The Imposter Bride (32 page)

“When she came to my store I thought she didn’t know who I was. My relation to Lily Azerov, I mean. I thought she had come only because she had heard about the quality of my
work. By reputation. But I never had such a reputation, I’m sorry to say. If it were strictly a matter of who was thought to be the best jeweller to go to with such a diamond she would have gone to Grinstein. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true.” Ida shrugged. “She came to me because she knew who I was. Elka had told Sol that I had a cousin Lily Azerov, that that’s why we had come to the wedding, and Sol then told her, and she put it together.” She paused again. “Wait here a minute,” she said, as if I were about to run out the door just when someone finally seemed willing to tell me something about my mother.

Ida went into her den and re-emerged with the letter her sister Sonya had written to her about the strange visit from a girl who claimed to be their cousin, a stranger with their cousin’s name who was on her way to marry a lucky bridegroom by the name of Kramer. I couldn’t read it any more than I could read the notebook—the letter was also written in Yiddish—but I had already heard about it from my father, and again I wondered what my mother could have been thinking, going to the cousin of the girl she was claiming to be.

“When she came to my store, she didn’t know about this letter, no one did, but she must have figured out that my sister had written to me. From the fact that I showed up at their wedding. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that this woman with my cousin’s name was now presenting me with a diamond that could well have been in my cousin’s possession at the time of their … encounter. I assumed the worst, I admit it.”

And what was the worst? I wondered, afraid to ask, but just as afraid to let the moment pass. “You think my mother might have … killed her?”

“She told your grandmother that she didn’t, and there’s no reason to disbelieve that.”

She told my grandmother? Bella, but not my father?

“But at the time, that morning in the store, I didn’t know. I knew only that my cousin had disappeared in the war and that this woman had emerged instead.” Bearing her cousin’s name and a rough diamond of the sort that used to pass through her uncle Chaim’s workshop. “What was I to think about your mother’s purpose in my store that morning?”

She looked at me as if I might have the answer to that question.

“I assumed her interests were mercenary. I assumed that she wanted me to cut the diamond so she could turn around and sell it.”

A diamond that my mother had obviously stolen, and probably from Ida’s own relative.

“But I was wrong,” Ida said. “I misunderstood her intentions. I came to realize that after she left. She would not have come to me if she simply wanted to cut the diamond and sell it. She had not survived five years of war only to lose all of her common sense with the arrival of peace.”

Couldn’t she have, though? Weren’t there people who only flourished in times of danger?

“No, she knew who I was and that’s why she came to me. Because of who I was. Because I was the cousin of the girl she was claiming to be. But why? That’s what I wondered in those weeks following her visit. What had she wanted? To see if I intended to expose her? To implicate me in whatever crime she had committed by tempting me with that stone? And it’s an excellent stone, incidentally. A superb stone. I was plenty tempted, believe me. Which just goes to show …” But her voice trailed off, leaving me to draw my own conclusions about what was shown by her temptation to cut a stone that she knew to be excellent as well as stolen from a girl—her own
cousin—who had not survived to reveal the circumstances of the theft and her own death.

“I would not have exposed her. I knew it the moment she stood before me in my store. It was not a decision, so to pretend now that it was is to make me more of a
tzedekah
than I am. It was more … I was afraid, I think, of what might happen if I told her what I knew.”

Afraid of what? I waited.

“All of her poise and her superior, cultivated airs … It was like … the surface of ice you see on a river the first cold morning in late autumn. It looks solid but you know that it’s not. You know that if you put too much pressure on it—any pressure—it will crack.”

Ida paused again. “It was an instinct, that’s all, but then, in the weeks following her visit, it grew reasons like branches on a tree. I wouldn’t expose her because what would be gained by ruining yet one more life? I wouldn’t expose her because who was I to judge her? I wouldn’t expose her because … it went on and on. Who knows? Maybe a part of me hoped that if I didn’t expose her, eventually I would get my hands on that diamond.” Ida allowed herself a small, tight smile at that.

“The point is, her secret was safe with me, and that’s what I went to tell her. I would not ruin her life, I would not destroy her. That’s why I went, I promise you.”

She looked at me as if I had asked her for that promise.

“Why else would I have gone on the day before the eve of Yom Kippur?” she asked me. “We don’t visit each other before the Day of Judgment to cast our own judgments. We don’t go to accuse. We go to beg forgiveness, to repair what can be repaired among our fellow human beings so we ourselves can be forgiven by God.”

Why the religious lecture? I wondered.

“But she wasn’t home.” A shrug now, as if my mother’s absence that day had been fateful in some way.

“It was a beautiful afternoon, very warm. I remember it well. It had been cold earlier that week, just days earlier. I remember it all so well, that fall. It was the fall that Sol and Elka started going out in a serious way. He had taken her to a ball game just days earlier. That coloured man was playing …”

“Jackie Robinson,” I said.

“That’s right. A very big event, winning that ball game. Everybody so excited they practically caused a riot.” She shrugged. “But it was cold out, very cold. Elka held her hands out to me when she came home, so I could feel how cold, and right away I knew. I can’t tell you how I knew—she never told me anything close to her heart, my Elka—but I knew that she loved him, and I knew also, without any doubt, that your uncle Sol would only disappoint her and lead her into misery, because that was just the sort of man he was. But, of course, I was wrong about him too …” Again her voice trailed off.

“So you went to see my mother …”

“On the day before Yom Kippur. The weather had changed again. Indian summer. It was warm on the streetcar. Too warm. I was thirsty by the time I arrived at your grandmother’s. Your mother wasn’t home, but Bella asked me in, offered me a drink. We talked … That was the first time we met, your grandmother and I. The beginning of our friendship.” Ida allowed herself another smile. “Another reason not to expose your mother. Not that my list of reasons mattered, at that point. Your mother thought I was going to expose her. That’s what mattered: what your mother thought were my intentions—and they were never my intentions, I promise you. You
have my solemn vow that I would not have sought to destroy the life she was trying to build. But she thought I would, and that was the pressure.”

Could Ida really believe that? I wondered. Did she really think that had it not been for that fateful visit of hers whose purpose my mother misunderstood, my mother would not have left? And could she possibly be right? Or partly right? Was it my mother’s fear of exposure that drove her away? Did it crack the thin surface of the new life and identity she was trying to build?

“I intended to return after the holiday, but life became busy. The whole world was getting engaged that fall, it seemed—it was the beginning of the so-called baby boom, and it wasn’t just the babies that were booming. Everything was, including my business. Like never before. And the next thing I knew, Sukkos had passed, Simchas Torah …”

“I saw her walk by my store one day. They had moved into their own apartment by then, she and your father. The apartment where you were born. It wasn’t far from here.”

I nodded. I knew exactly where it was.

“It must have been November by then. Cold. She was wearing a beautiful coat, black lamb’s wool, and trimmed in fur. I’m not sure what kind of fur. Expensive. A coat that told the world just how well your father was doing. And it was tight on her already—she was showing by then. Another few weeks and she wouldn’t be able to button that coat over her stomach, I remember thinking. He offered it to Elka after she left, incidentally. Your father. But what would Elka want with a coat like that?”

A coat that would remind everyone of my mother every time they saw it? Is that what Ida meant?

“And socks too, he offered her.”

“Socks?”

“A pair of woollen socks that she had brought with her from Europe. What he thought Elka might want with them I can’t imagine.”

I remembered the pair of old woollen socks I had found in my father’s drawer years earlier. Did he still have them? I wondered.

“But that day, when she walked by my store, she looked like any other young married woman at that time, nicely dressed, her first pregnancy beginning to show, and I thought then that the time to expose her had passed. That she had become Lily Azerov Kramer; that’s what I thought. Not my cousin. I don’t mean that. I mean a new person. And it no longer seemed so suspicious to me. It wasn’t uncommon, after all, for a person to change her name if she had escaped from death. It’s not a custom here, I know, but where we were from, if you recovered from a serious illness or escaped death in some other way, it wasn’t thought to be such a bad idea to change your name. To confuse death—you understand?”

I nodded.

“So when I saw her walking by that day I thought that it could be as simple as that. She had taken someone else’s name at the end of the war. That was all. I didn’t know the circumstances, it was true, but why assume the worst? She’d taken the name of someone who was already dead, her thinking being that death wouldn’t come looking for that name again. Not for many years.

“But I was wrong, of course. It wasn’t that simple. How could it be? A name is not just a sound that our mouths make. It’s an evocation. It’s bound to the life and soul of its bearer in
ways that we don’t fully understand—that’s why we’re forbidden to utter the name of God, why we call him The Name, The Place, our King, our Lord. It’s not just out of respect—you understand? But out of fear of what’s bound to His name, what we might evoke in our utterance of it …”

She paused for a few minutes, then looked at me again.

“I can’t tell you what your mother was or wasn’t thinking when she took my cousin’s name. I’ve thought about it often, believe me. And then, why her pretending went as deep as it did. Were the shocks and losses she suffered so extreme that she really no longer felt like the person she had been before the war? Could your mother really no longer remember what it had felt like to be that person, the person she was before? It can happen, I know. People can be shaken from themselves by shock. But to this degree? I asked myself. Why not, I answered. A human being’s not an egg, after all, carrying her essence from place to place inside a shell. We rely on our surroundings and the people who know us to remind us who we are. You don’t believe me, I know. I see it in your face. You think that who you are is written in stone and that if you were to be torn from your world and flung into another you’d land there the same Ruth Kramer you’ve always been. But you wouldn’t, believe me. I didn’t. Your grandmother didn’t. Your grandfather didn’t, may he rest in peace.”

“But you didn’t become someone else,” I reminded her. “And neither did my grandparents.”

“Not in that way, no.”

Could a person really lose her very sense of self because the world that had formed and reflected that self back to her was destroyed? I wondered. Wasn’t a person’s self something more intrinsic?

“Maybe it wasn’t because of what she lost but what she did,” I said. “Maybe she did something so terrible that she couldn’t recognize the person who did that as herself.”

“That I can’t tell you.”

But could the notebook? I wondered.

“All I know is that after my visit the person she had been started coming back to her. And that person …”

Who was she? I waited to hear.

“Maybe she felt she didn’t have a right to you. To any of it … your father’s love, his name, his family, the new apartment, the expensive coat …”

Was she a murderer, after all? I wondered. A traitor? One of those Jews who had joined forces with the murderers in some way to save their own skins? I reached for the notebook again.

“There are no answers in there,” Ida said. “I also thought there might be. When your father brought it to me—he brought it to me after she left.”

I nodded. I knew that.

“I thought maybe I would find out what had happened to my family. Not one of them has ever been heard from again, you know.”

I knew.

“It’s as if God followed my steps through this life with an eraser in his hand.” She paused. “So when your father brought me this … You can imagine.” She paused again. “But there was nothing, nothing and more nothing. Not a word about my mother, my sisters and brothers, except at the very beginning, that very first dream. After that, just page after page of … well, you’ve heard it now. So what was I supposed to do with it?”

She looked at me as if I might know.

“The terrible thing is, I never liked my cousin. She was just a little girl when I knew her, but still I didn’t like her. You can see a person’s character even as a child, and hers I didn’t like. Maybe it was jealousy, bitterness on my part—I’m not proud of it, you understand—but it’s the truth And as soon as I started to read it I remembered that, just how much I had always disliked her.” She shook her head. In regret, perhaps. Or shame that what had endured over time and unimaginable tragedy was her dislike, her jealousy, her near hatred of her cousin who had died. “I gave it back to him. I had to. What kind of guardian could I be?”

She was still looking at me; I felt an answer was called for. “Do you think we should have it translated?”

“What for?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe because that’s what she would have wanted? If she was writing for an audience …”