“Mitch, we don’t have a neighbour Mrs. Gold....”
“Sha. I met her on the elevator when you were sleeping. So Mrs. Goldblum is maybe ninety-four and she insists on telling me this story even though I don’t know her from Adam. She says she went to the doctor with this embarrassing problem. She told him, ‘I pass gas all the time’ — actually she said ‘fart’ — ‘but they’re soundless and don’t smell. You won’t believe this but since I’ve been here I’ve farted twenty times. What can I do, Doctor?’ So the doctor gave her a prescription for pills. She should take them three times a day for seven days and then come back to see him in a week. The next week Mrs. Goldblum marched into his office, furious. She said, ‘Doctor, I don’t know what was in those pills but the problem is worse. I’m farting as much and they’re still soundless but now they smell terrible. What do you say for yourself?’ The doctor said, ‘Calm down, Mrs. Goldblum. Now that we’ve fixed your sinuses, we’ll work on your hearing.’ “
Rebecca closed her eyes and smiled. Some things didn’t change.
“Your father makes up a neighbour every time he wants to tell a joke.”
“Your mother just won’t admit she takes an afternoon nap. Mrs. Goldblum lives on the other side of the garbage chute. Honest. Besides, good medical jokes are scarce as hen’s teeth. And what else can I tell our daughter the Doctor?”
“I think she’s heard enough jokes for one night,” Flo said. “We have to let the poor girl get some sleep. You do sound tired, dear. We’ll call again on Saturday. Or if you feel like talking, call anytime.”
“Can’t wait to see you, doll,” her father said.
Rebecca lay back in bed, exhausted, but couldn’t sleep. It was comforting to hear their voices. Yet she couldn’t help feeling that everything in her life had turned upside-down again. The sense of vulnerability when David died, the aloneness, stole back into her life like a phantom. She tossed and flailed in her bed. The air in the room was so close she could barely breathe. She was suffocating in her own bed. Then she realized that the door was shut — she never closed her bedroom door, something was lurking behind it, something she almost recognized.
Suddenly someone was pounding her front door with ferocity. They pummelled and banged with unreasonable force until Rebecca checked outside the window, wondering if she could climb down the two floors to the ground. The dark outside was impenetrable. How would she get down? It would be like falling into an abyss. They were yelling something unintelligible downstairs so she opened her bedroom door to hear better. Though she knew the bedroom was upstairs, the front door had somehow moved directly across the hall and now she knew terror because it was brutally clear that she couldn’t escape.
“¡Abra la puerta!” screamed a man’s voice. “¡Abra la puerta!” The pounding continued.
She tried her utmost not to approach the door but something pulled her there, an old curiosity, an ancient fate.
“Who’s there?” she asked, her own voice echoing in the hall.
Hard fists answered her. “¡Abra la puerta!”
“I know what you want and I’m not coming.” Even as the words spilled out, she watched her own hands betray her and open the deadbolt on the door. Her own hands.
Five men with guns fell on her and pinned her arms behind her back. Everything was in shadow. “Okay, bitch, where is she?”
Terrified, she cried, “I don’t know!” But on the couch, barely visible in the dark, lay a woman facing the other way, unknowable.
“Lying bitch!” they said.
Then one man stepped forward, his face still obscured by the shadows. “My colleagues are crude, doctor. They like to hurt people. Why not cooperate, just help us get the old woman the way you helped us get Goldie.”
Rebecca gasped, shrieked toward the shadow-man. “It wasn’t me. I loved her.”
One of them was about to hit her across the face when the phone rang. They all stared at it, until one of the men said not to answer it; another said she must answer it because someone probably knew she was home. A third man picked up the receiver but said nothing. As he moved in the dark room, a slat of light from somewhere found his face. It was Feldberg.
Her eyelids burst open. The back of her neck felt damp and cool from sweat evaporating into the morning. The noise of the phone beside her was relentless.
She picked it up automatically, but she couldn’t quite recall what day it was or why she felt so awful. All she remembered was the dark outline of the woman floating on the couch in her dream.
“Rebecca? Are you all right? Have you seen the paper?”
Rebecca blinked at the clock on the mantle. Seven-thirty. The woman on the couch — Rebecca knew now. It had been Chana.
“Are you awake?” said the voice.
“Oh, Iris, I’m sorry. I should’ve called you ... I didn’t think....”
“What on earth happened?” asked Iris. “It says Mrs. Kochinsky is dead.”
Rebecca knew this stretch of Bathurst Street from her adolescence when she had frequented the Jewish “Y” north of Sheppard Avenue. For several summers she and her friends had spent whole afternoons reclining around the outdoor pool meeting unsuitable boys. Twenty years later, the “Y” was still there. She was glad to be driving against traffic in the morning rush hour as she caught a glimpse of the 1960s white stone building, updated, added on to. It was sprawled on the edge of a ravine that extended from south of Sheppard all the way up past the northern boundaries of the city, a greenbelt along whose bottom groove snaked the Don River. Only a river could stop developers from paving over the grass from end to end. No matter that in some places the riverbed spanned a mere four feet. There was no way of getting around a river, its inevitable pull, like gravity, toward the lake, so one had to accept it gracefully and incorporate it into the plan. The ravine this April was still pallid, the trees bare, but there was an expectancy in the branches, a knowledge of green beneath the dormant grass that Rebecca wished she could be part of.
She had begun to feel a connection before Goldie died. She couldn’t think of her as Mrs. Kochinsky anymore; she had gotten too close for that. Rebecca had been almost optimistic, as far as that went; not very far considering the state of her psyche. But it had all flattened out. No, not flattened. Sunk. Declined. She was going to have to catch herself on the decline, or someone else would. The man who killed Goldie, whoever he was. She had to find out what she could now. She was hoping against hope that Chana could tell her something. Goldie had visited her sister frequently. Maybe she’d said something about the man she thought was going to kill her.
Once past Finch, Rebecca kept her eye out for Sunnydale Terrace, the only other nursing home she knew of on Bathurst besides Baycrest Hospital. Baycrest was the model in Toronto, the queen of geriatric medicine, not a waiting-room for death like those places usually were. She hated Feldberg for his cheapness. Poorer people were in Baycrest.
The sign came into view announcing a two-storey box of a building, probably the same vintage as the “Y,” only not updated. The red brick had lasted the decades well enough, but the place had a desultory look to it, sun-faded curtains stretched crookedly across the upstairs windows.
Rebecca stepped up to the reception desk where a slim dark-haired woman sat in an exaggerated upright position listening on the phone. A plump blonde in a short skirt was passing behind her.
“Excuse me,” Rebecca said.
The blonde looked at her but hardly stopped moving. Rebecca had seen the look before. Professionals in hospitals saved it for people they didn’t need to pay attention to. That meant everyone except doctors. There was another expression altogether they saved for doctors.
“I’m Dr. Temple,” Rebecca said crisply, delighted to see the woman stop in her tracks and rearrange her face. There, that was the expression she wanted. A bit of deference. “I’m looking for Chana Feldberg.”
The blonde smiled a tight polite smile as she came around the desk. “Mrs. Feldberg is up in her room. I
s this a professional visit, Doctor, or are you a relative?”
“I was her sister’s physician. Mrs. Kochinsky. Have the police come by to speak to Mrs. Feldberg?”
The blonde put her stubby hands together in front of her. “I was horrified to hear about what happened. It shocked us all here. The police called this morning but I explained Mrs. Feldberg’s condition to them and they left it up to us to deal with it.”
“And what is her condition?” Rebecca asked, getting a bad feeling from the woman’s tone of voice.
“Her behaviour has regressed. We think there’s some dementia involved. Maybe Alzheimer’s. Most of the time she won’t verbalize and when she does, it’s in Yiddish. If we didn’t feed her, she wouldn’t eat. Even then, she’ll only eat in her room, refuses to socialize. It’s difficult for the staff.”
There was little expression in her voice except for a slight whine.
“Have you told her about her sister’s death?” Rebecca asked.
“The social worker and I believe she wouldn’t understand, and in so far as she’s able to understand, we feel it wouldn’t be in her best interests to be told. It would just upset her.”
And that would be difficult for you, thought Rebecca.
“I’d like to see her,” she said.
The blonde glanced at her briefly, only in acknowledgement, no challenge. Rebecca knew her own authority, but suspected that the woman had reservations about Rebecca’s role: was she going to tell Chana and set her off for good? Rebecca could leave after this visit and not come back. The staff had to deal with the patient afterwards. None of this was voiced but Rebecca sensed it in the stiff resentful walk of the chubby woman in front of her, rather brisk considering the heels and tight white skirt. As it happened Rebecca hadn’t yet decided what she would tell Chana. She despised the power professionals reserved for themselves in making decisions for their charges, though she knew that it was sometimes necessary in cases of patient incompetence.
They stopped in front of room 201. Down the hall a thin craggy-faced man leaned on a cane and watched them. Rebecca hated these places. Waiting for death. The blonde knocked on the door. There was no answer from inside the room, nor did the blonde expect any for she opened the door several seconds later. A tiny bird of a woman sat in a wooden upholstered chair facing the window. She turned her head in anticipation, her face somewhat animated. When she saw Rebecca, her eyes went blank, her cheeks slackened, and she turned back to the window. It was disappointment, Rebecca realized with a chill, that she wasn’t Goldie.
“You have a visitor, dear,” said the blonde in a raised voice. “Dr. Temple has come to see you.”
No response. “Mrs. Feldberg....” The blonde raised her voice another notch.
“It’s all right,” Rebecca broke in. “We’ll be fine.”
Rebecca stepped into the room; the woman clicked the door closed.
On the wall to her right stood a desk with a portable sewing machine in the corner. Small stacks of colourful fabric stretched across the back of the desk. It all looked too neat, as if it were never touched. Rebecca imagined Goldie bringing her sister material to tempt her into activity.
Rebecca brought the only other chair close to the old woman and sat down. Chana’s unwashed grey hair lay thin and flat against her tiny head. Her skin was nearly transparent, the skull beneath poking through. She had once been beautiful, Rebecca knew from her photos. Now her eyes sunk amid features that mingled with bone. She stared out the window but appeared to see nothing. Rebecca followed her eyes toward Bathurst Street and beyond. Across the road, extending as far as she could see, were cemeteries, both Jewish and Christian. Some joke, she thought. The universe was filled with jokes like these. That Rebecca was here at all was a joke. What could this ghost of a woman possibly tell her? Especially since Rebecca couldn’t speak Yiddish.
“I’m Dr. Temple,” she said. “Your sister’s doctor.” She wondered if Chana had regressed beyond the ken of English or whether she was just more comfortable using Yiddish.
Though Rebecca had spoken quietly, the woman was startled, her hands beginning to tremble. That was when Rebecca noticed the doll in Chana’s lap. An uncomfortable pang of recognition went through her. The doll was a match to the one in Goldie’s bedroom, made of coarse grey cotton and striped clothes.
“What an unusual doll. May I see it?” Rebecca asked, holding out her palm.
Without expression, Chana grabbed the doll tightly, and pressed it close to her breast, bringing the other hand up as a shield.
“Then again,” Rebecca said. “I can see it from here.”
“You know, your sister Goldie has one of these dolls in her bedroom.” No reaction from Chana.
“Your sister tells me she comes to visit you. When was the last time she was here?”
Chana stared out the window, her expression unchanged. Rebecca had gotten a basic response from her before. Maybe the woman was capable of more.
“When your sister was here, did she talk about a man? A man who frightened her? Did she say anything about him? What he looked like? This is important, Mrs. Feldberg.”
The woman’s eyes remained fixed but they suddenly shifted from the window to the bed. That was progress, thought Rebecca. Now the woman was avoiding her. Rebecca followed her gaze to the bed. Perhaps Chana was communicating. On the flowered comforter near the pillow, a dozen more misshapen cloth figures in the same prison stripes lay camouflaged amid the vibrant colours of the bedclothes that, Rebecca imagined, Goldie had picked for her sister.
“Could I see one of those?” Rebecca asked softly.
When there was no response, Rebecca stood up and stepped across the floor. She glanced back at Chana hoping for permission. The old eyes were empty. Rebecca bent over slowly, giving Chana time to voice any objections. None were forthcoming and Rebecca picked up a doll.
“Kinder,” a dry voice croaked.
When Rebecca looked up, Chana’s small eyes watched her. Good, thought Rebecca, at least a response. Kinder. Children.
“Kinder,” Rebecca repeated, hoping for more. But Chana seemed all talked out.
Rebecca turned the doll in her hand, marvelling at the primitive simpleness of the thing, very much like a grey sock with arms and legs sewn around. Some brown yarn tacked on for hair, a few stitches for eyes and mouth. Not much uniformity. The object must’ve been to crank out a population of inmates but she hadn’t stuck to a pattern. Each one seemed a new beginning, each an individual. The doll in Rebecca’s hand wore rough trousers, but a number of figures on the bed wore skirts, all of the same striped fabric. Chana must’ve sewn each of them along a bitter journey backwards into some depth of memory. Her sewing table appeared abandoned. Perhaps she’d sewn these in the early stages of her illness. Rebecca knew that the trauma suffered by victims in concentration camps was a wound that never healed. These figures were clearly images from that period. Had the regression halted there, in that time of nightmare?
Rebecca glanced at Chana, whose bony face could have been one of the pitiful multitude staring out from behind barbed wire in the photos she’d seen of camp survivors. Rebecca’s eye was drawn to the doll whose head poked out above Chana’s hand. Something was different about it. Beneath the yarn hair, the head was tightly covered with red gauze, the eyes and mouth stitched over it. Rebecca peeked back at the bed. She focused on each doll till she found two more with redcovered heads.
“Kinder” Chana said.
“Kinder” Rebecca repeated. She wanted a closer look. “May I?” she said, as a formality.
But as soon as she picked up the two red dolls, Chana began to moan. Rebecca glanced at her, surprised.
“Nisht kinder!” she wailed “Nisht kinder!”
“All right,” Rebecca said. “I’m sorry.” She put them down but near the edge of the bed where she could examine them. One doll was a match to the one Chana held, only male to her female, both heads covered with red gauze. The other doll was definitely different
. Its trousers were not striped like the other males, but black, worn with a black jacket and cap. This was a uniform. She screwed up her eyes to try to decipher the irregular object sewn onto the end of its arm. A greyish form, probably a gun. What was the significance of these dolls, especially the three with their sanguine, forbidden heads?
Goldie used to describe to Rebecca the elegant clothes Chana sewed for her. It was hard to fathom that the same hand that had created Goldie’s wardrobe had fashioned these crude representations. Yet what was the point of fathoming? Chana was lost somewhere within herself, unable to give Rebecca directions. Whatever Goldie had told Chana was lost with her, the words rattling around somewhere amid forty-year-old memories.
chapter fifteen
Thursday, April 5, 1979
Nesha opened the door of his hotel room and waited, one hand leaning against the frame, the other grasping a can of Coke. The front desk had called to say a courier had arrived with a package for him. Something from his accountant. Could they send the guy up? They sure bloody well could. How long had he been waiting for this?
Down the plush distant hall, someone in a black baseball cap bobbed up and down at a gallop. A young East Indian man stopped at Nesha’s open door, eyeing the scraggly hair, probably writing off any possibility of a tip. He read the name off the front of the package.
“Mr. Malkevich?”
“Yep.”
He gave Nesha a form to sign then handed him the padded envelope.
The man was about to fly but Nesha reached into his pants pocket and brought out an American five dollar bill.
The dark eyes widened beneath the cap, then narrowed into a smile. “Thanks, man.”
In the room, Nesha took his penknife and slit open the top of the padded envelope that he had taped so firmly shut in San Francisco. He pulled out all the extra paper and crumpled junk mail filling out the empty spaces that would have given shape to the object he wanted to render shapeless.
Finally he drew out the Luger, a hard bit of reality poking out of his dream of the past. He held it flat in his palm, entranced by the silky cold of the steel. This was no ordinary gun. With his connections he could have arranged to buy something in Toronto. But this was the gun he wanted. The symbolic value was worth all the effort. He had called in a favour from a former client. The man had Nesha to thank — at least, Nesha’s experience with the intricate workings of the IRS — for the accumulation of capital that helped him expand his business. Evading taxes was a democratic right. It also helped him afford the small plane that flew Nesha’s package over the U.S. border, avoiding customs. A Canadian courier company had taken it from there.
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 9
