My October (21 page)

“All we ever do is try to meet them,” he went on. “Trouble is, most of us haven't got a clue how to do that. The strategies we come up with are usually pretty unskillful. But the needs themselves—”

“Are just fine,” she offered.

“Right.”

He was smiling, visibly pleased that she'd stayed with him. What harm could there be in indulging him? “Give me an example,” she said.

“You've got a need, say, to keep silent. Even when your spouse is bullying you.”

She looked sharply at him.

“What?” asked Mandelbaum, gazing at her innocently.

She didn't answer.

“Tell me. What?”

“That was unkind,” she said.

Mandelbaum nodded. “Do you remember the reason you gave two days ago for consulting me in the first place?”

Hannah nodded. “Communication,” she said, picturing the sheet she had filled out.

“So, you've got a need to keep silent, but also a need to communicate.”

She felt exposed. As if he could see right through her.

“It's a contradiction, Hannah. When I was rude to you just now and pressed your buttons, you said nothing. I had to ask you, pointedly, if something was wrong. You have a need to communicate, Hannah, and yet you don't speak.”

Hannah realized she was clutching one of his little pillows to her chest. She replaced it deliberately in the space between their bodies.

“I have a need,” he said, tossing and catching an orange pillow with tiny decorative mirrors sewn into its fabric.

The pillow glittered like a spinning sun. She couldn't turn her eyes away.

“I need to find out more about this father of yours.”

The pillow came down and he caught it, holding it on his lap.

“I'm curious,” he said, turning to face her. “Even if we're not blood relations. His story sounds remarkable, leaving Austria right before the war broke out. He can't have been more than a kid.”

Hannah told him the story of the
Kindertransport.
Or at least, she told him what little of it she'd heard from her father. He had ridden a train for a day and a night along the Danube and then the Rhine, coming at last to Holland and freedom. From there, he had boarded a ferry and made a night crossing to England. He had eventually ended up on a farm in Sussex. It had been, briefly, a happy summer, during which his parents still wrote him letters. They neglected to mention that his father's livelihood and the family home were gone and everyone he had ever known was in mortal danger.

All through August of 1939, on the dairy farm in the south of England, Alfred was kept in ignorance of these details. On
September 3, after Poland was invaded, Great Britain declared war on Germany. The British family with whom Alfred was boarding was kind to him, despite the fact that they'd hoped for a bigger boy, one who could help with all the heavy physical work to be done. When it became clear that Alfred Stern wasn't remotely up to the job, they hadn't got angry. They let him feed the chickens and, when the summer was over, enrolled him in the local school, where he soon mastered English.

His year in Sussex was a time of discoveries and adventures. The biggest worry was his parents back in Austria, from whom he had heard nothing since the start of the war. It was only years later that Alfred learned about the mass deportation of Vienna's Jews by the Gestapo, which began in October of 1939.

In the spring of 1940, Winston Churchill became prime minister. Germany had just invaded Holland and Belgium, and Churchill issued an edict ordering all German and Austrian men on British soil interned. Never mind that Alfred was a Jewish war refugee and barely shaving. He qualified. The British authorities took him into custody and shipped him with other internees across the ocean to a work camp in Canada, a country about which he knew next to nothing.

“He had to wear a uniform,” Hannah said. “The jackets were blue, with a large red circle on the back.” This had impressed her when she was ten. The circles were there, Alfred had said, to give the guards a target when someone tried to escape.

“How old did you say he was?” asked Mandelbaum.

“Sixteen. Just turned.”

Mandelbaum whistled. “That must have left some scars.”

She shrugged. “He's got a tough hide.”

Manny Mandelbaum nodded. “I can imagine.”

Hannah remembered another story, which she also told Mandelbaum. It involved her father's maternal grandfather, whom he'd adored. Alfred's mother had married late, in her thirties, and Alfred had been her only child. Her father, who had lived with her and her small family, had cherished his only grandson. To ward off evil spirits, he'd tied a red ribbon inside the boy's shirt. Alfred wore this ribbon all through his childhood, even though his parents dismissed it as pure cabbalistic superstition. In the year following his bar mitzvah, Alfred adopted their attitude and dismissed it too. He removed it from his undershirt and tossed it in the gutter. Shortly afterward, in the spring of 1938, the Wehrmacht arrived. Alfred remembered standing in the street with his grandfather, surrounded by a cheering Viennese mob and feeling personally to blame as wave after wave of German aircraft flew over them.

“What happened to him?” Mandelbaum asked.

“The grandfather? No one knows. He disappeared in October of thirty-nine, along with all the other Jews. Alfred thinks he died in a transit camp somewhere, or maybe on a train. He never found any record. His parents' deaths were documented, though. Auschwitz. Fall of forty-two.”

“What a legacy,” said Mandelbaum.

Hannah nodded. “It's why he went into law, I guess. Defending people's freedom.”

“I mean you,” said Mandelbaum, searching her face. “It's your legacy too.”

“I guess,” she said. Alfred Stern had never made it seem like her legacy. “My father didn't like to talk about it.”

“He told you those stories about England and the internment camp.”

“Yes,” she said. “But that was exceptional. As a rule, he didn't dwell on the past. I think it was too painful.”

Mandelbaum smiled. He seemed more attractive than he had when they first met. “You know what my definition of adulthood is?” he asked, seemingly out of the blue. “I didn't get it out of a book or anything,” he said. “It came to me from watching the kids in my practice. When a person can tell the story of his parents, really imagine them as beings with their own complex pasts, well then …” He tossed the pillow into the air.

They both watched it spin.

“Well then?” said Hannah.

The pillow landed with a soft
thud
in Mandelbaum's bluejeaned lap. “The job's done.”

“Okay,” she said uncertainly.

He was smiling again. “I like that Hugo picked it.”

“Picked what?” she asked, still pondering the definition.

“Your name. I like that he's trying to resurrect it.”

“It's not mine,” she said, forcefully enough that it surprised her as well as him. “I go by Lévesque now, I told you.”

Mandelbaum leaned slightly away from her, causing the mirrored pillow to slip off his legs. “Sorry,” he said. “This time I didn't mean to press your buttons.”

“How did you even find out about the name?”

“Hugo put it down on the sheet I gave you at our first session. It wasn't French, so I figured it was yours.” He paused for a moment. “Changing names isn't always a bad thing, you know. It can be just the opposite. In Japan, for instance, artists used to change their names ritualistically. They did it only once, at a point in their careers when they felt they'd developed into
the creator they'd always wanted to be. It was a sign to the world that they'd arrived.”

He retrieved the pillow. “I changed mine,” he said affably. “My first name used to be Bruce. Manny was a nickname from high school. But I liked it. It made me feel like I was part of the human race.”

“Which you weren't as Bruce?”

He looked uncomfortable. “I was pretty alienated in my twenties.”

“So you changed it,” she pressed. “Legally?” The roles had switched. She was interrogating him now, truly curious.

“Yes. Legally. It was right after I opened my practice. I was thirty.”

Hannah shook her head. “But Hugo is fourteen.”

Before she could say anything more, the door to the inner office opened. Hugo stood glowering at them on the threshold.

“Hey,” said Manny Mandelbaum, putting away the pillow and standing up. “All done?”

There was no answer.

Hannah got up off the edge of the big old couch. She scanned Hugo's face, wondering how much he'd heard. He must have overheard something, because he didn't look at her or at Manny Mandelbaum as he headed for the door.

“I'll call you,” Dr. Mandelbaum said hopefully. He raised his eyebrows and seemed on the verge of saying more, but she couldn't stay to hear it. Hugo was already out of sight.

14

T
he next afternoon, Hugo slipped outside again after the final bell. He had to get air. Couldn't face the stuffiness of Vien's classroom after a full day of sitting inside. He didn't see anyone he particularly wanted to hang with. Without Vlad, the yard didn't look all that welcoming.

He wandered to the back of the school. The basketball court was full of boys playing pickup. No one called out to him, not that it mattered. He wouldn't have played anyway, and basketball wasn't his thing. He stopped and watched a kid take a foul shot. The ball bounced off the backboard, touched the rim, and dropped through the net, hitting the asphalt with a satisfying
thunk
. The kid pumped a fist. Hugo moved on, unnoticed.

“You're late again,” Vien said as Hugo entered the classroom. He was sitting at his desk, marking papers. The mural was done now, the paint and glue dry.

“The contract says ‘after school.' Your last class ended fortyfive minutes ago.”

Hugo didn't look up.

“You didn't bring the folder on Lanctôt either, I see. Did you take a look at Pierre Vallières?”

Hugo couldn't restrain himself. “He's a terrorist. It actually says so in the title.”

Vien smiled, his eyebrows forming their familiar arch even as his eyes gazed in different directions. “He uses the word ironically, Hugo. The authorities in New York slapped that label on him when they arrested him for staging a hunger strike in front of the United Nations. That's all he was doing. Refusing to eat, trying to draw attention to the rampant injustices in Quebec and the need for political independence. It was nonviolent resistance, Hugo. Just like Mahatma Gandhi in India.”

Hugo frowned. “So why does he call for armed struggle?”

“You've got to understand the times. It wasn't like it is now.”

Vien kept repeating that phrase like a mantra. You had to have been there. And if you hadn't been, there was no way you could understand. The truth was, Vien just wanted to be agreed with. Hugo remembered seeing a guy in a T-shirt once with the words “You're Entitled to My Own Opinion” printed in bold black letters on the front. Vien should seriously buy one.

He'd never admit it to Vien, but Vallières's book had been a shock. He couldn't believe it had been published, let alone reached cult status among students and so-called intellectuals in Montreal. It was a rant against the people who ran things— the presidents of banks and corporations, the leaders of political parties. In one ten-page chapter, Vallières blazed through three hundred years of Canadian history, reducing thousands of stories to a simple fight between capitalists and workers—referred to by Vallières as “slaves.”

The only chapter Hugo hadn't found completely maddening
was the one about Vallières's home life. He had stayed up until one thirty in the morning reading it, but even it rang false. Vallières blamed his parents' failed marriage and his own tortured relationship with them almost totally on their working- class status. Capitalism was to blame for every problem, large and small.

“He did condone some violence,” Vien conceded, “but his actions were selfless, political.”

“You mean like bin Laden's?” Hugo shot back.

“No, Hugo. Not even a little bit like bin Laden's.”

“Or Lanctôt's?”

Vien exhaled. “That's enough.”

Hugo fell silent.

“Look,” said Vien, making an obvious effort to stay calm. “Lanctôt wasn't violent. But don't take my word for it. See for yourself. I have boxes of material about him. I'll tell you right now, though, you're not going to find what you think. I've read everything that's out there on the man. As I said, he was the subject of my master's thesis.”

Lanctôt was obviously a sore spot. It was as if Hugo had slandered a member of Vien's family or something. Not that
slander
was the right word. All he'd done was group him with someone willing to sacrifice anything to achieve a political goal. Lanctôt had kidnapped a man and held him captive for almost two whole months. He'd made repeated threats against the man's life. He had even wired him to a bunch of dynamite and filmed him sitting there like a human time bomb. These acts were established. He'd admitted them, and yet Vien and practically his entire generation defended Lanctôt as if he were a hero.

They saw themselves as victims, that was why. But when you thought that way, it seemed you almost always ended up hurting someone else.

He would write about Lanctôt, Hugo decided. He would lay out the violence so plainly that no one, not even Vien or his own father, could deny it.

15

H
annah was lying on the couch with a book she had taken out of the Westmount Public Library over the weekend. When the telephone rang, she held her breath until it stopped, and then she shifted her weight, guiltily rearranging the cushions. She would check the voice mail later, she told herself, although for the last week she had stopped performing even this simple task. Numerous messages were waiting, unheard and untended to. This last call was probably from Connie, relentless in her campaign to guilt Hannah into coming to Toronto. Allison March was another possible candidate, with another cartload of guilt. Most days, Hannah managed to repress all thoughts of the translation, her mind busy with the much more pressing concerns of Hugo and her father. Luc's book felt utterly unreal, like the fiction it actually was. It had no substance, no connection to her life.