The County of Birches (24 page)

I was also starting to realize that if I weren't always such an obliging child, she wouldn't keep moving me around at her convenience. Counting the nursery school I went to when we first arrived in Canada, the new school in Ville d'Anjou would be my third. And one grade two class wasn't the same as another. I dreaded having to be a newcomer again.

This move in October unnerved me. Through spring and summer my parents had spoken of little else. The purchase, the decision, where Mummy would work. Plans and speculations were nothing new, but these had been interspersed with references to a trial in Israel.

Should they go, shouldn't they?

Go where? What for?

It would cost too much, and what with buying the house, they needed every penny. Others would testify.

By the hundreds. By now the world knew plenty.

Their stories wouldn't be missed. There was evidence enough to hang him a million times.

“A million times,” erupted Mummy, higher-pitched. “A million times would be too few. He destroyed more than a million. What about the rest? He destroyed me as well!” By now she was loud enough for the neighbours to hear.

“Sári, enough,” Apu had interrupted, “we're not going. Be reasonable. Why do we need to go there? It might not be safe. Think of the children, if something happened to us.”

They were still talking about Eichmann.
Eichmann.
The name that drew silences but was suddenly always in the air. Eichmann caged for his own
protection.
Why shouldn't they testify? Apu alone claimed eighty dead. And Mummy. Mummy had survived Auschwitz. They
should
go. They had plenty to tell.

“No,” Apu finished, “I will not see that face.”

I filled with dread over the coming move. I pictured the strange children turning to stare at me as I was introduced to the class. I thought of having no one to play with at recess, and remembered the loneliness of the last schoolyard where I had been left off early each morning when Mummy went to work. Waiting in the winter cold, the empty schoolgrounds spread out before me. Hoping for another child to turn up. Thinking maybe I wasn't early. Maybe I was late, so late everyone else was already inside and I had missed everything important.

I remembered the old stories. Not the good, daytime ones about the former Perfect World, but the nightmares of terror and loss I had overheard my parents recount at night. I remembered the helplessness of adults who couldn't stop the badness from taking place. The adults powerless as children and unable to protect them. And now he was trapped like an animal in a cage, this
Eichmann,
this
person,
this
old man.
I couldn't stand hearing Apu object to going to Israel. It was intolerable that he said they should do nothing. Hadn't they already done nothing? All of them. The good, kind grandfather, and the pious, loving grandmother, and the as-it-turned-out not-so-clever sons—Apu and his brothers—university laureates, but who cared, if in the end they were masters of nothing, certainly not their fates.

*   *   *

The teacher in the new class was very tall and thin with her hair piled high. She spoke in the clipped and authoritative tones of the British. Pinning a picture over the blackboard, she unfurled a yellow duckling swimming on a blue pond beside a red barn.

“Boys and girls, for this week's composition I want you to write a story about what you see in this picture.”

Composition.
My blood froze. What was that?
Composition,
something complicated and technical, far beyond my powers.
This week's! A composition each week!
This grade two certainly wasn't the same as the other.

I started to cry. The English lady bent over me, and I smelled the false powdery sweetness of her perfume. She patted my shoulder. “That's all right, Dana. Your composition can be about yourself.”

Composition
—that word again! I cried all morning. I cried when a girl was assigned to be my partner to go out to the recess yard. And I cried at lunch even though Mummy told me I'd be a laughingstock if I kept this up.

I cried daily in that class for the first two weeks, embarrassing my mother in front of her new principal and colleagues. Did I want them to think her child was a “problem”?

“Really, Dana, you know you could write down a few words if you tried.”

Not that I cried all the time. I jumped rope in the recess yard, and walked one day after school to the home of a classmate to play. I did my arithmetic, and felt pleased to be one of the last ones out in an all-class spelling bee. But whenever the English lady came up beside me to say, “Dana, won't you just write a word or two about yourself?” I started to cry.

I didn't know why, exactly. The thought of writing anything except practice letters and spelling words was overwhelming and beyond me. It felt so good to give in and know it was too much. It was all too much, what they expected of me. It was more than I was capable of. And it felt good, so good, to show it. I would not write for this British person despite her smile and interesting hair piled in a beehive. I would perform no more tricks.

“What do you make me look like?” snapped my mother. “Do you want them to think I can't raise my own child properly?”

I listened to the other children read aloud their stories about ducklings. I watched as a new picture got clipped to the blackboard a week later. This one showed a family, a boy, a girl, a mother and father, somewhere among strange structures—a huge wheel with people on it, and an elaborate giant slide thing that went up and down in waves. The children in the picture held sticks with something pink and
fuzzy
that looked like the top of my teacher's hairdo. She rested her hands on my shoulders. “Won't you write something, Dana, about yourself?”

After two weeks I relented, stopped snivelling and wrote my first composition. The teacher let me take it home. Mummy laughed, showing it to Apu and my sister Lillian.

“All this bawling over nothing. Look here,” she said.

I had written in pencil pressed so hard into the paper it had broken through in places:
I was born in Hungry. My sister was born in Hungry. My mother was born in Hungry. My father was born in Hungry.

“So,” said Mummy, laughing, “this was the big news?”

By December 1961, we were settled in. The new living-room suite was delivered and the old secondhand set that had been bought for the apartment was relegated to the basement TV room. By December I had made new friends, joined Brownies, taken up the recorder; I hung on my teacher's every word as on a prophet's. In December, even without Mummy and Apu's testimonies, Eichmann's sentence was passed.

*   *   *

Apu started digging that spring. In the fall he had managed only to tame the lawn. It had grown wild and he couldn't pass the mower through it. First he had to bend over double to cut out big swaths with pruning shears that looked like a giant's nail scissors. Then he used the mower, its rotary blades clogging with green muck. He tugged the mower back, pushed forward, pulled back, pushed ahead. He inched his way over the back yard until we had something to walk on instead of through.

But in spring his real gardening began. As soon as the ground had thawed enough and while it was still soggy and pliant, he started to dig holes. He dug so many, in the evenings as the days grew longer, and on weekends, that I thought he'd gotten fed up with the lawn and wanted to do away with it altogether. Down the right-hand border beside the fence, he dug six holes equidistant from each other. In these would go the flowering shrubs: forsythia, honeysuckle, spiraea, hydrangea, lilac and snowball. Along the left-hand border that was open to the other neighbour he cut a deep ridge for a hedge. Across the top of the garden he dug pits for trees: crabapple, hawthorne, apple and pear. Last, he dug the one in the middle of the yard for the tree that was supposed to produce shade for Mummy's webbed lawn chair.

I laughed at the puny thing he put in the centre of the big yard. Mummy had better drape a scarf over her face for her summer siestas. It would take quite a while for those twigs to give shade. But he wasn't finished. Apu dug a wide flower bed around the skinny sapling. Then, on his hands and knees, he put in the plantings: red salvia closest to the measly trunk, yellow marigolds in the middle, and white alyssum for the edge. With his hands in the earth, and his gardening hat on his balding pate, Apu said Kaddish for the dead.

He chanted the Hebrew words that I recognized from the Yom Kippur service when the house was veiled in mourning, curtains drawn and memorial candles aflicker. Lili and I were barred from this ritual, not because Mummy and Apu required privacy but so we wouldn't be branded by their grief. But out here in the garden in spring, under the clear sky, Apu openly spoke the words for the dead, not afraid that I or the neighbours would overhear. I wondered if all this digging and praying meant he was finally burying them. When he stood, eventually, to survey his work around the weeping willow, he wiped his hands on his trousers and pulled me close. He held me in silence, staring with wet eyes at the little tree.

“Too bad, Danuska,” he said in the Hungarian he always spoke at home, “too bad that on the last day the Lord chose to rest.”

Too bad.
The Lord took a nap, and the serpent spoiled His garden. Seventeen years had passed since the Hungarian deportations. The Lord had taken His time to awake. On the last day in May in the first spring of our new life, Eichmann was hanged.

*   *   *

Along crescent streets muffled in snow, zipper-hooded adventurers emerged to plod past the split levels whose rooflines had oddly descended. Overnight the snow had risen, obliterating the primary hues of doorways, and filling the undeveloped fields with a crystalline blankness that felt like the start of the world. Nylon snowsuits crackled as our buckled boots broke trails to the park that joined our crescents. Children were first to venture out into that white sea that frothed over our boot tops. Station wagons stayed landlocked in carports. Businesses, like adults, stalled, opened late. Shovels came out after we were already in our seats, socks damp inside buffed leather. Puddles formed in lockers. By lunchtime we could spring home on firm treads left by sidewalk plows, and crunch up the walks shovelled clear by fathers before they'd left for work. But in the opening bars of those winter preludes we sounded the first notes. We children of morning in the new world. A world pure in its erasure of woods and pasture, where even the rutted earth that filled in the spring with pools that spawned tadpoles was a transitional ecosystem, promising streets that were newer yet than those bordered by saplings that matched us in height; streets as obliquely connecting, navigable only by automobile and bicycle and humming happily with the mechanical whirs of an emerging world.

I had fallen in love with the newness of Ville d'Anjou. I loved the shape of the houses, spare and angular. I loved their bright colours. I loved the playground and its futuristic apparatus. The painted bars of the rocket ship that, last summer, I was still afraid to climb to the top. The clean sand. The amoeba-shaped wading pool painted aqua like the sky. I adopted this landscape, having come from a world that history had disfavoured. Like a false start, it shouldn't have happened. My place now was among the split levels, bungalows and duplexes of Ville d'Anjou—a world without war or want or fear—on the eastern edge of Montreal. The last inhabitable outpost before the island's desert stretch of refineries. A glimpse of the future sliced from farmers' fields and nestled like a spare-edged brilliant inside a baroque setting. The east end's characteristically dark brick façades were heavily curtained with evergreens. Spiral, two-storey staircases, curling with black grillwork, twined up the fronts of prewar walk-ups. We had had to negotiate those dark streets like a journey through the past before breathing a lighter ether once we turned north from Sherbrooke Street and climbed—not uphill, there was no grade though I could feel myself lift—into a largesse of land and air, yes, more air; the homes hardly impinged on the sky. I exhaled once we reached Chenier Street after the march of duplexes from Sherbrooke. On Chenier the bungalows began, and the ranch-styles low and sprawling.

In those tidy, self-contained domiciles, children knelt on wall-to-wall carpeting, watching electric trains rock around a track. Little girls hauled about blonde-haired dolls as tall as themselves, pulling a ring on the neck to hear words in English. Their dinners, absurdly premature, were at four in the afternoon, when my mother was lying exhausted, feet up in the La-Z-Boy. Their bedtimes were punishingly early when in our house we were still eating—well—not from a box. I didn't envy them. But there was something certain in the heavy hang of a thick and perfect ringlet suspended from a plaid ribbon. A location in time and place. A privilege in knowing trends, and a luxury in caring about them. I hankered for the sureness of these gestures. Inside picture windows young-looking mothers stayed home and dangled legs beside telephone tables. I loved this vision of ease and belonging. Living rooms were off limits when you stepped in after school. A glimpse of perfect composure like an unblemished face. My family's duplex was new, but branded with economic expedience, a paying tenant and the proximities of shared walls. It made me feel set apart, as did my older parents, and working mother, and empty garage.

On winter mornings my father was long gone on his trek by public transport to Bernstein's downtown office. Our front walk was a crisp scar in the white expanse that had filled overnight, and the sidewalk in front a smooth swath to the neighbour's invisible border. He wouldn't let my mother risk climbing over snowbanks to the street where, he hoped, at least a car or two would have left a track for her to walk in, for my mother, like me, had to make it in time for the schoolyard bell. She'd leave before me, giving herself extra minutes because the snowfall would slow her down, to be ready to greet her class at the kindergarten entrance. I noticed her pointy-toed boot prints and made my blunt-nosed marks beside them.