The Imposter Bride (33 page)

“What she wanted was to live.”

“I know, but …”

“What but?”

She had wanted to live. There was no but. “I wonder if my mother was trying to make it up to her in some way.”

“Make what up to her?”

“That she died and my mother lived.”

“I don’t think your mother was trying to make anything up to her.”

“What about the notebook, then? Why did my mother spend so much time reading it?” And when Ida didn’t answer: “Because your cousin would have wanted someone to read it.”

“Maybe so. I can’t tell you what your mother felt about my cousin, what she felt she did or didn’t owe her.”

“Maybe that’s why she bought that other notebook,” I continued. “The empty one. Maybe she was planning to translate the notebook so other people could read it. So it wouldn’t all be for nothing—your cousin writing it.”

“I didn’t know there was another notebook,” Ida said.

“My mother bought it, but then she never wrote anything in it.”

I remembered how I had once thought that maybe she had written in it using invisible ink, and that that was why she’d left it behind. Because she knew someday I’d figure out the solution to making the ink visible, to deciphering what she had written and left for me to find. I told Ida that, about the various attempts I had made to reveal the ink that was invisible to the naked eye, admitting that even when I got older, I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t really empty. I knew how ridiculous that sounded, so I hastened to explain. “There were a few times in high school that I tried to write in it. Not as a diary.” I didn’t want Ida to think I would have presumed to use such a beautiful journal for something as mundane as the fact that Charles Blumenthal was by far the cutest boy I had ever met and I could only hope he liked me as much as I liked him, or that Carrie was being such a bitch that I didn’t know why I was still her friend. I had my own journal for the daily trivialities of my own life, a dime-store purchase with cheap lined paper and a faux-vinyl cover imprinted with an image of a young woman bent over an open diary, pen in hand, long hair falling around her head like a curtain. “For poetry and things,” I explained.

Ida nodded.

“But I couldn’t write in it.”

I expected Ida’s impatience then. Even Carrie had been impatient with me when I’d told her that. “What do you mean
you can’t write in it?” she’d asked. But Ida fixed an interested eye on me and asked me what I meant, so I found myself telling her how it had felt wrong from the start, from the moment I had told my father I wanted it. “You mean for your own use?” he had asked. “Not as a diary,” I’d explained. “For something special. For poetry.” My father had thought about it, then he said he didn’t see why not, but he was hesitant; I could hear it in his tone. He couldn’t think of any reason why the book should sit unused, but neither was he comfortable with me removing it from the shelf and filling its pages with my own writing.

“I took it anyway,” I said to Ida. I removed it from its long-held place and stowed it in the drawer of my night table. “But then I couldn’t bring myself to write in it.” Every evening I would sit with my pen poised over the page. Every evening I had just the poem that I thought was perfect but I couldn’t bring myself to inscribe it. “It was as if the pages were already filled,” I concluded to Ida.

Ida nodded as if I had just said something eminently reasonable and rational.

“When I was a young woman I worked as a diamond cutter,” she said. “You know that, yes?”

I nodded.

“I started at the bottom, as a polisher. It was considered routine work, tedious, and in some ways it was, but there was always a point with each stone I handled that I would come to know if it had been realized in the way it should have been. I can’t explain how I knew it, I just did. I mentioned it to one of the girls on the bench with me and she laughed at me. She told one of the young men in the shop, my eldest cousin, Theo, whom she liked. She was hoping to impress Theo with
her tidbit, to bring herself to his attention at my expense, but her telling had the opposite effect. He was a skilled diamond cutter, the most talented in the shop. It was he who cleaved the stones. Do you know what that means?”

I nodded.

“No, you don’t. How could you? A rough diamond is nothing to look at,” she went on to explain. “Its beauty is there, but it’s unrealized. It’s waiting to be released—but how? That’s the question that faces the one who’s going to cleave it. As he holds a rough stone in his hand, he has to put himself inside that stone, to walk around inside it, to understand its inner landscape. He has to detect the direction of the grain, which may sound straightforward, but it’s not. Diamonds aren’t like trees, where what you see reflects what is. That’s why the word ‘truth’ in English is derived from ‘tree.’ Did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“Oh yes,” she assured me. “With diamonds, though, the grain can often be the exact opposite of what it seems at first, and if that’s the case, if the cleaver gets it wrong, makes his V in the wrong direction and gives that tap …” She mimed a quick tapping motion. “It’s over.”

“What’s over?”

“The diamond. It’s finished. It shatters to pieces on the table.”

“But I thought diamonds are the hardest substance on earth.”

She waved her hand dismissively. “Hard, but not tough, not at all. You want tough you’re talking nephrite jade. It’s netted with fibrous layers like a web of roots. You can scarcely hurt it with a hammer. But a diamond? Hard, yes, but vulnerable if struck wrong. So there’s no room for error.” She looked at me. “You think I’m exaggerating.”

“I don’t,” I protested.

“When Joseph Asscher cleaved the Cullinan—this was back in 1908—he had to have a doctor and two nurses in attendance. When he cleaved it, the release of tension, the nervous exhaustion … it was too much. He collapsed immediately. They had to put him in the hospital for three months.” She smiled. “But he had gotten it right.”

This from Ida, who supposedly disapproved of tendencies towards the dramatic.

“So when my co-worker went running to tell my cousin about my oddness—what she thought was my oddness—it worked against her, as I said. He brushed her aside and noticed me for the first time. Noticed me not as his poor cousin who had fallen so far down in the world, but as a kindred spirit. He began to talk to me about his work. He would show me the rough diamonds, have me hold them, examine them, and we would talk about them, how to release their brilliance, how to transform them into what they were meant to be.”

She paused.

“That’s how I ended up in Montreal, of course, but that’s a different story.”

“Because you turned out to be better than him?”

“What, better? I couldn’t hold a candle to him. Because we fell in love with each other. Two cousins. And even if we hadn’t been cousins … who was I? A lowly worker in his father’s shop. A girl with no money. I was not exactly what my uncle Chaim had in mind for his son.”

“But I thought …”

“Never mind Elka’s stories. I’m telling you now what happened. And that what you think about your mother’s diary is right. Not that it’s been written in yet, but that what’s meant
to be written in it has already been determined. That’s why you couldn’t write your poems in it. Because that’s not what that book is meant to hold. When you discover what it is … that’s when the words will flow from your pen. Not before.”

I was so tired last night that I fell asleep as soon as it was dark. We’d had a bad day. Two bad days. It’s the mud. We’ve left the path we were on, and with it the hard surface of summer that’s held us until now. With each step we sink a little deeper; each step costs us twice the effort of the one before. It’s as if the earth itself can no longer bear to have us walk upon it. And yet it also doesn’t want to let us go. It sucks at us; we have to fight it to free our feet from its clutch. We curse it, this place that doesn’t want us on its surface but doesn’t want to let us go, this earth that will turn itself into another element just to spite us
.

When I woke the darkness was moving. Andre was sitting up beside me, alert. At first I thought it was the earth itself that had woken me, the cursed earth turning to liquid all around us, but it was the air this time that was disturbed. Distant mortar, I thought at first—sometimes its vibration wakes me before I’m aware of its sound—but it was a disturbance of a different sort
.

Listen, Andre whispered when he saw I was awake
.

Then I heard it too: the fall migration, a thousand wings beating overhead
.

CHAPTER 15

L
ily returned home one October afternoon to find the door unlocked, the kitchen in disarray, but no sign of her mother-in-law anywhere. A raw brisket sat on the kitchen table, unwrapped but still on the butcher’s paper; a handful of carrots had been thrown into the roasting pan beside it. On the stove, a pan full of chopped onions waited to be fried. It looked like Bella had been in a flurry of cooking when she realized she was missing an ingredient and had then run out to buy it.

Lily stood by the counter, by one of Bella’s interrupted tasks: a half-sliced potato on the cutting board. She looked at the fan of slices spreading out from the lump that had spawned them and wondered what could have been so pressing that Bella would just put down her knife and run out like that, mid-task.

The weather had changed again; a return to summer after the cold that had frosted lawns and banisters just two days earlier. The kitchen was stuffy. Lily glanced at the window to see if it was open and saw that there was someone on the fire
escape. Her heart contracted and her grip tightened around the handle of the chopping knife that was now in her hand, though she did not remember picking it up. Her fingers ran along the blade of the knife, unconsciously, instinctively, testing it for sharpness. She moved from the counter to the window, saw that it was her mother-in-law sitting on the stairs.

“Are you all right?” she asked through the open window. Her heart was still pounding but her voice was calm.

“Ah, you’re home,” Bella said.

Lily had never seen Bella out on the fire escape before that moment, would not have thought her agile enough to step through the window, would certainly not have thought her interested in something as frivolous as enjoying the last rays of sun on a beautiful autumn day, which was what she appeared to be doing.

“I couldn’t spend another minute in the kitchen on such a fine day,” Bella said, which Lily heard as criticism, Bella’s way of pointing out that it was the day before the eve of Yom Kippur, and a pre-fast meal had to be prepared, and who did Lily think had shopped for it and done most of the prep work today?

“Can I bring you out a cup of tea?” Lily asked.

There was a moment’s hesitation. It was an unexpected offer, unprecedented.

“That would be nice,” Bella allowed.

Lily replaced the knife beside the potato on the cutting board, put the kettle on.

“Do you know where to find everything?” Bella called through the window.

Lily ignored the implication that she would not know how to find teacups in the kitchen that had been her home
for almost three months now. She made two cups of tea and placed them on a tray, which she passed through the open window onto the landing, then she stepped through the window and joined her mother-in-law on the stairs. The air was as warm as July.

“It’s beautiful, no?” Bella asked.

Indian summer, Nathan had called it that morning, this interlude that wasn’t a season so much as a spell.

“
Babye Leto
,” Lily said to Bella, preferring the Russian to the English. Women’s Summer. It carried with it the poignancy of this last bloom of warmth before winter, a poignancy not unlike that of the last, late blooming of a woman’s beauty before its final ruin.

“
Babye Leto
,” Bella repeated with a smile. It had been years since she’d heard the term, years since she had even thought of it. It brought to mind the hard-working peasant women finally getting a chance to relax and enjoy a few days of summer, this last bit of warmth coming as it did after the harvest, after the first frost, at the end of a long summer of unrelenting work. “We used to go to see my grandparents this time of year,” she said, slipping into Yiddish now. “We would take a cart as far as the river, then a boat. Often it was already cold, but sometimes we had days like this, and we’d see the people sitting out as we floated past, enjoying the sunshine, the warmth. We’d be eating our apples …” She could taste the sweet, crispy flesh of the apples her mother would pack for the trip, feel the smooth, waxy dome of one in her hand. “We’d wave …”

“Which river?” Lily asked.

“The Dnieper.”

Lily nodded.

“You know the Dnieper?”

“Of course.” Lily thought of the river she used to go out on with her father, that snake of a river with its intricate web of tributaries and side streams. It was not as wide or as grand as the Dnieper. She never saw anyone as they floated along. Quite often they made their crossings at night. “The apples … they were Antonovs?”

Bella smiled. “What they call apples here …”

“They’re still better than the ones in Palestine.”

“In Palestine they don’t have the climate to grow apples. What an apple wants is a day like this, warmth and sun, to bring out its sweetness, followed by a cold night, but not so cold that it should freeze. That’s what makes it perfect, what puts a bit of sour in the sweet.”

Lily remembered the plum she and Nathan had shared in the first moments of their marriage, that familiar edge of tartness, the shock of it in her mouth. “Can you get Antonovs here, then?”

“Here they don’t have the soil.”

“Where I lived we didn’t have the soil either.”

“So how do you know Antonovs?”

“My father would bring them in from time to time.”

It was the first mention she’d made to Bella of her father, of anyone from her family. “So, your father—was his … specialty … fruit, then?”