The Imposter Bride (5 page)

“I can go,” Elka offered.

“Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “When I invite you for coffee I don’t send you out to buy your own milk. Will you be all right with the baby for a few minutes?”

(She may not have said it exactly like that—she was from Europe and had only been in Montreal a year by then. But she also might have, because she was an expert at languages, even English. On that point everyone in my family agreed.)

Elka was a little nervous to be left alone with me. She had never been alone with a baby so young before. With any baby, actually. “You’ll never have that problem,” Elka assured me. Because of Jeffrey, she meant. I’d been helping her take care of him since he was born. “She’ll be fine,” Lily assured her. Me, she meant. “I just fed her before you got here.” Elka nodded and said that she too would be fine. And so my mother put on her hat with the veil that covered half her face, pulled on the long gloves without which she never ventured out into the sun, tucked her purse under her arm and left.

And at first everything was fine. I slept. Elka waited. She
was sure it wouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes or so. But fifteen minutes passed, then a half-hour. I was still sleeping, but Elka was beginning to wonder what was keeping my mother. Maybe there was a really long lineup at the store, Elka told herself. Maybe there were a few other things my mother had to get once she was out. But finally, when a whole hour had passed, Elka knew something was wrong. She called her mother, who did not say
Don’t worry
. She said she would be right over, though it took her an entire half-hour to close up her jewellery shop and make her way over to the apartment, by which time I was awake and crying and Elka was crying too and my mother had still not returned with her quart of milk.

My father was called. The police. The apartment began filling up with family, friends and neighbours, every one of whom knew that a young mother who did not return to her baby after going out to buy a quart of milk was a young mother lying dead in a ditch or abducted by a maniac or pinned under the wheels of a streetcar.

In the meantime I was still crying, so Ida Pearl went to the kitchen to see if there was any formula. She opened the fridge and it was then that she saw the full quart of milk, as well as several bottles of formula arranged neatly behind it, a finding she reported to the police officer, who didn’t have time to listen to a busybody’s meddlings when there was a young mother missing and a possible maniac on the loose.

“Excuse me,” Ida Pearl said again to the investigating officer, who was asking Elka about any suspicious-looking characters she might have noticed lurking around the street or building when she arrived. It could well have been me, Elka thought, sobbing now at the thought of her own near miss, her
close encounter with the dark force that had brushed past her just moments before sweeping Lily into its deadly embrace. “Excuse me,” Ida Pearl interrupted yet again, quite a bit louder now, and she drew the police officer into the kitchen towards the fridge, which she opened. The police officer still didn’t see why Ida had interrupted him, so she pointed to the full quart of milk that stood right in front of the bottles of pre-measured formula. A different line of investigative inquiry was immediately launched, one that led, not much later, to the bedroom, where resting on my father’s pillow was a note.
Forgive me. Yours, Lily
.

A FAIRY TALE
. That’s what that story had always felt like to me. Now, though, it became the only story I wanted to hear. And the old versions no longer satisfied. What did she look like? I wanted to know. What did she say? Tell me again. Why did she leave? What do you mean she didn’t say, you don’t know for sure? What do you know
not
for sure? Who was the note to? How could everyone be so certain she wouldn’t come back?

CHAPTER 3

L
ily sat on the bed and listened. It was three o’clock on a hot summer day and it was quiet, as quiet as it ever got before midnight. She and Nathan had been married almost three weeks now and were still living with Bella and Sol in the family apartment on Clark Street. “It’s just for a few months,” Nathan promised her. Soon they’d have a place of their own. She smiled as she thought of that promise; he repeated it every night. “I don’t mind living here,” she responded every time he said it. “It’s your poor brother who won’t relax until you remove me from his home.” At which Nathan too would smile.

Sol was so ashamed of what he had done that he barely showed his face. He ate his evening meal out and then stayed out until late at night, creeping in under the cover of darkness to sleep on the cot behind the piano in the living room that had become a bedroom for both him and his mother while Nathan and Lily occupied the real bedroom. “He’ll get over it,” Nathan would say every night about Sol.

Through the open window she could hear drifts of people’s voices, children calling, the clanging of the streetcar from a few blocks away. From inside the apartment: nothing, though Bella was home. Bella would be in the kitchen this time of day reading the afternoon paper over coffee or tea. Lily knew she should join her. She knew she should get up off her bed, open the door and join her mother-in-law in the kitchen, but she couldn’t force herself to take those actions. She pulled the notebook from under the mattress where she kept it and began to read.

October 1943

I begin with a dream. I’m running through a city. It’s a city I don’t know. I’m running along streets of stone, trapped between the high stone walls that rise on either side of the street. It’s not the white stone of Jerusalem that cousin Sonya wrote about in her letters, white stone tinged pink by the sun that’s kissed it for centuries, by the blood spilt for it and absorbed, over centuries, as its own. No, it’s the cold, grey stone of Europe that entraps me. Sun-starved stone under a low, grey sky. It will have my blood, but refuse to absorb it. My blood will puddle on its surface until a dog laps it up, until marching boots carry it to another place of butchery
.

I’m running for my life through a nameless city of Europe, running through a city of death. I’m running for my life, but death is gaining. I hear its boots behind me, its song, a drinking song. I turn blindly down an alley, a blind alley I see too late
.
Alongside me, two high walls of stone, and ahead a wall, also stone, with a heavy wooden door. The door is weathered grey. It matches the streets, the walls, the sky of the city. The markings on it are familiar, the scratched indentations to the left of the keyhole. I throw myself against it but it doesn’t yield. I hurl myself against the unyielding door as death approaches, its marching boots, its laughing, singing voice. I press my cheek against the door, and then it opens
.

Have I died, then? I don’t know. Can a person die in her dream and then wake the next morning to recall it? They were upon me, the door wouldn’t yield, and then it did. To Aunt Lottie’s courtyard in Krakow, where my mother would take me every summer, the clucking chicks and summer warmth, the notes of a piano filtering through the leafy cover
.

Is that what awaits me? A fragrant courtyard and summer warmth? The scent of ripening fruit and drifting fragments of music? If yes, then I fear I have no hope of survival. For why would I choose this, this fear and cold and hunger and mud? Why this pain, this futile task, if the summer courtyard of my childhood awaits me when I fail?

Lily closed the notebook as she heard footsteps on the front stairs. She had already started to slip it under the mattress when she realized the steps weren’t Nathan’s. They were too heavy, too slow. Mr. Hausner from upstairs. He stopped briefly on the landing outside the Kramer apartment, then continued up the
final flight, where she would hear his tread again later, pacing over her head half the night, back and forth, back and forth, more of a shuffle than a walk. She reopened the girl’s notebook, leafed past the pages she had already read, had read so often already since she had found it—taken it—that the images in them seemed to rise from her own memory.

Who am I? A mound of mud in an autumn field. A pile of leaves to the side of a forest path. I tuck my hands beneath me as you pass, press my face into the earth. I’m a blur of motion out of the far corner of your eye, utter stillness by the time you fully turn your gaze. In your cities I’m a rat scurrying beneath the surface of your life. I hide in your sewers. I infect your dreams with pestilence. Vermin, you call me. Insect. Cur. Swine. Once I was a girl
.

Who are you? he asked me. He had uncovered me as I slept, pushed aside the layers of mud and leaves and lies to reveal me
.

He scraped the last of the leaves from between the blades of my shoulders, swept the crumbs of soil from my neck. I knew his touch, the brush of his fingers on my skin. I turned from the earth to face him and my entire field of vision filled with light, the dreadful day, the indifferent Polish sky. In the centre was a shadow, an absence in the shape of him, his broad shoulders, his curls in silhouette against the sky. He held something towards me. A potato? A piece of bread? I reached out to take it but my fingers closed on my own empty fist. I
reached farther and my entire hand disappeared, my arm
.

A crack had appeared in the Polish day, a drawing back of the world along a ragged seam. I narrowed my eyes to make it out, this parting in the shape of him, this opening to someplace else
.

Get up, he said. Quick
.

Lily sat on the edge of the bed as she read. The room was warm—stuffy, Nathan would complain when he got home from work—but she enjoyed the warmth on her shoulders, bare except for the straps of her slip. She’d been reading for a while, had lost track of how long. She closed the notebook as she heard footsteps again, lighter and quicker than Mr. Hausner’s. She slid the notebook underneath the mattress, touched up her lipstick in the mirror, fixed her hair, put on her dress.

“Hello,” she said to her mother-in-law as she appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Hello,” Bella answered.

Both women paused then, Lily in the entrance to the kitchen, Bella at the counter. It was the first they had seen of each other since breakfast.

“I’ve made hamburgers for supper,” Bella said. An attempt at conversation that sounded—to both—like accusation.

“I should have helped you. I’m sorry. I started to prepare something before I lay down for my nap, but then …”

When Bella opened the icebox earlier she had seen, on the lower shelf, the full extent of the supper Lily had prepared: a plate of sliced cucumber, three hard-boiled eggs, also sliced and sprinkled with paprika, a bowl of blueberries with sour cream.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Lily said. “I was suddenly so tired.”

It was the same thing that came over her every day. The moment Lily finished the minimum allotment of chores and shopping that she deemed necessary to fulfill what was expected of her, she retreated behind the closed door of the bedroom. And to do what, exactly? Bella wondered. To nap, she said. To hide, it seemed to Bella. And from what? Or rather, from whom, more to the point, since Bella was the only other person in the house all day. But Bella was trying not to take it personally, trying not to see the closed bedroom door as a slap in her face, as a rejection of her overtures, of her offered friendship, kinship.

“You feel better now?” Bella asked.

Lily looked at her as if she had already lost track of the conversation they were having. She hadn’t, but how could she explain the feeling of strangeness that overwhelmed her when she was out of her room, trying to interact as a person normally would when buying bread in a store or talking to her mother-in-law in the kitchen or going about any other business of everyday life? She couldn’t, not even to herself. It was as if the world outside her bedroom was a stilted play she’d walked into and couldn’t walk out of again, a dream she couldn’t wake from, where everything was menacing in an intangible, slightly surreal way. She hadn’t felt this way during the war, when the dangers that she faced were real. Had she felt it then, she would not have survived, she thought; she would have given herself away with the sort of anxious glance or gesture that had been fatal to so many. Why now, then? she wondered. Was it a normal response to what she’d seen and been through, to the difficulties of a new marriage to a man
she didn’t know, a new life that could not yet be expected to feel like her own? Perhaps, but nothing about her existence felt normal. She was beginning to think the problem might lie elsewhere, in the very life she was trying to make, the life of another that was stolen, not really hers, not ever meant to be her own.

“Since your nap …”

Now she really had lost track of the conversation. “Yes,” she said automatically. “Thank you.” She glanced at the hamburgers that were sitting on the counter. She could no longer stand the sight of raw meat. The very thought of it in her mouth, the dripping fat, the charred, ground flesh … If she had to eat it she would vomit, she was certain.

It was grief, Bella knew, watching Lily. It had nothing to do with not liking Bella. It was a shocked sort of grief that demanded time, space, patience and understanding. And a firm hand in equal measure. “You might feel better if you got out more,” Bella said. “It might help you to—”

“Thank you,” Lily said again automatically, not really meaning to end the conversation with those two curt words, but ending it nonetheless.

And with that ending—abrupt, imposed, as insulting to Bella as the closed door of the bedroom, as her husband’s closed face had been day after day, night after night for years—Bella surged again with a familiar, useless anger. And just beneath that anger, the vaguer, more uncomfortable unease she’d felt since the first moments she’d watched Nathan and Lily together. It was there almost constantly, the feeling: when she awoke in the night to the sounds of her sleeping household, Mr. Hausner’s pacing overhead; when she was out shopping, questioning the butcher about the true age of the chicken he
claimed was last spring’s, or commenting to the fishmonger about the cloudiness of a particular carp’s eyes; when she was standing in the peace of her own kitchen shaping raw, minced meat into hamburger patties. Unease so heavy it felt more and more like dread. It was not that she felt she knew the specific disaster that was coming, the specific form her son’s pain would take. It was more a mother’s vague but certain dread as she feels the rumbling of the approaching truck that is still invisible, around a bend, but already bearing down on the little boy who is running happily out onto the street after the ball.