The County of Birches (19 page)

“What a beautiful choir,” Mummy exclaimed as we left the temple that first night.

“Choir!” protested Apu. “Who ever heard of a choir in shul? They don't know the difference between a synagogue and a basilica.”

“And you won't accept any change. For you everything has to be just like it was or else it is worthless. But this synagogue is beautiful. The music is beautiful. The rabbi speaks in a language we can all understand. But for you this isn't good enough because you didn't do it this way when you were a boy on the Rákóczi Tanya. Nothing, not even such a palace for God, is good enough for you.”

Apu sighed. Again, the new world had bested him. Not Reform Jewry, nor even Mummy, but the adulterated North American rendering of values he held dear. If this was Canadian Judaism, and if it contented his womenfolk to sit through a service conducted in English, he'd have to settle for what he could get.

But, as it turned out, I was the one who got the temple. It hadn't occurred to me when we started going to the odd Shabbat service, nor when we attended at Purim, or, in the spring, at Shavuoth, that I was going to have to take up a kind of permanent residence in the beth Adonai.

At Shavuoth I had watched the temple's confirmation class make its procession through the congregation. It was like a wedding with seven or eight brides. The boys in their blue gowns held little interest for me. It was the girls I studied, their long hair swept back off their faces to reveal sweet, open grace. Heavy locks fell forthrightly, gleaming, to shoulders. Smiles broke from flawless, tooth-straightened mouths. Gold signet rings adorned the fingers that guilelessly held their bouquets. The girls were the incarnation of virginal charm. I doubted that I would achieve this transformation from the smart-alecky little pest I recognized as myself, never guessing that this was my parents' very expectation.

The confirmation class moved down the sloping incline of the sanctuary, not with pride exactly, and certainly not solemn. They basked. They soaked up the admiration that hit them from both sides of the aisle lined with their families. They descended by twos, boy and girl, girl and boy, in a blue gown–white gown alternating pattern splashed with the deep red of the roses the girls gathered to their breasts. The boys' arms swung by their sides. No one looked ahead. The confirmants focussed on their families and the congregation, winking at younger siblings and cousins, acknowledging generous grandparents with disarming smiles, narrowing their eyes at parents as though they shared an inside joke. I twisted in my seat to avoid their glances, conscious that our only extended family would never step into this sanctuary, let alone fill up an aisle.

Lillian successfully completed her first year at McGill, aceing Latin although her swim stroke still lagged. The following September, to my surprise, found me on the bus every Saturday bound for the temple's religious school. Two buses and an hour and a half took me across town along Sherbrooke Street from Ville d'Anjou to the temple in Westmount. Sherbrooke was an endless strip of dark canvas the bus wove in and out of the disparate strands of the city. By the time I reached the temple, I felt dazed from displacement, but one point was clear. I owed this journey to Lillian because, for the first time in her life, she had failed. Not at university, but in the eyes of our parents. She had failed to leap the social barrier into the McGill chapter of B'nai B'rith, and Mummy and Apu weren't going to make that mistake twice.

Within a few weeks, the teacher from temple called to speak to my parents. I had stopped going to religious school. I had missed two weeks.

Mummy took his side. “Dana, there has to be more than a few bratty kids you don't like. What a pleasant young man this teacher is. There's nothing wrong with him. See how he bothers. It upsets him, your not going. He wants to know what's the matter.”

Apu looked downcast. “Already you knew your
aleph bet,
” he said ruefully.

Why didn't the teacher mind his own business? I had thought I was shut of religious school, until he decided to call. It was easy for him to show his sympathy now by approaching Mummy and Apu. They didn't know what went on under his long nose, and he wasn't going to tell them. I hadn't told them either.

The next time he called, he asked to talk to me.

“Dana,” he said softly, “this is Mr. Sherman.”

“Yes,” I said, steeling myself against persuasion.

“We all miss you in class.”

Who did he think he was kidding?

“
I
miss you in class. Now no one listens to what I'm saying.” He laughed encouragingly, so I could feel free to joke too. “Dana, are you with me?”

“Yes.”

“Have we done anything to offend you?”

Had they done anything to offend me? More like had they done anything
not
to offend me. The children ignored me. They shoved ahead of me in line. They made snarky comments on the pattern of the tights that had come in the last parcel from England. They mimicked me when I courteously answered the Hebrew teacher's questions. What a laugh. They offended everybody, as he well knew.

“Dana?”

“What?”

“Has anyone hurt you?”

What I had felt was something different. Getting hit when you least expected. Not so much pain, as the shock of it. This was a Jewish school. It wasn't like Ville d'Anjou, where I had to be on guard against slurs, jokes, misconceptions stemming from ignorance. These were Jewish children, and I had assumed a common ground. I knew that however different these children were from me on the surface, I was stuck with them. If the ocean liner started to list, we'd be forced into the same lifeboat. But they didn't get it.

One of the boys had brought in a magazine with an article that had more photographs than writing. It was called “Remembering—Twenty Years After.” The class clustered around him to look at the pictures. I knew plenty enough not to look.

“Lampshades. That's what they did with the skin.”

“Wow, look at this guy: ‘Look ma, no hands.' It says they did experiments.”

“They could gas a hundred at a time in one of those rooms.”

“Cool.”

“What do you mean cool, you idiot, it was an oven.”

I sat numb and stunned, not even thinking to tell them to stop. How could they be so interested, so
detached?
How could they not
know?
Didn't every Jew in the world know in their blood that it could happen to them?

“Hey, Janet, how'd you like that hairdo? Just wire her up.”

“They took little kids and smashed their brains out on walls.”

“Nothing would come out of your head, stupid.”

I went to the washroom and sat. I must have sat awhile, because the teacher sent Tracy Cooper to see if I was okay. When I came back they were reading out captions.

The teacher had no right to call our house after he had let the deaths of Mummy and Apu's families be turned into an amusement for ignorant Jewish children. He wanted to know now what I felt? He was asking if anyone had hurt me?

I felt a very hot shame that I had to keep from my parents. They had been violated again, but this time by next of kin in the land that made them free to do so.

“Will you come then?” I heard him ask as though he were repeating the question. “Will you give us another chance?”

I had done many things before now to please Mummy and Apu, but always to humour them. When it came to appeasing our parents, Lillian and I had a habit of rolling our eyes. Mummy and Apu were comically out of step with the brash, smugly assured world Lillian and I were daily growing more to be a part of. They took offence easily at the gestures of their neighbours and colleagues, mannerisms that were merely colloquial and not meant to insult them. Lillian and I had taken to viewing our parents ironically through the amused lenses of our adopted country. I didn't feel so much like laughing right now.

With a sinking sensation, I hung up the phone.

*   *   *

Apu took the bus with me. He came along Sherbrooke as far as St. Lawrence Boulevard where he worked half days on Saturday. He read the
Gazette
on the Ville d'Anjou bus, but then he folded it into his briefcase, and began, once we were settled comfortably in a double seat on our course west, to talk. Over the length of the religious school year, on those Saturday bus rides, he painted a picture of his version of what it was to be a Jew.

I had always known about Apu's lost world. Year in and year out he noted for us the birthdays of each loved one.

“Today your grandmother of sainted memory would have turned seventy-one.” How was I supposed to respond to this? “That's nice”? Or “What a shame”?

“On this day in nineteen hundred and eight your uncle Bandi, my beloved brother, was born.” Did he expect me to feel something? I had never met this uncle outside of Apu's anecdotes.

“Today my little Clárika would be a woman of twenty-seven.” A woman of twenty-seven, yet I was eleven, almost twice the age my half-sister had been when she died in Auschwitz.

These would-have-been birthdays were as ungraspable in their own way as six million or infinity, but my father stubbornly fumbled at them. He showed us photographs, some sepia-toned, but not all. Most were black and white like ours. All the faces were familiar as though I too had known them in a previous existence.

But although I had heard anecdotes, seen photographs and picked up many references to the people and places Apu had loved dearly, he had never before recounted from the beginning the story of his truncated life. I didn't know if this was his express purpose on the Saturday bus rides, to prepare me for my religious education; perhaps finding himself alone with me for uninterrupted periods simply put him in a storytelling frame of mind, for he was by nature a raconteur. It was much later, after my head swam with images of a world that seemed superior in all ways to the one in which we lived, that it occurred to me my father wasn't as naive or as vulnerable as I had supposed. I guessed he had heard from the teacher at temple what had put me off, and, over the course of those Saturday mornings, formulated a response to my dilemma.

Apu started with legends about his ancestors in the early nineteenth century and then, in more detail, moved through the generations of growth and burgeoning until his own birth at the beginning of our era. Here the plots split, mutated, multiplied. Stories of influence, renown, wealth and affliction. It seemed unlikely there'd be enough weeks in the religious school year to get through them all. He drew a picture of a clan, familial but worldly, large enough to have included the devout and the emancipated, the orthodox as well as apostate, all of them unswervingly Jewish. In the centre was my father, the willful child, bold adolescent, brave young man, daring adult. Be as I once was, he wished to say, not the defeated immigrant you have known. I imagined table-wide loaves of love, a palpable yeasty fragrance, and ached for that certainty we had all lost, of belonging to a place and a people.

Once begun, the stories spilled from my father as though they were inscribed in an internal script that he had only to turn on and play. I succumbed to the melody of his voice, its modulated, well-formed sentences, the line of narrative illustrated with references to the Bible. His Hungarian was literary and I didn't catch all of it, but the formality of the language resounded in its rhythms, and the underlying sadness of the story, however lightly it began, created depth he didn't have to engineer. Each week he picked up from where he had left off, always at a new chapter that would unroll like a carpet runner, from beginning to end, by the time he had to get up to leave.

At St. Lawrence Apu pushed open the red swing door in the rear of the bus, and glanced back at me before disembarking. This was where his journey ended, from the grand estates of central, prewar Europe to working-class St. Lawrence, Montreal's great divide. He'd lacked the confidence to continue. English started here, shoddy at first—Sam's Shoe Repair, a sign read; another, even dingier, The Philatelist—then drew strength from cosmopolitan downtown to the affluence of Westmount. St. Lawrence Boulevard's seediness dismayed me. Apu deserved better. But so he believed of me. As the bus pulled from the curb, I looked out the streaked window. He had stopped to search for my face one more time before the bus lurched off. Through smears of city grime, I met my father's eye. Then he touched the brim of his hat to me, releasing me on my way.

The sound of my father's voice on those Saturday morning bus rides forged something permanent in me, only the lesser part of which was Jewish. Apu always regretted this as his failing. In his view, the lost beautiful world had derived its vitality from Jewish tradition. But the vision I formed of Apu's clannish, populous relations was of a singular inclusiveness. He lived each day by the same precept, one foot in the present, the other in the past, unable even now to let go anyone he had loved. It suggested to me how Apu was able to give up settling among the Jews in Montreal's west end in order to live side by side with his in-laws, Cimi-néni and Uncle André, albeit distinct from one another, intolerant of their differences, fractious, yet cleaving together, the bond of a shared past too rare to risk for principle.

The kind of Jew I wasn't to become might have withstood the stares of the other passengers on the crowded bus, who hung above us from the overhead rail. But I was acutely tuned to their distaste for the foreign, older man who spoke too loudly in an offensively strange tongue to a girl who was likely his granddaughter. The bus didn't exist for him; nor did its passengers populate his universe. There were just me and him and the people he had loved more than his life. It felt all wrong. The wrong place, too public for so personal an accounting. And too mean for sacred recollections under the smoky exhalations of strangers who were so removed from his experience they could have come from the moon, they had as little sense of his worth. I felt a collision, a hard unabsorbable impact between our location in lowly transit and the elevated world my father hoped to transport me back to. For that, he would have had to stand at a lectern or a pulpit, at least to have held forth from a winged armchair in his own domain; not here under stony stares that took his elegant language for an insult, nor when he let himself be disgorged onto the penny-grubbingness of St. Lawrence Boulevard.