Fugitive Pieces Read online

  Over the years, Naomi’s non-sequiturs continued to catch me off-guard like a sunshower. In the produce section of the supermarket, I reaped the benefits of being married to a non-fiction editor. Choosing lettuce I learned that Chopin’s own “Funeral March” was played for him when he died. While figuring out our taxes I was informed that “Baa baa black sheep” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” share the same melody. I’ve learned many things while shaving or bundling the newspapers. “After World War One, a German chemist tried to extract gold from sea water to help Germany repay its war debt. He’d already extracted nitrogen from the air to make explosives. Speaking of war, did you know Amelia Earhart nursed veterans in Toronto in 1918? And speaking of nursing, Escher had to have emergency surgery when he was in Toronto to give a lecture.”

  For several months Naomi worked on a series on municipal affairs.

  “Tell me what’s happening in the city.”

  In bed, in her favourite grey T-shirt shapeless as an amoeba, she seduced me with details. Lawyers, architects, bureaucrats; from her descriptions I knew them all. From their tastes in books and music, to awkward incidents in public and private places — all the minutiae of prominent lives—I came to an irregular and intimate knowledge of the city. Cities are built on compromising encounters, on shared affections for certain foods, on chance meetings in indoor pools. By the third week she could tell me, with a meaningful look, of a certain politician’s penchant for antique glass and I’d understand the new parking bylaws. Naomi told these stories like a courtier. Not as flabby, loose-lipped gossip, but with the cool acknowledgement that she was revealing the inner mechanisms of civic power. And sometimes, when she stopped talking, I rose to her with a pang of expectation like a taste crushed open in my mouth.

  I reciprocated by feeding her bedtime stories: weather reports. When snow is ready to avalanche, the slightest disturbance will trigger the disaster: the jump of a rabbit, a sneeze, a shout. A faithful mascot waited three days by a mound of snow until someone investigated; they excavated the bewildered postman of Zurs who survived because most of freshly fallen snow is air.

  In Russia, a tornado dug up a treasure and rained a thousand silver kopecks into the streets of a village.

  A freight train was lifted from the tracks and placed down again, facing the other direction.

  Once in a while, I admit, I made things up. Naomi could always tell. “Name your source, name your source!” she’d say, beating me with a pillow, dangling my glasses by the stem.

  We used to play a game in the car. Naomi knew so many songs, she claimed she could match a lullaby or a ballad to anyone. One winter day I asked Naomi what songs she thought of when she thought of my parents. She answered almost immediately.

  “For both your parents, ‘Night.’ Yes, ‘Night.’“

  I looked at her. She was flustered that I didn’t understand; wary.

  “Well… because they heard Liuba Levitska sing it in the ghetto.”

  I glared at her. She sighed.

  “Ben, keep your eyes on the road—Liuba Levitska. Your mother said she had a beautiful coloratura, that she was a real singer. She’d sung Violetta in La Traviata when she was twenty-one. In Yiddish¡ She gave children singing lessons in the ghetto. She taught them ‘Tsvey Taybelech’ —’Two Little Doves,’ and soon everyone was singing it. Someone offered to hide her outside the walls, but she wouldn’t leave her mother. They were both killed there…. Halfway through the war, she sang at a memorial concert in the ghetto for those who had already died. There was a big argument because a man complained that it was wrong to have a concert in a cemetery. But your mother said your father told him that there wasn’t anything more holy than hearing Liuba Levitska’s ‘Night.’“

  “And what song would you choose for Jakob Beer?”

  Again Naomi answered too quickly, as if she’d decided long before I asked.

  “Oh, ‘Moorsoldaten,’ definitely the ‘Peat Bog Soldiers.’ Not only because it’s about bogs … but because it was the first song ever written in a concentration camp, in Borgermoor. I mentioned it to him when we met at Maurice’s. Of course he’d heard of it. The Nazis didn’t allow prisoners to sing anything except Nazi marching songs while they cut the peat, so it was real rebellion to invent a song of their own. It spread to all the camps. ‘Everywhere we look, bog and moorland stare … but winter cannot reign forever.’“

  We drove on for a few minutes in gloomy silence. That February day was particularly wet, and the roads were a mess. I remembered how my classmates and I used to squeeze the slush between our boots, draining the water, leaving little molehills of white ice. We worked industriously until the schoolyard was a miniature range of mountains.

  “It’s the only thing you can do for them,” Naomi said.

  “What is? For who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Naomi.”

  My wife pulled at the fingers of her wool gloves and pushed them on again. She opened the window a crack, let in a whiff of snow, then closed it.

  “The only thing you can do for the dead is to sing to them. The hymn, the miroloy, the kaddish. In the ghettos, when a child died, the mother sang a lullaby. Because there was nothing else she could offer of her self, of her body. She made it up, a song of comfort, mentioning all the child’s favourite toys. And these lullabies were overheard and passed along and, generations later, that little song is all that’s left to tell us ofthat child ….”

  Just before sleep Naomi experimented until she found the right position wrapped against me in some way. She moved about, adjusted limbs, searched for the right angles, and like a penguin under the ice, found the best breathing hole between bodies and blankets. She nuzzled, adjusted, nuzzled again, then slept with the resolve of an explorer out to conquer a dream landscape. Often she was in exactly the same position when she woke.

  Sometimes looking at Naomi, the sweetness of her ways—settling into bed with her work, a little dish of licorice allsorts beside her, wearing her crazy misshapen T-shirt, such childlike contentment in her face—tightened my heart. I pushed away her papers and lay on top of the covers, on top of her. “What’s wrong little bear? What’s wrong…”

  My mother taught me that the extra second it takes to say goodbye— always a kiss—even if she were simply rushing to the corner for milk or to the mailbox—was never misspent. Naomi loved this habit in me, for the plain reason one often finds a lover’s habits charming: she didn’t understand its origin.

  What would I do without her? I began to be afraid. So I picked fights with her over anything. Over saying kaddish for my parents. And that’s when she was driven to an edge: “You want to punish me for my happy childhood, well screw you, screw your stupid self-pity!”

  Because she was right, Naomi was sorry for having said those words. All candour eventually makes us sorry. I loved her, my warrior who swept aside the war in fits of frustration with a single “screw you.” Even Naomi, who thinks love has an answer for everything, knows that that’s the real response to history. She knows as well as I that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you’re silted up and can’t move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you most.

  When my parents came to Toronto, they saw that most of their fellow immigrants settled in the same downtown district: a rough square of streets from Spadina to Bathurst, Dundas to College, with waves of the more established rippling northward towards Bloor Street. My father would not make the same mistake. “They wouldn’t even have the trouble of rounding us up.”

  Instead, my parents moved to Weston, a borough that was quite rural and separate from downtown. They took out a large mortgage on a small house by the Humber River.

  Our neighbours soon understood my parents wanted privacy. My mother nodded a hello as she scurried in and out. My father parked as near as he could to the back door, which fac
ed out onto the river, so he could avoid the neighbour’s dog. Our major possessions were the piano and a car in decline. My mother’s pride was her garden, which she arranged so the roses could climb the back wall of the house.

  I loved the river, though my five-year-old explorations were held in close check by my mother; a barrage of clucks from the kitchen window if I even started to take off my shoes. Except for spring, the Humber was lazy, willows trailed the current. On summer nights, the bank became one long living room. The water was speckled with porch lights. People wandered along it after dinner, children lay on their lawns listening to the water and waiting for the Big Dipper to appear. I watched from my bedroom window, too young to stay out. The night river was the colour of a magnet. I heard the muffled thump of a tennis ball in an old stocking against a wall and the faint chant of the girl next door: “A sailor went to sea sea sea, to see what he could see see see …” Except for the occasional slapping of a mosquito, the occasional shout of a child in a game that always seemed dusky far, the summer river was a muted string. It emanated twilight; everyone grew quiet around it.

  My parents hoped that, in Weston, God might overlook them.

  One fall day, it would not stop raining. By two in the afternoon it was already dark. I’d spent the day playing inside; my favourite place in the house was the realm under the kitchen table, because from there I had a comforting view of my mother’s bottom half as she went about her domestic duties. This enclosed space was most frequently transformed into a high-velocity vehicle, rocket-powered, though when my father wasn’t home I also set the piano stool on its side and swivelled the wooden seat as a sailing ship’s wheel. My adventures were always ingenious schemes to save my parents from enemies; spacemen who were soldiers.

  That evening, just after supper—we were still at the table— a neighbour pounded at the door. He came to tell us that the river was rising and that if we knew what was good for us we’d get out soon. My father slammed the door in his face. He paced, washing his hands in the air with rage.

  The banging that awakened me was the piano bobbing against the ceiling beneath my bedroom. I woke to see my parents standing by my bed. Branches smacked against the roof. It wasn’t until the water had sloshed against the second-storey windows that my father agreed to abandon the house.

  My mother tied me in a sheet to the chimney. The rain hit; needles into my face. I couldn’t breathe for the rain, gulping water in mid-air. Strange lights pierced the wind. Icy tar, my river was unrecognizable; black, endlessly wide, a torrent of flying objects. A night planet of water.

  With ropes, a ladder, and brute strength, we were hauled in. As if released from the grasp of searchlights from the shore, when our house plunged into darkness, it was swept, like every other on the street, fast downstream.

  We were fortunate. Our house was not one of the ones that floated away with its inhabitants still trapped inside. From high ground I saw erratic beams of light bouncing inside upper floors as neighbours tried to climb to their roofs. One by one the flashlights went dark.

  Shouts flared distantly across the river, though nothing could be seen in the pelting blackness.

  Hurricane Hazel moved northeast, breaking dams, bridges, and roads, the wind tearing up power lines easily as a hand plucking a stray thread from a sleeve. In other parts of the city, people opened their front doors to waist-high water, just in time to see an invisible driver backing their floating car out of the driveway. Others suffered no more than a flooded basement and months of eating surprise food because the paper labels had been soaked off the tins in their pantries. In still other parts of the city, people slept undisturbed through the night and read about the hurricane of October 15, 1954, in the morning paper.

  Our entire street disappeared. Within days, the river, again calm, carried on peacefully as if nothing had happened. Along the edges of the floodplain, dogs and cats were tangled in the trees. Alien bonfires burned away debris. Where once neighbours strolled in the evenings, they now wandered the new banks looking for remnants of personal possessions. Again, one might say my parents were fortunate, for they didn’t lose the family silverware or important letters or heirlooms however humble. They had already lost those things.

  The government distributed restitution payments to those whose houses had been washed away. It was only after my parents died that I discovered they hadn’t touched the money They must have been afraid that someday the authorities would ask for it back. My parents didn’t want to leave me with a debt.

  My father took on as many pupils as he could find. We vanished into a cubbyhole of an apartment nearer to the music conservatory. My father preferred living in an apartment building, because “all the front doors look alike.” My mother was frightened whenever it rained, but she was happy to be living high up and also that there were no trees too close to the building to threaten our safety.

  When I was a teenager I asked my mother why we hadn’t left the house sooner.

  “They banged at the door and shouted at us to leave. For your father, that was the worst.”

  She peered from the kitchen into the hallway to see where my father was, and then, with her hands cupped around my ear, whispered: “Who dares to believe he will be saved twice?”

  That my mother took Naomi into her heart chafed me, a jealousy that grew intense. Like my father, I was being thrust out. The first time I was startled to attention by their familiarity, I was waiting for Naomi to finish scrubbing a pot. I had twisted the dish towel into a crown, a trick my mother had taught me. Offhand, innocently, Naomi said: “Just like your cousin Minna.”

  My mother held kitchen conferences with Naomi, in the guise of discussing ingredients or dress patterns, while I sat mute with my father in the living room, scanning the bookcases and shelves of phonograph records for the umpteenth time. How my mother must have pressed Naomi’s hand, held on to her, conspired with her. Naomi emerging from the kitchen smiling with a recipe for honey cake. All the loving attention she lavished on my parents, the care so characteristic of Naomi—ever-considerate, generous to a fault—I began to read as insinuation, manipulation, a play of power. Later I even distrusted her visits to my parents’ graves, her gifts of flowers and stones of prayer. As if Naomi were buying me a guiltless conscience the way a man buys jewellery for his mistress. Why do you do it, why?—thinking, what good does it do? She’d always say the same thing, a reply that made me ashamed, lowering her head like a felon: “Because I loved them.”

  How could anyone simply love my parents? How could an untrained eye see past my father’s silence, his crabbed rigidity and rage, his despair; past the diminished piano teacher to the once elegant student conductor in Warsaw? JHow could an unskilled heart see past my birdlike mother’s paisley dresses and cut-glass brooches to the passionate woman who kept a pair of elbow-length, white leather opera gloves wrapped in scented tissue in her drawer, and a postcard collection in a shoebox in her cupboard, who cooked to remember generations, who gardened on her balcony so she could have fresh flowers without my father’s disapproval? By what right did Naomi earn their trust?

  I began to recall the brusque affection she evoked in my father when she spoke of her own father’s love for music. She was so blatant with them¡ For a long while I had no idea how much this hurt me. In fact, I’d even come to believe I liked this familiarity, this family feeling Naomi brought to that empty apartment. She was blunt and sweet, a crayon, when everything before her had been written in blood. She blundered in with her openness, her Canadian goodwill, with a seeming obliviousness to the fine lines of pain, the tenderly held bitterness, the mesh of collusions, the ornate restrictions. And while I now see that nothing could have pried open my father or melted him—even at the end of his life—I began to believe he had shared himself somehow with Naomi. Of course he had, but they hadn’t been the sort of confidants I’d suspected. A foreigner, a stranger in our midst, Naomi entered the powder-box apartment and instead of blowing our furtiveness sky-high ha
d simply brought flowers, sat on an ottoman, accepted our ways, never overstepping her position. Decorous, patient, an impeccable guest. What I had mistaken for confidentiality from my father was simply the relief of a man who realizes he won’t have to give up his silence. It’s the ease Naomi’s grace encourages in everyone. She will honour privacy to the end.

  People ask, do you dream in colour? But I wonder, is there sound in your dreams? My dreams are silent. I watch my father lean over the table to kiss my mother, she’s too frail to sit up long. I think: Don’t worry, I’ll comb your hair, I’ll carry you from the bed, I’ll help you— and realize she doesn’t know me.

  In dreams, my father’s face, with the expression he wore on Sundays listening to music, contorts; a reflection in the still surface of a lake smashed by a stone. In dreams I can’t stop his disintegration.

  Since his death, I’ve come to respect my father’s caches of food around the house as evidence of his ingenuity, his self-perception. It’s not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

  In the back of my mother’s closet was a small suitcase, the contents of which my mother revised as I grew. This small suitcase, which I feared as a child, now represents to me the enormity of their self-control.

  My mother was suddenly old. She had turned herself inside out; her skin hid behind her bones. I noticed the pull of fabric over her curved back, her thin hair over her scalp. She looked as if she might close up, clatter like a folding chair. All that was left of her were the parts that would make a terrifying sound—skeleton, eyeglasses, teeth. Yet at the same time as she was disappearing, she seemed to become more than her body. And that’s when I realized how deeply Naomi’s daughterly attentions were injuring me, each small jar of scented hand lotion, each bottle of perfume, each nightgown. Not to mention the distress evoked by the futility of objects that outlast us.