The County of Birches (18 page)

“Why do we dance, Danuska, with the Torah? Why are we Jews so happy today?” quizzed Apu.

Who knew, and who cared? We Jews were so rarely glad. Wasn't that enough? I must have shrugged, because Apu persisted.

“
Why
is always important. There has to be a reason.
Why
is what matters,” he instructed. “On this day four thousand years ago, God gave Moses the Tablets. The Ten Commandments we read now in the Torah.”

But the gladness seemed to me to have as much to do with the waving flags, the flag of Israel, a nation, a joy that made old men make fools of themselves. The crowd jostled and pushed together more closely as the leaders of the service paraded around the room, holding high the beautiful Books of Moses. Apu picked me up so I could see better. He held me aloft, and I felt presented, too, like the silver-crowned Torahs.

“You couldn't pay me to go through that again,” Mummy exploded when we met her outside. “I thought I would faint, the sweat of all those women's bodies.
Phuy.
I don't know what you were thinking of, Gábor. We came for
this?
In the second half of the twentieth century we want our children to be in the Dark Ages? I couldn't understand a word of that mumbo jumbo! And it wasn't sanitary. It didn't even feel respectable, all that rubbing against strangers! Phuy,” she spewed as though cleaning her mouth.

Apu was silent. I pulled on his hand. “I liked it, Apu, especially the dancing.”

“And you, Lilikém, what did you think?” he asked, brushing Lili's cheek with his finger.

Why should Lili's ballot decide the vote? I thought. Two to two was an even split. Just because I was younger shouldn't mean my opinion counted for less.

Lili didn't look at him directly. “Here, Dana, you want my flag?”

I was delighted. Mine had torn from too much flapping, but Lili's was still like new. Waving my fresh flag at Apu, I saw him tuck his shawl pouch back into the inside pocket under the lapels of his trench coat. Disappointed by his capitulation, I judged that it hadn't taken much to clip my father's wings.

*   *   *

Lillian came home in the dark fall evenings from the Redpath Library, sometimes on the same bus as Apu, and after supper she didn't come out of her room until after I'd gone to bed. There was a Latin requirement at McGill, but Latin hadn't been offered at Mountview High. The compulsory phys. ed. course included swimming. Lillian couldn't float. The sea of bodies at McGill threatened to engulf her. One or two of her old high school friends had gone on to university, but on the campus spread over downtown streets and a colony of buildings each the size of Mountview or larger, Lillian and her friends didn't catch sight of each other in passing. They met at prearranged times for lunch, then had to fend for themselves.

My sister's difficulties didn't touch me deeply. I believed she could manage anything, as she always had. Skipping grades. Hungarian, English, French, now Latin. She was so much older than me, so smart, and so ahead of her age, I was sure she could do anything. She was just fifteen, after all, when she started university. Repeatedly assuring us, our parents would say, “With your brains and opportunities, there is nothing you can't do.” They made it sound easy. Of course, if your standard was being gassed, tortured or stripped of everything you held dear, the rest would seem a breeze.

Lillian's days were long. By the time she came home, I had already finished my homework. Stamping her feet outside the door, she let in a rush of cold autumn air when she shoved her overladen bookbag across the threshold. Red fingers tugged at the scarf knotted beneath her chin.

Hearing her at the door, Mummy called, “Did you go to the B'nai B'rith meeting today?” before Lillian had even unbuttoned her jacket.

“No time,” Lillian muttered, heading to the bathroom. “Maybe next week.”

“Next week?” protested Mummy, following her and talking through the closed door. “Next month, next year, will be too late. By then all the nice boys will be taken.”

This recent obsession of my parents to throw Lillian together with boys, Jewish boys, wasn't consistent. Until now they had jealously guarded her from all social events. Lillian and I knew very well what we were, and she didn't need a Jewish boyfriend to prove it.

I was in grade five, a dull year enlivened by a few changes in routine, like the strange name of a new arrival—Samra—more exotic than Dana. But she was a quiet child. Her strangeness, ultimately, didn't rival mine.
Her
hand wasn't always waving to show off that she was different, or special, or that she knew more about the world than the provincial children in our suburb. I looked down on my classmates for having no grasp of geography or sense of the events that had shaped our era. I could rattle off the names of world leaders, and, because my older sister was an anglophile, recite the kings and queens of England like a creed. I read avidly about those who had been noteworthy and were dead. All the greats seemed to have come from Europe: Madame Curie, Anna Pavlova, Louis Pasteur, Beethoven.

Hymns each morning followed the national anthem. The singing held off tedium briefly. But by October they too grew stale, always the same ones: “Jesus Loves Me,” “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The slim green hymn book was replaced in late November by a red one. It felt like a blessed rain after drought. Christmas carols. Oh, why couldn't we have them all year? None of this conflicted with being Jewish. Hymns and carols were just songs, more interesting than what we sang in music class: “Home on the Range,” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in double and triple rounds as if once wasn't mind-numbing already. Being Jewish was hard, clear and private, although sometimes it rushed heart-poundingly to the surface.

“I can't be here for the test tomorrow. A Jewish holiday. I have to stay home.”

Heads craning for a view of my face that was suddenly not commonplace but worth staring at. Flushing because the teacher didn't really get the message and I was going to have to pronounce the Hebrew words with the accent on the second syllable making it sound more foreign—Yom Kip-púr—because in Ville d'Anjou there were parents who ate kippers and otherwise someone was bound to hold his nose.

Donna Tait was Jehovah's Witness. She had to wait outside the door while we sang hymns. It was against her religion. I felt sorry for her standing out in the hall just like the kids who got punished. But it gave me an idea.

“I have to do a project about Jesus.”

“So?” said Mummy. She had been teaching in my school since I was in grade two, and she made it her principle not to request favours on my behalf.

“I have to make it into a book and put in pictures.”

“Good.”

“What do you mean, good? It's about Jesus.”

“So?”

“I shouldn't have to do that.”

“You're too lazy, Dana. You know, that's what you are.”

“But it's not my religion. It's
against
my religion,” I corrected myself.

“I wish it were against your religion to have such a
mouth.
”

The best change at school was when the Bible Ladies came. Assemblies were always a welcome distraction, but the Bible Ladies were genuinely entertaining. Two middle-aged ladies stepped on stage in grey flannel skirts and plain blouses buttoned to the chin. They were greeted with thunderous applause. They ducked back into the wings as though they'd forgotten something, then returned, each dragging an easel with a felt flipboard. Unlike the simple felt boards we had in class, the Bible Ladies' boards held a stack of colourful scenes. Each felt page flipped up to unveil a fresh felt picture beneath. There was always the hint of a story at the bottom of the pile, one that we would have to wait to hear at their next visit. Cheering echoed off the high gymnasium ceiling, until one Bible Lady sat down to the piano and thumped a few chords. The whole school broke into “The Wise Man Built His House upon the Rock.” Why, I wondered, would anyone bother to do otherwise?

Their stories were about Jesus and the loaves and fishes, and Thomas the doubtful, and Jesus when he walked on lovely, light blue, rippling felt waves. There was one about the moneylenders. Moneylenders were Jews, I heard someone near me whisper. And that awful heart-pounding flush swept me up, and there I was in the great big gymnasium, in front of the whole school, the only one with my hand in the air.

“Jesus was a Jew too.” My voice sounded too loud in the hush of hundreds of schoolmates. An uncomfortable pause as children squirmed on their bottoms, unsure what to make of this assertion.

The Bible Lady hardly missed a beat. “Of course he was, dear, but he was also the Son of God.”

I sat down, not convinced that she had gotten my point. I was rock-certain of what was credible. If my poor schoolmates thought a man could really be a God, they lacked essential mastery over the evidence of their senses. Talk about building on shifting sand.

From my perspective—one row up from the teacher with the other officious girls currying her favour at the front of the class—my sister and I were solidly Jewish. Living in Ville d'Anjou had heightened our sense of uniqueness, as though our family were the only Jews left.

Before bed I poked my head into Lillian's room, dim except for the desk lamp shining on the deep black of her crown. “Night,” she murmured without looking up, absorbed in effort to get through the day's assignments.

She managed what she had to, but the cashmere-clad girls at the McGill chapter of B'nai B'rith weren't part of the prescribed liberal arts curriculum. Mummy didn't want to believe that at B'nai B'rith Lillian didn't count as a Jew. These boys and girls, Lillian tried to explain, knew each other from high school, or elementary school, or Talmud Torah. They went to the same synagogue youth groups or had bumped into each other at bar mitzvahs of cousins or friends. They lived in Hampstead, Westmount, Côte St. Luc. They came from St. Laurent, Town of Mount Royal or Nôtre Dame de Grace, all municipalities west of St. Lawrence Boulevard. “Ville d'Anjou? Is that on the island?” they questioned dubiously. It was enough to make Lillian's second venture among them her last.

What exactly was a Jew? I caught Mummy off guard one afternoon while she was still resting after school before starting to make dinner.

“Don't ask stupid questions, Dana. It's bad luck to pretend you're an imbecile.”

But I wouldn't try to ask Apu, because he'd get a hurt remote look that made me feel I'd failed him.

“Are Cimi-néni and Uncle André Jewish?”

“Why do you want to make trouble? You know what they are. They go to church on Sundays.”

“But Cimi-néni's your sister. She was in Auschwitz too. You said so. And Uncle André's family was Chassidic.” I snorted, although I knew I was moving onto a minefield. The thought of Uncle André, with his painterly, French-style beret, deriving from a clan of caftan-robed Chassids was more than ironic; it was hilarious. “What about them? Do they still count as Jews?”

“You are what you are. Hitler proved that. It didn't matter what you called yourself.”

“But then what about my cousins? Simone and Gérald don't even know they're Jewish!”

“Don't be ridiculous, Dana, they've been baptized. Their parents are, God-forgive-me-from-having-to-say-so, Christian converts, just like their beloved Paul the Apostle as they keep telling me. How can the children be Jewish?”

“You tell me. Look who's asking stupid questions!”

Mummy laughed appreciatively. She didn't like my big mouth, but she couldn't resist the bald-faced truth adults had too many reasons to dance around.

“Don't you dare say anything to your cousins. You know Uncle André and Cimi-néni are crazy when it comes to this Jewish question. Just be happy
you
don't have to go pretending.”

But for Lillian to fit in at B'nai B'rith, she'd have to pretend lots of things that she wasn't. She'd have to pretend that all her friends weren't gentile, that her relatives weren't Christians, that we didn't celebrate Christmas with them, and that we belonged to a synagogue. She'd have to pretend that she was Jewish in ways besides the single most important one by which history had defined her.

“Mummy, why do you want Lili to go to B'nai B'rith? She's not like those Jewish kids. She didn't grow up among Jews.”

“And what do you call us, you little know-it-all? What do you call your family?”

*   *   *

The temple in Westmount suited Mummy and Lillian's taste for the vernacular. In the ultra-modern sanctuary, the light-studded domed ceiling that resembled the night sky shed a soft light over red plush seats that flipped up and down like the seats at the new concert hall downtown where Mummy had taken us to see the Bolshoi. Mummy and Lillian appreciated the temple's choral music and its magnificent organ. Apu mustn't have realized that the pipes zigzagging up, down and over the ark housing the Torahs were anything other than a modern design. When the first reverberating chord rocked the air under the dome of the sanctuary, he started, jarred to the nerve by a sound he had never before encountered in shul. And then the leaders of the service mounted the dais, decked out in prayer shawls, but heads naked in the Lord's Temple. Apu was fully aware that this was a Reform congregation. Only a few men in the aisles wore
kippahs;
Apu was the only man in a formal hat. But he had not imagined that a rabbi of any Jewish school of worship would stand before an open ark without a shred of covering for his head. As the rabbi began to intone the words of the
Shm'a,
I happened to glance down at the old, mud-stained prayerbook that Apu held in his hands. It had been his father's, and Apu had salvaged it after the war from the debris of his family's estate. The prayerbook shook, and the dark hair on Apu's wrist stood on end.