The County of Birches (17 page)

“Don't be smart,” said Mummy in Hungarian. “The university isn't going to be like Mountview High. At McGill you will meet all sorts of suitable Jewish boys.” This was the first we heard of the term that became Mummy's code word for Lillian's post-secondary education.

Apu would get home later than usual this evening because it was Friday. First he had to stop at a deli on St. Lawrence Boulevard, to choose a Shabbas challah and coiled poppyseed buns for the sabbath
brocha.
Mummy picked up crusty white bread and baguettes at La Savoreuse here in Ville d'Anjou, but real bread—challah, bagels, pumpernickels and ryes—couldn't be had in our suburb. I rode my bicycle desultorily up and down Boulevard de la Loire, weaving around the crescent across the street from our house. It was too hot to pedal in earnest. I was hungry and impatient for Apu to arrive.

Mummy had been preparing the meal, off and on, since morning. Out on her lawn chair under the filmy awning of a sapling willow, she'd snapped green beans for the evening's cold sour cream soup. At noon, she'd chopped cucumbers and onions for the salad that needed time to marinate and chill. Mummy grumbled about being overworked on her summer holiday, but her meals were inspired by memories of her own mother's kitchen where, although Rózsa the cook had held dominion, only my mother's Mamuka's hands ever shaped the feather-light dumplings that went into their Sabbath soup. As Mummy dipped a moist slice of veal into a dusting of flour, then soaked it in egg and dredged it slimily through bread crumbs she had crushed herself, her face rested into a look that approximated serenity.

Apu, too, contributed to our meals, and not just with the foodstuffs he picked up on St. Lawrence. He could turn an incident at the office into a slowly building drama, sustained through countless interruptions about what the rest of us had seen or heard at school or in the neighbourhood. Last night, Apu had put down his knife finally, and, looking up from his plate, which he had cleared with appetite while we hijacked the conversation, asked in a flat, reproachless tone that never failed to arouse our curiosity, “Does anyone want to know what Mrs. Black said when she came back from the stockroom, and discovered, as I knew she would all along, that indeed there were a hundred and thirty-eight lots of green shirts, as I said there would be, and not the one hundred and fifty Manny the salesman had promised to ship immediately to the buyer?” And yes, of course we all did, even Mummy, who couldn't help but slip in one more invective against the aptly named office manager who tried in vain but with mulish persistence to catch Apu out in a fault. We wanted to know, because, over three courses and despite our interjections, Apu had managed to draw out a drama that depended on this punch line.

“Mrs. Black came out of the stockroom, and I could see she wasn't happy. She stopped by my desk, and I waited, knowing she couldn't turn this against me as I had warned her three days ago that the shipment was short.” Apu's thin mouth twitched mischievously while Mummy unleashed a tirade against that stuck-up harpy who, if she wasn't the sister-in-law of Mr. Bernstein the owner, would have nothing much—certainly not
looks,
Mummy's supreme dismissal—to crow about.

“If your mother has finished,” Apu continued blandly, “I will tell you what Mrs. Black said. ‘Mr. Weisz, this weekend Manny will have some sewing to do!'” Apu's dour face broke into a shy, puckish smile as he relished the joke of Manny the big shot bent over a Singer.

Finally, I saw my father round the corner from Yves Prévost. Even at a distance, Apu couldn't be mistaken for anyone else. He had an odd gait, leading with his head, a residual effect of his childhood illness. When he turned the corner onto de la Loire, my world of bungalows, carports and duplexes shrank, looking toylike and fake. And he was out of place, weighted by his fifty-seven years and the jacket and tie he wore even in this hot weather. Head foremost, Apu plodded single-mindedly down de la Loire, bent to the purpose of erasing the last bit of distance that kept him from his family. Watching him come down the street reminded me that the other suburban fathers didn't walk; they drove, instead, in long cars, bare elbows thrust from sports shirts and jutting out the window. I sped up to meet Apu, hoping my appearance in pedal pushers and runners and on a pair of wheels mitigated, in a small way, his dislocation.

When the Shabbas candles were lit, the blessings chanted over wine and bread, and the curtains drawn for privacy opened again to the summer light, we settled down to the full bowls of soup I carried teeteringly to the table. Mummy topped them up before anyone took a mouthful. Apu cleared his throat. Instead of beginning his story of the day, he addressed Lillian, who had changed into shorts and a halter top. She looked more herself now, a fifteen-year-old girl with a guarded sulk on her full-lipped mouth. Apu fixed his eyes on her from under his bushy, high-arched ancestral brows, and asked meaningfully, “Lili, why do you think each Shabbas we light the candles and say the brochas over the bread and wine as have our ancestors from generation to generation?”

“Now what?” Lillian bridled.

“Lilikém,” Apu remonstrated matter-of-factly, “no need to be so edgy. I wish to point out only one thing. Hitler killed my family, your mother's family; he took six million Jewish people. He tried to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. Do we continue to be Jewish, observe our traditions, raise our children in the faith of our ancestors? Or do we help finish what Hitler started?”

Lillian's chair slammed back into the wall as she jumped up from the table. Down the hall, her bedroom door echoed the bang.

“
Na
—that was good work,” Mummy said drily. Clearly, she concluded, she had done better. At least she had managed to get in those key words, “suitable Jewish boys.”

*   *   *

Uncle André had assumed, on meeting the train that had brought us to Montreal from the dockyards at Halifax five years previously, that Mummy and Apu would follow his example about how to make a successful start in Canada. When he and Cimi-néni took us from Windsor Station to their Mountview bungalow, we gazed at the walls of snow banked on the sides of the streets, and the stark, rectangular buildings and the sleek, stretched cars, the high arched lampposts, the puny trees, recognizing nothing. Where we had come from was the past. This was the landscape of the future.

Arguments had flared almost immediately in the modernly furnished house Cimi-néni and Uncle André had already paid off. A few weeks after our arrival, I walked in on what was already an ongoing debate interrupted only by the days between our visits. I had wandered upstairs from the basement where my sister and cousins were laughing at a program but I couldn't catch all the jokes. I heard Uncle André's nasal insistence, speaking a French-accented English to discourage my parents from reverting to Hungarian.

What good had it brought any of them being Jewish? Forget about Hitler; afterwards, too, Apu had had to change his Jewish name to protect himself from Stalin. Show him one time it had ever proved an advantage to be Jewish.

Apu looked at my uncle pityingly, but with sufferance. “Do you remember, Brother-in-law,” he said in Hungarian because he wasn't easily diverted from his purpose, “what Abraham said to Lot: ‘Let there be no strife between me and thee, for are we not brethren?' Let's do the same. If you take the left hand, I will go to the right; if you choose right, I will go to the left. ‘Is not the whole land before us?'”

Uncle André snorted dismissively and leaned forward, hands on his knees, about to launch the next sally. He hated having the old scriptures thrown at him. He knew plenty of those too, but preferred new terms of reference.

Cimi-néni fluttered around the living room, not able to tolerate discord. She had expected a joyful reunion with her sister whom she hadn't seen since the end of the war, not such unreasonable resistance. In England, their brother Larry lived like a gentile too; Mummy and Apu should be used to it. So what if Cimi-néni and Uncle André had converted? It was a safeguard for the future.

“Gábor,” she importuned, “think of
tes enfants.
”

“Yes,” said Apu weightily, “it is the children I am thinking of. The children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is because of the children that we are here.”

Unable to sit down, Cim-néni brought more tea from the kitchen. Her hand shook as she sliced the nut-filled
baigli
she'd learned to make at her Mamuka's elbow, and the first slice crumbled.

“Chic-alors,”
she cursed.

Mummy took the knife from her sister and ran it under hot water. Then she turned a plate upside down and drew the blade zinging across the porcelain. She tested its sharpness with sangfroid, against her little finger. Then, back in the living room where stillness had lowered, she pierced the toasted flesh of the perfectly rolled pastry. The knife slit cleanly to the bottom. She handed a slice first to Uncle André and then to Apu.

“I have one sister,” she said, her voice hard and sharp in her native tongue, brooking no more nonsense. “One sister left out of four. Call up the children for dessert.”

*   *   *

Before Mummy got her job teaching for the public school system, she worked at a Jewish nursery school in the heart of what is now called the Plateau, but in 1959 was simply referred to as beside the Mountain or the Mount Royal area. The neighbourhood was working class, Jewish, as close as we got in Canada to a dense, ghetto-like atmosphere. Double- and triple-flatted walkups built in the last century leaned into each other across narrow, heavy-trafficked lanes.

Mummy hated it. It reminded her of Europe. She hadn't come all this way just to arrive into the same old smells, same old faces, same old reminders of disaster. But despite her aversion to the district, jobs for my parents were initially available in the Jewish community. Uncle André used his connections in the garment business to get Apu work on St. Lawrence Boulevard among the Jewish delis, clothiers and textile wholesalers. My uncle did this grudgingly. Apu was an agronomist. Uncle André would have been happier to help Apu find employment with a government agency. All my father had to do was brush up his English and learn a little French. But Apu was too rapt in testing his new-found wings of religious freedom to try. The openly Jewish trade on St. Lawrence Boulevard gave him the justification he needed for having left his homeland. The Jewish shop names—Schwartzes, Moishe's, Finkel's Hardware—warmed him in a way he had missed from his brother-in-law's welcome. Uncle André shrugged when Apu told him that the modest position of bookkeeper at Bernstein Imports was good enough for an old immigrant. My uncle had discharged his obligation. If his brother-in-law was going to be such a big Jew, let him stew in it.

But Apu didn't stew; first, he revelled. He had not seen caftaned Jews on public streets since before the war. What had been expunged from Europe seemed to him restored on St. Lawrence. One evening Mummy tied a scarf under her chin, then smoothed her caramel-coloured gloves over her fingers. Apu fussed, still folding and refolding more to his satisfaction the prayer shawl he usually took out only on the High Holy Days.

“Are the children prepared?” he asked.

“Don't be absurd. What do you want from them, they're just children. No one said they had to become
rebetzin.
Let's just go if we're going.”

The street felt different in the dark than it did in the mornings when I came to nursery school here with my mother. Cars were parked on both sides of the narrow road instead of tooting their horns up the middle, and the walkups formed two solid embankments. Jewish people hurried through the fall air, the women wearing what Cimi-néni would call
“un vrai chapeau”
and the men in dark suits and hats, and clutching silk or velvet pouches like the one Apu had finally folded his prayer shawl into, but which he had tucked out of sight into his trench coat so no one on the buses we had taken from the east end would see. The children skipped along beside their parents, in their hands little white flags with blue Stars of David.

“Hurry,” said Apu, “the service will start when the first star comes out.” Lili and I scuttled to keep up with him, my hand in his.

Behind us, dragging her heels, Mummy answered sourly, “Don't worry. We won't miss anything the children won't be thoroughly sick of by the end.”

It wasn't her idea to come back here at nightfall, but Apu had got it into his head that Lili and I could use a little
yidisch-keit,
and Simchas Torah was just the right holiday for our first exposure to real tradition; this service was more lively than most.

“Ya, ya, a lot of old men dancing around.” Mummy didn't relish sitting up in the gallery with a bunch of strange bewigged women while Apu took us children into the men's section that would get all the action.

The Clark Street synagogue was a small dark box with narrow slits in its side filled with thick multicoloured glass. In the arch at the top of each slit was a white, six-pointed star. “A mausoleum,” muttered Mummy before we went inside.

The crush of bodies was intense, hot and sudden. I didn't get a chance to say good-bye to Mummy; she was swallowed by the crowd. Lili clutched the back of my coat. A strange bearded man noticed my empty hand and gave me a flag. Turning around, I saw him push one at Lili too. Apu looked for a space on the pews, but Lili hung back, so we remained standing. So many people in such a small building. Such a tumult. Even when the praying started, people nudged past others who rocked back and forth on their heels. But it was a spectacle, all the flags and Torahs wrapped in silver, others in different-coloured silk—white, blue, gold. It was lovely. The old men carried the Torahs around the room, chanting and dancing like Mummy said, while we waved our flags.