“You don’t have to do this, Mama. I’ll look for my own place.”
“There is not much time. You’ll want to get settled before summer begins. Here’s what I suggest.”
Toni is about to give her an argument, but sinks onto the breakfast nook bench instead.
“Find something for the first of June, after your exams. Start looking right away. There will be lots of vacancies, especially where students live.”
The voice that delivers this advice is calm, practical, resigned.
“Rent an apartment, and if you need to share, you be the one to choose the roommate. Advertise for the kind of person you want— someone quiet and clean and so on. Well, I leave that up to you. That’s your job. Just don’t take in any louts or freeloaders or drug addicts or pushy types. And you must have a written agreement. I’ll speak to my lawyer about that. What I want to emphasize is that you should select, not be selected. This gives you better choices.”
The strategy makes sense. Toni remains quiet, still not sure whether to believe in the forgiveness implicit in her mother’s words.
“Heaven forbid I should chase you out. But if your mind is made up to go, then you must start your search immediately. You have no time to waste.”
“Will you be all right on your own, Mama?”
“Me? All right? Why should I not be all right?”
The motherly head rises, the jaw stiffens, the eyes blaze.
“I am not some delicate egg that needs to be coddled. I have taken care of myself all my life. I have survived Hitler. Have I not? Have I not?”
Lisa’s fist crashes down on the table. Toni ducks her head and stifles the wild laugh that such tirades inspire.
“But you! You have a lot to learn, Miss Know-It-All, Miss-Let-Other-People-Walk-All-Over-You. Yes, that’s you. Don’t give me an argument. In one way or another, that’s what happened with that girl. I could smell it. Well, you better learn to stand up for yourself. You better learn right now. My daughter must not be a dish rag.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Why do you smile? There is nothing funny.”
“Yes, Mama.”
When they have finished their discussion on apartment hunting and rise to leave the table, Toni bends low to envelop her quivering, indignant, five-foot-two, stand-up-for-herself mother in a hug. The first proper one in ages.
chapter 31
In the end, she settles on a bachelor apartment in a modest, low-rise building on Hutchison Avenue, a little east of the Ghetto. The bachelor is slightly more expensive than shared accommodation would be, but there are fewer hassles. She really doesn’t want to deal with roommates. After she and her mother scrub the place from top to bottom and apply a fresh coat of paint, it looks cheery enough. The amenities include a galley kitchen and a balcony of sorts in the form of a fire-escape landing on which she places a potted geranium, the biggest and most thickly blossomed plant from her mother’s collection. The pink blooms shake in the early June breeze, soaking up the warm sunshine, and look plucky and bright against the austere black of the metal rails.
Her furniture consists of the desk from her room at home, the foldout couch her father used to nap on in his study, some bookshelves Mr Abbott gave her, and a small table-and-chair set her mother found at the scratch-and-dent sale at Eaton’s. Toni tried to argue she could eat perched on a stool in front of the counter between the kitchen and main room, but her mother insisted a home was not a home without a proper table. Robin has given her scented candles, a couple of plush, tasselled cushions, and a poster of Virginia Woolf.
“I’m not supposed to let in any louts or freeloaders or drug addicts or pushy types,” Toni had said when Robin came by.
She’d been rehearsing the line all morning and thought she did manage to say the words with a reasonable lightness of tone. Robin smiled, ignored Toni’s attempts at stoic reserve, and reached up to plant a kiss on her mouth. Toni knew Robin too well by then to read a great deal into the kiss. All it meant was: Now that the messy stuff is over, I officially grant you permission to join my tribe of ex-lovers so we can simply be friends. After Robin left, Toni thought her heart would break all over again, that the emptiness of the apartment would crush her to bits. She took a long walk through the downtown streets, bought herself a jumbo steamed hotdog on Saint Laurent Boulevard, and felt a little better. She went to a poster store and, after searching through the Picassos and Mirós, the James Deans and Marilyn Monroes, she bought herself a map of the night sky. She liked the foreign-sounding names of the stars and the idea of learning patterns that had guided explorers through the centuries.
The star map looks down from the wall beside her bed, giving her something to contemplate when she’s tired of reading but not ready to turn off the light. Opposite is a photo from her Jerusalem days of a cat on a garbage bin. She has contact sheets full of famous Israeli landmarks, but the cat has always been her favourite. For some reason the scrawny figure with the shoulder blades sticking up through loose skin, the lowered head, the tense stance, the wide, watchful eyes encapsulates Jerusalem for her. Everything is distilled in that defiant, unblinking stare: mazes of lanes and walls, vistas of dry hills, the searing sun, the thorny cactus, the choking dust, the cries of vendors, the pungent smells of sage, Turkish coffee, and dung. Curses and arguments, life on the boil. “You can never forget me,” the photo says. “May your tongue cleave to the roof of your mouth if you try.”
Toni has never read a word of Virginia Woolf. According to Robin, the British author was a lesbian at heart, if not fully in the flesh, and a brilliant, stunningly beautiful almost-lesbian at that. Toni was instantly captivated. The black-and-white portrait shows a young woman in profile, pale, delicate featured, sad-eyed. Her hair is done up in a loose, old-fashioned bun behind her head, exposing an elegant neck and a pretty ear. Virginia graces the wall above the dining table. Toni considers the poster a kind of tribute to what she had with Robin, but it is nice for its own sake too. Something lovely and female to look at while breakfasting alone.
When her mother saw the Virginia Woolf portrait in pride of place above Toni’s table, she screwed up her lips and seemed unimpressed even after Toni explained who the great lady was. Her mother said nothing, only glanced up at the portrait with a certain resentment Toni only understood on Lisa’s next visit. Her mother arrived with bagsful of additional house-warming gifts; cutlery and pots and pans, but also a collection of family photographs in five-by-seven standalone frames. There was a copy of the photo of Grandma Antonia that had dominated the bureau in her parents’ bedroom. There was a snapshot of Toni’s father, younger than she’d ever remembered him, looking handsome and energetic in an open-necked short-sleeved shirt, his suit jacket flung over his shoulder. He stood on a path against a background of lush woods—a pause during a ramble on the Mountain, no doubt. Another photo showed Toni’s parents standing close together at some fancy dance party, both dressed to the nines. A fourth was of Lisa holding Toni as a toddler on her lap.
“Why must you have pictures of strangers in your apartment?” her mother asked, placing the photos around the room. “Isn’t your family good enough?”
Toni accepted the offering, while making it clear Virginia would remain where she was. When her mother left, Toni repositioned the family photos all together in a line on the ledge of the window overlooking the fire escape and the back lane.
Toni has come to agree with her mother that it’s good to have these familiar faces in the room. They provide a kind of company and reassurance. In certain moods, Toni sticks out her tongue at her stern-faced grandmother whose disapproval she always took for granted, though they never met. But she also rather admires the strong features, the set jaw, the unflinching eyes. Sometimes, when she glowers defiantly into the mirror, she finds a certain, pleasing resemblance.
The photos of her mother inspire arguments.
“Look here, I know what you’re thinking,” Toni says to the doting, young-mother face, half submer
ged in a pale mop of toddler curls. “You wish I could have been normal. You’re resigned but not happy. Too bad. I like girls. Okay? That’s how I am. Can’t be changed, and I wouldn’t want to change anyway because then I wouldn’t be me. See? I’d be some other person. It would be like I’d never been born. And I can’t wish that on myself, not anymore. You think my feelings are unnatural. Well, guess what? Nature is a lot weirder and more complicated than you think. There’s homosexual activity among monkeys and dolphins. The female spotted hyena has a fake penis. There are birds that kill their young. Nature isn’t good or bad, it just is. You can’t use biology to make moral arguments. And anyway, plenty of people do things that are a lot stranger than what I’m doing. Just look at the classified ads for orgies and wife swapping and swingers’ clubs, if you don’t believe me. As for grandchildren, they’re just not in the cards.”
By this point in the lecture, Toni is jabbing her finger and shouting. The photo mother continues to look back with the same benign, unruffled, slightly besotted expression as before, and Toni slowly simmers down. This framed mother is manageable, after all. But so is the real-life parent back in Snowdon, comfortably removed, yet just a phone call or bus ride away.
Strangely, she cannot bring herself to talk out loud to the picture of her father. Often she catches his eyes looking through his glasses across the room at her, eloquently tender, yet veiled in his impenetrable mist of reserve. It still enrages her that he could take himself away without a word. He will forever remain unreachable. Although her reasonable brain tells her otherwise, his elusiveness seems a retribution for—what sin exactly? The sin of her own vulnerability. He would have been far less judgemental than her mother, and yet, and yet. If only she could assure him she will be okay.
Among the books that line her bookshelves are several of the novels by out-of-fashion German-Jewish authors her father liked to collect and that Mr Abbott persuaded her to save. “You might develop an interest some day,” Abbott had said. She doubts it. She is sure the dense German prose of a bygone era will always be a colossal bore. But these books seem as good a memento of her father as his Omega watch. Seeing the grey spines with the German titles makes her see her father as he caresses the cover of a cherished volume, cradles it in his hands. The smell of the aged pages, in particular, brings him back. An odour of mustiness, sorrow, regret, and yearning. Now and then she sticks her nose into one of those tomes and sniffs. She feels sweetly close to him then.
Along with the photos her mother gave her, Toni has put out a few of her own. On her cork bulletin board above her desk, she’s tacked the row of four playful mug shots that she and Robin and Monica recently took together for a lark in the photo booth at Woolworth’s. There’s also a colour shot of the girls’ softball team Toni recently joined and one she rather likes of herself alone. It shows her in her gear, baseball cap pulled low over her eyes, fielder’s mitt held up, ready for action. She’s grinning boldly and, she has to admit, she doesn’t look half bad.
Now, on this sunny Sunday morning in June, seized by a fit of perfectionism, she attacks her apartment with an arsenal of cleansers until every speck of dirt has been pounced upon and every surface gleams. Despite this frenzy of work, excess energy still hops beneath her skin, so she dashes into the streets. There is solace in the hum of traffic, the variety of people strolling by, the smell of cars, dust, French fries, lilac blossoms, and new-mown grass. She loves this neighbourhood—a mix of residential buildings and shops, old and new—in the heart of the city. The campus is close by, her summer job at Browser’s Paradise within walking distance, the wooded paths of Mount Royal a short hike uphill. Just minutes away there’s Loulou’s—newly named Loulou’s Disco and bursting at the seams on Saturday nights with enticing women from every part of the city. She loves the bustle of the main streets and the seedy look of some side streets, where down-and-outers smoke butt-ends on rickety staircases and hippies jam with bongos and guitars. Each time she goes exploring, she discovers some new delight: a nifty tobacco store, a café that features live music, an all-night pool hall, a delicatessen with the best smoked meat in town.
Her growling belly leads her to Schwartz’s, into the steam and clatter, the mess of jostling bodies and boisterous voices that shout out their orders and argue in Yiddish. Elbows on the counter, she sinks her teeth into a sandwich piled high with thinly sliced, juicy smoked meat slathered in mustard and topped with a fat dill pickle.
“Nice and tasty, eh?” says an old codger by her side. He lifts his rat’s nest eyebrows and winks to his friend. “Vot en eppetite.”
“See how the schmaltz runs down her chin? You want for me to lick it off, Maedele?”
The two men chuckle as if they’ve reached the pinnacle of wit. They know she’s Jewish—knew the moment she walked in the door, could read the shared ancestry in her face—and they treat her accordingly, with the friendly-rude-lewd manner reserved for one of their own. They are part of the décor, these wheezing letches. Toni shrugs and continues to chew. One of these days I’ll walk in here with a sweetie on my arm, and won’t your ogle-eyes pop? She savours the thought along with the taste of smoked meat on her tongue.
After Schwartz’s, Toni wanders over to Sainte Catherine Street to join the parade of Sunday strollers, young folk in beads and feathers and leather fringes who crowd the sidewalks to see and be seen. What a city! Montreal in the summer of 1970. There are hookahs and puzzle rings in window displays. There are saffron-robed Hare Krishna guys in Phillips Square. There are jugglers and drummers and psychedelic murals. Music is everywhere, in jazz clubs, Latin clubs, blues joints, boites à chansons. “Mon pays,” cries Gilles Vigneault from a car radio. “Let it be,” croon the Beatles. “I’ll be there,” chant the Jackson 5. Everyone, but everyone is included in those songs.
She finds herself searching for members of that other tribe she belongs to. You perhaps? Are you? A game of fantasy and hope. The passing faces give back nothing. Never mind. Already, after a short month in her new digs, she has become one of the downtown people, hip and cool and ready for adventure. She continues to saunter and to scan faces, in tune with the mood of the throng. The air pulses with messages, the exchange of countless secret and not-so-secret glances, the hunger in every heart for connection.
And then, incredibly, it happens to her too. A head turns, recognition flashes, a pair of eyes lock onto her own. The girl in the crowd slows down. A moment ago she wore a dull, closed, almost surly expression, but suddenly she blazes with interest and a delicious smile lifts the corners of her mouth. Is this someone Toni knows from the club? Or just a stranger whose soul reaches out across the void? You. Yes, you. I know. Spinning around on her heels, Toni tries to give chase, but the current of bodies moves too swiftly, the girl has vanished. It doesn’t matter; the animated look on the girl’s face was real and staked a claim, if only for an instant. For blocks and blocks, Toni carries the energy of the fleeting encounter in her squared shoulders and striding feet, and she knows the unknown girl must do the same.
For the moment, daiyenu, it is enough.
GABRIELLA GOLIGER’s first book, Song of Ascent, won the 2001 Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award. She was co-winner of the 1997 Journey Prize for short fiction, a finalist for this prize in 1995, and won the PRISM international Award in 1993. Her work has been published in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best New American Voices 2000 and Contemporary Jewish Writing in Canada. Born in Italy, Goliger grew up in Montreal. She has also lived in Israel and the Eastern Arctic, and currently divides her time between Ottawa and Victoria, along with her long-time partner, Barbara Freeman.
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
PART I: THE MOUNTAIN
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
PART II: CAMP
TIKVAH
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
PART III: JERUSALEM
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
PART IV: LOULOU’S
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
PART V: THE GHETTO AND BEYOND
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
Girl Unwrapped Page 31