The Imposter Bride

  “It’s just perfect for one person,” Yuri assured me. He glanced at me in the mirror. “You have a husband?”

  I considered not answering but sensed that he would just think I hadn’t heard him and would ask the same question, but louder.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He doesn’t like Israel?”

  Everything was personal here. I’d forgotten that. “He couldn’t get away right now.”

  He accepted that answer. “I’ll tell you what … You have a name, Madame Professor?”

  “Ruth,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what, Ruthie. I’ll stop along the way so you can have a look—we’re going right by there anyway. Then, if you don’t like it, I’ll take you straight to Jerusalem, no extra charge for the detour.”

  “I thought you said we were going right by there anyway.” “You’ll be happy. I promise.”

  I HAD NOT SEEN my mother again after our first meeting. It was as I had sensed during the time we spent together. She was my mother, my beginning, but our lives had diverged, we had separate families and she couldn’t integrate me into her life. I had hoped for more, and maybe she had too, but it had also been enough to meet her, to sit in her presence, to have a sense of who she was and why she had to leave, and to know that she had a sense of who I was, who I loved, how I lived. I felt more comfortable in the world knowing where she was, being able to picture her in the living room of her home in Thunder Bay, sitting by a fire in the evening, or tending her garden or walking in the forests around her home.

  As the years passed, though, I did begin to think more about her again. I wondered how her health was, how her life was now that she was getting old. Did the past sit differently within her now that less of life lay ahead? Had her memories of her family resurfaced in her? Would it give her any pleasure or comfort to meet my children, who were now young adults, finding their own ways into the world? I began thinking about writing to her, asking her if it would be all right to visit again, if she would like that; but then my father became ill, Sophie’s marriage fell apart, and Reuben’s mother moved in with us while waiting for a bed to become available at an extended-care facility. All that was more pressing.

  My father died in November 2004, on a bleak day of a bleak month. And then, not more than two weeks later, the phone rang after dinner. Reuben answered.

  “Yes?” he said. “Yes. I see. Just a moment.” He handed me the phone. “It’s Anton Eglitis.”

  She had asked for me. That was my first thought as I reached for the phone. By the time I said hello I had already imagined my mother on her sickbed, surrounded by the family she loved but feeling that someone was missing, me, the daughter she had not been able to raise as her own. She had told them about me, finally, had begged their forgiveness and understanding for her long-kept secret and asked them to bring me to her side. I would leave the next morning, no question. Sophie, Sam or Joey could move back in to help with Reuben’s mother.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello,” he said. “This is Anton Eglitis. I know we’ve never met, but we have the same mother.” Did he think I didn’t know that? “I’m calling with some sad news, I’m afraid. I’m calling to—she’s died. Our mother.”

  “She has?”

  “Yesterday morning. At 10 a.m.”

  I’d been at work at 10 a.m. the previous morning, had not felt anything unusual. Nor had I noticed any change in the world, just the continuing, grim reality of my father’s recent death, Reuben’s mother’s decline, Sophie’s sadness about her broken marriage.

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  I felt Reuben standing behind me, his hands on my shoulders.

  She had been sick for a couple of weeks with the flu, Anton told me. She just couldn’t seem to shake it. And then it moved into pneumonia.

  “I see,” I said, with what felt like the last bit of air within me.

  Anton began to speak then of the funeral. They had buried her within twenty-four hours, in a simple pine box, according to her wishes. “She was Jewish,” he explained to me. Did he think I didn’t know that? I wondered again. I was her daughter, for God’s sake. But then, I hadn’t even known her name for years and years, had I?

  “The funeral was today, then?” I asked.

  “This afternoon. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

  “I appreciate you calling now. How did you know …?”

  That I even existed, is what I meant to ask. I wasn’t sure how to phrase it, didn’t need to.

  “She told us. After you came to meet her.”

  “She did?” That too felt like a blow. She had kept her distance not out of fear for the stability of her marriage and family, then, her husband’s possible response, but for her own psyche. Because to face me was to face a part of herself and her own experience that she felt compelled to rebury.

  But what about Anton, this half-brother of mine? Had he not felt curiosity about me, his only blood relative on his mother’s side?

  “Do you live in Thunder Bay?” I asked him.

  “Toronto. But we’re all here now, of course.”

  In the living room that I could picture. But how many of them were there? Who exactly?

  “Your family?”

  “My wife and our sons.”

  The family and life that my mother had built atop the wreckage of her former lives and identities.

  “How many sons do you have?”

  He hesitated. Did he think it was a trick question? That I wanted something from him, was going to lay a claim on the family that wasn’t mine? Had my mother conveyed to him her fear of the place within her in which I resided, the terrible mix of feelings attached to me that I could carry to the surface of her life, blowing it apart as I did?

  “Four,” he said.

  “Nice,” I said, and on one level I meant it. It was nice that my mother had four grandsons, but as I imagined them all gathered in that living room where I had sat with her, to mourn her death, their mother and grandmother who had been my mother as well, I felt like the defective puppy who’s been pushed out of the warm litter to the lonely coldness of the world. And I felt angry that I should have a half-brother and nephews who were all strangers to me, and that my children had an uncle and cousins who would always be strangers. It seemed a useless, stupid waste of blood relations.

  Anton didn’t ask me anything about myself, didn’t make any noises about how nice it would be if we could meet sometime, how if I was ever in Toronto I should call, come over and meet the family. Was he not even curious? I wondered again. Was he an insensate blockhead? Did he not even know that curiosity about our own origins is what defines us as human? That it wasn’t speech, as he might think, or opposing thumbs, but origins, which were inextricably linked to destiny?

  “I appreciate you calling,” I said again.

  “No problem. I thought you’d want to know.”

  After I put the phone down, Reuben got a razor from the bathroom and made the beginning of the tear in my blouse for me. He made it on the left side of my blouse, over my heart. Then I took the fabric and pulled it apart and Reuben took me into his arms while I wept alone for my mother.

  YURI’S COUSIN WAS a woman of indeterminate middle age who had obviously been asleep for the night when Yuri rapped at her door. She greeted us pleasantly, adjusting her housecoat with a tug and giving her hair a quick pat—surprisingly pleasantly, I thought, for someone who had been roused from sleep at eleven o’clock on a rainy winter night to show an apartment to someone who had no interest in renting it.

  “I’ll just get the keys,” she said.

  As we followed her up the three flights of stairs, I imagined a dim room smelling of mould, but when she pushed open the door I was dazzled by the whiteness, the blue floor that shimmered like the sea in sunlight even in the middle of the night.

  “It’s lovely,” I said immediately. The entire apartment was one white room with a blue-ti
led floor. It wasn’t large but it felt spacious. The furnishings were minimal—just a desk against the wall with the window, a bureau made of wood, and the bed, pushed against another wall and covered in a white quilt. The blue of the floor repeated in the tiles of the counter in the kitchenette.

  “It’s like a ship,” I added, which was perhaps a peculiar thing to say because it was nothing like a ship except in the way it made me feel. I felt I could return to it after I had delivered the notebook that I had once hoped might hold the key to my mother’s life, could trust that room to carry me through whatever might lie ahead and deliver me to a new harbour.

  Yuri flashed a hopeful smile at his cousin. “It’s completely remodelled,” he said, though it must have been obvious to him by then that no further salesmanship was required. “It’s one of the original buildings in Tel Aviv. It was built … When was it built, Ayelet?” he asked his cousin.

  “Never mind the history lesson,” his cousin answered. “She’s tired from her trip, can’t you see?”

  I was exhausted, I realized, as every cramped, uncomfortable moment of the last twenty hours of travel suddenly caught up with me.

  “You’ll sleep well here,” she assured me.

  I haven’t slept well here, but I don’t care. I’m not here to sleep.

  It’s 5 a.m. now. I know without even having to look at the clock. The first flight of the morning just roared overhead, banking steeply in its turn out to sea. Yuri didn’t mention the flight path, would not have thought it worth mentioning. “You’ll get used to it,” Ayelet assures me. She pities me, it’s very obvious. Lost soul, she thinks. Nothing better to occupy her nights than worrying about barking dogs and the noise of airplanes. But she’s wrong.

  The apartment faces east, away from the sea, and I like how that fault catches the first light of morning. Soon I’ll see it, that first ray of light. It will sweep the wall by the desk where I’ve pinned the photo of Reuben and the kids emerging, laughing, from the freezing cold lake at Wawa on that road trip across Canada in 1982. Then the desk, where I’ve placed the pink quartz that I’ve always used as a paperweight.

  Lily Azerov’s notebook is gone—I delivered it yesterday, along with the diamond, still uncut and unfinished. The curator looked at the notebook for a long time, nodding. She told me how rare this sort of document is, how important, how helpful it will be to future generations. The diamond, though, puzzled her. She raised her eyebrows at me.

  “It was found with the girl,” I said. “With Lily Azerov.”

  I would leave it to the curator and those future generations to determine the role it had played in the life of the girl who hadn’t survived to tell us.

  What’s left on my desk now is the other notebook—my mother’s. It’s empty still, but not for long. I opened it last night before I went to bed, and it lies open to the first page, where I’ll begin this very morning, as soon as the first ray of light sweeps across it. I’ll begin with a wedding in July of 1946. I’ll begin in a small room off a banquet hall in Montreal.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to the following people, who read early drafts of this novel and offered helpful observations, criticisms and encouragement: Cynthia Flood, Tova Hartman, Sara Horowitz, Barbara Kuhne, Lydia Kwa, Helen Mintz, Janet Ostro, Susan Ouriou, Diane Richler, Dianne Richler, Martin Richler, Carmen Rodriguez, Robin Roger, Julia Serebrinsky, Howard Stanislawski, Rhea Tregebov, Vicki Trerise, Aletha Worrall.

  Thanks to Dean Cooke and Iris Tupholme for their faith in this novel, their insights and their patience. The fresh eye that Jennifer Weis brought to the manuscript was also very helpful.

  I also wish to thank my parents, Myer and Dianne Richler, for their constant generosity and support.

  The Calabria Café in Vancouver, B.C., was my second home during the writing of this book. Thanks to Frank Murducco and sons, who own and run it.

  And finally, always, thanks to Vicki Trerise.

  The first chapter of this book appeared in slightly different form in Room of One’s Own, Volume 28:2, 2005.

  The stanza from Czeslaw Milocz’s “Dedication,” which appears at the beginning of this book, was translated by the poet and is used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  About the Author

  NANCY RICHLER’s short fiction has been published in various American and Canadian literary journals, including Room, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Another Chicago Magazine, and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her first novel, Throwaway Angels, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel. Her second novel, Your Mouth Is Lovely, won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction and Italy’s Adei-Wizo Literary Prize. The book has been translated into seven languages. Born in Montreal, Nancy Richler lived for many years in Vancouver but has recently returned to her hometown.

  To receive updates on author events and new books by Nancy Richler, sign up at www.authortracker.ca.

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  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  THE IMPOSTER BRIDE

  “With delicacy and warmth, Richler weaves together the threads of a family: its closeness and secrets, opaqueness and hidden beauty, like the uncut gem whose mystery haunts these realistic characters. The rich storyline moves between the quotidian and the unspeakable, showing survivors starting over in an evocative post-war Montreal.”

  —DAPHNE KALOTAY, AUTHOR OF RUSSIAN WINTER

  “An intriguing tale of historical fiction that will transport you from Montreal to war-torn Europe and back again for a satisfying resolution of one family’s haunting secrets.”

  —SHILPI SOMAYA GOWDA, AUTHOR OF SECRET DAUGHTER

  “Nancy Richler paints a deft and loving portrait of Jewish Montreal in the post-war years and then turns to wartime Europe for the dark mystery that provides her intriguing plot. The results are engrossing, both highly readable and moving.”

  —KATE TAYLOR, AUTHOR OF MME PROUST AND THE KOSHER KITCHEN

  “The Imposter Bride is a jewel of a book. With a true storyteller’s craft, Richler spins her tale from the wreckage that was the inheritance of World War II, each life carrying a secret burden of loss. These are characters that will stay with you long after you read the last word of the book, and show us that even out of the greatest tragedy, it is possible to shape hope and love.”

  —NAOMI BENARON, AUTHOR OF RUNNING THE RIFT

  Also by Nancy Richler

  Your Mouth Is Lovely

  Copyright

  The Imposter Bride

  Copyright © 2012 by Nancy Richler.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-40405-1

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  FIRST EDITION

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  First stanza (5l.) of “Dedication” from The Collected Poems 1931–1987 by Czeslaw Milosz. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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