The County of Birches (14 page)

Mummy has taken on the house like an opponent. No one expects her to beat the years of disuse from its rooms, but she won't be outshone by the neighbours. She intends to make it clear that we are as good as the English. She and my father are well educated and well bred; she won't let it appear otherwise. She engages one room after another. Even those sealed and never used have their day in the sun when she opens their windows and beats out the dust. Urns and ornamental vases taller than I am are stripped of their thin cotton wraps. They look bland and shapeless until she unveils their exotic forms.

“For goodness' sakes!” she cries, rocking back onto her heels as though the colours on the vase were indecent. “Where did
this
come from?”

I ripple the lush silky fringes on lampshades never lighted, breathe their dust, stroke the plush insides of rolled-up rugs.

“Can't you stay out of my way? You're always under my feet!”

I'm intrigued by these collectibles that seem to have no real place in the lives of the English. Mummy speculates about them at times, but after wiping them clean, wraps them up without regret. No one feels any sentiment for these forgotten foreign objects.

“Allures of grandeur,” Apu pronounces, poking his head in to see what Mummy has uncovered. I'm not sure what he means. “Allures of grandeur” is how he refers to the roots, position and wealth of his lost family. They had put their faith in “allures” when it is clear to us now that they should have given up all and run for their lives.

“Allures and folly,” Apu sighs defeatedly before retreating to his garden. He makes it sound as if we were compelled to come to this place and succumb, as well, to the blandishment of “allures.”

Grandeur notwithstanding, my parents work at a factory that makes televisions. I study the television at my uncle and auntie's. Auntie Christine is tall and slim with curls on top of her head. She speaks only English, unlike my mother who, in addition to Hungarian, can make herself understood in five other languages. Auntie Christine's English, however, has all the proper tones and glib expressions.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she says, tweaking my ear as I gaze at the dead screen in the sitting room at their house. Rarely is it animated. It sits there, a dumb fixture with a doily under its two-pronged antenna. The speaker is covered in a textured crisscross design. I run my finger over the brushlike velvet and think no wonder the sound comes out fuzzy. The television cabinet is as sturdy as a chest of drawers. I can see how heavy it would be to load into a delivery van. My father is not a young man, nor brawny. He is round and soft with a head that is in all ways his largest part.

“Do you want it on then?” asks my auntie. “There's nothing to see until teatime.”

On a couple of evenings each week, Uncle Larry teaches my father English by telephone. Apu struggles with the words in the newspaper. He sits at a little tiered corner stand, the
Times
spilling awkwardly from his lap, while Lili does her schoolwork at the dining-room table. I assume he chooses the small stand because he typically allows his children the biggest and best. He takes the smaller table, not because it happens to be the one on which the telephone rests but because of the kind of father he is and how we figure in his life. I imagine Uncle Larry comfortable in his sitting room, one light leg swaying casually over the other as he listens to my father read the headlines haltingly. Apu traces the lines of newsprint with one hand and holds the voice of Uncle Larry in the other. He declaims each word of world news laboriously, ensuing with a stream of commentary in Hungarian. He and Uncle Larry spend a half hour this way, mutually edified.

Uncle Larry teaches Auntie Christine, too. My mother barely conceals her pleasure in Auntie Christine's trouble with her studies. Auntie Christine wears rings with fat twinkling stones my mother says are real, “God help poor Laci.” Any mention of the real stones is followed by the epithet “God help poor Laci.” But Uncle Larry is the one who does the helping from what I can see. He wants Auntie Christine to get her diploma so she can teach school. My mother, who was a teacher in Hungary, bitterly acknowledges that by the time Auntie Christine finally passes her exams, she will still be stuffing English televisions with tubes.

Auntie Christine fails, but not because she isn't smart. During the examination her breath comes out too fast and light and the words on the paper begin a Charleston. As she describes this condition to Mummy, she grabs me by the hand, kicks her long legs behind her and breezily glides us down the hall to the sitting room. Auntie Christine's rings sparkle merrily as she dances. I don't see why God shouldn't continue to help Uncle Larry buy them.

One Saturday, Auntie Christine drops by in the little car to take Lillian to the shops to buy Christmas gifts for her school chums. Mummy feels slighted. Lili hasn't said anything to her about shopping.

“If that's what she wants to spend her allowance on, it's her money,” Mummy says. Lili winces, wishing Mummy wouldn't always sound so grudging.

“It's not the same having boys, you know,” says Auntie Christine, trying to smooth things over. “Boys just come along because they want you to buy them something. Girls take pleasure in choosing. This will be a treat for me.”

Mummy doesn't answer. In her opinion shopping is a sport of the recently elevated peasant class; people of quality don't need to show off money. She doesn't like Lili wasting her few pennies on the spoiled children of strangers.

“You're so lucky,” continues Auntie Christine, finger-combing Lili's tresses. “Girls are much more fun to shop for and dress. Shall we find a velvet ribbon, Lillian, while we're at it? A nice wine red to go with your dark hair would be just the thing for the holidays.”

Mummy pushes back her chair noisily from the kitchen table, where she's been peeling potatoes, and wipes her hands vigorously on her apron.

“Lili has plenty of ribbons from home, unused in her drawer, some of them silk.” But velvet is what the English girls wear at Christmas; I can tell by the expectant look on Lili's face.

Later that evening, Mummy holds the wreath Auntie Christine bought at arm's length, like something smelly: “She thinks she may bring this thing into our home and tell us what we must do!”

Apu says, “What harm? A little decoration to make the neighbours happy? It's nothing.” He's so rooted in himself such trivialities don't matter. He had assumed the role of master of High Banks with ease, but also humour. Noting the heavy brocades and sensitive chintzes and lion's-paw table legs, he jested, “You see, we cannot escape the allures of grandeur.” For Apu the wreath isn't Christian or offensive, just another of God's little jokes he has to forbear.

Mummy doesn't get it. “It's not enough she made my brother's children into gentiles, now she wants ours too?”

What does Mummy mean? All Auntie Christine has promised is a real English Christmas. Her voice sounded rich with offering and self-importance: holly and fruitcake, minces, Christmas pudding. There will be a tree and, of course, presents. She gave me a wink before leaving: “Maybe even one for you, Dana.” I look forward to Christmas crackers that pull apart with a bang.

Something besides the wreath is gnawing at my mother. She's been promoted at the factory. Lots of people without English work there. Mummy's English is good now, and in addition to her Hungarian, Czech and Russian, she picked up German and Polish in the concentration camp. She is moved into the office to translate letters. This is good as far as I can tell, better than fitting televisions. But Mummy is a teacher. The promotion is an insult. No matter how well she knows the language, her accent prevents her from teaching the children of the English.

Uncle Larry tutors children after school to earn more money.

“Imagine, making a man work two jobs so you can wear sparkles in your ears!” In Hungary only gypsies pierced their ears. Mummy can't accept that Uncle Larry has so departed from his origins, even his prejudices have been affected. “What kind of people care more for stones than for the life of a man?”

Auntie Christine's efforts to make us welcome seem to me innocent enough. It is my mother who's ungracious. “She thinks she is better,” Mummy scorns, “because of what she wears.”

As the holidays approach, Lili makes it her job to guide me through the Christmas story. Inexplicably, it seems to me, I have been selected to play Mary in my infant-school play. I know what I am, a little Jewish girl, the child of survivors of the war. And I know who Mary was, the mother of Jesus, that other God who was just a person. And I know I am the wrong child for the role, in all of that school for children of privilege.

Lili tells me why I've been chosen for the lead. As Mary I have just to look holy, I don't have to speak. I won't stumble over English. I'm actually the perfect child for a part that is just a pose. At school I rarely move about. I have told Lili about the German shepherd that ranges freely through the playrooms. I stay glued in my seat, tracking its progress. If I act like a statue, perhaps the bristly beast, its long tongue hanging from a permanently open maw, will leave me alone. Lili says the teacher knows I can be counted on not to move in the live tableau of the crèche, while the rest of the class tells the story and sings carols behind me.

Lillian wants to help me by sharing what she knows. I'm her little sister after all, and our parents aren't equipped for this. She tells me the story she has heard at Christ Church School about the star and the shepherds and the family in flight. They were escaping, she says, like us. They wanted to go somewhere safe. She says it will help me understand what I'm doing up there.

It does not. I refuse to understand what I find indigestible. I don't know why my parents in that audience of families on stacking chairs wave at me with pride. I don't know why being mum and stupid with a veil on my head is considered an achievement. I don't understand how they can applaud me as the Mother of God when she means nothing to them and it is all a lie.

I harden with anger that cements my performance. The Mother of God is a stony little statue. A white sheet has been draped over me, held by a band across my forehead. An icy truth grips my heart, fat and crystal clear like one of Auntie Christine's rings. I can learn to be just like the British, or remain with the fancy urns locked away in High Banks.

*   *   *

On Christmas day the table at Auntie Christine's is extended to seat the two families. It's piled high with platters my cousins corral down at their end. There's laughter: “How is it the food always gravitates to the boys' end of the table?”

Aglow in a blue blaze, the Christmas pudding emits an aroma that is spicy and strange. A pale blue halo hovers over the dark mound. It looks ugly, yet burns in a heavenly colour like the sky. Auntie Christine presents it with pomp, like a birthday cake. A homely brown pile, mysterious, aflame.

“Try it,” the cousins coax, giggling and elbowing each other. So dark and dense, smelling sweet and pungent. I find the candied fruit inside and chew the mass energetically. Sticky and glutinous and strange, but I eat almost anything. Sweetly hot and hard to work with my small jaws. Around me laughter tinkles like the pretty glasses.

Suddenly my eyes gush wet, and my mother is yelling.

“What! What have you done to yourself now!” Her alarm and anger, often one, throw her into panic. “What's the matter?”

I can't speak. The metallic jarring in my teeth has spread into my jaw.

“How much?” a cousin laughs. “Pull it out. Is it a shilling?”

“No, it looks like just a penny's worth,” quips another.

My tongue curls away from the horrid metal taste.

“It's only the Christmas money,” Auntie Christine reassures us.

Mummy refuses to understand. She demands an explanation. “What do you mean money? There are coins in the food? You have
put
money in the food! On purpose?”

My mother's indignation feels like a balm. The others have all laughed. She's standing beside the table, trembling. “It is amusing, yes, to break the teeth of a child?”

“Sarah, Sarah, it's nothing but a custom.” Uncle Larry strokes her arm, gently tugging her back down.

But she pulls away and snaps at Uncle Larry in a way I have heard her speak only to us. “It is a fine tradition you have now, Laci, that laughs when a child is hurt.”

Apu refills the glasses, pained that my mother can't control her wrath. These people have helped us. They are family, her family, all we have left. Lili, too, squirms in her chair, mortified by my mother's outburst. Mummy is ungrateful. She is unkind and ungenerous and grasping.

I open to my mother's anger as to the sun. I feel released, as if a gate has swung clear before me. Excavating the mess in my mouth, I admire the currency it has yielded. I feel rich and very full as though she has made me a present.

M
ONAHAN
A
VENUE

The usual clouds hang above Monahan Avenue. My mother shuts the heavy door behind us and looks up to check for rain. It is typically chilly, the sky weighted with damp that hasn't yet materialized. Mummy takes my hand and leads me down the road. Under my cardigan I wear a new, crisp black overall with a little pink posy stitched on the bib. It's nice wearing something new, like on a special occasion, only this is different. We walk down to the bus stop, which means the hospital must be in London, or somewhere beyond my infant-school or the greengrocer's. My mother carries a small suitcase with some of my things. The houses descend like stairs to the bottom of the street. I feel them urging me downhill, saying, “Get along now, Dana. Out you go.” Mummy says I'll be gone a few days.

My mother was gone a week when
she
disappeared into a hospital. It went so fast, like a holiday afternoon, not like a week at infant-school that yawns towards what feels like an ever-receding weekend. I trace the silky stitching of the posy on my pants' bib over and over as we walk down the road. Pink and delicate and pretty. I'm not sure why I'm going. I don't feel anything hurting me. My mother has explained that the operation must be done in a hospital, just like when she had her stones. My mother's stones came from eating good things like butter and cream. She wouldn't be so stupid as to eat stones, but she got them just the same. I don't feel what I imagine as the cold clammy weight of stones in my stomach. I have been caught scooping butter out of the dish on the kitchen table so many times it's now kept in the icebox, but I don't think my parents would actually send me away because of that.