“She lives with you, your daughter?”
The shake of the mother’s head confirmed Ida’s hunch. The daughter was not living at home, but neither was she living with a husband—such information would have been freely and happily offered. The problem was of a moral sort.
“The daughters aren’t easy,” Ida remarked in a half-sigh that surprised Bella, the openness of it, the admission she heard in it that Ida’s own daughter was also problematic. It was an openness that Bella would not have expected from this overly proud woman who had come to see her daughter-in-law.
“And it’s much more difficult without a man,” Bella admitted in turn. She, like her guest, was normally not the sort to pour out her life story, not to anyone, but the admission she had heard in Ida’s sigh had encouraged her own. “Nina was only eleven when her father died, and her brothers were not much older, still boys.”
“Elka also grew up without a father,” Ida heard herself saying, surprising herself now with her own outpouring, because that’s what it felt like, those seven words—an outpouring. For when had she ever put into words for another person the shame of her circumstances? “He left before Elka was even born.”
Bella was well aware of the shame and sorrow behind that straightforward delivery of fact. It was an offering that demanded reciprocation, a response that would place her neither above nor beneath her guest, but beside her. It was the sort of demand Bella hadn’t had to meet in years—she had made no real friends here, she realized.
“I’ve met your daughter,” Bella said. Ida nodded, making clear that she knew of Elka’s visit the previous week. “She’s willful, yes, I could see that …”
Ida nodded again, half afraid of what was coming, but hungry for it too. She had been too alone in raising her girl. There had been no one who cared enough to venture an opinion.
“But there can be strength as well as mere stubbornness in will …” Bella looked at Ida. “The sort of strength that comes from knowing one’s own worth.”
Which you and you alone imparted to her, Ida heard just beneath Bella’s words. Which you managed to impart to her without benefit of a husband or social standing.
“She has her moments,” Ida responded. It was the closest she could come to thanking Bella for her compliment, for Bella’s tactful way of letting Ida know that she had not failed with Elka as completely as she had feared. “When I think what I was like at her age …”
“What were you like?” Bella asked.
Their eyes met. They had embarrassed themselves now, both of them, two mature women feeling like schoolgirls, thrilling to their reflections in the eyes of the other. It was a feeling that lifted them into a type of conversation neither of them had ever expected to have again, and it was that feeling that had sent Bella out onto the fire escape later that afternoon, that long-forgotten thrill of her life being of interest to another. Not her physical life, which of course her children cared about, even Nina, but her inner life, “her soul,” she would have called it once. The long-forgotten pleasure of feeling herself come alive under the attentive gaze of another, and seeing that other unfold and reveal herself in turn. It was a pleasure she wanted to savour for a little bit longer before turning herself over to the brisket that needed roasting for the pre-fast meal.
“Did she say what she wanted?” Lily asked. Was it possible Ida had already unmasked her to Bella, had aired to her mother-in-law the accusations implicit in the way she had looked at Lily that day in her store, in her refusal to have anything to do with the diamond Lily had brought her?
“She didn’t,” Bella said. She wondered how the two women knew each other, was half afraid to ask, but then did ask.
“I brought a stone to her a few weeks ago.”
“A stone?” Bella asked.
“A diamond.”
She remembered her sense of purpose as she made her way across the city to see Ida that day, a city where she had no purpose but this, she remembered feeling: to return to the living what was left to return, to return what she had been entrusted to return.
Would her madness never stop?
“She accused me of stealing it.”
“And did you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“The girl was dead. Can you steal from the dead?”
Bella didn’t answer. She was thinking about the pair of boots she had taken off the feet of a corpse years earlier, during the civil war that had followed the revolution. It was an act of acquisition that would have been unthinkable, criminal, had the woman been alive to feel the loss. But was it theft to have taken them off of someone who would never take another step, would never feel the ice forming around the soles of her feet? Was it a crime to take from the dead what was needed to sustain the living?
“The girl it belonged to was a relative of Ida’s,” Lily said.
“You knew one of her relatives?”
There was a calmness to Bella’s voice, a matter-of-factness that was soothing.
“Her cousin. I didn’t know her. I was charged with bringing her to a place where she’d be safer, but when I arrived at the place I was to meet her … something had gone wrong.”
Was there truth in Ida’s assumption that Lily was just a common thief? Lily wondered. That it was profit that had motivated her? Acquisition? Had Ida seen in Lily what she herself only feared? An irregularity of conduct that in the light of peacetime revealed itself as sin? A flaw that was not merely circumstantial in nature, but essential to who she was, inseparable from her very character? Did the extraordinary vision Ida was rumoured to have with regard to the quality of a stone’s worth extend to the human heart?
She was “charged with bringing her”? Bella wondered. What did that mean? “You … helped people?”
“I moved people. I knew the landscape,” she explained. “I knew people who would help. From before, my father’s work. Whether it was helpful in the end to those I moved …” Lily shrugged.
“Your father’s work …?” Bella asked.
“He was a smuggler. Though that’s not what he started out to be.”
Did anyone ever become what they started out to be? Bella wondered.
“He was a ferryman. Like my grandfather, like my great-grandfather. That’s what we were, my family. The men. Ferrymen. The river was the source of my family’s livelihood for generations. But then the revolution in Russia, the war … After the war, the Polish–Soviet war, our river became the new border. Do you know it, the Slutsk?”
“Only by name.”
It was no secret, the smuggling along the new state’s borders. Even before Bella and Joseph had left Berdichev, smuggling had been identified as one of the major problems facing the new regime. Contraband derails the decree on the nationalization of foreign trade, turning it into a fiction, she remembered reading in a newspaper just months before they left; and at a meeting she had attended in Montreal years later a guest lecturer had told them that the volume of contraband and numbers of people involved in the smuggling during the twenties and early thirties were higher than in any other era in Russian—and perhaps world—history.
“All of a sudden no one was allowed to cross it any more,” Lily said. “So, crossing it became lucrative. You can’t imagine what they lacked there, between the disruptions caused by the war and then, just a few years later, the redirecting of the most basic goods away from domestic, everyday use …”
Towards the collective effort to build a better, fairer future, Bella thought.
“… kerosene, matches, shoes … They banned artisan production of shoes in 1932 in favour of state production, then underestimated by tens of thousands how many to produce, so half the people in the western regions were barefoot …”
Poor children had always gone barefoot, Bella thought. At least now there was no stigma attached to the condition.
“… leather goods of any kind, religious articles, of course, thread, needles, kettles, cooking pots, any hou
sehold goods that were made of metal—they redirected all metal for industrial use in the 1930s, it suddenly became illegal to own a pot—” She shook her head at the memory of it. “It provided a living my grandfather and great-grandfather could not even have dreamed of … two homes, one of which we used only in summer, education for all of us, fine furnishings, clothing …”
“A real entrepreneur,” Bella said, immediately regretting the sarcasm, fearing it would shut the small chink that had finally opened in her daughter-in-law’s outer shell, but Lily only smiled. There was relief for her in Bella’s sarcasm, a familiar tone, not unlike that of her aunts when they would discuss her father’s sudden rise in the world.
“He would take me with him. Against objections from my mother, who didn’t want a daughter of hers mixed up in … well, you can imagine.” She glanced at Bella. “It was my mother who was right, in fact. My father’s work was dangerous, difficult. He should not have taken me with him. He should have preferred that I stay safely at home in the soft bed that he could afford to buy for me, benefiting from the education and polishing that his own parents could not provide for him. But at the end of the day it was his bad judgment that saved me. Had my mother prevailed, as she did with my younger sisters, had he not taken me with him, had I not learned from him what he knew … Not just the practicalities that he taught me—his knowledge of the land and how to traverse it, the people he knew who would help us—but the withstanding of fear, of bodily discomfort of every sort …”
Bella nodded again. “And the girl? Mrs. Krakauer’s cousin?”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“She wasn’t there?”
“Oh, she was. She was exactly where she was supposed to be—I was to pick her up in a village I knew. But she was dead.”
The word itself—toit in Yiddish—forced an ending, Lily thought. That final t. There was no hanging vowel or soft consonant that could be rolled or extended, no bridge of any sort to whatever would follow, just that word and the full stop of the mouth that it forced.
“I don’t know how she died,” Lily said, though Bella hadn’t asked. “She had been robbed …” She glanced at Bella again. “The payment was gone.”
“What payment?”
“For her passage.”
Did the shock show on her face? Bella would wonder later. Her shock that payment would have been required to save the life of a girl whose life had barely had a chance to begin? It must have, because Lily’s next words were justification.
“We needed it for food, medicine,” Lily said. “Not just for the two of us. There were others. An encampment …”
Bella nodded.
“I think she’d been ill. From something she ate, perhaps.” The cat. The cat that Andre had told her was squirrel and that could well have been dead, septic, when he found it.
“You think it was illness that killed her?”
“It could have been.”
“But you’re not certain.”
“No.” Lily said. “But a person wouldn’t have to have killed her to rob her.”
The girl had been robbed, it was true, Lily thought, but not everything had been taken. The two diamonds, yes, the two polished diamonds were gone, but not the identity card, the notebook, the last diamond. And why not? Why had he left them?
“There was a stone on her—a diamond. The one I brought to Ida.”
Why had Ida come here today? Lily wondered again. To unmask her? But as who? To accuse her? But of what?
“It was rough. Unpolished.” Without value, Ida had told her. “That’s the only reason he left it behind.”
“He?”
“The thief. And her ID card was also still on her. Which is more difficult to explain.” She looked at Bella. “As the Germans retreated, a Jewish ID acquired value. Anyone would know that. Anyone would know that it could open certain doors for the right customer.” She was still looking at Bella, wasn’t sure if Bella understood. “A random thief would have taken it,” she explained.
“So … it wasn’t a random thief?”
“It wasn’t. No.”
“You know the man who robbed her, then?”
“I do,” Lily said.
“It was … your … comrade?”
“It was,” Lily said. “Andre.”
“Andre,” Bella repeated. The man the girl had trusted to take her to safety.
“He didn’t kill her,” Lily said.
“But he left her,” Bella said, and Lily didn’t disagree. “And he left you the diamond,” Bella said. The worthless diamond. “For your payment.”
Her payment for a job uncompleted, a job for which no payment was due and for which no amount of repayment would ever suffice.
“And the ID,” Lily said.
“For you to sell.”
“For me to use,” Lily said. “I was afraid of the Russians. They had already arrested my father when they took over in ‘39. We went to bed one night as respected citizens and woke up enemies of the people. They took him away. Andre knew I was afraid of being caught by them—it was the Soviets who were liberating Poland. Of being repatriated. To them. So he left me the ID.”
“A thoughtful man.”
“He was trying to get rid of me.”
Bella looked at her.
“He wasn’t just my comrade.”
“You … cared for him?”
“Very much. But he didn’t care for me quite as much, it seems. He betrayed me with her. It’s all there. In the notebook.”
“What notebook?”
“The girl had a notebook, and he left that for me too. I thought at first he had left it simply because it had no value to him, the ramblings of a girl who’d served her purpose—I’m sorry to be so crude. But I realize now that he left it for a reason. He left it so I could read with my own eyes how he’d betrayed me. So I wouldn’t try to follow him, I suppose.”
“Follow him where?” asked Bella.
“Into Russia. The Soviet Union. That’s where he wanted to live. It’s the place he dreamed of—he was of a different class from me. For me there would be no opportunities there, just the opposite. But for him? Why wouldn’t he dream of a society like that, where his origins wouldn’t always block the path ahead?”
The tide had turned by then, and it was time to turn with it. It was time to take what could be taken to fuel a future. Which is exactly what he had done, Lily thought. He had taken what he had needed. And he had left the rest behind.
“He was a butcher’s son. And illegitimate to boot. My parents almost killed me when I brought him home. That they would have worked so hard, only to have me marry someone so clearly beneath us in status, education, manner. They thought it was my little rebellion, I guess, but it wasn’t. It was love. It was—”
“You were married to him?”
“I still am, I suppose.”
She could have said no, Bella thought, but she didn’t. Because she still felt married to him, the first husband, the one she obviously still loved though he had betrayed her with another, though he was neither worthy of her nor decent, though he—
“He didn’t kill Ida’s cousin,” Lily said.
“And you know that for a fact?”
“Not for a fact, no, but she looked peaceful.” She had looked like her youngest sister had in sleep. “Would she have looked peaceful had she been murdered at the hands of the man she loved?”
The sun had dipped by then behind the houses across the alley. They were sitting entirely in shadow, though it was warm shadow, pleasant on the skin.
“I don’t deny that her death was convenient for me.” He had left it for her, the ID that he had freed for her, the ID of the girl with whom he’d betrayed her, with its place of birth so far from the Soviet sphere, its name with an attached history so different from her own family’s. His payment to be rid of her, she had come to think. His insurance that she wouldn’t try to follow him. “Does that mean I caused it?”
Bella didn’t answer.
She was trying to understand what her daughter-in-law was telling her, what it really meant to have survived the destruction of her entire world only to be betrayed by the last person standing, the person who perhaps mattered most to her. And what was the scope of the betrayal? Lily didn’t seem to know, was afraid to know, perhaps. The love between them, yes, their marriage … but what beyond?
“I don’t think she suffered in the end,” Lily said.
“Maybe not,” Bella answered. The only comfort she could offer. “And what was her name?” she asked. The girl whose final payment was the ID card that proved convenient to someone else.
“Lily Azerov.”
“Ah …” An exhalation more than statement or comment.
They said nothing more for a while, sat in silence in the deepening dusk.
“And your name?” Bella asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters.”
Soon, very soon, Nathan would be home. It would be time to go inside, get supper on the table.
“Yanna,” she said.
“Yanna,” Bella repeated.
How long had it been since she had said her own name? How long since she had heard it? “Yanna Marissa,” she murmured. She closed her eyes to be alone with all it carried.
CHAPTER 16
Bella died in September 1972. It was early in the month. The whole family was gathered at Sol and Elka’s to watch the first game of the Soviet–Canada hockey series, a contest that we expected to be brutal and sweet, more demonstration than contest, really. We would show the Soviets how the game is played.
I was five months pregnant with my daughter, Sophie, at the time and felt so much movement within me throughout the game that I was convinced I was carrying a boy. We would name him Phil, I thought, after Phil Esposito, who scored for Canada within the first minute of play. As I looked at Reuben, though, I knew that in the matter of naming our children, as in so many other aspects of our life together, tradition would rule.
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