children can stop and go, like mechanical toys. Mr. Michaeli came towards me with a smile. He had reinhabited his body, more or less, but I found myself unable to detach his approaching figure from the cowering apparition I’d seen through the window. “Maya, hello, hello.”
“I was on my way to the office,” I said, stumbling on the words.
“Yes, yes, down the hall, on the left.”
The children stared at me with wide-eyed innocence from their desks. It was impossible to leave, impossible to stay.
In the washroom, in one of the stalls, the familiar onslaught, a headache of Martian proportions. Once again I was in the worm museum, running down the halls with my mother, seeking an exit, the small worms wriggling under glass globes. I wasn’t hallucinating; I knew where I was. The images, however, seemed all too real—like a film you’re forced to watch, like something out of A Clockwork Orange. The nausea and pain were definitely real, and I moaned.
“Maya?”
I must have been there for a while, because Rosie had come searching for me. She crawled under the door, joined me in the stall.
“I’m sick,” I said.
“Daddy told me you looked pale.”
“Where is he?”
“In the teachers’ room.”
“The kids were throwing things at him—” I began, though I’d told myself I wouldn’t say anything. But the words tumbled out, toads instead of diamonds.
“Oh, that! Don’t worry about that, Maya. He knows what kids are like!”
How did she do it? How did she come by her faultless choreography? Practice, I had to suppose. All those hours, doing the Bachanova … I was the opposite, tripping and slipping. And I couldn’t find a way to get untangled.
“I feel really sick,” I said.
“I can get you an aspirin from the office.”
“It won’t help. I need to go home.”
“You don’t have to worry about Daddy,” Rosie said. “He wouldn’t want that.”
“I don’t care, I don’t care,” I said. “Just get me my coat and stuff, please. I need to go home.”
Rosie brought me my things and saw me to the door. It was as if the shadow of an enormous liquorice wing, low and ferocious, had crept over me. Why were buses so sadistically slow in coming, in a city as cold as ours? Decades of incompetent administration, as everyone knew but did nothing about, and we were the ones who suffered. Rush hour was over, which meant nearly an hour at the stop. By the time the bus came, my fingers and toes had undergone the miserable transition from aching to numb, and the heat inside the bus failed to penetrate. I ran the last three blocks to our house, fumbled with the key, and burst inside, limping and crying. Bubby phoned my mother at work, and in her usual tempestuous way my mother rushed home in a taxi. I was already in bed by then.
That very week Mr. Halpern had taught us about ’ir miklat, the city of refuge, where murderers were held for their own safety until they were forgiven or tried. If they killed someone by accident, they had to stay in the ’ir miklat forever—or at least until a High Priest died. That’s what I would do: I would stay in my bed forever, safe from the avenging mob. My bed was narrow and not long enough, but Bubby ironed our heavy cotton sheets and remade the beds every five days, and the smooth, sturdy linen that swaddled my naked body was, like all sensuous pleasures, reassuring, consoling.
My mother assumed at first that I was having one of my worm museum episodes. But this was different. The museum had dissolved in the frigid air as I’d waited for the bus, and my headache and nausea had vanished with it. What remained was an absence that seemed narcotic, and all I could imagine wanting, ever, was to sleep.
“Tell everyone I’m not going back to school,” I instructed her.
Rosie phoned, Dvora phoned, the principal of the school phoned. My mother was forced to overcome her fear of the ominous rings and take the calls herself. “Say I’m sleeping,” I murmured. My thoughts collided like ocean debris swept to shore by the waves—the remains of a shipwreck or a plane crash. The debris would be useful if you were stranded on a desert island. But I had everything I needed, apart from, possibly, a compass.
Who was I before I met Rosie? Who was I now? Though such pseudo-ontological queries were standard currency at the time—a fashion fed by Hermann Hesse’s esoteric quests and Castaneda’s far-out encounters with the all-knowing Mexican shaman, Don Juan—my view of myself had never been problematic. I was Maya: tall, pale, and freckled, feet as long as a man’s, arms that forgot to stop growing, breasts that forgot to start growing.
Now the variables had shifted. Something new and threatening hovered at the edges, always at the edges. I was tired.
I wanted my father—I longed for him. I was used to thinking of my father in terms of my mother’s requiem, recited not as a plea to the gods but as a reminder of their malevolence. Now, for the first time, I put in a claim. It was possible, after all, to uproot my father from Fanya’s personal narrative; I’d lost him too. And though I didn’t know what he looked like, I had an image in my mind so particular that I wondered whether it had travelled in some paranormal way from my mother’s brain to mine.
The story of my parents’ courtship was the only one of my mother’s stock pieces that had a beginning, middle, and end, and the only one I enjoyed hearing. My parents had run into each other on the ship that was carrying them
to Canada, or, more accurately, my mother had run into Josef, my ailing father. His lungs had been damaged in the war by the deadly fumes of a chemical plant—some they kept alive to do work—my mother veered for a few minutes into there before returning to the ecstatic reunion. She recognized my father at once; he was sitting on a folding chair with a blanket over his shoulders, and she flung herself on him.
They’d grown up in the same neighbourhood, had gone to the same school, and eventually performed together in a cabaret. Though Josef was three years older than my mother, she knew him well, was in fact in love with him, as were, she boasted, all the girls. It wasn’t only him—his entire family was revered. Josef’s house was famous for music, theatrics, prophecies. His mother, Miriam, was said to have second sight; his father could play musical pieces backward on his violin and extract coins from ears. They were jolly and generous. Just as some families were cursed, theirs was blessed; everything they touched turned to gold, my mother said, and every one of them was gifted: Josef, his four sisters, even the mysterious Aunt Hilda, who lived with them and was rumoured to be a novelist writing under a pen name.
It was Josef, though, who made my mother’s heart stop, and she mooned over him day and night, trying to come up with schemes to make him notice her. And then her prayers were answered: she was chosen to perform in a skit with my father, and rehearsals were to take place at his house. She had found a way into that favoured circle. It was a coveted place, and she was coddled by them all—they brought out the best in you, my mother explained, made you feel deserving. In the skit my father played a dictator and my mother was a peasant; the story had something to do with water from a well and included a kiss. My mother dreamed about that kiss for weeks.
The show, according to my mother, was a great success, and had war not broken out, she and Josef might have married far sooner, for my father, she was certain, had looked forward to that kiss with as much secret longing as she had. And on the night of the cabaret, Miriam had taught her a magic incantation—time and again, during the war, that incantation had saved her life. My mother wanted to teach me the magic chant, but at this point her story buckled under the weight of unmanageable events, and signifier collided with signified in a spectacular disintegration of meaning.
The plot recovered with the reappearance of Josef on the deck of a ship that was taking both my parents to Canada. Here he was, Josef Levitsky himself, sitting on a folding chair, staring out to sea, a blanket around his shoulders. A shadow of what he’d been, the life drained out of him, but alive nevertheless. And still young, after all; only thirty-two. He’d spent nine years working at a resort in Sweden—nine years we wasted not knowing we both were living— until the owners decided to relocate to Canada and suggested my father come with them.
My mother rarely mentioned her post-war years in Europe, though I gathered she worked as a dressmaker and waited for missing relatives to show up. At some point Mrs. Blustein came into her life, initially as a customer, and encouraged my mother to join her in applying for a Canadian immigration visa. She was Irma Zimmer back then; her cousins had moved to Montreal years earlier, and they wrote long letters that made her envious. They described toilet seats covered in pink fur, long hot showers, carpets, time-saving kitchen appliances, television … the list went on and on. It wasn’t only a question of comfort: Canada was safer, it didn’t matter if you were Jewish or Zulu, and there would be more eligible men to choose from. And who knew when Canada would change its mind about taking in immigrants, and revert to its wartime policy? My mother and Irma received their visas in time to board the ship that, as if by divine intervention, was also transporting my father and his Swedish friends to Halifax.
For several days my mother stalked my father with reminiscences and, fortunately for me, my father lived long enough to humour my mother, whose ecstatic agenda included marriage and a child. She managed to find a rabbi among the travellers. At first he protested: no, no, he wasn’t a rabbi, he believed in nothing, he hated God. The passengers insisted: everyone remembers you, you can’t hide.
Sullenly, the man followed them to my father’s cabin. My father sat on the bed in the tiny cabin and my mother stood beside him, beaming. Ten witnesses had somehow squeezed in as well, or at least peeked in through the doorway. A Hungarian who was a stickler for proper procedure handed my mother a kerchief and a skullcap. My mother tossed the head coverings back with a laugh, and quickly, to avoid an argument, the rabbi muttered a few words. My father repeated them—and there! My parents were married. A bottle of wine appeared, toasts were made.
Six days later a virus, or maybe food poisoning, struck the ship. The passengers, who had barely recovered from a turbulent storm the previous week, lay in their beds groaning. My father knew this was the end for him and, according to my mother, didn’t much care. He’d asked himself why he’d bothered holding on, for as far as he knew, his entire family—parents, sisters, grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts—had been killed. “It’s my time,” he told my mother. “I can leave at last. I’m no use anyway.”
My mother begged him to take a more optimistic view. Her efforts were futile; in the early hours of the morning, my father died. The rabbi was summoned again. This time he was adamant. Locked himself in his cabin, refused to come out. The Hungarian would have to do: he’d studied to be a rabbi and would have been ordained if not for the war. The required prayers were chanted, and my father, hidden inside sheets, was sent sliding down to the depths of the ocean. His body, weighted down with a heavy object, sank at once. His body, which was neither tall nor short, only devoid of life. Those are pearls that were his eyes.
On the third day of my bed-in, nightmares worse than any worm museum struck me like a Passover plague. In the nightmares I was aware that I was dreaming, and because I was dreaming I knew that anything could happen—inanimate objects could speak, the floor could crumble under my feet, a door could open onto a brick wall. Terrifying events lurked ahead, and then the things I was afraid of began to happen—sometimes in wild succession—and I would try desperately to wake up, I would try to locate my body in my bed, in my room, so I could wake, but I couldn’t do it, and with every failed effort the terror increased. When I managed, somehow, to emerge from sleep, I couldn’t shake off the fear. I kept the lights on, and the radio, I tried to read novels to take my mind off my fear and so I wouldn’t fall asleep, but sleep tugged at me; it was as if I’d been drugged, and my eyes grew heavier with every word. As soon as I shut them, the nightmares returned.
My mother’s catastrophe meter went haywire. Luckily she had to work, and I had long breaks from her fidgety attentions. When she was away, Bubby took over, brought me meals on a borrowed trolley, straightened my blankets. Then my mother would come home, brimming with new ideas about what might be wrong with me. Possibly I was exhibiting the first stages of anemia, or maybe it was the Generation Gap that had turned me against society. I tried to stay awake as she expounded on her theories, but my nightmares reached out for me like the Hydra, and my mother’s voice became another horrifically transformed fragment of the real world.
I’d been in this purgatorial state for a week when Sheila showed up. She didn’t bother to call—she simply rang the doorbell and let herself in.
In a single, elegant motion Sheila sank down cross-legged on the carpet next to my bed, retrieved cigarette paper and marijuana from a leather pouch, and began rolling a joint. She was aiming for decadent chic, with her wine-red crushed-velvet skirt, dancer’s leotard, and long hair that fell down her face as if she’d just woken up and who knew where or with whom. But her oval face and refined features were more reminiscent of a da Vinci saint than a turned-on, tuned-in dropout.
Sheila took a drag from the joint, and we both peered at the thin, spiralling smoke that promised so much.
“Want?” she offered.
“No, thanks,” I said, falling back onto the pillow and pulling the blanket up to my chin. “You know I don’t like to get high.”
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br /> “Remind me why?”
“It’s all I need,” I said. “Have you met my mother?”
She turned on the radio. Joe Cocker was getting by with a little help from his friends, and from a new arrangement. He started off on his throaty own, and then suddenly there they all were: the organs and guitar and backup singers.
“I saw Joe Cocker,” Sheila said. “I was really close to the stage—I could actually see him. It made you realize, Woodstock, how easy it would be to brainwash the masses. Everyone was zonked.”
“I’m trying to stay awake,” I said. “If I drift off, shake me, okay? I’m having these crazy nightmares. Promise to shake me awake.”
“Okay.”
“How are you?” I asked her.
“Everyone thinks happiness is so important,” she said, shutting her eyes. “People think joy and happiness are important.”
My mother knocked on the door, entered with a tray. Kasha and bowties, canned green beans, fried potatoes.
“Thanks, man,” Sheila said, and my mother glanced at her hopefully.
—such a smell here—she began but thought better of it and retreated. There were rare moments when my mother had tact.
“Another case,” Sheila said. “We’re surrounded by the living dead. One foot in hell, one foot here. My own parents give me the creeps.”
“I always meant to ask you, Sheila,” I said. “That leotard—what happens when you have to go to the bathroom?”
“Yeah, it’s not too practical.”
“You know, I never knew, until last summer, that men had so much hair down there—just like women. I was shocked. I thought women had the hair, men had the floppy appendage.”
“How could you not know?”
“How would I? You can’t tell from a sculpture, and you don’t really get a lot of male nudes in paintings. It’s hard to paint a nude guy, for some reason—maybe because you can’t hide anything. It’s either you see it or you have to cover it.”
“Well, how did you find out?” she asked, taking a long drag. “Since obviously not by getting laid.”