The County of Birches (25 page)

Dire threats of penicillin injections had impressed me with the need to dress properly for the cold: not only hat but scarf, not just jacket but also sweater. Two pairs of mittens, for one was bound to get wet. Sometimes, during her exams, my sister would be home to lock the door behind me. More often she left early with my father for her classes at Mountview High. I locked the door with the key that hung like a charm under my cotton school blouse, and went out with the other children, into the snow.

My over-swaddled burliness made each step an extra effort as I waded through the wet snow on Boulevard de la Loire. Rounding the corner onto Croissy Circle, I took in a sudden, frigid draft of air. Immediately, it was not
my
hand that I felt burrowed in the quilted lining of a nylon pocket; it was my hand grasped inside someone's larger woollen mitten. The past came on me like that. In a breath. An uncomfortable intrusion like the intake of cold air. I was working my way through the deep snow behind the Budapest tenement, my sister's hand firmly clasping mine and tugging me up the white hill looming largely ahead. My sister the school-going age I was now. My sister big to my small. Our woollen jackets heavy with wet snow. The prickly leggings bunched between our legs rubbing thickly together. My panting breath behind the scarf a wet, thready steam forming an icy crust that grazed my nostrils. Trudging up, up, plodding sweatily in the cold. I followed my sister anywhere. Going up. Hurtling down. I assumed unquestioningly some good reason for our labour in that whiteness.

The memory was alive, vivid and concurrent. I felt it. In Ville d'Anjou, on the fifteen-minute walk to school through snow up to my kneecaps, hot with effort under my nylon and zippers, snot crystallizing on the scarf over my mouth, and snow stinging, not yet wet, as it bit over my boot tops, I'd slide back. Not through pictures, or snapshots, or narrative, but through a physical sensation of being in different worlds at once.

*   *   *

That year I learned how to iron on my father's monogrammed handkerchiefs. These, already worn and, according to my mother, needlessly time-consuming in Canada where there was no lack of paper, would be suitable for practice. I had the time, and if I scorched or stained them, my forbearing father wouldn't complain.

The pointlessness of these handkerchiefs annoyed me. Just rags made for soiling, it seemed stupid to have to iron them. They were out of place in the new sunlit suburban kitchen, but then so was my father, old-world in his manners and values, and plain old compared to the fathers of my friends. No one who saw my father in the modern kitchen, dishcloth in hand, could guess he had been a person of consequence in another time in his life, someone who had run a large agricultural concern, and belonged to a dynasty that had dominated its community. My father was a mild, past-middle-aged immigrant who took three buses into the city each morning to his bookkeeping job at a rag-trade wholesaler's. He shrank from dealings with French-Canadian tradesmen who he sensed despised his mechanical helplessness as well as his linguistic impediment. He felt scorned because he knew nothing about hammers or water pipes or electrical outlets, when in the old days labourers had done those tasks on his family's estate. It was hard for me to reconcile my father in Canada with the image of the world he had come from and conjured. That world had shrunk to the proportions of his handkerchiefs.

Grudgingly I took up the chore of ironing them. At first I resented the time it stole from Brownie badges and ballet. I would shake open the handkerchiefs roughly and hold the iron above them like a threat. But I couldn't resist first fingering the scroll of my father's raised initials, reversed in the Hungarian practice of surname first. I traced the letters, bemused, pitying. Imagine a world so guileless it bothered to initial linens believing they would last a lifetime, just like it assumed a life unfolds in one place.

I grew protective, spread the cotton flat on the ironing board with my open palms and followed the pencil-thin borders that framed grey checks and solid manly hues. An uncompromising light flooded through the wall-high window behind me and passed through each thread, showing how the weave had pulled open and thinned. I began to handle the handkerchiefs like artifacts. I stroked the worn fabric, feeling how tenuous was my connection to that other time, that other place of which remained only these threadbare remnants. I brought the iron down with care, anticipating the hiss as heat hit damp cloth, the steam of this union producing soft layers I folded precisely, matching up the edges.

I considered myself light years from the world of my father's old photographs and anecdotes. Ville d'Anjou was the future. We had inherited nothing here. It was all brand-new, the trees twiglike and the gardens bare. The bright paint on sharp-sloped roofs was a first application. The scent of sawdust seeped from the framework in the houses. I felt I had sprung fully formed into this landscape. I had been dreamed into a world without war or want, and I started at this point, like the bushes and trees my father planted our first spring in the new house. Mummy and Apu had once occupied a terrain blasted by uncertainty, loss and terror. My world was new. My life, lucky child of fortune born after the Holocaust, had slid open like the ironing board onto a clean slate of blue and white linoleum tile.

THE COUNTY OF BIRCHES
. Copyright © 1998 by Judith Kalman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Some of these stories have appeared in slightly different form in the following publications:
The Fiddlehead, Saturday Night, Queen's Quarterly, Descant, Windsor Review, Grain, Prairie Fire,
and the 1997
Journey Prize Anthology.
“Flight” was broadcast on CBC Radio's “Between the Covers.”

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ISBN 0-312-20886-3

First published in British Columbia by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

First U.S. Edition: September 1999

eISBN 9781466882577

First eBook edition: August 2014