The Imposter Bride (28 page)

“I know, but I don’t remember her.”

“That’s how pretty she is.”

“Lily Kramer,” he said, still smiling. “If I didn’t know better I would think you’re jealous.”

“Of that?”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He was still smiling, more amused than disturbed by her annoyance at having her place in Sol’s affections usurped. He knew about Sol’s longing for Lily. He’d seen it on his brother’s face at the wedding. He hadn’t minded; it had pleased him, in fact, to see Lily avenged of the shame Sol had brought her.

Jealous? Lily thought. The very idea was an insult. Did Nathan not realize how beneath her it would be to compare herself to that teenage girl? A girl with no depth or shading. A girl who didn’t even know how to choreograph a scene with a man who had spurned her … Or did she? Lily remembered the tenderness in Sol’s face as he read to her the stiff, pompous letter Elka had written, a letter that touched him, it seemed
to Lily, for the transparency of the emotions that drove it, the transparency of the girl who loved him and was offering herself to him.

“She doesn’t lack spine, you have to give her that,” Sol had said, and Lily had understood from the pride in his voice that he already saw Elka as part of himself, was already claiming her qualities as his own.

He might cast Lily longing looks any time he had the opportunity, might continue to desire her, but he would marry this Elka, she now realized, a girl who had nothing wrong with her, nothing within her to make him recoil as he had instinctively recoiled the first time he saw Lily.

And then what, she wondered. What would be said between herself and the girl’s mother, who would become, through the marriage, a relative? She couldn’t think about it yet.

“Your mother seems to like her,” she said.

He took her hand again. “My mother doesn’t dislike you.”

“Doesn’t she?”

Just a week earlier Lily had done some shopping for Rosh Hashana. She was trying to make more of an effort, as both Nathan and Sol had advised her, each in their different ways. And Bella had been pleasant enough, had thanked her for the apples and honey, and then invited her to sit down and join her for coffee, which she had done. They had made small talk for a while, had tried to, but as Lily tried to summon an interest in what her mother-in law was telling her—the people she’d run into that day while shopping, the price she had paid for the chicken that was soaking in the tub—as she had tried to offer a response in kind, she had felt a weariness so extreme it was like a physical entity bearing down on her, the air itself thickening into another element. She felt like she was speaking in
slow motion, trying to project her words through an element more like water than air, a distorting element that slurred her words, blurred them.

Bella seemed to sense it, because she didn’t ask further questions or offer further chit-chat. She reached out to touch Lily’s hand and the warmth of her touch was shocking, the immediacy of the sensation despite the thickness in which Lily felt herself encased. Bella had told her then about her own first Rosh Hashana in Canada. She described a bleak, joyless holiday, her husband, Joseph, barely noticing her and Nathan barely noticing the meal she had worked so hard to make festive. At the conclusion of the holiday she had stood by the window with Nathan in her arms, looking at the moon—the new moon of the new year—and singing a song to the baby. “It was such a lonely moon,” Bella said, describing the thin, cold sliver of light suspended in the vastness of the night sky. And Lily had understood the analogy at once, the implication that Bella’s life too had been stripped back to nothing but then had waxed again over time. As Lily’s could. Over time. But the moon, even full, was still a cold, lonely light in a vast darkness, Lily thought.

“She’ll come around,” Nathan promised.

They crossed the street that divided their neighbourhood from Mount Royal and started along the wide gravel path that edged the playing fields before rising to the wooded upper slope of the mountain.

“That was my father’s bench,” Nathan said. They had passed that same bench many times on their evening and Sunday afternoon walks, but he had never pointed it out to Lily before. It was occupied now by an old couple, the woman wrapped in a duffle bag of a coat, the sort his mother would
wear, the man in a peaked cap with the ear flaps extended. They sat side by side, arms crossed, looking out at the world together but not exchanging a word. “That’s where he was when he wasn’t at work. Summer, winter …”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing. Daydreaming.”

“Nothing? Or daydreaming?”

Nathan smiled. “I don’t really know.”

More than once he had ignored his father when he walked by—though that he didn’t mention to Lily. He would play games of catch with his friends just a few yards away and pretend he didn’t see him. His own father. And why? When he had told another girl about it once, a girl he had liked, she concluded that Nathan was ashamed. “I wasn’t ashamed,” he spat back, as angry at himself for telling her as at the simple-mindedness of her response. “It’s normal for a boy to be ashamed of a father who does nothing but sit on a park bench all day,” the girl had assured him—Shirley was her name; she was married now to Pozniak. “He didn’t do nothing. He worked. All day,” Nathan answered. “Sorting buttons,” Shirley responded, as if that would be cause for shame. As if her own father were a brain surgeon instead of a butcher who was known for the weight he added to each purchase by pressing his pinky—just a little, just a few cents’ worth—on the scale. “Supporting us,” Nathan reminded her, to which Shirley had shrugged, letting the matter drop.

It had not been shame, but something else. How to explain, to understand that the man Nathan saw on the park bench each afternoon seemed to him a stranger in his father’s body, a man with a different life from the one in which Nathan was his son. He was sunk so deep into that other life that he didn’t even
see Nathan. That’s how it seemed, how it felt. And when they sat at the same supper table in the evenings, he never gave any indication he had noticed Nathan in the park just a few hours earlier. Except for once. Nathan remembered it now: an evening meal, Nina and Sol bickering over something, their mother yelling back at them, giving them each a sharp slap. In the ensuing chaos of offended crying and accusatory howls of who started it, his father had looked up from his bowl and met Nathan’s eyes with the clearest and most focused of gazes. It was just the two of them at that moment, Nathan locked into his father’s gaze by the force of it. “That was a good save,” his father said, the calm quiet of his tone cutting through the surrounding noise. Spoon in hand, he had mimed perfectly the overhead catch Nathan had made earlier that day. Then he hunched back over his soup, gone again, for the rest of the meal.

“I had a dream about him the other night,” Nathan said. He almost never remembered his dreams; they dissolved with consciousness. Sometimes, though, fragments lingered like wisps of smoke, wafting through his mind throughout the day.

“What did you dream?” Lily asked.

It started coming back to him, filling in: his father, sitting in sunlight on the top step of their landing. It was spring sunlight—clearer, harsher than the thick, melting light of summer. He was wearing a red and black plaid flannel shirt—Nathan hadn’t seen it in years, hadn’t thought of it once—and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing his strong, muscled forearms. He described his father’s forearms to Lily, the remarkably smooth skin of his inner arms, skin as smooth as a child’s, but with ridges of muscle just beneath. He could feel his father’s inner arm as he described it. He described that to Lily too: the odd sensation he was having—right then,
as they walked together on the mountain, his father dead ten years already—of the soft skin of his father’s inner arm beneath his fingertips.

“They say our deepest memories are in our fingers,” Lily said.

He looked at her.

“I think it’s true,” she said. Sometimes at night, as she lay in bed, her hands felt estranged from her, enlarged, warmer than the rest of her body, alive to sensations to which the rest of her felt numb. It was as if they had a life separate from her, might take wing and fly off without her.

“He was sitting on the top step, whittling,” Nathan said. “He used to whittle toys for us: soldiers for me and Sol, dolls for Nina, spinning tops … He made Nina a horse once, a stallion.”

“A stallion?”

Nathan smiled. “It looked more like one of the old nags who delivered our milk, but that’s what he called it. A stallion.”

Nothing Lily had heard about Joseph Kramer from either of his sons would have led her to imagine a man who would whittle a stallion out of a block of wood for his young daughter.

“My father tried to make me a
dreidel
once,” she said. She smiled. “It didn’t work.”

“What do you mean, it didn’t work?”

“It didn’t spin. You’d give it a nice twist and it would just fall over dead.”

Nathan smiled too. “He wasn’t good with his hands?” Ever since she had told him her father was in import–export, he had imagined a wealthy man with a fancy store who did nothing with his hands but run them over the soft Persian carpets he imported.

“He was very good with his hands; he just couldn’t whittle. He could tell the bark of an oak from a beech with his eyes closed, just from the texture. He taught me when he took me out in his boat.”

“He had a boat?”

“Of course he had a boat. He was a ferryman.”

“But I thought you said …”

“He transported goods for import and export.”

“What sorts of goods?”

“It varied,” she said, “depending on the market.”

“Which market?” he pressed on. He didn’t understand her reluctance to reveal the most basic details of her life before the war.

“Russia,” she said.

“Russia?”

“The Soviet Union. We lived near the border,” she explained. “Our river became the new border after 1920.”

“But … I didn’t realize there was trade with Russia after the revolution. I thought they closed the border.”

“There was trade.”

He waited for more, some detail, explanation.

“You didn’t finish telling me your dream,” she said.

“I did. That was it.”

“You saw your father on the front stoop, whittling, and … what about you? What were you doing?”

“I wasn’t in the dream.”

“You were outside it?”

“That’s right. Looking in. Tell me more about your father’s business.”

“I told you. He had a boat. He brought goods across.” She glanced at him. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m not looking at you any differently than I ever do.”

“He was a ferryman. Just like his father, and his grandfather before him.”

“Except that when his father and grandfather ran their ferries it was legal,” Nathan said, careful to keep any note of censure from his voice.

“Everybody benefited,” she said.

“Wasn’t it dangerous?”

“It was a little risky,” she acknowledged. “Less so when he took me with him.”

“He took you with him?” Was that what she had meant when she said that she worked with him like the son he hadn’t had? What kind of father …? “What if you were caught?”

“I wasn’t going to get caught. They were very well paid not to catch us.”

“But surely not every border guard …”

“There was much more leniency shown for women and children.”

He nodded.

“Don’t look so shocked.”

“I’m not shocked.”

“Disappointed.” As she’d known he would be. Here he’d thought he’d married class, found a bargain in the bin of refugees delivered up by the war, only to discover …

“Not at all.” He was actually relieved, he realized. It was the first information she’d offered that made sense of her secrecy, of the evasiveness that had begun to worry him, to make him wonder what might be hiding in its shadow, but that was now revealed to be nothing more ominous than shame about her origins. He took her hand. “Are you warm enough?”

“Perfectly. It’s the perfect coat, Nathan. Thank you.”

They walked in silence again for a while, their path in the forest now, climbing gradually towards the lookout over the city.

“So, if you closed your eyes and I led you to a tree and placed your hand against it, you could tell me what it was?”

“Try me,” she said. She closed her eyes and immediately became aware of the feel of the path beneath her feet, the areas of spongy softness where layers of rotted leaf had accumulated over years, the harder patches of bare trampled earth, the jutting bits of rock and root that broke through the surface. He stopped walking and placed her open hand against the trunk of a tree. She held her hand without moving it, as if absorbing the bark through her skin.

“Maple,” she said.

“Good guess,” he responded, to which she laughed.

They walked farther, the trail skirting a cliff of exposed rock. She ran her hand along its face as they walked past.

“I suppose you can tell me what that is too.”

“Gabbro,” she said.

He looked at her, surprised.

“Was it nice to see him?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Your father.”

“It was,” he admitted, feeling slightly self-conscious to be talking about his dream as if it were real life.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “I never see anyone.”

“It’s not like I
actually
saw him.”

“My dead don’t come to me,” she said.

“It was just a dream, Lily.”

“There was one time I thought I heard them. It was in the desert. I had gone down there with a man I had met.
An Englishman, on leave. I should never have gone with him, I know … our terrible enemies, the English. Though in Europe they’d been our great friends.” She shrugged. “It was November—”

“Is that how you learned to speak English so well?” Nathan interrupted. “From this … Englishman?”

“No, no. I already knew it. I studied English in gymnasium. I was the very top student.”

“When you weren’t helping your father smuggle?” He heard the sarcasm in his tone and didn’t care. It was jealousy, he knew—just who was this Englishman?