Harrowing

by S. E. Amadis

  I struggled out of the subway station to the street. A cool wind whistled past me, harsh, unseasonal. Almost bearing the ice of winter again even though it was late May. My feet twisted under me. I stumbled ahead, grazed against a street lamp covered with mould and staples and wrenched-out bits of papers. I wrapped my arms around the pole to steady myself. If anyone was looking at me at this moment, for sure they would think I was drunk.

  And I was drunk. Drunk with grief. Drunk with worry. Drunk with anxiety about our future. My future and Romeo’s.

  I pulled myself upright haughtily. I wasn’t going to teeter about and make a fool of myself in front of everyone. I tucked my blouse carelessly into the waistband of my dress pants, tugged on the hem of my jacket and straightened the jacket over me. Holding my head up high, I strode confidently down Finch Avenue towards the cemetery.

  It was a long walk, but I figured I more than needed the fresh air. Halfway down the street, my foot rolled over a stone, nearly pitching me to the ground again. I grabbed at thin air, cursing, then realized perhaps it was a sign from heaven. A reminder. It had been several years since I’d returned to the cemetery, and I’d almost forgotten about the stone.

  I picked the stone up and dropped it into my pocket.

  “Thank you, Mama,” I whispered.

  I stalked down the street in a hurry. I couldn’t remember when the cemetery closed, if it did close. I didn’t want to find myself locked out, for once that I passed down that way.

  Storm clouds mingled with the darkness of the approaching night when I finally reached the sturdy stone wall that guarded the entrance to Beth Tzedec Memorial Park. I heaved a sigh of relief to see the gates swinging wide open, welcoming me with comforting arms, and I careened forward as though I were a crazed mourner who actually expected a re-encounter with my deceased loved one alive and kicking among the graves.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance. I tried to remember when was the last time I’d come here. Romeo was a baby, I recalled, and I’d brought him to visit his grandmother’s grave, trying to push a path across the lawn with his stroller. And now Romeo was ten. I’d neglected my mother for almost a decade. Although I didn’t feel as if I’d abandoned her at all. After all I talked with her every day, often even said a prayer with her – with her, not for her, for I felt as if she accompanied me whenever I tried to speak with God alone in my bedroom – before going to sleep at night.

  I strolled solemnly down the vast avenues of the burial ground, trying to remember exactly where my mother’s grave was located. My feet retraced the steps of their own accord, kinaesthetic memory taking over where my conscious brain flunked out. Down to about the middle of the terrain and a faint angling towards the left. Just opposite the second star to the right. Opposite and on the other side of the universe from Paradise.

  I found my mother’s tombstone easily after that. Just one ordinary, square slab flanked by dozens of identical white markers, anonymous and forgotten except for the humble stones perched atop them that indicated that someone still remembered and had taken the time to pass by. It was a Jewish custom: instead of bringing flowers, we left small stones.

  My mother’s tomb was practically the only one bare of stones. Her only daughter, I was the sole member of her family still remaining in the city. And I’d abandoned her for ten years.

  I settled on the grass next to my mother’s headstone and just stared at the faint writing for a while without saying a word. “Fayge Adler, beloved wife and mother | We will never forget you”, proclaimed the engraving in shades of limpid grey. And just above it, in writing as clean and crisp, her name in Hebrew: “Rachel Leah bat Chaim”. Then her dates of birth and death. Hers had been a short life, only forty-five years. Only twenty in which to enjoy the company of her only child.

  I curled up on the ground next to my mother’s grave, wrapped my hands about my legs and rocked myself back and forth. Then I rested my chin against my knees and tried to sob, but the tears wouldn’t come anymore. Now that I had the freedom to cry as I wished, just bawl away as much as I pleased, the tears simply wouldn’t flow.

  I heaved a deep sigh.

  “You don’t know how hard it’s been, Mama,” I began. My voice echoed in the empty field and disappeared into the breeze. “Or maybe you do. I remember you telling me how hard it had been for you and Dad, starting out anew in a foreign country.”

  The youngest and only living child of Holocaust survivors who had settled in France after the war, the teenaged Fayge Biederman followed Dov Adler, an American university student spending a year in France, to the States after the untimely death of her parents in a car accident. She had no one else to turn to. No aunts, no cousins, no grandparents. She was all alone in the world, and by a fortuitous turn of fate Dov, my father, just happened to be there, by her side, in her most vulnerable moment. He promised to take good care of her.

  With nowhere else to go and nothing better to do, she agreed. The pair arrived in New York on Independence Day of 1974. For the first few years, they drifted aimlessly, wandering from city to city, even stumbling across borderlines. They eventually settled and rented a cheap, rundown apartment in the city where one day I would arrive, squalling and protesting, into the world.

  Dov, my father, dabbled in the current hippie sub-culture of Flower Children and acid trips. Marijuana and LSD occupied most of his time while all alone and locked up in their minuscule apartment, my mother did her best to run a decent household and perform the way loving housewives were supposed to, with the memory of her own parents as models. She cleaned up after my father’s multiple drunken orgies and swept the traces of drugs underneath the beds when his relatives came to visit. In one unfortunate incident, moved by the urge to support her husband through thick and thin, she followed him with fierce loyalty when he tottered, drunk and pissed out of his mind one sunny Saturday morning, into the Holy Blossom Temple, a Reform Shul, to mock the devoted followers congregated there.

  They were both kicked out on their butts and soon became notorious in the city. It was mortifying for her. It went against the grain of everything she believed in. But in her mind, supporting her husband, showing the world that she had his back, came first and foremost before all other considerations.

  People scoffed at this unlikely bond formed between the daughter of Holocaust survivors who followed traditional customs, raised in post-war France, and the irresponsible and frivolous Flower Child who flirted with pseudo-magic, mysticism and Transcendental Meditation. No one believed their union would last more than a day but somehow, they made it through, thanks mainly to my mother’s stoic patience.

  Even after settling down with a job and a career, my father’s wild parties with sexy young things and plenty of booze didn’t come to an end. My mother would sit at home with infinite patience, waiting for him to arrive and still cleaning up his messes for him. Calling in sick for him at his company when he couldn’t get out of bed due to a massive hangover. Inviting his boss to dinner so he wouldn’t lose his job and just generally picking up all the pieces.

  One day it all became too much for her. Hunching down in her kitchen, she tied on her prim white apron and baked two loaves of braided bread, challot, for the Holy Shabat. When evening arrived, all alone in her darkening living-room, she lit some candles and waited for Dov to return from his latest drunken rampage.

  At last, around midnight, my father crawled in sheepishly through the doorway on his hands and knees. He had scarcely enough sense to stay on his feet, but my mother hauled him up anyways and plonked him rudely onto a chair at the table. She fixed him with a fiery stare.

  Then she began to sing.

  “Shalom Aleichem malachei ha-sharit, Malachei Elyon,” she intoned almost in a whisper. “Mi-melech malche ha-melachim Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu.”

  The haunting, melancholy melody whispered in my mother’s sweet soprano wrenched my father out of his senseless daze. His eyes widened in astonishment and he truly paid attention to his wife for the first tim
e since he’d brought her over the sea.

  “When I was a child, not a single week went by that we didn’t sing this on Friday night,” she began, settling on a chair next to my father and lacing her fingers together on the table in front of her. “We weren’t religious, but this was important to us. Mama told me, when they were in the ghetto, even when all else was falling apart and they were literally starving to death, they still tried to keep the Shabat. They would scrimp and save the whole week long in order to collect enough flour to bake two challot for the family. And every time they sang this song, they knew, they just knew, perhaps it would be the final time. Their last Shabat together.

  “And as they expected, one week it was indeed the last time. The very last time the six of them would gather and sing together around the table. The following Monday, all the residents of the ghetto were deported on cattle trains and sent to Auschwitz.

  “Mama was the only member of her family who survived. Her father and two brothers were torn from her arms as soon as they arrived. And soon afterwards, her mother succumbed to illness. Only she and her sister, Batya, remained. Batya died of typhoid on January third, 1945. Mama was the only one left.

  “And now this is how you defile the memory of these noble, humble people, and all that they stood for, by drinking yourself into a hellhole every day, Dov? Smoking weed, taking all those things that give you hallucinations that you call flying trips? How easy it is to see that you are indeed nothing but a crass and vulgar American after all. One of those pampered people who suffered nothing during the war.”

  My mother banged her fist on the table. My father jumped, in spite of the obvious numbing of his nerves.

  “We-we had the Depression,” he murmured, cowed and unconvincing.

  “The Depression, bah. That wasn’t suffering.” My mother slammed her hands palm down on the table. “I will tell you what is suffering, Dov Adler. I will tell you what is a flying trip. A flying trip is being squeezed into a tiny cattle car with no room to even sit down, and no place to pee. If you wanted to pee you peed on your shoes. That was what my mama did. That was what everyone did. For two days and nights. The air was so fetid, many people died. Yes, died. Just from the bad air alone.

  “When Mama survived, she vowed she would make babies. Lots of babies, in memory of all those who’d died, and to prove to the Nazis that they would never, ever defeat us. That life goes on no matter what. That you could take a person’s family away from him. His photos, his livelihood, his home and even his life. But you couldn’t take away his memory. You couldn’t kill everyone who would remember him. And you couldn’t kill an entire race with all its dreams, its memories, its memorials and everything that has ever been sacred to them or meant anything to these people. Someone would still survive. Something would still remain.

  “After the war, my mother married and tried to make babies. They both wanted children more than anything. But my mother was broken. Something inside her had broken, and she kept losing her babies. She lost three baby girls, all of them named Batya for her sister, because she was the one who’d survived the longest.

  “At last, more than ten years later, I came into the world in a slum in Paris, the blessed, longed-for child they’d been praying for for years. My mother wanted to call me Batya as well, but she didn’t dare. She was afraid that if she did, I’d share the same fate as all those other unfortunate little Batyas. So she called me Fayge, ‘so I could fly free and not be contained by steel bars’, she always explained when I asked her.

  “I have tried to keep this memory sacred, Dov. I’ve tried to be the wife to you that Mama was to Papa. But it just isn’t working. Mama and Papa worked hard. They worked very hard. They had to. Life wasn’t easy after the war. And it isn’t easy for me, today, either. And I just can’t take it anymore.”

  She broke one of the loaves in half and handed a piece to Dov.

  “Unless you change, Dov Adler, this will be the last thing I ever make for you.”

  She got to her feet and picked up a shabby suitcase concealed underneath the table.

  “Good-bye, Dov.”

  She approached the front door. Wild-eyed, my father looked around himself, saw my mother as if beholding her for the first time in his life. As he’d often repeated to me, he explained that at that moment, she was the most beautiful person in the world to him. She appeared like an angel, with a halo of bright light about her golden head. He couldn’t lose her. So he leapt onto her, pinned her arms by her sides and knocked her down with a humungous kiss. Her suitcase plunked to the floor and she melted into his arms.

  I like to believe that I was conceived that night. I wouldn’t know if that was exactly when it happened, but approximately nine months later I, Annasuya Rose Biederman Adler – thus named in honour of my father’s rollicking, Flower Power days – arrived in the world, full of protests and screams on a dreary autumn afternoon, already hating my life and all the suffering that was still to follow. Shrieking with rage and fury as if somehow I had already divined that what awaited me was going to be anything but fun and games.

  Chapter 21

  Now I pulled myself into a tight ball next to Fayge Biederman Adler’s grave and just rocked myself for a while.

  “You don’t know how hard it’s been, Mama,” I repeated, swaying back and forth in front of the tombstone. “Raising Romeo all by myself. Trying to hold a job down and juggle work and daycare and all those expenses as well. The times we didn’t have anything to eat, and I had to choose between buying formula for Romeo or lunch for me. The times daycare was closed, and I had to tote Romeo along to work with me and risk losing my job. And then later, when Romeo was older, sometimes I had to leave him all alone at home while I went to work, because I didn’t have enough money to pay a babysitter. I’d spend the whole day on tenterhooks, biting my nails, terrified something would happen to Romeo, or the police would find out and take Romeo away from me.”

  I glanced down at my nails. They were still bitten and dog-eared in spite of the perpetually chipping lacquer.

  “Yes, I know it was hard for you. Starting a new life from scratch, without any family to help you out. But at least you had Daddy. And Daddy had a job. At least you could stay at home and devote all your time to me. You never had to leave me alone so you could put food on the table, and worry the whole day long that something could happen to me. And I didn’t have any family to help me out either. You know Daddy left me, don’t you? You know he just abandoned me and flew away to Australia and forgot all about me. Just left me alone with a baby. Without a partner. Just like that.

  “I love him but, fuck it, Mama. He left me at the time when I needed him the most.”

  I waited to hear a sound, a sighing on the wind, the fluttering of birds or the gossamer trail of butterfly wings. Something, anything. Any sign that could indicate to me that my mother had heard me, that she was near.

  But there was nothing.

  “You said you’d watch over me always, Mama,” I whispered, and reached out to stroke the cold, hard stone.

  I remembered that time, several years ago now, when, driven mad by grief and the shock of losing my mother so unexpectedly, I’d crawled out of my habitual shell of scepticism, reached out and contacted a famous medium. I’d heard that he had come to town all the way from California and was offering a limited number of sessions. There were only a handful of places available with Sergei Gozzoli, and I’d dashed him a desperate email. Thousands had clamoured for that treasured hour with him but somehow, as if moved by a miracle, my email was one of the chosen few.

  I was certain it was the result of my mother’s loving, capable hands, pulling invisible strings behind the veil and moving heaven and earth so I could speak with her one last time. Either that, or my guardian angels were on my side for once.

  Damian, my partner at that time, glowered over me, hostile and suspicious, as I ostensibly prepared for work that morning and bundled one-year-old Romeo into his stroller for his trip to the daycare
.

  “Why are you bringing the stroller?” Damian growled. “The daycare’s just down the street. You can’t carry him that short distance?”

  I shook my head, and he grabbed my arm fiercely in an iron grip.

  “Are you that flaccid?” he spat out, squeezing my arm without mercy. “Don’t got no muscles in there or what? You telling me you’re a damn flat bloody sissy?”

  I pulled away from him without answering and busied myself with preparing Romeo’s things. Damian’s resounding slap across my cheek stunned me out of my reverie.

  “Answer when I speak to you, damn it!” he screamed. “Dunno what the hell I’m doing with such a lazy fat cow like you, woman.”

  I smacked my purse over the handles of the pushchair, letting it dangle in any old way, and dragged Romeo out the door as fast as his baby legs would carry him.

  “It’s my stroller. I can take it whenever I want,” I hissed, defiant.

  Damian made a beeline for the door as I slammed it into his face. Without waiting to see what he would do next, I dashed down the stairs huffing with pushchair and toddler in tow, hailing towards the entryway as if fire goaded at my heels, panting so hard I could scarcely gulp the air down fast enough as I ran. I only dared to stop once we were out on the sidewalk.

  At that time, we were living with Damian in his apartment in the west end on Bloor Street, in one of those typical brick affairs that housed a store on the ground floor and a series of residences above it, just around the corner from Dundas West station. With relief, I hurried Romeo through the swinging glass doors of the station, past the tacky adjoining McDonald’s with its omnipresent beggars, out of sight of Damian’s possible prying eyes.

  Normally I left Romeo at daycare in our neighbourhood before going to work and stopped by to pick him up during my lunch break. Then back to daycare again while I finished my afternoon shift. But today I decided to bring Romeo with me, lest I arrived too late at the daycare to pick him up, since I didn’t know how long the session with Sergei Gozzoli would last. Of course Damian knew nothing about my plans. I could just imagine his disdainful face, lips curled up in a sneer of contempt, if he’d known what I was up to.