And what about Goldie? Justice for Goldie. Another innocent casualty. She would never see the spring. He mourned for her but from a distance; in his heart as well as literally. He could do that because he didn’t remember her. He’d been too young when they had visited each other in Poland. Goldie and Chana were already fashionable young women when he was still in short pants, maybe seven or eight. They were cousins, children of an older uncle, but he always called them aunts because of the age difference. He was glad to keep the sadness at bay. Yet the photo they published of her in the paper tugged at what was left of his heart. He recognized that pale blonde of women of a certain age. When his wife had gone blonde one day in her forties, he was surprised. To her it was a turning point, not because of the change, but because till then, he had noticed nothing about her.
“You’ve dyed your hair,” he had said that fateful day.
“I’ve been dyeing my hair for years,” she had said.
It turned out she had been dyeing her hair brown to cover the grey. It had gotten greyer and lighter until there was more light than dark, and the sensible thing to do was to go blonde. Confronted with the stark change, he finally noticed. Only by then it was too late. Now, ironically, he noticed women’s hair. The older ones were blonder, like Goldie, because they were white underneath.
He only thought about Margie maybe ten times a day now. Not bad considering he hadn’t seen her for three years. Or was it four? If it was only three, she’d worked pretty fast to find herself a new husband. A friend from the office, the only one who kept in touch, had called last week to invite him to a Seder and given him the latest gossip. Okay. So good luck to her. Probably a normal guy this time. She’d make damn sure of that. Could he blame her for eventually gagging on the kind of grief he lived with? The grief that hadn’t allowed him to celebrate a joyous occasion like a Seder for years. After all, how could he take part in a festival that honoured God for His miracle in Egypt? If God could part the Red Sea to rescue the Jews from slavery, where was He when Nesha needed a miracle?
This time of year was always painful for him. It had happened in April, six days before Passover. His mother had been busy cleaning up the house for a week. Everything had to be spotless before the holiday began. All the cupboards had to be cleaned and wiped free of crumbs, the Passover dishes prepared to replace their everyday crockery. God, he could still see her stooped on the floor with her head in a cupboard, wet schmata in her hand. So many times he wanted to crawl back into that picture and stay there forever.
He remembered in younger years singing “Chad Gadya/One Little Goat” after the Seder every Passover. A simple Messianic little folk-song in which a father bought a baby goat for his child. Nesha always pictured a son. But the goat was eaten by a cat that was bitten by a dog that was beaten by a stick that was burned by fire that was quenched by water that was drunk by an ox that was killed by a shoichet, a ritual slaughterer, who was killed by the Angel of Death who, finally, was slain by the Almighty Himself. Blessed be He, said the text. Only the Messiah, whom God had sent, could kill Death, hence the Jewish yearning for his coming. Nesha never sang that song again. The primitive wheel of punishment, in which the executioner himself is executed, no longer held any charm for him. He never understood why God waited all that time to slay the Angel of Death. God always came too late.
Tonight, a million miles from that little boy, he would gather the four memorial glasses filled with wax that he’d brought with him from San Francisco. He would light them in his hotel room at sunset as he had lighted them every Yahrzeit for decades. They would burn for twenty-four hours, then he would begin another year alone.
Sunnydale Terrace was a low-rise institutional kind of building on Bathurst Street in the north part of the city. There had been only seven nursing homes in the Toronto phone book. It didn’t take long to call and find out where she was. Why had he lost touch with his two cousins, the only ones left of his family? He supposed it was the difference in their ages. They had written periodically from Argentina. When Chana moved to Canada there’d been a flurry of letter writing. Months before Josh’s bar mitzvah, Nesha had phoned Chana for the first time and invited her to come. She’d been excited on the phone and he was sure she would make the trip to San Francisco. Then they’d received a modest cheque in the mail with her unexplained apologies. He phoned again to find out how he had been so wrong about her intentions. She sounded diffident this time, almost nervous, whispering into the receiver. Apparently her husband told her they couldn’t afford the trip, and besides, she said, he didn’t like family affairs. Nesha offered to send a plane ticket if she wanted to come by herself; she could stay with them for a week if she liked. He remembered her gasping at the other end. “Oh, I couldn’t do that. Leo wouldn’t let me....”
He’d spoken to Goldie only once on the phone, several days before leaving San Francisco. Was it just last Thursday? It seemed like last year. When asked about Chana, Goldie told him she was in a nursing home. Goldie was still furious with Chana’s husband for depositing her there. “I told him, ach! I look after her half day if he look after the rest. Just half day. Terrible man. He don’t want. Easier sent her away. Now she suffering.”
A wide scraggly lawn separated the front of Sunnydale Terrace from the four lanes of suburban traffic that sped by. On the other side of the road was a series of cemeteries, some Jewish, some Christian, all of them fenced in spiked metal to separate the dead from the living and protect them from each other.
The reception area was not ungenerous, furnished with wine-coloured sofas, their material thin and dirty on closer inspection, and tables and chairs that looked too orderly to be much used.
Nesha waited before the empty reception desk, part of a cubby-hole that backed into an office. “Excuse me?” he addressed the air.
When no one answered, Nesha raised his voice. “Anybody here?”
A very wide middle-aged woman with permed dark blonde hair appeared behind the desk, irritated. “Please keep it down, sir. This is the residents’ quiet time.”
He glanced at his watch: 2:40 p.m. Must’ve been afternoon nap time.
“I’m looking for Chana Feldberg,” he said.
“Are you a relative?” she said, looking over his baseball cap and leather jacket. He could imagine her face if she could see the ponytail inside the cap, or if he still had his beard. At least he’d had the foresight to bring a packet of daffodils as an offering.
“She’s my aunt.”
“You haven’t been here before.” Her head tilted with suspicion.
“I’m visiting from the States,” he said. “I’m staying at the Harbourfront Hilton. You want some I.D.?” He pulled out his driver’s licence and made a show of displaying it.
She blinked with annoyance. “Gloria!” she called behind her. “Take Mr. — “ She turned to him.
“Malkevich.”
“Take Mr. Malkevich up to Mrs. Feldberg’s room.”
A younger woman with mousy brown hair appeared out of the depths of the office. “Come this way, Mr. Malkevich,” she said, heading toward the elevator.
There were only two floors in the building, but Nesha followed. In the elevator, the woman kept her eyes on the floor number overhead. “Mrs. Feldberg doesn’t talk anymore. Only sometimes in Yiddish. It’s terrible what happened to her sister. But she doesn’t understand.”
The woman knocked once on the door of room 201, then opened it without waiting. In a raised voice reserved for children and the mentally impaired, she said, “My dear, you have a visitor.”
Chana half-turned her head, barely glancing at him, satisfied, it seemed, that nothing behind her could be of interest. She returned to stare out the window as if she were watching her favourite TV show. She had a good view of the cemeteries from here. He wondered if it bothered her, contemplating the uneven earth where one day soon she might lie. He took off his cap, letting his ponytail fall onto his neck. The mousy brunette sniffed, satisfied with her opinion of h
im, then left.
He approached Chana’s chair, surprised at his own shyness. Her mere presence was pulling him back forty years to the house in his small Polish town, his mother, the contented memories of a ten-year-old that were obliterated by what came after. The last time he’d seen Chana she was in her early twenties, closer to his mother’s age but elegant with long smooth brown hair.
This woman in the chair was tiny, on the point of disappearing. What little was left of her hair was white and pressed flat against her head. By his calculation she was not more than sixty-five. She looked closer to eighty. She had survived the camps but couldn’t escape the ravages of the body. Would his mother, if she had lived, have succumbed so early to some unstoppable disease?
“Aunt Chana,” he murmured. “It’s Nesha. Do you remember?” He drank in the worn pointed features of her face. Did he see his uncle there? Her expression remained unchanged, no movement in the chair.
“My mother was Rivka. Your father’s sister. Your father was my Uncle Yitzhak.”
Then he remembered what the woman had said in the elevator about the Yiddish. Something had happened to Chana since he’d last spoken to her, some years before. She seemed to have retreated into herself with nothing left but the language of her youth. He hadn’t spoken Yiddish in thirty years, not since cousin Sol died. Nesha started to sweat. To him Yiddish was a distant dam holding back the flood of his memories. Once he touched it, cupped his tongue around its intimate cadences, the dam would be breached and the ordinary days of his youth would flood in and drown him with his mother’s silky face, his brothers playing in the square, the neighbours chatting along the muddy street. All of it waiting for him to open his mouth in the Mameloshen, the mother tongue. Okay, what do I have to lose, he thought. I have nothing left.
He pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. “Meema Chana,” he whispered. Then he tried it out loud. “Meema Chana. Du mir gedainkst?” His Yiddish probably wasn’t perfect after all these years, but she didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t notice anything. “Rivka iz gevein mein mameh. Farsteyst?” Nothing.
She remained immobile staring out the window, while his heart flinched within him at the familiarity of the words, children’s words stored up and waiting. He had come this far. “Meema Chana, du bist mein eyntsik familye. Du bist mein meema.” It felt strange addressing an old woman he hadn’t seen in forty years with the familiar Du. Yet not so strange. Her small eyes, the shape of her cheekbones reminded him of his uncle, even his mother, if he looked hard enough. What wonder, his mother in Chana’s face.
He laid the bunch of daffodils in the old lady’s lap. In her hand, he saw a small rag doll, roughly made. Now she was the child and he the adult. Despair rolled over him in a wave; the dam had broken when he wasn’t watching. He crossed his arms over his stomach and leaned over in the chair, his head close to his knees, rocking, rocking.
“Kind” she said softly.
He looked up, astonished. She watched him with eyes like his mother’s. Her brown-spotted hand floated in the air near his head. “Kind ... bist...” she murmured.
Tears filled his eyes; he was overwhelmed with loss. He took her feather-light magical hand and brought it to his lips, his head echoing with his mother’s soft words of petting and comfort. The air diffused into another time, grew bittersweet with memory and longing as he knew it would.
“Di denkst azoi?” he said, looking once more into his mother’s eyes.
“Kind” she breathed, the pressure of her bony hand like a bird’s.
He drove back downtown in a haze, drained, at the same time enervated by his connection with Chana. Why couldn’t he have come before? Why couldn’t he see Goldie once before she died? They were all that was left of his past. All except the murderer. The invisible man. The needle in a haystack. How did one go about finding a needle in a haystack, he thought, stepping into the elevator in the hotel. Look under N for needle? For Nazi?
He bought a can of Coke from the machine on his floor. The caffeine and sugar jolt kept him going when his energy level dropped in the late afternoon. He sat down with the Toronto Yellow Pages and flipped through. What was he looking for? He came to Restaurants. One of the pages listed them under ethnicity. There were three restaurants under the German heading. Not much of a presence in the city.
He picked up the White Pages and looked under German. German Bakery, German Consulate, German News, German Translators. He dialed the number of the German consulate.
“Deutsches General Konsulat.”
“Guten tag. I’m new in Toronto and was wondering if there is a community centre or club where I could meet other German immigrants?” People told him he had a wisp of an accent; now he introduced gutturals into his r’s and pronounced w like v.
“Well, we don’t usually recommend such places over the phone.” The man clipped his words in a hurry, all business; maybe a line of people were waiting in front of his desk. “But there is an Austrian club that is quite popular. The Edelweiss on Beverley Street. Below College.”
Nesha examined his Toronto map book and found Beverley Street. Just a few blocks from the market. Easy enough. He searched for himself in the mirror. His grooming would have to go a step further. Taking his scissors he began to clip at his hair until all the straggly ends lay on the floor. He ran wet fingers through what was left, folding it behind his ears. A little more fashionable. Now he looked artistic, rather than vagrant.
It was still too early to go to a club. The Coke hadn’t touched the profound fatigue he felt settling in his bones. The emotional charge of Chana’s presence had depleted all his energy. He lay down on the bed and fell into a deep sleep.
The lake was dark outside his window when he woke up. He couldn’t quite remember where he was, until he saw the four Yahrzeit candles in their little glasses waiting on the round table near the window. He lit the wicks and, for a few minutes before he left, watched the tiny flames transfigure the walls with flickering memory.
He drove up Spadina because it was familiar, then turned right on Dundas till he reached Beverley. A few blocks north, the Edelweiss Club hovered on the east side of the street. The building had seen better days, a narrow structure squeezed in between a small office building on one side and a semi-detached house on the other. Edelweiss was printed in an arc of large Gothic letters above the door.
He didn’t know what he was expecting, but the inside of the club wasn’t it. No one greeted him at the entrance. There was a strong smell of onions and meat as he climbed the few steps into what looked like a ballroom. A wrought iron railing fenced in a round carpeted area set with square tables and white tablecloths. The centre was left uncarpeted, the wood floor scuffed but waxed. Only one table was occupied; two men talking quietly. Nesha stood awkwardly for a moment, glancing at the two in the hope they would greet him. Then a man in a white shirt and tie appeared quite suddenly before him.
With a courtly bending of the head he asked, “Do you come for dinner?”
Nesha looked around at the nearly empty room. “It’s very quiet here.”
The man’s nearly bald head shone beneath the 1950s chandeliers. “Oh, you want company. Come back tomorrow night. Saturday and Sunday, too. The place will be full with people. We’ll have music and singing. Accordion music. Very nice.”
Nesha looked at his watch. It was nearly eight and his stomach was growling. “You serve dinner here?”
“Yes, sure,” the man said, pretending offence. “Tonight we have roast beef and potatoes. Very nice. It comes with apple strudel for dessert.”
Nesha sat down at a table and waited. When the man came back with the obligatory beer, Nesha said casually, “I must ask you. I’m new in town and I’m looking for someone. A friend of my father’s. His name is Johann Steiner. Maybe he’s been here?”
The man examined Nesha, at the same time appearing to think. “The name is not familiar, but I don’t know everyone who comes here. Why don’t you look in the phone book?”
“I tried that. You have no idea how many J. Steiner’s there are.”
Nesha was only half way through the beer when the balding man brought out his roast beef and potatoes, well done with some gravy. While he ate, he practiced questions and answers, none of which satisfied him. Whatever he said, he was taking the risk that Steiner would get word of it and run for cover. On the other hand Steiner might never have set foot in the place. He had to take the chance.
The man appeared after Nesha had finished dinner. While clearing the dishes, he said, “How about some coffee?”
Nesha pulled out the photo he carried around with him. “I’d really like to find my father’s friend. They were close in the Old Country, and now that Vati is gone, I would love to meet him again. Here. Take a look. Maybe you’ll recognize him.”
The man scrutinized the muddy photo with the duck, then looked at Nesha with new eyes. “Who are you?”
“Look, I don’t want any trouble. My father ... they were together in the war. Buddies, you know? You can ask him. Waldhausen. He’ll remember. Ernst Waldhausen.”
The man checked Nesha over, the harshness in his eyes fading. “He doesn’t have that name, Steiner.”
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 12
