Between Gods: A Memoir (26 page)

Degan reads for the MAN: “ ‘I stand with you in awe before the wonder of existence …’ ”

I can see from his face, though, that he’s still thinking about his opera tickets. There’s a long paragraph in transliterated Hebrew: I wonder what it means.

On the opposite page is a blessing to say upon a miscarriage, but I am not worried about my baby’s viability. Little wings tremble in my belly. That night I dream about a filament, buzzing brightly in the centre of a bulb.

I visit my doctor, Dr. Singh. Her hair is pulled into the high bouncy ponytail of a cheerleader. She tests my urine, confirms the double line’s augury.

“We’re going to Europe,” I tell her.

“When?”

“On Friday!”

Surely this isn’t allowed. “Am I okay to travel? To fly?” I ask.

“So long as you feel up for it.”

I feel up for it, I tell her. I feel
fantastic
.

There are things I have wanted in my life, things I have longed for. To have a book published. To meet a partner. But this particular longing to be a mother is different. Only in its consummation do I realize its extent, like a vast continent whose hinterlands I’ve purposefully ignored. I’ve spent the past decade bracing against pregnancy, trying not to capitulate to its allure.
The abnegation has gone on so long that I have come to believe myself incapable. Only now that I am pregnant and therefore undeniably fertile can I acknowledge how I long for a child. There is nothing I want more in the world’s farthest reaches.

We spend the next couple of days getting ready for our trip. Degan cleans the kitchen and I tidy the bedroom for our subletters. I fight my impulse to hide the Sabbath candlesticks, the
tzedakah
box emblazoned with the Star of David, the books by Martin Gilbert. Most people are good, I reassure myself. I’m safe.

Degan reads aloud to me from the guidebook about the Jewish Quarter in Vienna: it was a hotbed for antisemitism, yes, but also an epicentre for Jewish culture before the war.

Vienna
, I’ve always thought, would make a nice name for a girl. And the V would go well with Degan’s last name, Davis.

twenty-two

I
’M MYSELF, AN AVERAGE WOMAN
boarding a plane, and then all at once, I’m someone else. Somewhere high over the Atlantic a transformation occurs, sudden and complete, an eclipse of the moon, a slap across the face. “It’s just jet lag,” I tell Degan when we land in Austria. I gesture to some cracked plastic chairs at the back of the arrivals lounge. “Can we just stop here for a quick rest?”

I’m so tired he has to drag me out of the airport by my arm. I fall asleep the second the taxi starts moving, so I see nothing of where we are, where we’re going. The taxi drops us off in the middle of a concrete square. It’s five in the morning; everything is closed. I lie like a dishrag in the front lobby of a tanning salon while Degan figures out the directions to our hotel.

When we get there, I sleep for fifteen hours. When I wake,
Degan is dressed and shaved. He hands me a coffee—I flinch and push it away, acutely nauseous.

His eyes widen. Never in the decade he’s known me have I refused coffee.

We visit the rooms where Sigmund Freud saw patients, and the bustling Naschmarkt. Degan tours Schubert’s apartment while I sleep in the stairwell outside. When he emerges, he mistakes me, briefly, for a vagrant. At dinner I scarf down three-quarters of a roast chicken and a huge plate of spaghetti. Six weeks pregnant. The hunger is for the new person I’m growing inside me, and the new self, the mother I’ll become.

The Jewish Quarter is marked on our map with a Star of David. On Friday we take the bus down, looking for a place to make Shabbat. We have to stop and ask directions. In our single day here, Degan has learned enough German to be mistaken for a native speaker. The man he stops gives long directions, pointing and gesticulating. Degan nods and smiles, although he doesn’t understand a word.

The synagogue, when we finally find it, is flush with a row of office buildings. It is distinguished only by two guards outside the door.

Where are we from? the larger bald one asks. Are we part of the Jewish community in Toronto? Can he see our passports? How are we related?

“We’re married,” I say.

He’s looking back and forth between the passports, his brow furrowed.

“Oh!” I say. “Our papers say we’re single. We just got married a month ago.”

“Mazel tov,”
the guard says, but he isn’t done with the interrogation.

Have we ever been to Israel? Do we celebrate Shabbos and the High Holidays?

He turns to whisper something to the other guard; I see he has a bug in his ear.

Several metres away is a third guard, a machine gun slung over his shoulder. I clench with indignation and then I remember the terrorist attack described in the guidebook, in which thirty people were wounded and two killed while they were attending a bar mitzvah service here in 1981.

Finally we’re granted access. As we enter, we hear the woman behind us in line pleading with the guard. “I’m a
Jew
,” she cries. “I just want to pray.”

Inside the synagogue, I climb a stairway to the balcony, where the women are segregated. Four teenage girls in hats and long skirts are looking down into the synagogue proper, where there are maybe forty men, most with black hats and beards. These men are wandering up the aisles toward the bimah, draping their arms over the backs of pews, chatting with their neighbours. I locate the top of Degan’s head and watch him find a seat. It’s hard to tell whether the service has started or not. Eventually the rabbi rallies the troops, turning to his Torah and calling out page numbers in Hebrew. He bobs back and forth at the waist as he chants, pumping his fist in the air like a teenager at a rock concert. The bimah is crawling with little boys with long ringlets beside their ears. They cling to the tassels of the rabbi’s tallit, then try to crawl completely beneath the prayer shawl.

It dawns on me that the rabbi is their father. They are here with him at work.

The service is, mercifully, in English, to accommodate an unusually large number of visitors to the city. Still, I feel
irrelevant, segregated in the rafters. The rabbi looks up at the women once during the service, and once he addresses us directly, making sure we all have siddurs. Otherwise, he speaks to the men. He talks about Tisha B’Av, the annual fast day that is approaching. It commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, tragedies that occurred on the same Hebrew date but 655 years apart. How could the bereft Jews possibly mark such events? Three suggestions were put forward, but it was the third suggestion that took, that at Jewish weddings a glass be broken. “At almost
every
Jewish wedding a glass is broken,” the rabbi says. “Why?”

He answers his own question.

“Because it is a time of such great, overflowing joy. We can remember our persecution and move ahead, as well.”

I catch Degan’s eye below me; we share a smile.

At the end of the service the rabbi alludes to the number of Jews killed in Vienna before the war, to the antisemitism that characterized the city. I remember Degan reading to me from the guidebook, about Jews after the Ausschluss being forced to scrub toilets with their prayer shawls. “You might think of this place as relatively evil,” the rabbi says. “And I am not denying that horrible things happened here.” He pauses. “But things are changing. It’s different from before.”

As though to celebrate this, the dance that Jews seem to love erupts, the dancers linking arms in a large adult version of Ring around the Rosie; it always reminds me of a Newfoundland folk dance. The balcony obscures half the circle: I have an aerial view of the bobbing black hats, and the edge of the circle as it turns, heads coming in and out of view like the portion of a wheel visible beneath the fender.

That night, I wake in the darkness from a dream in which
Degan has to retrieve something from a toilet. The feeling in the dream, which Charlotte always says is the most important part, is not shame but joy. There is a document in those fetid waters, something from the past, and Degan is the one to fish it out.

Our next stop is Prague. Because of an article I’ve been commissioned to write, we are put up in the Czech Republic’s most resplendent hotel. Our bags are whisked to an opulent suite where chocolates and champagne await. The smell when Degan uncorks the bottle makes me run for the bathroom. I spend the whole day curled on the bed in the fetal position. The lavish buffet is lost on me. I emerge at dinner to eat off the “beige menu”: dry toast, bananas.

“I can’t even enjoy good food!” I wail.

“Be gentle with yourself,” Degan says. “It’s a lot.
All
of this.” He gestures around at our fancy hotel room, but I know he’s referring to much more, as well.

Since I’m here, I’ve decided to take advantage of the chance to delve into my family history. I leave Degan at the hotel, bundle up and head down into the street, looking for some scrap of Granny’s life
before
. Thinking of Gumper’s
Report from England
: “There is no trace of the Bauers and we must assume they are no longer alive.”

It’s mid-afternoon by the time I make it down to the Jewish Quarter. The place is crawling with school groups, teenage boys elbowing each other, laughing about the mandatory
kippahs
they have to wear. I hesitate in front of a display of Judaica. The vendor tries to explain, in halting English, that the six points on a silk tallit represent the points on the Star of David.

“I know,” I tell her. “I already know.”

I head down to the Pinkas Synagogue, a monument to the Czech Jews killed in the Holocaust. The names of the murdered are written on the walls. Granny visited this synagogue in the 1980s with my cousins. She wasn’t interested in hanging around inside for too long, so they went outside and sat on a wall and she smoked a cigarette. She told them that she imagined her mother, Marianne, had looked after the chickens in Theresienstadt. Unlikely, yes. But the confidence with which Granny said it made it seem true.

Later, when they were getting into bed, Granny said she felt that if she began to cry about everything that had happened, she would never be able to stop and might go mad.

I brace myself and enter the building. I, too, have been here before, but in the intervening decade the monument has been completed, and now every square inch of wall space is covered with names. Each last name is written only once, in bold letters, followed by all the first names in smaller writing. My stomach flutters as I scan the dense script. I find the name Bauer, Granny’s maiden name, and gasp to see just how many of them were murdered. A whole band of different Bauers, with their own families, their own stories. It takes me ages to find Granny’s parents. I run my eyes along the long list and land on the names with an odd mixture of gladness and grief:

Oskar 29 xi 1880—20 1 1943;

Mariana 8 viii 1894—20 1 1943

The memorial does its work and my eyes film over. I touch my belly, both to share the act of remembering with my unborn child and to protect her from it. I take a few deep breaths and try to absorb the moment but am jostled from behind by a group
of laughing teenagers; I lose my footing, and when I regain it, Oskar and Marianne have disappeared back into the mass of writing on the wall.

I catch the scent of someone’s body odour and my stomach rebels. I push through the crowds and stand outside, gulping the fresh air. I want to do something else; I want some other, better way to honour them. I approach the beleaguered woman in the ticket booth. “Is there somewhere to go to an actual service?” I ask.

She launches into a rickety English explanation of the various synagogues my ticket gives me access to.

“No,” I say. “A service.”

“Now?”

“For Shabbos. Tomorrow.”

“Oh,” she says. She doesn’t know.

Degan and I decide to get up early on Saturday regardless. The Charles Bridge, flanked by its famous statues of saints, shimmers in the pink light of sunrise. St. John the Baptist, St. Francis of Assisi, the lesser known saints Norbert of Xanten, and Sigismund. We sit outside the locked Pinkas Synagogue, rubbing our arms against the chill. I want to show Degan what I’ve seen, the names of Granny’s parents. Why is nobody here? When I pull out the guidebook, I see that the synagogue is closed for the Sabbath.

“I fumbled it again,” I say.

Degan hugs me. “I’ll visit it when you’re in Plzen,” he says. “Okay?”

I sniffle. I am set to head off to research my article for the travel magazine. “You’ll stay here?”

“I’ll meet up with you on Monday.”

I sniffle again and nod.

“Let’s read the Kaddish,” he suggests. We’ve practised the prayer for the dead in the preceding weeks, going over and over the unfamiliar syllables. Degan pulls out the folded sheet. We read it in halting Hebrew, all the way through. I’m thinking about Lucy’s dream: “Mrs. Liska Pick very much regrets that she is unable to attend.”

The next morning I board the train to Plzen, home to the most famous Czech brewery. The article I’ve been commissioned to write, irony of ironies, is about beer. I am to tour the country’s world-renowned microbreweries, sampling the wares. “Alcohol is prohibited!” my daily pregnancy email warns cheerfully. As if I had a choice. I turn away glass after glass, bile rising hot in my throat.

The tours of the breweries cover hectares of hallways. I race after my guide, through a pea-soup fog of malt and hops. I gag and sweat. It is as though I’m being trained for a marathon, maybe, or for some more ancient relay involving armour, a crossbow and a unicorn.

I keep my hand pressed against my stomach and picture the cells multiplying. I make up a silly song and sing it under my breath: “ ‘My little baby. Oh! My little baby.’ ” It’s a lullaby, and a hymn, and a mantra.

Degan takes the last train from Prague and meets me at the hotel. We lie on the bed and have a huggle. “How were your last few days?” I ask.