The Street

by Mordecai Richler

  “I’ll tell you what,” Rosen said in a booming voice, “let’s all go over to my place for a decent feed and some schnapps.”

  Our living room emptied more quickly than it had filled.

  “Where’s your mother?” my father asked, puzzled.

  I told him she was in the kitchen and we went to get her. “Come on,” my father said, “let’s go to the Rosens.”

  “And who, may I ask, will clean up the mess you and your friends made here?”

  “It won’t run away.”

  “You have no pride.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t start. Not today.”

  “Drunkard.”

  “Ray Milland, that’s me. Hey, what’s that coming out of the wall? A bat.”

  “That poor innocent boy is being railroaded into a marriage he doesn’t want and you just stand there.”

  “Couldn’t you enjoy yourself just once?”

  “You didn’t see his face how scared he was? I thought he’d faint.”

  “Who ever got married he didn’t need a little push? Why, I remember when I was a young man –”

  “You go, Sam. Do me a favour. Go to the Rosens’.”

  My father sent me out of the room.

  “I’m not,” he began, “well, I’m not always happy with you. Not day in and day out. I’m telling you straight.”

  “When I needed you to speak up for me you couldn’t. Today courage comes in bottles. Do me a favour, Sam. Go.”

  “I wasn’t going to go and leave you alone. I was going to stay. But if that’s how you feel.…”

  My father returned to the living room to get his jacket. I jumped up.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the party.”

  “You stay here with your mother you have no consideration.”

  “God damn it.”

  “You heard me.” But my father paused for a moment at the door. Thumbs hooked in his suspenders, rocking to and fro on his heels, he raised his head so high his chin jutted out incongruously. “I wasn’t always your father. I was a young man once.”

  “So?”

  “Did you know,” he said, one eye half-shut, “that LIVE spelled backwards is EVIL?”

  I woke at three in the morning when I heard a chair crash in the living room; somebody fell, and this was followed by the sound of sobbing. It was Mervyn. Dizzy, wretched and bewildered. He sat on the floor with a glass in his hand. When he saw me coming he raised his glass. “The wordsmith’s bottled enemy,” he said, grinning.

  “When you getting married?”

  He laughed. I laughed too.

  “I’m not getting married.”

  “Wha’?”

  “Sh.”

  “But I thought you were crazy about Molly?”

  “I was. I am no longer.” Mervyn rose, he tottered over to the window.

  “Have you ever looked up at the stars,” he said, “and felt how small and unimportant we are?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me before.

  “Nothing really matters. In terms of eternity our lives are shorter than a cigarette puff. Hey,” he said. “Hey!” He took out his pen with the built-in flashlight and wrote something in his notebook. “For a writer,” he said, “everything is grist to the mill. Nothing is humiliating.”

  “But what about Molly?”

  “She’s an insect. I told you the first time. All she wanted was my kudos. My fame … If you’re really going to become a wordsmith remember one thing. The world is full of ridicule while you struggle. But once you’ve made it the glamour girls will come crawling.”

  He had begun to cry again. “Want me to sit with you for a while,” I said.

  “No. Go to bed. Leave me alone.”

  The next morning at breakfast my parents weren’t talking. My mother’s eyes were red and swollen and my father was in a forbidding mood. A telegram came for Mervyn.

  “It’s from New York,” he said. “They want me right away. There’s an offer for my book from Hollywood and they need me.”

  “You don’t say?”

  Mervyn thrust the telegram at my father. “Here,” he said. “You read it.”

  “Take it easy. All I said was …” But my father read the telegram all the same. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “Hollywood.”

  We helped Mervyn pack.

  “Shall I get Molly?” my father asked.

  “No. I’ll only be gone for a few days. I want to surprise her.”

  We all went to the window to wave. Just before he got into the taxi Mervyn looked up at us, he looked for a long while, but he didn’t wave, and of course we never saw him again. A few days later a bill came for the telegram. It had been sent from our house. “I’m not surprised,” my mother said.

  My mother blamed the Rosens for Mervyn’s flight, while they held us responsible for what they called their daughter’s disgrace. My father put his pipes aside again and naturally he took a terrible ribbing at Tansky’s. About a month later five dollar bills began to arrive from Toronto. They came sporadically until Mervyn had paid up all his back rent. But he never answered any of my father’s letters.

  TEN

  The War, Chaverim, and After

  BLUMBERG, our fourth-grade teacher, was a militant Zionist.

  “How did we get arms in Eretz? Why, we bought them from the British. We’d pretend somebody was dead, fill a coffin with rifles, and bury it against … the right moment.”

  If we responded to this tale of cunning with yawns or maybe two fingers held up to signify disbelief, it was not that we weren’t impressed. It was simply that Blumberg, a refugee from Poland, heaped a vengeful amount of homework on us and we thrived on putting him down. Blumberg fed us on frightening stories of anti-semitic outrages. Life would be sour for us. We were doomed to suffer the malice of the Gentiles. But I wasn’t scared because I had no intention of becoming a Jew like Blumberg, with a foolish accent, an eye for a bargain, and a habit, clearly unsanitary, of licking his thumb before turning a page of the Aufbau. I was a real Canadian and could understand people not liking Blumberg, maybe even finding him funny. So did I. Blumberg had lived in Palestine for a while and despised the British army. I didn’t. How could I? In Which We Serve was in its umpteenth week at the Orpheum. Cousins and uncles were with the Canadian army in Sussex, training for the invasion.

  War. “Praise the Lord,” my father sang, demanding more baked beans, “and pass the ammunition.” My Cousin Jerry wore a Red Cross Blood Donor’s badge. I collected salvage.

  The war meant if we ate plenty of carrots we would see better in the dark, like R.A.F. night fighters. V stood for Victory. Paul Lukas was watching out for us on the Rhine. Signs in all our cigar stores and delicatessens warned chassids, pressers, dry goods wholesalers, tailors, and melamuds against loose talk about troop movements. University students, my Cousin Jerry among them, went out west to harvest the wheat. My uncles, who bought two dogs to guard their junk yard, named them Adolf and Benito. Arty, Gas, Hershey, Duddy and I gave up collecting hockey cards for the duration and instead became experts on aircraft recognition. Come recess we were forever flashing cards with airplane silhouettes at each other. I learned to tell a Stuka from a Spitfire.

  One of the first to enlist was killed almost immediately. Benjy Trachstein joined the R.C.A.F and the first time he went up with an instructor in a Harvard trainer the aeroplane broke apart, crashed on the outskirts of Montreal, and Benjy burned to death. Charred to the bone. At the funeral, my father said, “It’s kismet – fate. When your time comes, your time comes.”

  Mrs. Trachstein went out of her mind and Benjy’s father, a grocer, became a withering reproach to everyone. “When is your black-marketeer of a son going to join up?” he asked one mother and to another he said, “How much did it cost you the doctor to keep your boy out of the army?”

  We began to avoid Trachstein’s grocery, the excuse being he never washed his hands any more: it was enough to turn your stomach to take a pound of cheese
from him or to eat a herring he had touched. It was also suspected that Trachstein was the one who had written those anonymous letters reporting other stores in the neighbourhood to the Wartime Prices & Trade Board. The letters were a costly nuisance. An inspector always followed up because there could be twenty dollars or maybe even a case of whisky in it for him.

  Benjy’s wasted death was brandished at any boy on the street hot-headed enough to want to enlist. Still, they volunteered. Some because they were politically conscious, others because boredom made them reckless. One Saturday morning Gordie Roth, a long fuzzy-haired boy with watery blue eyes, turned up at the Young Israel synagogue in an officer’s uniform. His father broke down and sobbed and shuffled out of the shul without a word to his son. Those who had elected to stay on at McGill, thereby gaining an exemption from military service, were insulted by Gordie’s gesture. It was one thing for a dental graduate to accept a commission in the medical corps, something else again for a boy to chuck law school for the infantry. Privately the boys said Gordie wasn’t such a hero, he had been bound to flunk out at McGill anyway. Garber’s boy, a psychology major, had plenty to say about the death-wish. But Fay Katz wrinkled her nose and laughed spitefully at him. “You know what that is down your back,” she said, “a yellow stripe.”

  Mothers who had once bragged about their children’s health, making any childhood illness seem a shameful show of weakness, now cherished nothing in their young so greedily as flat feet, astigmatism, a heart murmur, or a nice little rupture. After a month in camp with the university army training corps my Cousin Jerry limped home with raw bleeding feet and jaundice. A Sergeant McCormick had called him a hard-assed kike.

  “Why should we fight for them, the fascists,” my father said.

  “The poor boy, what he’s been through,” my mother said.

  Hershey had a brother overseas. Arty’s American cousin was in the marines. I was bitterly disappointed in Cousin Jerry and couldn’t look him in the eye.

  One evening my father read us an item from the front page of the Star. A Luftwaffe pilot, shot down over London, had been given a blood transfusion. “There you are, old chap,” the British doctor said. “Now you’ve got some good Jewish blood in you.” My father scratched his head thoughtfully before turning the page and I could see that he was immensely pleased.

  Only Tansky, who ran the corner Cigar & Soda, questioned the integrity of the British war effort. Lots of ships were being sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic, true, but how many people knew that U-boat commanders never torpedoed a ship insured by Lloyd’s or that certain German factories were proof against air raids, because of interlocking British directorships?

  If Tansky was concerned about capitalist treachery overseas the truth is French Canadians at home gave us much more cause for alarm. Duplessis’s Union Nationale Party had circulated a pamphlet that showed a coarse old Jew, nose long and mis-shapen as a carrot, retreating into the night with sacks of gold. The caption suggested that Ikey ought to go back to Palestine. Mr. Blumberg, our fourth-grade teacher, agreed. “There’s only one place for a Jew. Eretz. But you boys are too soft. You know nothing about what it is to be a Jew.”

  Our parochial school principal was a Zionist of a different order. His affinities were literary. Ahad Ha’am, Bialik, Buber. But I managed to graduate to F.F.H.S. uncontaminated. In fact I doubt that I ever would have become a Zionist if not for Irving.

  Irving, who was in my classroom at F.F.H.S., ignored me for months. Then, on the day our report cards came out, he joined me by the lockers, bouncing a mock punch off my shoulder. “Congrats,” he said.

  I looked baffled.

  “Well, you’re rank two, aren’cha?”

  Irving represented everything I admired. He wore a blazer with IRV printed in gold letters across his broad back and there was a hockey crest sewn over his heart. He had fought in the Golden Gloves for the Y.M.H.A. and he was high scorer on our school basketball team. Whenever Irving began to dribble shiftily down the court the girls would squeal, leap up, and shout,

  X2, Y2, H2So4,

  Themistocles, Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian

  War,

  One-two-three-four,

  Who are we for –

  IRVING, OLD BOY!

  Irving went in for rakishly pegged trousers and always carried prophylactics in his billfold.

  “How would you like to come down to Habonim with me tonight? If you like it, maybe you’ll join.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The Habonim meeting house was on Jeanne Mance Street, not far from my grandfather’s house, and I recalled that on Friday nights the old man glowered as the chaverim passed, singing lustily. The fact that it was the sabbath was all that restrained my grandfather from calling the police to protest against the racket the chaverim kicked up. My grandfather was uncompromisingly orthodox. Switching on lights, tearing paper, were both forbidden on the sabbath. So late Friday afternoon it fell to one of my aunts to tear sufficient toilet paper to see us through shabbus; and one of my uncles had devised a Rube Goldberg type apparatus, the key part of which was a string attached to a clock that turned off the toilet and hall lights when the alarm sounded at midnight.

  Now I would have to risk passing the house with the others. Shoving, throwing snowballs, teasing the girls, singing.

  Pa’am achas bochur ya-’za, bochurv’bachura.…

  Irving, chewing on a matchstick, picked me up after supper and on the way we called for Hershey and Gas. I was flattered that Irving had come to my house first, and in the guise of telling him what fun Hershey and Gas were, I let him understand that I was a much more desirable boy to have for a friend.

  Walking to Habonim with Irving, Hershey and Gas, became a Friday night ritual that was to continue unbroken through four years of high school.

  The war was done. Cousins and uncles were gradually coming home.

  – What was it like over there?

  – An education.

  We read in the Star that in Denver a veteran had run amok and shot people down in the street; the Reader’s Digest warned us not to ask too many questions, the boys had been through hell; but on St. Urbain the boys took off their uniforms, bought new suits, and took up where they had left off.

  IS HITLER REALLY DEAD? was what concerned all of us. That, and an end to wartime shortages. Sugar, coffee, and gas, came off the ration list. The Better Business Bureau warned housewives not to buy soaps or combs from door-to-door vendors who claimed to be disabled veterans. An intrepid reporter walked the length of Calgary’s main street in an S.S. uniform without being stopped once. HAVE WE FORGOTTEN WHAT THE BOYS DIED FOR, he wanted to know. Ted Williams was safe, so was Jimmy Stewart. Mackenzie King wrote, “It affords me much pleasure both personally and as Prime Minister, to add a word of tribute to the record of the services of Canadian Jews in the armed forces in the recent war.” Pete Grey, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ one-armed player, was made a free agent. A returning veteran took his place in the outfield.

  Harry, our group leader in Habonim, had served in the R.C.A.F, where it had been his job to show returned fighter pilots the combat films they had taken. Each time a pilot fired his guns, Harry explained, a camera in the wings took pictures, which was how it could be established if a pilot’s claim to a kill was true. Some of the films, he said, showed enemy aircraft bursting into flames. But on the flight home most of the pilots swooped low over German streets to shoot up cyclists for sport. These films would end abruptly – just as the cyclists crumpled.

  Hershey’s father, gone into the war a scrap dealer, a rotund good-natured man whose sporting life had once been confined to cracking peanuts in the Delormier Downs bleachers at Sunday afternoon double-headers, now flew army ordnance corps colonels and their secretaries by chartered aeroplane to his hunting and fishing cabin on a lake in northern Quebec. He emerged as a leading dealer in army surplus trucks, jeeps, and other heavy equipment. Hershey’s family moved to Outremont.

  Duddy Kra
vitz drifted away from us too. Calling himself Victory Vendors he bought four peanut machines and set them up on what he had clocked as the busiest corners in the neighbourhood.

  Irving and I became inseparable, but his father terrified me.

  “You know what you are,” Irving’s father was fond of saying. “Your father’s mistake.”

  Irving’s father was a widower – a wiry grey-haired man with mocking black eyes. He astonished me because he didn’t eat kosher and he drank. Not a quick little schnapps with honey cake, head tossed back and eyes immediately tearing, like my father and the other men at the synagogue when there was a bar-mitzvah.

  – This is quality stuff. The best.

  – It warms you right here.

  – Smooth.

  Irving’s father drank Black Horse Ale, bottle after bottle. He settled in sullenly at the kitchen table, his smile morose, and suddenly he would call out, “Pull my finger!” If you did he let out a tremendous burp. Irving’s father could fall asleep at the table, mouth open, a cigarette burning between his stubby blackened fingers. Sometimes he sat with us on Saturday nights to listen to the hockey broadcasts. He was a Canadiens fan. “You can’t beat the Rocket or Durnan when the chips are down. They’re money players. Real money players – heeeey, here it comes …” He lifted himself gently off the chair. “SBD.” A self-satisfied pause. “Know what that means, kid?”

  Irving, holding his nose, would open the window.

  “Silent But Deadly.”

  Another time Irving’s father said, “Here,” shoving a finger under my nose. “Smell.”

  Scared, I had a whiff.

  “That’s the one that went through the paper.”

  Irving’s father ridiculed Habonim.

  “So, little shmendricks, what are you going to do? Save the Jews? Any time the Arabs want they can run them right into the sea.”

  On the occasional Friday I was allowed to stay overnight at Irving’s house and the two of us would sit up late to talk about Eretz.

  “I can hardly wait to go,” Irving said.

  I can no longer remember much about our group meetings on Fridays or the impassioned general meetings on Sunday afternoons. I can recall catch-words, no more. Yishuv, White Paper, emancipation, Negev, revisionist, Aliyah. Pierre Van Paasen was our trusted ally; Koestler, since Thieves in the Night, was despicable. Following our group meetings we all clambered down to the whitewashed cellar to join the girls and dance the hora. I seldom took part, preferring to puff at my newly acquired pipe on the sidelines, and watch Gitel’s breasts heave. Afterwards we spilled exuberantly on to the street and either continued on to one of the girls’ homes to neck or drifted to the Park Bowling Academy.