Finally they arrived in the basement of some official building. First she was blindfolded, then, without any preamble, she was put on the machine. She didn’t know it was the machine then; she merely knew her fate was catching up with her. Someone placed her on a cot, attached what she later realized were electrodes to her mouth, and pushed a button. A fire, a howling, started in her mouth. She fell into the noise headlong, forgetting her name, forgetting her face. The plague had carried off her family in Europe thirty years before; it finally remembered to come back for her. She was being punished for surviving.
Later on she found out that all the prisoners were given the machine on their arrival to rattle them into submission. Routine. Then to business. At the beginning the conversations went like this:
“Where is your son?”
“I don’t know.”
A sharp slap across the face.
“How can I help you if you don’t cooperate? We don’t want to hurt him. We just want to speak to him about his subversive activities.”
“He has no subversive activities. He’s a musician. He writes songs.”
“Songs? Propaganda that describes us as animals. Lies that give comfort to the enemy.”
“Students are your enemies?”
“Your son is young. Maybe he fell in with a bad crowd. We understand all that. We don’t want to hurt him. Where is he?”
“Out of your reach, Mr. Interrogator. Nowhere you can find him.”
The fist smashed her mouth. That stubborn mouth. Her interrogator, once interested in her son’s whereabouts, now enjoyed torturing her for her own shortcomings: her uncowed demeanor, her Jewishness, her stubborn mouth that refused obedience. An uncontrollable mouth. Not that she didn’t want to control it, only it was directly attached to her brain and her brain she couldn’t control. With the result that her tongue, no matter how she manoeuvred it, succeeded in inflaming her interrogator to heights of sadistic rage. What was worse for an old woman — sitting in pyjamas on the wet floor of a cell, praying the scorpions wouldn’t find her, or sitting in the interrogator’s chair, her only human contact slamming his fist into the side of her ribs, searching for something she could not give him: herself?
After some weeks, when Goldie lay filthy on the stone floor, her pyjamas soiled from the remnants of bodily functions, her interrogator grew bolder. When fetching her from her cell, he neglected to blindfold her. She now saw he was fat, with short greasy hair. He was ageless, sexless, she would not recognize him on the street. She allowed herself a fleeting moment of hope before coming to a halt in the room. Seeing it for the first time, she was perversely satisfied with its shabbiness — it could have been a converted kitchen. She smiled to herself, surprised that she was able. She was being fried in an old kitchen. The smell was damp, musty, like long ago fried fish.
“This amuses you?”
Goldie startled at this German-accented Spanish. She twisted her head toward the source but found the figure in shadow.
“Jorge, the old whore finds her situation amusing. We must show her the seriousness of her position.”
The faceless voice was German; she would hear it in her dreams long after the danger was over. Her mother, her father, her brothers, aunts, cousins, grandparents had all marched into the maw of history because of a German voice. The guttural rasps in the throat still had the power to terrorize her, the deceptively rounded vowels that could pierce a heart.
They placed her on a cot. The fat interrogator attached electrodes to her mouth with clumsy fingers. The anxiety was not on her account, she realized, but resided in the shadows with the faceless German who had, no doubt, given instructions.
The arrogant voice begins:
“Jewish cow, is it not true that you and your son are part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over Patagonia?”
Even his Spanish sounds German.
“We know everything, whore. We even know the name chosen for the new homeland: the Republic of Andinia. Does that surprise you? What is your son’s role in the conspiracy?”
She hesitates.
Then someone pushes a button somewhere and the fire starts in her mouth. She no longer knows who she is, she no longer cares. She can’t stop shaking, even when they tire of this recreation. Goldie never knows whose finger actually pushes the button, but she’s convinced it’s the German whose voice fills her dreams.
“Excuse me, lady.”
The memory of pain, the need to escape from it, brought Goldie back to the Bathurst Street bus, still on her way to the doctor’s.
“Excuse me, lady.”
More students had boarded, a thicket of bodies manoeuvring around her. A dark, heavy man with angry eyes was heading toward her and she knew they’d found her. He was a tall man for whom she, all five-foot-one of her, would be candy. The words in her head conquered time and space to land in his mouth. We will get you to talk, Jewish whore.
In a second, Goldie pushed her way roughly through some students.
“Well pardon us, lady.”
Standing on the step, feeling the kidnapper’s breath on the back of her neck, she pulled the cord continuously. It chimed every few seconds.
“Okay, lady, we get the message,” one kid said. “Maybe she has to go to the bathroom.”
When the bus finally came to a stop a block above College Street, Goldie hurled herself out the door and began to run. If only she hadn’t worn these heels. She dashed across College Street. She’d run like this in her nightmares, aching from fear, past eyes and eyes and more eyes, in shoes that wouldn’t stay on. She could hardly breathe now after two blocks. Blisters had formed on the heels of both feet. Danger lurked behind lampposts, window blinds, in the most quiescent of eyes. She would never be safe. She stumbled once, twice, finally through the blur of her exhaustion she turned to search for her pursuer. No one.
She stopped. The overcast sky hung low over rooftops, cast shadows on the street. Like a loosenecked owl, she scanned in all directions at once to check for danger. The old houses whispered their secrets, their paint in shreds, their rails studded with rust. I will follow you till you drop. I will get you one day. I am always there.
So she was spared another day. She had surprised him and escaped. At least she had reached College Street. Goldie limped up to the cement island to wait for the streetcar. If she hadn’t been so absorbed with the streetcar approaching in the murky distance, Goldie would, no doubt, have noticed the swarthy little man step up beside her on the island.
When she finally decided she was standing in the right place to go east on College, she turned, startled at the unexpected proximity. How had this one slipped through her defences so easily? The intruder was disguised as an Italian labourer in jeans and heavy plaid shirt, carrying a lunch pail big enough for an unassembled machine gun. How stupid did they think she was? He could have a half dozen guns in there, or knives. And handcuffs, they would need handcuffs. He had dark greasy hair like the other, but his skin was coarse and red as if he worked outside. They were so clever about these things; there was nothing they wouldn’t do to fool her.
Glaring at him produced no reaction. He looked back, but blankly. These were confrontations she would rather have avoided, but she had to defend herself.
“Stupid they must think I am,” she addressed the little man finally. “Stupid and blind.”
The man blinked, then smiled with brown crooked teeth. “You ‘a trouble, lady?”
“Me you don’t fool. I know they send you for to get me. I know their dirty tricks.”
The man looked around, as if an explanation might hang in the air, as if someone might translate. Failing that, he boldly proceeded.
“Ahh,” he lifted his free hand (the one that would hold the gun in the lunchbox), “my hand she’s a-dirty. I no toucha. You no worry.”
“You don’t take me so easy. Not this time.”
The little man continued to smile but it was forced now. When the streetcar stopped in front of him, he motioned for Go
ldie to get on first.
She couldn’t believe the audacity. Crossing her arms, she planted herself on the island like a tree waiting for the storm.
“I’m not so stupid like that,” she said.
The man quickly climbed aboard and when inside, turned on the top step to face Goldie one last time. This was it, she thought, now comes the gun, the knife, the last pain through the heart. Hello, Enrique.
Before the doors folded shut, he opened his decaying mouth and replied, “You too olda for me, lady.”
chapter three
Wednesday, March 28,1979
Rebecca was looking over the morning’s test results. Every now and then she glanced up at the print of Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields and Cypress in the waitingroom to reassure herself that none of David’s paintings had escaped the basement. She wondered whether Iris had realized when she put up the Van Gogh how turbulent it was, the thick heaving clouds filled with energy, the dark trees springing from the ground like flames. Iris chuckled on the phone as she booked an appointment with a patient. Without warning the front door flew open and Mrs. Kochinsky wobbled in. She was wearing a stylish navy blazer over beige trousers but something seemed askew, as if she hadn’t put them on straight. Or maybe it was the sweaty bangs of greying brown hair that stuck to her forehead. But, she still looked a decade younger than her sixty years.
“Mrs. Kochinsky!” Rebecca exclaimed. “How are you?”
“Not good!” she said and hobbled over to the waiting-room instead of approaching the counter. She dropped into one of the chairs and appeared to be trying to catch her breath.
Rebecca stepped toward her, concerned. “Are you all right?”
Mrs. Kochinsky looked up at Rebecca and absently lifted the damp bangs off her forehead with her fingers. “I’m so glad you’re back, Doctor. But bus — bus ride killing me. A man....” She suddenly glanced up at Iris, who had stopped talking on the phone to listen.
“Come into my office, Mrs. Kochinsky,” Rebecca said.
One of Iris’ eyebrows shot up in mock offence.
Once they were seated privately, Rebecca said, “So, it’s been some time since we last met. How’ve you been?”
The dark half-moons under her patient’s eyes hinted at the anxiety, the web of paranoia she’d woven around herself.
Mrs. Kochinsky shook her head. “Not good, not good.” The charming Spanish-Polish inflection. “All winter I have such trouble sleeping. The other doctor — Romanov — he no good. He don’t understand. Only wants me take drug for sleeping. Maybe I don’t want sleep. Because of dream. Yesterday I dream of Enrique. Oh, Doctor! I don’t want sleep. I have nothing left. Why I should always reminder have....” She was still agitated, her chest rising and falling too quickly.
“You don’t usually dream about Enrique,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t you tell me about it.”
Mrs. Kochinsky hesitated a moment. She cleared her throat, then took a breath. “Night very dark in my dream. My husband, dead two years, sits in bedroom on chair. He say, ‘They find him, Goldie. Don’t wait for him. He not come back.’ This scare me because I know what. Then suddenly I’m in plane. Flying. Much noise. Very dark outside. Two men — young men — sit on floor, hands tied behind. Noise from plane terrible. I shout at men: ‘Wake up!’ They don’t move, eyes closed. Suddenly big man opens door to outside. I see clouds beside. I shout, ‘Close door!’ But he take one man, lift and push him out! I look — body fall through clouds, down, down into water. I scream louder. Big man don’t hear me. He take other young man — I see sleeping face and suddenly I know it’s Enrique. I grab his arm but like cloud, I can’t touch. Big man lift like before but I push hard on Enrique’s chest and finally, finally he open his eyes and smile last time. Then ... then man throws him down through door. I try catch my boy, but he falls. Falls. I can’t look. I know he land in ocean....”
Rebecca waited a moment, noting how pale her patient had become. “That must’ve been a very frightening dream.”
Mrs. Kochinsky looked up at her, brown eyes fierce. “Not just dream. Before I leave Argentina I hear talk, secret talk, about how soldiers get rid of people. They don’t want bodies left. So they take prisoners up in plane. Give them drug make them quiet, weak. Then ... then,” she put a hand over her eyes, “they throw them out into ocean. Still alive. Alive.”
Rebecca couldn’t speak. Mechanically she rose and took three steps to a small sink in the corner. She pulled a disposable cup from the dispenser and filled it with water. She handed it to Mrs. Kochinsky.
“I’m so sorry,” she said and sat down across from her, suddenly very tired. This was not paranoia; it had the unfortunate ring of truth.
Mrs. Kochinsky drank from the cup mechanically.
“My family gone. Why I should live? I’m only alive because I’m not dead.”
Rebecca leaned forward toward the older woman, seeking eye contact. “Your sister’s still alive. It sounds like she needs you.”
Mrs. Kochinsky lifted her head, bird-like. “What I can do? I’m helpless. She just sit there, won’t talk. Only sometime a word in Yiddish. We don’t speak Yiddish from before war. I bring material so she can sew. She have her little machine there. You should see clothes she make for me. Beautiful dress, blouse....” She inclined her head and tapped her cheek with one hand. “Aye, you won’t believe how she was good with hands. You know, in camp she had job in factory — no one can do like her, with small fast hands. She make part for weapons, little pieces metal must fit together, and if not fit, gun not work. They will shoot her. She told me religious boy come work beside her, can’t do with hands. Young, clumsy. She show him, try help, but he can’t. What you think? She do work for him, so they don’t take him away. She lucky — they change her from factory and then she clean officers’ place. Help her survive. Survive. For what?
“Now she just sit. Do nothing. Her husband happy he get rid of her.” She lowered her voice. “I tell him I look after her, but he send her away. I know why he don’t want me. He have office at home. Many business deals. Crooked deals. He don’t want me find out. Who knows what he do there. I told her for long time leave him. Bad man. Did bad things in war. But was good to Chana, so she marry him. Desperate after war, no one left. And now? He don’t care. I want take care for her.”
“But that would’ve been a huge commitment, taking care of your sister. Maybe it’s better this way.”
“What else I have? Three mornings at bakery? He can afford pay me same like bakery. Much cheaper than nursing home. I wanted look after her.”
Tears formed in her eyes, glistening. She wore her gently waved hair chin length, and with her straight nose and small face, she often reminded Rebecca of what Greta Garbo might have looked like at sixty. Except that, as far as Rebecca knew, Greta Garbo didn’t need psychotherapy to see her through the week.
“She only one I have left.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Man on bus — he upset me. When I get off, he follow. I run and run...”
Rebecca scribbled notes. She’d heard this before. “There’ve been other times when men followed you. Was there something different about this man compared to the others?”
“They all different. They send different man each time. So I won’t know. But I always know. And now they got more opportunity, because I go two buses for here. Before, I walk five minutes to old office. I wish you don’t move. This not safe neighbourhood.”
“I understand how you feel,” said Rebecca. “I know it’s hard to go out of your area, but it will get easier. It’ll just take time.”
Mrs. Kochinsky studied her for a moment. “If you say, I believe. Look — I’ll bring you knishes for Passover. Home-made. Just next week. See? I believe you.”
Rebecca smiled uneasily. The emotional wall she usually kept between herself and her patients had been impossible to summon in Mrs. Kochinsky’s case. The pain she had gone through, the horror, put her in a different category.
Before leaving, Mrs. Kochinsky turned to
Rebecca and said, “Oh, I forget something tell you. A visitor coming for me. Cousin from California. So long when I saw him — I didn’t even know he still lives. When he call, like voice from past.”
Then she suddenly smiled goodbye, her mouth partly open in mute apology as if there was something she preferred not to say. It was the same smile each time she left. Apology for what, Rebecca wondered: for living, for being a casualty of war, for surviving with complications?
Iris was deep into files at her workstation when Rebecca passed by at five forty-five. “I’ve got my pager,” Rebecca said. “I’11 just be around the neighbourhood if you need me.”
Iris looked down at Rebecca’s feet. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’m going to do what I tell all my patients: go for a brisk walk around the block.”
Iris examined her from the feet up. “Well, the shoes are good. But you need a swanky track suit, Doc. Something with polyester to show off the slimmer you. That skirt with those running shoes...,” she shook her blonde head. “You want to exercise, you gotta have the right outfit. Come shopping with me this weekend and I’ll find you something spiffy.”
Rebecca put one hand on her hip in protest but realized there was no use arguing. She stepped downstairs past the office of the other doctor. Lila Arons, M.D. They’d met briefly when Rebecca leased the space. A brisk handshake, the usual greetings, and they had both gone on their way.
She stepped outside the medical building, heartened by the way her feet felt in the new leather running shoes. Solid. She was ready to take on Beverley Street. The street looked as empty as the first time she’d seen it, leafy quiet in the shade of another century.
Once on the sidewalk, she dipped her hand inside her jacket pocket to deposit the beeper. What she felt there made her stop.
“Rebecca, Rebecca!” David chided out of an undefinable corner of her past. His trimmed reddish beard pointed at her with irony.
She held the wrapped sugar cube up in her palm, impressed with its survival. She hadn’t seen the gabardine rain jacket since last September when she had pushed it to the back of her closet together with the white cane. She had always carried something for David’s carbohydrate hunger, which came on suddenly when his medication reached its peak. It was a reaction to the insulin. Common enough. Not dramatic enough for a haunting, too physical to ignore. She had gotten rid of his aftershave, his jeans, his tweed sports jackets. She had tried to sweep her life’s surface clear of reminders of him but every now and then there was this self-sabotage she couldn’t explain. She dropped the cube back into her pocket, but uneasily.
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 2
