Whipping out a slightly flattened pack of Players Navy Cut from his back pocket, Arnold doles out cigarettes to each member of the gang. He lights his own by flicking a match against his thumbnail, sucks in smoke, and exhales it through his nostrils. No one else can match this feat, but the other guys push out their lips and attempt to blow smoke rings. Toni takes short, shallow puffs that burn her throat and curdle her stomach, though she’d never let on.
“Know what happens to girls when they grow up?” Arnold says in a thoughtful tone while gazing up at the patch of sky between the trees. “They pee blood.”
There’s stunned silence for a moment, then Nick and Peter explode into hooting laughter while Frankie stares goggle-eyed at Toni through his smeared glasses.
“Bullshit,” Toni says.
“Nope. Got it from a very reliable source.”
“Load of hooey,” Toni says.
“Peeing blood. Yech!”
Nick makes retching sounds.
“Tell you something else,” Arnold says coolly as smoke curls from the sides of his mouth. “Girls get hair between their legs. I know it for a fact ’cause I’ve seen it myself.”
“Who? Who’d you see?” Frankie shrills, leaning so far forward on his perch it looks like he’s about to topple over.
Arnold ignores him. His eyes flick up and down Toni in a funny way as if he’s trying to tell whether she too has sprouted hair in unspeakable places. There’s only one answer to this. She flings her burning cigarette into the pond, springs to her feet and kicks Arnold in the thigh. Maybe she got him in a spot already sore from his father’s beatings because he gasps and clutches himself and has to concentrate on the pain. But in another moment Toni’s on the ground, straddled, arms pinioned above her head. The other boys crowd around chanting, “Bellybutton, bellybutton.”
The bellybutton treatment is Arnold’s special brand of torture, reserved for times when extra discipline is in order. He grows one of his thumbnails especially long for this purpose. Still pinning her arms with one hand, Arnold lifts up Toni’s T-shirt with the other and digs into her navel with his long, sharp nail. She squirms and bucks, but Arnold holds her firmly in the vice of his knees and the grip of his fingers. The thumbnail burrows deeper, igniting an astonishing flash of pain. The surprise and misery come not just from the hurt—which is bad enough—but from where it hurts. The sting travels right down to her privates as if the damp little hole in her belly were connected to her peeing place by a taut, invisible string. The sensation creates a fierce need for release. If Arnold decides to keep the pressure up long enough, he could make her piddle her pants. That’s the brilliance of the bellybutton torture—that it can end in a smelly, humiliating mess. And what if this time there was more than just pee? What if she gushed a bright red, stinking stream out of her privates, making them shamefully visible? It’s bad enough she has to crouch in the bushes while the guys can stand tall and aim their little water pistols straight ahead.
The thumbnail drills down. Arnold smirks as he waits for her whimpered plea for mercy. Abruptly, Toni stops struggling. She lets herself go limp and stares right into her tormentor’s eyes. Without moving a muscle, she floats herself away, high into the treetops, and the pain changes from a red-hot fire to a small yellow ball behind her head. It’s a trick that came to her some time ago in the dentist’s chair when the whine of the drill was so unbearable she just had to escape. Suddenly, amazingly, she could, she did. Now she continues to stare at Arnold with deadly calm, letting him know she can wait him out. The gleeful certainty in his face becomes confusion, his eyes drop, his grip loosens. Finally he rolls off her, with an embarrassed shrug. When she’s on her feet again, he claps her back to show there are no hard feelings. She’s one of his men, after all.
“Anyway, even if girls do pee blood when they grow up, that won’t happen to me,” Toni crows. “I’m not like other girls.”
“That’s true, you aren’t,” Arnold admits, but there’s an unsettled question in his voice.
The game of Indians and Settlers begins, a game of stealth and strategy, of hiding, searching, and killing with pointed-finger guns. The boys whoop as they give chase through the underbrush. The woods resound with yells and mouth explosions, the snap of twigs, the splash of rocks in the shallow pond. Everyone except Toni is caught and killed and freed and killed again. None of the boys can hide as well as she does. They give themselves away, almost immediately, with an impatient grunt, the need to taunt their pursuers. They never want to stay hidden for very long, whereas Toni does. Stretching out on the ground behind a log, she covers herself with branches and disappears. She becomes a thing, hard, impenetrable, unmoving, just like the dead tree that shelters her. She knows that once, long ago, her father flattened himself into a paper-doll figure and lay, barely breathing, under a tumbled heap of books in the attic of his shop while the Nazis crashed around in the room below. Papa, too, knew how to leave his body.
In the distance, she hears her name.
“Toni! Toni! We’re going home without you.”
The calls become fainter and fainter. She falls into a great, deep, tranquil silence that wraps itself around her like an eiderdown quilt. Dampness from the ground seeps through her trousers, bugs crawl about, but she is happy and busy within herself. All that exists is this little patch of earth beneath her elbow. Look at last-year’s leaves that have been disintegrating into the forest floor. They are stiff, stark skeletons, intricately branched. Look how one leaf vein connects to another and how they spread out to mirror the shape of the full-blown tree.
“Toni! Toni!”
An anguished voice punctures her dream world. Peeking through the brush, she spies a hat, a long lean figure, and a grimacing, ashen face.
“Hi, Papa,” she says sheepishly.
He sucks in his breath with a strangled sound. His eyes hold horror. They are fixed upon her face, but it’s not his Toni he sees. There’s no daughter here, no precious little girl. Instead, he sees a sight so dreadful it eats him up from inside.
“Wha … what?” he gasps. He points a long shaking finger. “What have you done to yourself?”
She touches her face and her hand turns red. She sees what he sees: blood, gore, mutilation.
“It’s okay, Papa. It’s just the lipstick. We put it on our faces for war paint.”
She wipes her face with her arm to demonstrate the truth of her words. They walk out of the woods together in shamed, crushing silence. How could she kill her papa yet again?
chapter 5
The landlord wants to raise the rent by five dollars, and the Nutkevitches next door are on the move—two facts that send Lisa into a rage. How dare that skinflint ask more for an apartment with gaps, cracks, rust stains, pipes that groan like old men complaining, and windows with broken pulleys that could crash down and chop off your head?
How dare the Nutkevitches find their dream house in the suburbs first? Lisa learned about their neighbours’ happy prospects after running into Mrs Nutkevitch at the produce section of Steinberg’s. Mr Nutkevitch—a shoichet, a butcher, and before that a common rag peddler— has bought a split-level bungalow in an up-and-coming west-end suburb to which Jews are flocking in droves. The other bit of news that Lisa has divined was that another little Nutkevitch is on the way. The twins’ mother looks exactly the same as ever, as far as Toni can tell, but Lisa knows, she can smell the baby coming. To top it all off, a sleek, brown Chevy sedan from Harold Cummings’ used car lot stands in front of the building next door waiting to carry the burgeoning family off to their four-bedroom palace with the basement den.
“Good riddance,” Toni chortles into her cup of cocoa. But Lisa bristles with the energy of discontent. She gulps her morning coffee at the kitchen counter while shredding a large head of cabbage. The cuckoo clock warbles and Lisa barks, “Verdammt!” and Toni stifles a giggle because her mother’s curses are hilarious when not aimed directly at her.
“Now’s the time to buy,” Lisa
declares, knife poised in mid-air. “Now.”
Julius continues to read the paper, folded twice to make a neat parcel he can hold steady in front of his face while his other hand lifts the coffee cup to his lips.
“We could get a nice bungalow in Côte Saint-Luc for about twenty-thousand dollars.”
“Twenty-thousand dollars?” Julius tears his eyes away from the newsprint and stares at her, incredulous. “That’s what you call affordable? Twenty-thousand dollars?” He speaks the number slowly as if trying to get a grasp on that huge tower of money.
“We get a mortgage. We put a little down, the rest monthly. It wouldn’t be so much more than we’re paying now.”
“Yes, of course, a mortgage.” He taps his forefinger to his temple to show what he thinks of such a notion. Verrucktheit. Madness. “You want to ruin me with debts.”
“Everyone here has debts. That’s how people live in this country. That’s how people get ahead.”
“Naturlich! Buy now, pay later. Pay with my blood.”
If they’d just ask Toni her opinion she’d tell them they can stop fighting right now, because she has no intention of moving. She glances around the kitchen, cosy and crowded with familiar objects—the Arborite-topped table, the vinyl-covered chrome chairs, the sputtering gas stove, the fat-tubbed wringer-washer, and the dear old cuckoo clock on the wall. Where could be better than here? But Mama and Papa are too caught up in each other to pay attention to Toni. So she turns back to the book she’s reading, Black Beauty, about the adventures of a lovely young horse who must deal with the injustice of bad masters in a harsh world.
The argument does not go away. Day after day, at breakfast, at supper, through the bedroom walls at night, her parents raise their voices against one another. Lisa cajoles, loses her temper, hurls sarcastic barbs. Julius meets her with crossed-armed silence or mocking remarks of his own. “Indeed, Xanthippe!” he mutters. One morning he reminds her of Uncle Alfred, ruined by debts, besieged by creditors, consumed by shame, and driven to fire a bullet through the back of his mouth with his World War I revolver. Debt is a cancer, Julius’s father used to say. And even he, a well-established bank employee, lost barrelfuls of money.
“That was the Inflation, the Depression. That was Europe in the dark days. Now there is prosperity, opportunity, the New World, in case you haven’t noticed, Mr Head-in-the-Sand. Where would we be if I didn’t push you forward? Still in some stinking back alley in Rome waiting for the right moment to leave. It was I,” Lisa strikes her fist against her chest, “I who got us the entry papers. I who made the arrangements.”
She glares across the breakfast table. A series of incredulous chuckles falls from his lips, a sound like bubbles bursting. He rolls his eyes. Her version of events is too preposterous.
“She forgets how she nearly lost us our chance to come to Canada because of all her scenes at the consulate. We were nearly blackballed.”
He addresses these words to Toni, speaks quietly, reasonably, hand on his cheek, head shaking, as if the two of them were consulting over a mental case. Toni doesn’t allow herself to crack a smile. She locks eyes with her father’s and nods. Then she stares down at her plate and focuses on her bread and butter so she doesn’t have to see her mother’s wounded expression. My own daughter betrays me.
The hostility between her parents gets worse. Every day, accusations fly back and forth. The conflicting stories about how they got to Canada get mixed up in the argument about moving. Her mother corners Toni in her bedroom after school as she’s changing out of her tunic.
“Listen to me, Bubbele, it was like this. A nasty little man at the consulate—an anti-Semite, you could see it in his eyes—tried to get in our way. ‘Wrong papers,’ he said. ‘Stateless.’ Of course we were stateless! Who wasn’t stateless? I stormed out of his office and slammed the door behind me. I threw myself at the feet of the consul himself. ‘Madam, you must not upset yourself,’ he said. A proper gentleman.”
The moral of the story? Never deal with underlings. Too much caution can kill you. And: Your father needs a fire lit under him.
But no, it was like this. Julius takes the opportunity while Lisa’s in the bathroom to explain what really happened.
“There were quotas, even after the war. The Canadians wanted immigrants with certain trades, like furriers, hat-makers, garment workers. The fact that your mother could sew wasn’t good enough because the men, the breadwinners, had to find jobs. A crowd grew unruly in the embassy corridor—not just Jews, regular Italians and DPs from all over. They didn’t understand the procedures, they didn’t know English. Some got hysterical. I put myself forward as an interpreter for the overwhelmed official and was able to calm the mob, and so I made a good impression. The official put me on the list.”
And the moral? Keep your head. Don’t act rashly. And: Your mother gets carried away.
Confusion buzzes in Toni’s head. Even the cuckoo seems overwhelmed. He peeps feebly, retreats slowly behind his door to the sound of groaning springs. What does it matter how they got to Canada? What matters is that the family is here now and not moving ever again, plain and simple. What matters is the adventures of a plucky little horse in old London town. While Black Beauty pulls an overloaded cart up a hill, Lisa ambushes Julius in the corridor.
“An investment in a house is money in the bank.”
“Ha! Money for the bank. The bank will own the house.”
He retreats into his study. She follows and pushes open the door he closed so firmly behind him. She is like a terrier with a bone. But he is made of unyielding material, like wood turned to stone through eons of sediment.
One evening, planting herself in front of the television screen and blocking out the announcer on the news, Lisa yells, “And, by the way, another thing, in case you haven’t noticed. My clock is ticking. I’m running out of time.”
“Time for what?” Toni asks, wrenching herself away from her book. Two horses have been talking about what it’s like to have a bit in your mouth, and Toni can feel the cold, cruel iron against her own tongue. Yet she is forced to lift her eyes from the page by the mystery in her mother’s words, the sound of a desperate plea.
Lisa glares at Julius, a look of smouldering resentment, while he regards her with a strange mixture of pity, apology, and pained embarrassment.
“Time for what?” Toni asks again. Neither of them answer.
A story in the Montreal Star changes everything. Her parents lean over the front page spread out on the kitchen table. Julius sits, Lisa stands by his side looking over his shoulder, her jaw clamped shut. There’s a deadly stillness in the room. No sound except the rustle of the paper and the dull ticking of the old, brown clock.
Still in her pyjamas, Toni watches their curved backs. She creeps forward and peeks at the paper. There is a picture of a balding man in a dark suit, with thick, dark-rimmed glasses like her father’s, standing with his head turned sideways and slightly raised as if someone is talking to him and he’s listening very carefully to each word. Behind him, a man with a peaked cap like a policeman’s sits on a chair looking bored. Above the photo, the headline reads: “Court’s Authority Challenged as Eichmann Trial Begins.” A smaller headline states: “Nation Aware Israeli State Also on Trial.”
“They should hang him from the nearest lamppost,” Lisa growls with animal fury. “They should hang him upside down and use his head for a football.”
“Hush. That would be wrong,” Julius says. He rakes his fingers across the furrows in his brow. “Eichmann must have a fair trial. Due process. The Israelis have to prove we are a civilized people. There’s enough controversy already about the abduction. The government says it wasn’t the Mossad that did it. Volunteers, they say. But everyone knows.”
“Right they were to hunt him down. He’d still be dancing in Argentina if they hadn’t.”
“The defence says the judges are biased and the court has no authority and Israel has no jurisdiction. Listen to this: ‘Since Isra
el did not exist at the time of the alleged offences, it has no jurisdiction to hear the case.’ They will have to make an iron-tight case, otherwise he’ll become a martyr.”
“That monster, a martyr? What are you saying, you of all people? Mutti, Mutti, listen to this madman, he defends Satan.”
“Hush, hush, don’t excite yourself. I’m just saying how the world might see it.”
“Who cares what the farshtunkene world thinks?”
“We can never ignore what the farshtunkene world thinks.”
He speaks quietly. He touches her arm, then takes her hand, balled into a fist at her side, and encloses it within his long fingers. He does all this without removing his eyes from the paper.
“Who’s Eichmann?” Toni asks.
Her father’s head shoots up. He whisks the newspaper off the table and refolds it into a small package. “Go, go, go. Get dressed. You’ll be late for school.”
When Toni returns, her mother has dismantled the burners on the stove and scrubs the tarnished rims with Dutch cleanser, as she always does when particularly upset. Her father eats scrambled eggs and toast, chewing with his usual care, but his eyes are unfocussed, and a bit of egg is caught in the bristles of his goatee. Lisa brings more toast to the table. She too seems lost in brooding silence. Neither of them takes notice of the rogue bit of egg in his beard.
There are no more fights. There are murmurs and long silences behind the wall that separates Toni’s bedroom from that of her parents. One Saturday morning, Toni finds her mother in her flannelette housecoat humming happily as she tends to her plants.
“Grow. I command you to grow. It is spring, and you must grow,” she warbles to the African violets lined up along the windowsill. Her flushed face appears softer and more rested than it has for a long time. More astonishing for Toni is to see her father emerge from the master bedroom still in his rumpled pyjamas. Usually he’s up and dressed before anyone else. The open V-neck shows the crinkled black hairs on the white skin of his chest. He seems a bit sheepish to have slept so long, but also, like her mother, unaccountably cheerful. When he’s been to the bathroom and put on his Saturday clothes—pressed pants, white shirt, grey wool cardigan—and is seated at the dinette, Lisa plants a kiss on his bald head. She brings the newspaper, but instead of handing it to him, as usual, she spreads it out in front of herself, open to the classifieds. Her finger runs down the columns of ads.
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