The Imposter Bride (35 page)

“You think it was illness that killed her?”

“It could have been.”

“But you’re not certain.”

“No.” Lily said. “But a person wouldn’t have to have killed her to rob her.”

The girl had been robbed, it was true, Lily thought, but not everything had been taken. The two diamonds, yes, the two polished diamonds were gone, but not the identity card, the notebook, the last diamond. And why not? Why had he left them?

“There was a stone on her—a diamond. The one I brought to Ida.”

Why had Ida come here today? Lily wondered again. To unmask her? But as who? To accuse her? But of what?

“It was rough. Unpolished.” Without value, Ida had told her. “That’s the only reason he left it behind.”

“He?”

“The thief. And her ID card was also still on her. Which is more difficult to explain.” She looked at Bella. “As the Germans retreated, a Jewish ID acquired value. Anyone would know that. Anyone would know that it could open certain doors for the right customer.” She was still looking at Bella, wasn’t sure if Bella understood. “A random thief would have taken it,” she explained.

“So … it wasn’t a random thief?”

“It wasn’t. No.”

“You know the man who robbed her, then?”

“I do,” Lily said.

“It was … your … comrade?”

“It was,” Lily said. “Andre.”

“Andre,” Bella repeated. The man the girl had trusted to take her to safety.

“He didn’t kill her,” Lily said.

“But he left her,” Bella said, and Lily didn’t disagree. “And he left you the diamond,” Bella said. The worthless diamond. “For your payment.”

Her payment for a job uncompleted, a job for which no payment was due and for which no amount of repayment would ever suffice.

“And the ID,” Lily said.

“For you to sell.”

“For me to use,” Lily said. “I was afraid of the Russians. They had already arrested my father when they took over in ‘39. We went to bed one night as respected citizens and woke up enemies of the people. They took him away. Andre knew I was afraid of being caught by them—it was the Soviets who were liberating Poland. Of being repatriated. To them. So he left me the ID.”

“A thoughtful man.”

“He was trying to get rid of me.”

Bella looked at her.

“He wasn’t just my comrade.”

“You … cared for him?”

“Very much. But he didn’t care for me quite as much, it seems. He betrayed me with her. It’s all there. In the notebook.”

“What notebook?”

“The girl had a notebook, and he left that for me too. I thought at first he had left it simply because it had no value to him, the ramblings of a girl who’d served her purpose—I’m sorry to be so crude. But I realize now that he left it for a reason. He left it so I could read with my own eyes how he’d betrayed me. So I wouldn’t try to follow him, I suppose.”

“Follow him where?” asked Bella.

“Into Russia. The Soviet Union. That’s where he wanted to live. It’s the place he dreamed of—he was of a different class from me. For me there would be no opportunities there, just the opposite. But for him? Why wouldn’t he dream of a society like that, where his origins wouldn’t always block the path ahead?”

The tide had turned by then, and it was time to turn with it. It was time to take what could be taken to fuel a future. Which is exactly what he had done, Lily thought. He had taken what he had needed. And he had left the rest behind.

“He was a butcher’s son. And illegitimate to boot. My parents almost killed me when I brought him home. That they would have worked so hard, only to have me marry someone so clearly beneath us in status, education, manner. They thought it was my little rebellion, I guess, but it wasn’t. It was love. It was—”

“You were married to him?”

“I still am, I suppose.”

She could have said no, Bella thought, but she didn’t. Because she still felt married to him, the first husband, the one she obviously still loved though he had betrayed her with another, though he was neither worthy of her nor decent, though he—

“He didn’t kill Ida’s cousin,” Lily said.

“And you know that for a fact?”

“Not for a fact, no, but she looked peaceful.” She had looked like her youngest sister had in sleep. “Would she have looked peaceful had she been murdered at the hands of the man she loved?”

The sun had dipped by then behind the houses across the alley. They were sitting entirely in shadow, though it was warm shadow, pleasant on the skin.

“I don’t deny that her death was convenient for me.” He had left it for her, the ID that he had freed for her, the ID of the girl with whom he’d betrayed her, with its place of birth so far from the Soviet sphere, its name with an attached history so different from her own family’s. His payment to be rid of her, she had come to think. His insurance that she wouldn’t try to follow him. “Does that mean I caused it?”

Bella didn’t answer. She was trying to understand what her daughter-in-law was telling her, what it really meant to have survived the destruction of her entire world only to be betrayed by the last person standing, the person who perhaps mattered most to her. And what was the scope of the betrayal? Lily didn’t seem to know, was afraid to know, perhaps. The love between them, yes, their marriage … but what beyond?

“I don’t think she suffered in the end,” Lily said.

“Maybe not,” Bella answered. The only comfort she could offer. “And what was her name?” she asked. The girl whose final payment was the ID card that proved convenient to someone else.

“Lily Azerov.”

“Ah …” An exhalation more than statement or comment.

They said nothing more for a while, sat in silence in the deepening dusk.

“And your name?” Bella asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters.”

Soon, very soon, Nathan would be home. It would be time to go inside, get supper on the table.

“Yanna,” she said.

“Yanna,” Bella repeated.

How long had it been since she had said her own name? How long since she had heard it? “Yanna Marissa,” she murmured. She closed her eyes to be alone with all it carried.

CHAPTER 16

B
ella died in September 1972. It was early in the month. The whole family was gathered at Sol and Elka’s to watch the first game of the Soviet–Canada hockey series, a contest that we expected to be brutal and sweet, more demonstration than contest, really. We would show the Soviets how the game is played.

I was five months pregnant with my daughter, Sophie, at the time and felt so much movement within me throughout the game that I was convinced I was carrying a boy. We would name him Phil, I thought, after Phil Esposito, who scored for Canada within the first minute of play. As I looked at Reuben, though, I knew that in the matter of naming our children, as in so many other aspects of our life together, tradition would rule.

“I’m not feeling well,” Bella said at one point in the second period.

“None of us are,” Sol said. The Soviets had pulled ahead by then and were outskating and outshooting as well as outscoring us.

Bella went to my old bedroom to lie down, and when Sol went upstairs after the game to tell her the disastrous final score, she was dead.

She was seventy-seven when she died, and had seemingly been in good health until the end of the first period of that hockey game, but at the
shiva
Ida told us Bella hadn’t been feeling well the last months of her life, had been finding it an effort to get her shopping done, to make herself a cup of coffee in the morning. She had been afraid that one morning she simply wouldn’t have the strength to get up at all, would not even be able to pick up the phone to call anyone, so Ida had been calling her every morning.

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“How would you?” Ida answered, and I wasn’t sure if she was accusing me of being a selfish, non-attentive granddaughter or acknowledging that Bella was always someone who had kept her troubles to herself.

“She loved roses,” the rabbi said at one point in the eulogy, which I also hadn’t known, but then, who didn’t like roses? It seemed an oddly generic type of detail to put into a eulogy, one that blurred Bella into a fuzzier, more Hallmark version of herself, rather than bringing her more sharply into focus. I wondered if there was list of safe, generic details that someone had compiled so that rabbis and other clergy could choose from it when writing eulogies for people they barely knew, but when I said that aloud, Ida Pearl shook her head.

“I’m the one who told him.”

On summer evenings she and Bella would often walk around the neighbourhood admiring the roses in their neighbours’ gardens, she told me. Bella liked the older varieties that hadn’t given up their scent for the sake of a more intricate layering
of petals. She thought that showy roses with no sweetness to their petals were like the shaved, deodorized women that Canada produced.

“She told you that?”

“You think I’m making it up?”

“I never really knew her,” I said.

“But you loved her,” Ida answered, and again I wasn’t sure if she meant that as accusation or comfort. Was it less important or more important to know someone than to love them?

Bella left me her candlesticks, an enamel butterfly pin that I had never seen her wear and a sealed envelope with my name on it.

She had left envelopes for each of her grandchildren. Jeffrey tore his open immediately. I watched his face as he read it, how full of feeling it was, feeling he tried to make light of.

“So now I know what she really thought of me,” he said.

The rest of us saved our letters for when we could read them in private.

My dear Ruthie
, I read when I got home that evening. Her voice was so clear in my mind that it was hard to believe I would never hear it again. It was a voice soft and heavy with the Yiddish she had spoken before she learned English. She addressed me as a granddaughter, but appealed to me as a mother. The birth of my first child was still a few months away, so it seemed Bella had expected to live longer than she had, long enough to see me become a mother. She appealed to my own understanding as a mother that there are times when you don’t know the best thing to do to help your children, the children in this case being me and my father. She told me about the conversation she had had with my mother on the back stairs of the apartment on Clark Street that warm
afternoon on the eve of Yom Kippur in the autumn of 1946. She told me about the life my mother had lived before, and of the husband she had loved and still loved three months into her marriage to my father, a man who had betrayed her and then possibly murdered the girl with whom he had betrayed her, the girl—Ida’s own cousin—whose name my mother then bore out of Europe. She told me my mother’s real name and how the person my mother had been re-emerged in the telling of it—
Right before my eyes, like the chicks I used to watch chipping through their shells
—and how once Yanna Marissa emerged from the outer shell that she had taken on, Bella knew she would stand up and walk away.
She had to
, Bella wrote.
How could she not? How could she stay when she was no longer the person your father had married and no longer the person who had married your father, and when I knew and Ida knew, but your father she hadn’t told?

The way a thing begins is how it continues, my father often said. What begins in deception continues in deception. I knew he believed that, but would it really have been too late three months into their marriage for my mother to correct the deception with which that marriage had begun? Could they really not have made a clean start had she wanted to, given the circumstances of her life at that time, the reality of where and what she had just come from? They could have, I thought. Had she wanted to.

What Bella hadn’t known was that my mother was pregnant at the time. She would have left immediately after that conversation on the stairs if she hadn’t been, Bella thought.
She would have left that night, or within days, and the fact that she didn’t was a credit to her. She didn’t have to stay. She could have left at any point, taking you with her in her belly
.
But she didn’t, and why? That’s what I’ve had to ask myself. Why did she stay when, in her heart, she was already gone? Because she had morals, your mother, despite everything that had happened to her and what she’d seen and been party to. She had morals and in her heart she was good. She knew you’d be better off with us than wherever she was going and so she left you. To be better off. That was her gift to you, to leave you with a family she knew would love you and raise you as you needed. And you were her gift to us
.

It was a nice spin on it, I thought, but I couldn’t really buy it. If I had been a box of chocolates, yes. Women gave chocolates as gifts. We gave pretty objects, flowers, books … but we didn’t give our babies. As atonement, then? Could that be what Bella really meant, but she didn’t want to come right out and say that my mother’s role in the death of Ida’s cousin might have made her feel she had to offer her own baby as atonement? Possibly. But I couldn’t buy that either. It had a neatness to its logic that human emotion didn’t obey.

As if sensing the turn of my thoughts, my own unborn baby stirred inside me. I rested my hand on her as I read further.

I should have told your father what she’d told me. Not right away. I don’t mean right away. She had taken me into her confidence and I’m not a person who breaks another’s confidence. And I felt sympathy for her. More than she ever knew. I think she may have thought I didn’t
.

There it was, then: Bella’s confession of her part in driving my mother away. Everyone in my family thought there was something they had done or hadn’t done, I’d come to realize. Some failing, a discomfort with her that they couldn’t hide. Ida most of all, but all of them, right down to Sol, who had rejected my mother at the very outset of the new life on which
she was trying to embark. Bella was probably telling the truth when she said she felt a sympathy for my mother. When she sensed that my mother wouldn’t stay—couldn’t stay, Bella stressed—she probably really did hope that my mother would be able to make a new life for herself somewhere else. But she was probably also relieved that that new life would not be lived in the core of Bella’s own family. It was a relief that she would not have been able to help but convey, and that then would have compounded the reasons for that young woman to be unable to stay. In Bella’s mind, in any case.