The Imposter Bride (18 page)

“I called Levine’s to take it away,” Lily told him. “He let us exchange it for credit towards the dining room table we’ll need when we move to our own place.”

Nathan was disappointed. In its absence both the room and Lily seemed barer, starker, stripped of something.

“NIE BYLO NAS, BYL LAS.
Nie bedzie nas, bedzie las
,” Lily said to Sol as they sat together on the fire escape a few nights later.

“Come again?” Sol said.

“We were not here, but the forest was. We will not be here, but the forest will be. There’s comfort in that, no?”

“Not really,” he said. It was depressing, actually. A bit morbid. “It makes it seem like there’s no point in doing anything, like nothing we do matters in the end.”

It had become their habit to sit together late at night while everyone around them slept. It wasn’t that Lily had chosen Sol’s company over Nathan’s; she hadn’t, but Nathan couldn’t sit on the back steps talking with her till all hours. He was building his own business; he needed his sleep. He had no time for the kinds of conversations she had with Sol, conversations that stretched for hours, with long silences during which
thoughts surfaced and resurfaced in different forms, and in which everything could be said because, in her mind, there was nothing between them to lose.

“I went to see your friend’s mother, you know.”

“Mrs. Krakauer?”

“Last week.” If she was going to come after me, she would have by now, Lily thought.

“But why on earth?”

“I guess I felt bad.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I guess—”

“It’s not your fault you have the same name as her cousin.” He was sorry he’d said anything. It would have passed had he kept quiet, but now it was there, in the air, and if he saw Elka again, if he were to bring her home, which he might, he realized, because there was definitely something about Elka …

“She seems to think it is.”

“What?”

“My fault.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I could tell. She kept staring at me.”

“Well, forget her. She’s an old bat.” She was too sensitive, he thought, off balance.

She’s not going to come after me, Lily knew, remembering the fear she’d sensed in Ida, a fear as disturbing to her as the thought of Ida coming after her, as if Ida knew something about Lily that Lily didn’t even know about herself. As if she saw something, as Sol had when he turned away from her at the station.

“Was that Polish you just quoted?” Sol asked, to get her mind off Ida Krakauer.

Lily nodded. “She wrote that on the first page of the notebook.”

She had told him a few nights ago about a notebook she had found near the end of the war. The notebook of a girl who had died.

“Who puts a quote at the beginning of their private diary?” Lily asked.

Sol didn’t answer. He was not even going to hazard a guess about the workings of women’s private diaries.

“No one,” Lily answered. “There’s something about her writing, the style of it … It’s not like a private diary. She was writing for eyes beyond her own. That’s what it seems to me. She might have been a writer or an artist. Had she lived, I mean. And so that quote … It’s like what a writer will put at the start of a book. So why that quote, I’ve been wondering. And when did she choose it? It’s right at the beginning, at the top of the first page, but it could have been written in at any time. She could have written it right before she died.”

The girl was already dead when Lily came upon her, Lily had told Sol. The notebook was in the satchel that lay beside her.

“And why is it in Polish, I wonder.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Everything else is in Yiddish.”

“So she was Jewish, the girl?”

“It would seem.”

He waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he took the opportunity to change the subject, shift it to something less morbid.

“Our new man’s from Poland,” he said. The man who was an insult to him, whose presence was as direct a statement as Sol had ever received from Eisenberg about just how low he stood, how limited his prospects at Button King really were. Not that
he should have expected otherwise, he knew, with two Eisenberg sons waiting like the princes they were for the business to fall into their laps. The business that Sol had helped build. And his brother and father before him. He should never have returned there, he thought. The war had provided a natural break, and he should have taken it. As Nathan had. He should have broken out, moved into new territory. His own. Zippers, maybe.

“He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. How to dress. How to speak. Nothing. And I’m supposed to train him in.”
To treat him as my equal
was the actual instruction he had understood when Eisenberg introduced the man as Sol’s new partner, a word he then used—overused—every time he poked his head into the office Sol and the new man now shared. “Without missing a step, of course. While increasing sales. With him hanging around my neck like a … like a …”

“Like an albatross,” Lily said.

“Exactly,” Sol agreed.

It was his punishment, Sol suspected, though Eisenberg would never admit it. It was the fallout from the debacle of Lily’s arrival; Sol had been waiting for it for weeks. Nothing terrible had been said at the time; if anything, Eisenberg had been reassuring—
We all make mistakes, the important thing is how we correct them
—but Sol had felt himself being watched since that day. And now this foisting of a partner onto him, the forced sharing of responsibility and prestige, the insulting implication that the refugee from Poland was Sol’s equal.

He was big on charity, this Eisenberg, Lily thought. Nathan had already told her how he had turned up at their father’s funeral eleven years earlier, not merely to pay his respects to the mourning widow and sons but to offer those sons employment at a time—the depth of the Depression—when the work
of those two boys, ages thirteen and fifteen, could not possibly have generated the salary he paid to them. And then there was his behaviour towards her, the immediacy with which he and his wife, Bayla, had opened their home to her after Sol’s desertion at the station, the sense they had imparted that she was no trouble and that it was of no importance to them how long she might need to rely on their hospitality. She wondered what motivated him and his wife to reach out their hands in those ways, what sins they were trying to expiate. It was a cynical turn of mind, she knew, wearying. She wondered if she’d always been this way.

“He’s big on helping refugees, your boss,” Lily said.

“His wife was a revolutionary back in Russia,” Sol said, and Lily smiled. Every second Jew she met in Montreal claimed to have been a revolutionary back in Russia.

“A terrorist, apparently.”

And the richer they were, these Jews in Montreal, the more radical their glorious, revolutionary pasts.

“His sons are useless, both of them.”

Lily had met the sons, two handsome men in their thirties. “Useless” wasn’t the word that came to her mind so much as “underused.” He was at least seventy now, the Button King, but he showed no signs of slowing down. The resentment Sol felt towards the sons was probably nothing, Lily thought, compared to that of the sons themselves, who waited in vain for some transfer of the father’s formidable powers and responsibilities.

“A couple of pansies.”

Lily’s mind filled with the deep colours of the flowers that spilled out of her mother-in-law’s window boxes. Such hard colours: purples and yellows as dense and impenetrable as the woman who tended them. Lily’s mother had grown pansies
as well, all along the path to the door of their summer home, but she had favoured softer colours: pinks and creams so delicate that all the light of summer flowed through them, yellows more like butter than gold.

“My mother loved pansies,” she said.

Sol smiled but said nothing. Nine times out of ten she outsmarted him in his own language, and he didn’t mind at all. He liked it, in fact. He liked smarts in a woman. But it was Lily’s errors that most endeared her to him, those moments when she slipped that he felt his own desire for her most sharply. It was her not knowing what she was revealing that gave a tender ache to his longing, her not seeing the chink in the armour of her intellect. It was like catching a glimpse of private skin inadvertently revealed when a woman reached overhead on the streetcar and her sweater rode up. That glimpse—stolen and unexpected—was more arousing to him than a sighting of thigh or cleavage freely offered.

Lily had not actually misunderstood Sol’s meaning. It was more that the other meaning was so pleasant, the image evoked so precious to her, so unexpected—the darkness of her mind parting, just a crack, to allow the light of her past to stream in. She held it for as long as she could, closing her eyes against the tedious description of Sol’s day and resentments that she knew were sure to follow. She saw the path that led from the gate to the front door of her family’s summer cottage, the lightly coloured petals fluttering in a summer breeze.

“I didn’t know they had pansies in Poland,” Sol said, amusing himself, if not Lily, with the cleverness of his double entendre.

“Everything you have here we had,” she said.

And it was of a higher quality, he could hear her thinking,
and the irritation he felt in sensing that smugness of hers, that sense of her own superiority, was relief to him. He did not actually want to be half in love with his brother’s wife. While he could not resist indulging the feeling, could not seem to stop himself from stepping through the kitchen window every night to join her on the fire escape steps, he did nurse a mild hope each time he walked down the brown hallway to the kitchen that this would be the night when he would be delivered from the feeling, that his attraction to her would break, finally, like other fevers had broken, leaving nothing but a feeling of having been returned to himself.

“It feels to me like a living thing,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“The notebook.” The words that changed meaning every time she read them. “She’s trying to tell me something.”

“She’s dead, Lily,” Sol said.

How could she explain about the souls of murdered people, how different their demands from those of the other dead, how quarrelsome they could be, how frightened, how anguished, how dangerous.

“I’m not saying that it isn’t tragic that she died—a young girl with her whole life ahead of her.”

Platitudes, she thought. Empty words. Words that only conveyed how little he understood her. And how could he?

“But she did die. She’s gone. And you didn’t. You lived.” He looked at her. She seemed to be listening. “And so you need to get on with your life.”

She said nothing for a few minutes, for so long that Sol cast about in his mind for ways to restart the conversation.

“Do you think I’m not trying?” she asked at last.

She had bought another notebook just a few days earlier.
She had awakened one morning—it was the morning after she’d returned the vanity to Levine—with an image of it in her mind: a journal just like the one she had taken, but new, pristine, its pages unmarred by word or mark. She had seen it clearly, its beautiful binding, its empty, creamy pages, an image so vivid she imagined she would be able to find its counterpart in the world in which she was now living. Which was a mistake. She could find nothing in her present world to match her interior life, but she did find a book with a soft leather cover and with paper whose texture and smooth finish pleased her. It was expensive, an indulgence, but she bought it anyway. Until that moment she had thought no further than finding as close a match as she could to the image she had woken with, but once she had found it that image began to change, to merge with the new book she held in her hands, and this too pleased her. It seemed the first instance of something in her new life merging with her internal yearnings, and though it was just an empty journal that had found a foothold within her, she felt a surge of hope that maybe this, at last, was the beginning she had been waiting for, that the other moments she had thought were the beginning—the landing in Palestine, the departure from Palestine, the arrival in Montreal, her wedding to Nathan—had been nothing more than the false starts of a runner who is so eager to race that his muscles push him forward before his ears hear the shot signalling the instant of the true start. She had been too eager to begin anew, impelled by fear and loss and guilt to move forward before her mind and heart were ready. But now, at this moment, as she felt the reassuring weight of the new journal in her hand, a weight that gave substance to what she had dreamed and imagined, she felt she had arrived at the beginning.

“I have my own notebook now,” she told Sol, hoping that
the hope she had felt in the store that day would be rekindled in the telling.

“You mean a diary?”

She nodded.

His sister, Nina, had kept a diary. He remembered her poring over it, her left hand shielding from her older brothers’ eyes the secrets that her right hand wrote. One of the diaries had a lock, easily picked with a pin. He remembered the disappointment he had felt breaking open that lock only to discover what he already knew: the names of the boys she had crushes on, the degree to which she felt afflicted by her brothers, the fact that their father had died. Why write it down? he had wondered. What was the purpose of writing down events and feelings that had been unpleasant enough in the actual living of them? It was not as if the recording of disaster alleviated its effects in any way. To the contrary, in fact. In Nina’s case it seemed to have made it worse:
Papa’s 4th yahrzeit today. Mama lit the candle, then yelled at me like it’s my fault he walked in front of the streetcar
. That’s what she had written on February 15, 1939, the fourth anniversary of their father’s death—and why? Their father had not walked in front of a streetcar. He had slipped on the ice, fallen into the path of the oncoming number 55. The coroner’s report had been very clear on that point, concluding without question that the death had been accidental, but Nina, wallowing in the contents of her own mind, had created for herself a reality even worse than the one she already had to endure.