by Edeet Ravel
Her sixth sense gave him sixteen more years that were good, before the war came. Her sixth sense gave me life.
I phoned my mother from the hospital and told her Bubby Miriam was gone. There was no funeral; my grandmother didn’t want one. No one in her family, other than my father, had had a funeral: everyone else had been thrown onto piles. My mother, under the influence of Gustav, behaved well. Every day I thank the good angels for bringing Gustav into our lives.
. . .
As for the Michaelis, Glenn moved in with them that September. My mother, who kept up with developments from her post at the dry cleaners, informed me that Glenn’s high school, Seed, had allowed him to complete his last year by correspondence. Rosie was taking music at Cégep and Glenn accompanied her to her classes. I was at Cégep, too, but not the same one, as the last thing I wanted was to see the Eden gang. I enrolled at a more offbeat, inner-city campus, a converted St. Henri factory, not far from the Camp Bakunin pickup spot, as it happened.
That winter, Mr. Michaeli died; my mother called to tell me, and I considered going to the funeral, but in the end I came down with the flu and couldn’t make it even if I’d wanted to. Sheila had also gravitated to the St. Henri Cégep, and sometimes we ran into each other in the college’s lounge, where between classes we lazed about on red and grey ottomans. Sheila told me that Glenn had been accepted by the Math department at Harvard. They were all moving to Boston: Glenn, Rosie, Mrs. Michaeli.
“How come you’re not in touch?” Sheila asked. “You used to be inseparable.”
I shrugged. “Things change.” Rosie had left several messages for me with my mother, but I never answered and she’d given up. I did hear from Mrs. Michaeli, though. The trip to Paris had whet her appetite for travel, and she joined a trekkers’ club. At regular intervals, my mother and I received postcards from her of desert dunes, children in holiday costume hugging shaggy llamas with oddly anthropoid legs, sci-fi peaks of aquamarine glaciers. The world is larger and more diverse than anyone imagines, she wrote.
Dvora is in touch with Rosie—she’s in touch with everyone. Two days after high school, Dvora found work as a waitress at a seafood restaurant, and there she met an Australian obstetrician who was in Montreal for a convention. When he returned to Australia, she went with him. They have five children and a horse farm, or maybe not exactly a farm, maybe just a large field that allows them to keep horses and enter competitions. Banished, as she puts it, to antipodean Australia, Dvora maintains contact via email with what she likes to call “life on the outside.” She mentions mutual acquaintances from time to time, but the information is skeletal: Rosie’s had three children, all boys; Earl and his wife are real estate agents in Toronto; Avi is a lawyer. A catalogue of lives.
Sheila phones me once in a while, or I phone her. She teaches at a high school in Vancouver; I gather that she’s popular with her students. Her two marriages ended in divorce, but she has a son, currently studying at Stanford, from a third liaison. Last year, her father fell off a ladder at work and died shortly afterwards. Her mother is at a nursing home in New Brunswick which is run, conveniently, by one of Sheila’s sisters. In her usual wry, dry way Sheila explained why she didn’t attend her father’s funeral and hasn’t been to see her mother. “My mother wouldn’t recognize me, and my father wouldn’t have, either.” She’s invited me to visit her in Vancouver, but I can’t leave Sailor. In any case, between semesters I find I want only to vegetate on the sofa under a mohair blanket and watch movies from La Boîte Noir.
Anthony has a child. Gloria came searching for him in late August; she’d had a change of heart and was looking forward to a happy reunion—especially in light of the good news that she was pregnant with Anthony’s child. Patrick had already absconded, and Gloria, scrounging for information about her husband, asked to see me, so I went round to Vera’s to meet her. Vera left us to ourselves.
I don’t know exactly what Anthony saw in her; we hardly ever know. To me, she seemed unengaging, but maybe pregnancy had made her placid, flattened an alluring intensity or hunger that had been there before. Or maybe I was too distraught to see her clearly. I gave her a truncated version of our last encounter: the restaurant, the nightclub, Anthony’s intimations that he was leaving soon, though he didn’t say where. My voice almost betrayed me, but Gloria didn’t know me well enough to identify as out of the ordinary the irregular pitch and halting syntax.
She nodded as I spoke. When I’d finished, she said, “We fought, you know. We fought over nothing. He was trying to protect me, I guess, and I kept saying, you’re being patronizing. But he wasn’t, I don’t think. Anyhow, he was right about those guys I went off with. All they wanted was for me to make them coffee and sandwiches. Women’s rights, that’s just lip service. They weren’t a real group. There’s power in sticking together, not in dividing up again and again. And sisters have to stick together if we’re going to get anywhere.”
It was my turn to nod.
I felt small, physically, I felt I was shrinking. Lying had shrunk me. I made my excuses as soon as I could and ran down the street, disoriented and ashamed. At the water’s edge I caught my breath. The lake’s soft beauty, its gentle desolation in the ethereal light of dusk, shifted me back into place. Anthony’s reach was long, but it weakened in the face of such distractions.
I worried about Gloria, pregnant and husbandless, and I was relieved to hear that two months after her fruitless visit she moved in with a famous New York theatre director. Vera bought an apartment in Brooklyn Heights so she could help with the baby. Gloria sent me news of the birth on a postcard of the Manhattan skyline. She’d had a boy on December 11, his name was David. If you hear from Tony, tell him we miss him, she wrote.
At first, Vera phoned me every few months. Skimming was not her style, and her conversation drew on unanswered, and unanswerable, questions. She assumed there had been a romantic entanglement up at the country house—heartbreak, unrequited love, perhaps a triangle that had driven us all apart. She asked if I’d heard from her sons. No, I said, we weren’t in touch. Facts are elusive, she said; they serve to hide more than they reveal. Like language itself, she mused. And did I know that Patrick was in Alberta in a small northern town, working as a shipper? He phoned her on Sundays but didn’t have much to say. He seemed to like the job and the people he worked with. He was on the defensive, she told me, torn between concern for her and resentment. She hoped he would find a way out.
The shipping stint lasted two years. Then Patrick had a fight with a new manager and quit. He continued westward to Vancouver—“even farther from me,” Vera commented, with her usual stricken composure. He decided to go back to school and study library science. And it was at the library that he met a woman who was translating a thesis on the medieval Jewish commentator Abravanel. Or Abrabanel. Or Abarbanel. That was the difficulty that brought them together: the many spellings of the commentator’s name. She was separated and already had a child; Patrick moved in with her, and they married when she became pregnant again. Their daughter is nineteen now, or maybe twenty. “It would be good if he found some balance,” Vera said. “Adar initiated the relationship, I think. She is the expressive, vulnerable self he longs to release but can’t. That can spell disaster.” As for Anthony, he was still at the monastery in India. “Searching for something, just like his father,” she sighed. She heard from him once a year, she told me; he sent her long letters. He was doing well; he liked the life he led; it was peaceful. Gerald, on the other hand, had returned from his travels. Did I want to come for supper and meet him?
I declined. It was hard enough lying to her on the phone; I couldn’t imagine maintaining the deceit for an entire evening, making small talk with Anthony’s parents while images of his freakish burial forced themselves on me like a movie reel spinning out of control. And Vera, who had struck me as a mind reader when I first met her, would notice at once that something was awry. No wonder Patrick had left.
Three months ago, I ran
into Vera at a bookstore. She wanted to buy a gift for her grandchild, Anthony’s son. He liked biography, did I have any ideas? In her billowing beige windbreaker she looked like a sad old owl. She was glad to see me, and we talked about my job, my mother, the weather. Then suddenly she peered at me and said, “I think you know where Tony is. I think you know and don’t want to tell me.”
“We promised not to tell,” I said uneasily.
“Ah. Well, as long as he’s happy with that sort of life. I thought it was a phase that would pass. But as long as he’s happy. It’s too bad for David, you know. Still, Wallie is a loving father to him.” And then I imagined that she looked at me suspiciously.
I looked away.
A few days later her heart, a frail bird’s heart, gave way in her sleep. Gerald phoned for an ambulance and then he phoned Patrick. The funeral was private, but there was a column in the newspaper about Vera: her work as a child psychiatrist, the books she’d written. I called Patrick and suggested we get together. “It would be nice to see you,” I said, “after all these years. I’d like to meet Adar too.”
I was aware, as I left the house, that I was excited—it was the sort of pleasurable excitement I’d feel if I were about to mount a major exhibition, or see a photo of my father. Patrick was after all a link to something, and maybe he had the key—though I hardly knew what I might be trying to unlock.
Patrick introduced me to Adar in the noisy brasserie. I saw almost at once that his marriage was not a success, and during the next few hours I was privy to a discouraging close-up. Patrick’s self-protective irony had strayed into the arena of offhand nastiness. He had become cruel—maybe against his will and without his approval, or even his recognition. Subtly he disguised a frozen rage, detached himself from his behaviour. Only when he spoke about his daughter did he step back, or away, as he had when he’d communed with Woofie, all those years ago in his attic apartment. His face lit up, and I saw that he was a loving father. But the rest of the world was as deadly as ever, and he had become deadly in return.
Adar—astute, fragile, sensitive—felt sorry for him. Her compassionate plan was to reinterpret the cruelty, hand it back to him transformed. It was a doomed project, and the only outcome was intimidation. She was afraid of Patrick, and I wanted to save her. Anthony would have said that the blueprint for utopia in my breast pocket was still impelling me, still defeating me.
I often wonder: did Anthony plan our fraud? It occurs to me that he counted on us to conceal his death, bury him, read a poem over his grave. He thought we were up to it, and that he wasn’t important and that we’d be fine, we’d move on, and if we were unhappy, well, people were unhappy; there was no avoiding that. He was wrong about everything.
Yesterday I wrote to Dvora and asked her for Rosie’s current email address. As always, Dvora was happy to hear from an old friend:
Hi Maya! Great that you guys are connecting! Rosie always writes to me from her hubby’s address at Harvard (makes me feel important to see the address on my inbox) but actually I haven’t heard from her since last spring. I’ll look around in my files (you know me, I never throw anything out) and see if I can find her letter and I’ll forward it to you. Guess what, I’m going to be a grandmother!!! Help!!! Emma’s expecting twins—probably girls but they aren’t exactly sure, could be boys with small (for now) willies. I’m attaching a photo of the whole gang. Phil as you see has gone grey and no wonder! He might retire next year as delivering squelchy babies in the middle of the night is getting to be a bit much for him. Our Beautyshop Quartet had to disband because Janet’s getting chemo. We’ve probably all gone croaky by now anyhow, though we placed sixth last year which isn’t too bad. I’m still doing the donkey rescue work, not that those bad-tempered grouches ever bray a word of thanks. OK gotta run, fab to hear from you!
An hour later, she forwarded Rosie’s letter:
Hi Dvora, I’m very glad things are working out so well for you and that your multi-family Passover dinner was a success. It’s obvious that you’re very popular in the community and no wonder, you were always so kind and generous to everyone and funny. Remember all those toffees you snuck into the pool for us? Yesterday Glenn bought a Wii for the boys, they’re very excited about it and making a racket. Did I tell you, there’s an immense man, he must weigh three hundred pounds, he runs the coffee shop a few blocks away and I want so badly to be his friend. Not that we ever say more than a few words to each other, but I wish I knew him better. He’s so unhappy! I brought him some tulips from the garden but I think I only made it worse. I dreamed we were lovers. Glenn reads The Prophet to me every night. Remember Kris gave me that book at the surprise party my parents and Maya organized when I turned 15? I keep dreaming that I’m swimming and I discover I have no arms, only tiny fins. It’s a very scary dream. Sometimes I imagine the whole room is teeming with people, half-dead, half-alive. I guess I’m actually dreaming but it feels so real! Do you dream? xx
I’ve read and reread the letter, trying to find in this distressing text—what? exoneration? a way out? or maybe a way in … though one thing does strike me with cathartic force: the shackles that held our parents to their unspeakable past, those shackles seem to have multiplied through some sort of process of spontaneous generation—and now it’s our own past that thwarts us, and we are flailing with tiny fins, trying to move on, but a great, cumbersome weight holds us back.
I clicked on “compose,” typed in Glenn’s address—how wonderfully simple it is, these days—and wrote:
I’ve been thinking about you, Rosie, and feeling sad that we lost touch—I hear news about you and your family from Dvora, but it’s chatty and superficial. I remember your sad eyes. Please write. I guess you heard that Vera died. She never sold the country house—an artist she knows has been living there for many years. Maybe we could drive to the house one day and visit the grave. Or meet in New York and see Anthony’s son, talk to Gloria. I’m sorry about everything. I want to see you. Maya.
Glenn replied almost immediately:
Dear Maya, I was so pleased to receive your letter, which I read. I hope you don’t mind, but you addressed it to me so I assume you wanted me to print it out and give it to Rosie. Rosie has been unwell. I don’t know how much you know, but the problem seems to stem from depression. Maybe if you came, she’d feel better. I don’t want to put you out of your way. You have your own life, I know. It’s only that I’m at my wit’s end, and I know you were once close. If you come, we have a big house and a guest room and you’d have all the privacy you need. Or we’d be happy to put you up in a b&b. Have you ever been to Boston? I think you’d enjoy seeing the sights. Well, that’s about it. I have a meeting and I have to run. Thanks for writing. Sincerely, Glenn.
We think we aren’t important; we tell ourselves that because we were helpless and ineffectual once, this is who we are, and our exits don’t matter—no one will miss us. I told myself that Rosie had Glenn. My desertion was a way of mourning through imitation, a way we have of re-enacting the worst traits of whoever it is we’ve lost. For those tangled reasons, and others, I did to Rosie what Anthony did to me.
Of course, I don’t know why she’s in trouble. I only know I haven’t been there to help out. And I also know something else now that doesn’t occur to us when we’re young, and when what we have in common with our fellow-travellers is being young, and it seems as if it’s easy to find friends. It only dawns on us later, as people drift away, that friends are in fact hard to come by, hard to replace.
I’ve already bought my plane ticket and arranged for a dog sitter. I leave tomorrow morning. The past is irretrievable. I will never be in Eden again, trailing after Rosie, helping her gather up her books. I’m waiting, as Anthony did not, to see what comes next.
EIKAH
Yes, I said
when they offered me a blanket
they gave me a blanket
I sat in the back of a truck
there were folding seats on the side walls
I sat on the seats with my back leaning against the wall
you could choose
without concealing that you were choosing
without hiding
that was what freedom was
not having to hide
the Russian drivers were full of good humour
they laughed and hit each other in play
sang out of tune
my thoughts were very narrow
I barely noticed the weather though I remembered later
that it was a sunny day with blue skies and a chill in the air
I was planning my future
everyone was in a stupor
everyone’s thoughts were narrow
they’d been narrowed
if I made it to Prague I’d look for Katya
find out if they were all in one piece
Katya’s father could help
if he was alive
he liked me
he knew people once
I wanted to continue my studies in Canada
I imagined horse-drawn wagons
hands hidden inside fur muffs
fields of snow
fireplaces
sparsely populated cities
fresh eggs
eggs were part of my future
if I found Katya I would eat two lightly salted poached eggs on
buttered toast
I’d wear a dress
I’d listen to the radio
everyone had diarrhoea
there were seven people in the truck and the driver had to stop
constantly
we pounded and the Russians laughed and stopped the truck
no we didn’t pound