Girl Unwrapped (4 page)

“He was so kind, your Grandpa,” Lisa says, as if kindness were not entirely an admirable thing.

All this—before-the-war—is one story. Then comes how Antonia said, “Go, go, go. They won’t bother with us old folks, but there’s no future here for the young.” So Lisa and her two brothers, Wilhelm and Franz, travelled by train to the coast of Italy, where they boarded a boat for Palestine. But it turned out to be a swindle. The boat chugged out to the open seas, then turned back that very same night so that when they looked out the porthole in the morning they saw, not the wide, blue Mediterranean, but the barnacled hull of the same Russian tanker they’d docked beside the day before. The captain had disappeared. Their money was gone. After that it was out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire. Banishment, arrest, release, internment, escape, hiding, hiding.

“All in all, the Italians were human. It could have been worse. How? Don’t ask! We found good people to help us.
Mutti’s
voice told me who to trust. We hid with poor farmers, high in the mountains. I learned to take care of the cows. Can you see your mama pitching hay?”

Toni can. She imagines her mother brandishing a pitchfork at German soldiers who run down the mountainside, their hands shielding their bums.

At the end of the war, Lisa and her brothers landed in a DP camp, which was not a prison exactly, just a place to wait, to rot, until some country, somewhere, was willing to take you in. Lisa worked as a nurse’s aid in the clinic where she tended to all kinds of miserable souls.

“Unbelievable stories. You can’t imagine, and it’s good that you can’t.”

They were mostly
Ostjuden
, speaking a babble of tongues, but one was a long-legged fellow from Vienna—practically a countryman! It was Papa. He languished on a cot and he was white and limp as cooked asparagus, his eyes like spent bullet shells. Dysentery. Plus something else that caused the doctor to shake his head. A collapse of the spirit. While others groaned endlessly and clamoured for attention, Julius disappeared into the silence of his bones. Not the most appealing sight, you would think, but he had beautiful hands, and after all that time with sausage-fingered peasants, Lisa was susceptible to a pair of elegant hands. And she liked the length of him. Tall as an American if you could stand him up. While she held a cup of water to his indifferent lips, Antonia whispered that this was the one. So he became Lisa’s project. She had will enough for them both.

“I cooked a hearty broth and fed him spoon by spoon. I knew if I could get my soup into him, one thing would lead to another, and I was right. After a while—” a sly smile plays around Lisa’s lips—“after a while he became hungry on his own.”

She stares down at the photo on the table.

“I knew there was no point in going back to Vienna. I read the cards. I knew all we needed to know, but he wouldn’t listen. He had to go back. To look. We lost our place in line at the embassies.”

“To look for what, Mama?”

Her mother starts, as if surprised to hear Toni’s voice. She digs her fingernail into the crevices of the photo frame to remove bits of caked-on polish.

“Always we were very close,
Mutti
and me. We were like one mind in two bodies.”

Toni slips off her chair and stands beside her mother to see what she’s talking about. The woman in the photograph is not as beautiful as Toni’s mother, but she does seem to have the same will of iron. Her back ramrod straight, she stares fiercely out of the photo and right into Toni’s heart.
I know you hate the name Antonia. What kind of granddaughter
shuns her Grandma’s name?

In her mind Toni argues that “Toni” sounds nicer and could even be a boy’s name, while “Antonia” sounds creaky and old. Grandma’s photo-face remains unconvinced.

One mind in two bodies
. The thought makes Toni feel left out. She flings herself against her mother, who still holds the picture in her hands.

“Oof, careful, you’ll break it,” Lisa grunts, shoving Toni away. But the next moment she has scooped Toni into her arms and clutches her hard, squeezing the breath out of her, causing a hot, bright warmth beneath Toni’s ribs and a smothered sensation too, so that it is she who must push away at last.

“Lay the cards, Mama. Please,” Toni begs, seized with longing for magic and revelations. “Maybe you have to warn someone they’re going to die.”

“Nonsense. I wouldn’t do such a thing. I only tell good fortunes.” Lisa narrows her eyes at Toni. “So you want to know what lies ahead, do you? All right then, fetch the cards.”

Toni hands over the deck. Her mother lays long rows face down on the table. “Hmm. Interesting.” She sucks in her lip as she peers first at the card she’s turned over, then at Toni over the tops of her reading glasses.

“What? What?”

But Lisa shakes her head. Let’s not be hasty and interpret too soon. One card means nothing on its own. More must be turned over to know whether there is a pattern here, a story, or only random bits of cardboard on the table. Aha, the Queen of Diamonds. Now all is revealed. A progression, see? A three of clubs grows up to become a lovely feminine face card. There can be only one meaning—a wedding foretold. Toni will one day become a beautiful bride in a frothy white gown. The guests will cry “
l’chayim
,” they will dance the
hora
. Her mother’s eyes shine with happily-ever-after.

A frothy white gown, Toni mutters under her breath as she lays the table for supper. She shouldn’t have asked for the cards to speak. Now she’s stuck with this picture in her head of the gown coming at her with outstretched sleeves, the spooky veil floating over a cold, dark emptiness. Over on the counter, the flame in the jar convulses in silent laughter.

Julius sits at his desk, bent over his ledger books. His shoulders are hunched, his long back curved like the arch of the goose-necked lamp that casts a glow on his bald head. Papa’s skull is like a delicate shell, with bumps and indentations and a thin, tight layer of skin—the same aged, yellowish colour as the pages in some of the old books he collects.
Tappa, tappa
, go the fingers of his left hand, dancing over the keys of the adding machine,
tappa, tappa, kachunk
, while his right hand makes neat, precise entries in the ledger squares, never straying over the lines. Now and then he tugs the short grey hairs of his goatee and sighs. Her father is a bookkeeper, which has nothing to do with real books; it means keeping track of other people’s money and not seeing much of your own. During the day, he hurries on foot or by streetcar from one client to another, carrying two bulging leather briefcases that knock against his sides.

“You can come in if you stay quiet,” he says without lifting his head. “Sit in the corner and read.”

The room embraces her, a narrow, cosy cave, crammed with Papa’s things, but with everything in its place, shipshape. Books stand at attention on bookshelves that rise from floor to ceiling on two sides. The wide wooden desk by the window has a view of stained brick walls, backdoor landings, metal rails, and circular stairs that wind down to a tiny courtyard between their apartment building and its twin next door. Through the raised window sash comes a faint smell of garbage and cement moistened by October drizzle. Toni takes a seat on a stool in the corner. The books on the shelves that tower above her are Papa’s treasures. They are mostly in German with dense print, old-fashioned Gothic letters, and impossible words. Books are precious, Julius says, and their value can’t be reckoned in dollars. Once, Hitler’s men burned books in huge bonfires because they were written by Jewish writers or because they said things Hitler didn’t like. His men hunted down books just as later they hunted down people. But they couldn’t burn everything everywhere. If Lisa had her druthers, the books in the study would be much fewer so she’d have space for an ironing board. “He hardly reads them anyway,” she says. “He collects. And they collect dust.”

Which isn’t true, of course. Julius does read, sitting still as a statue in his chair, a position of deep devotion, while the flicker of his eyelids and the slight movement of his lips tell you he’s very much awake and,
um Gottes willen
, don’t interrupt. He keeps everything on the shelves clean and perfectly arranged according to rules Toni will never understand. If she pulls out a volume and shoves it back in the wrong place, he rushes to fix her mistake. Ignoring her own stash of Walt Disneys in the corner, she attempts to remove one of Papa’s books now, a fat cloth-bound tome with gold lettering on the spine, like something a wizard might own.

“What are you doing?” Julius spins around in his chair.

“Show me, Papa,” Toni pleads. Not that the books themselves mean anything to her. She just likes how he shows them, how he becomes a different Papa when he does. A soft gleam has already dawned in his eyes. He hesitates, twiddling his pencil, but he can’t stop himself.

“Ah, by instinct you have found a jewel. Jakob Wassermann.”

He gingerly places the book on the desk in front of him and draws her close. “A great novelist. One of the best of his era. When this book came out in 1928 we filled our whole display case at Stubling’s with copies. This is a first edition.”

His eyes have gone from washed-out grey to silver-dollar bright. He enfolds Toni in the crook of his arm, keeping her still, while his right hand gently turns pages with the tips of his fingers. Her father handles his books as if they were butterflies that could be crushed by a clumsy gesture. He can spend hours poring over inscriptions with a magnifying glass or gazing at a decorative border. What a book says, he explains, is sometimes only a small part of what makes it beautiful or important. He loves typefaces, bindings, paper, ink. He loves how a fine book is put together, how it rests in his hands, the musty smells of old paper and glue, a black-and-white photo of the author’s face beneath onion skin paper, an engraving of a maiden posed beside a well. He loves the surprises that sometimes tumble out of the pages: a piece of a moth’s wing, a single white hair, a yellowed newspaper clipping, a grocery list from the olden days—signs the book had another life, in another time.

“Papa, how many books were in your store in Vienna? A million?”

She could listen forever to his tales about Vienna, a place of towers and spires, boulevards and cobblestone streets, the emperor’s palace and the giant Ferris wheel in Prater Park. A whiff of long-ago, never-again beauty comes through in her father’s recollections. Once Julius sat on his own father’s shoulders to see the emperor’s plume-bedecked carriage pulled by six prancing white stallions. Once he worked in a bookshop with golden letters on the plate-glass windows and oak display shelves and famous customers, like a certain Dr Freud. Those were the days, when lilting Strauss waltzes poured from outdoor band shells, when smells of roasted coffee, crusty rolls, and fine cigars mingled with the scent of hyacinths from the palace grounds, when people dressed for the theatre or for strolls on the promenades.
Ach
, those were the days.

“A million books!” her father now chuckles. “A million is a very big number. And besides, it wasn’t my shop. It belonged to my employer. But I was his right-hand man. In those days, in Europe, one had to study to be a bookseller. Not like here where you encounter some half-wit clerk who could just as well be selling matchboxes as books. I took courses after high school. My father was dead set against it. He wanted me to follow him into the banking profession.
Ach, ya
. He was right. A very uncertain business it turned out to be, selling books.”

Julius heaves a great gust of a sigh, sad, but also strangely comforting, like a breeze that stirs the bedroom curtains at the end of the day, telling you nothing else interesting is going to happen, you might as well shut your eyes and go to sleep.

“Tell about Minka the cat.”

Toni settles herself against his chest, her head under his chin. She likes the smell of him, the clean cotton of his shirt and the faint, minty trace of aftershave. He rocks back and forth in the swivel chair as he speaks.

“As a boy I wasn’t a good student like you,
Mausie
. Although I liked to read, I found it hard to apply myself, especially in mathematics, which was a great disappointment to my father. The irony is that after all these years, here I am, making my living with numbers after all. All right, all right. Minka. When I hid in my room in shame from a bad report card, she rubbed herself against me, purring like an engine. She knew I needed comfort.”

“I wish we had a cat. Why can’t we, Papa? Why?”

His mouth closes tightly, his encircling arm drops. Toni isn’t sure whether he’s annoyed by her question or troubled by the absence of a cat in their lives.

“The cat was actually supposed to be for my sister. To keep her company. She was often ill.”

“What was wrong with her?”

He doesn’t answer. He stares out the window at the dark brick wall. Then, after a long uncomfortable silence he says, “The cat was afraid of her.”

“Why?” Toni shrills. Suddenly, she, too, is afraid, because of the hollow sound of his voice and the sudden stiffness in his limbs. He turns from the window and fixes her with the strangest expression, as if he sees not Toni, but some terrible ghost, and this look takes her voice away, so that while she wants to call out to him, she can’t. The cry lies frozen in her throat. Now he turns away again, his eyes blank and empty, his body like unfeeling wood, all of him unreachable.
PapaPa-paPapa
. The words knock against each other but can’t find their way to her lips. She slides from his knee.

“There’s a good girl,” the hollow voice says.

“Show me another book?” she manages to whisper.

But nothing moves in his face except for the blink of eyelids over cold grey jelly. She slips away out of the room, closing the door noiselessly behind her to shut out the unbearable sight of her absent Papa. The spell could last a minute or a long, long time. Somehow it’s her fault. She made him disappear. Her wrong question, or maybe it was just her careless jostling against his shoulder, broke some invisible string. One moment he was her Papa, the next moment a puppet severed from the things that hold him up and make him work.