by Dennis Bock
Dedication
For my mother, who shared stories
Epigraph
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment.
There is no why. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1960
1938–1944
1960
1944
1960
1945
1960
1945
1960–1983
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Dennis Bock
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
PORT ELIZABETH, ONTARIO, JULY 1946
Lina Teufel was given no choice in the matter on the day Sister Evelyn came to tell her that the newborn’s mother had died in the night. They stood in silence at the top of the basement stairs for a moment, both unnerved by this tragic turn, and when the baby shifted in Sister Evelyn’s arms, Lina felt the warm, tingling sensation of her milk begin to let down, even though she’d nursed her own son just two hours earlier, before making her way to the hospice.
She took the baby and followed Sister Evelyn upstairs to where the child’s blind father waited. He stood when they entered the room and nodded as the sister informed him that a wet nurse had been found, then seated himself again without a word. The cataracts in his eyes were pearl-like and frightening and gave him the look of a haunted man.
The child was fussing now, rooting with hungry complaint. Sister Evelyn gestured for Lina to sit, and once she had, on the backless divan opposite the father, Lina unclasped the top buttons of her uniform and raised the newborn to her breast.
As the baby fed, Lina watched and pitied the man and wondered about his wife, the young mother who’d died in the night—somewhere in the hospice, she imagined, perhaps in a room only a few doors down the hall. She remembered the birth of her own son, so terrifying and difficult, and thought it more likely than not that the poor woman had died of some complication in childbirth from which she herself, for no reason she knew, had been spared.
The newborn’s arms came free from the swaddling then, and Sister Evelyn, standing close, reached forward to replace the blanket, but not before Lina saw the child’s disfigured hands, clawed and twisted and startling enough to cause her to retract and to gasp audibly.
The father rose from his chair.
Lina looked to Sister Evelyn with pleading eyes, the tumble of shock and horror and compassion crashing through her, but the sister only crossed herself and gestured once again that she was to proceed. And so began the nursing that would continue on into the autumn, always in the room that looked south over the rolling grounds of the estate and the shingle beach at the foot of the property. As much as possible Lina tried to avoid looking at the father. He was always in the room with her, silent as she nursed his daughter. Through the window she watched the big ships at anchor beyond the harbour, and on clear mornings she studied the horizon that she’d been told was America, just twenty miles across the lake.
She did not hate the baby at first, but nor did she love her, too sore from the hard gums that pulled at her day and night, and worse yet from the scrubbing she submitted herself to after nursing the sickly infant. She learned to feed her in tandem with her son, whom she fed first thing in the morning and upon her return home in the evening.
Port Elizabeth was flooded with men back from the war. She felt their resentment in the town’s quiet streets when she walked to and from work. She felt it when she saw them standing in breadlines and at soup kitchens near the harbour where the troop transports from Plymouth and Liverpool and Bristol had released them, deep in the heart of the continent. She heard the condemnation in the catcalls and insults they yelled after her. She felt it in her bones. Go back to where you came from, you’re not wanted here, they said.
She didn’t blame these returning soldiers for the prejudice they held against her, or the last of those in town like her who’d yet to be rounded up and sent away, as she feared she’d be if she failed in her duties at Mercy House.
She spoke German only at home with her husband, never at the hospice. Once, she let slip a German phrase as the child nursed, and for a full week afterwards she worried that the blind father would report the infraction, still unaware as she was that they held this language in common. Nor did she know how he longed to tell her that he himself was trapped here in this town, in this residence for the blind—not as she was, as a servant, but as someone who’d been obliged to escape his past.
He was not English, she knew that, but she was unable to place his accent on the few occasions she heard him speak with a sister. It suggested none of the romance languages, certainly not Portuguese—she’d already heard too much of that in her young life—and so she decided he was a Swede or Norwegian or Dane who’d found himself in London on the day of the bomb and later shipped here from one of the evacuee stations she’d heard about. She decided too that he was a decent man, for he seemed not to judge her or to detest her the way the other patients did. He was always proper and polite—silently, for they never spoke—though she had no rights or privileges at all, here in this house where not even her body was her own.
He was twenty or more years her senior, not yet fifty, perhaps, but the spirit seemed to have all but gone out of him, and how could it be otherwise, she thought, a blind man with a dead wife, and the poor child the way she was.
Lina did not tell her husband about her added duties as the child’s wet nurse at Mercy House. Born and raised in this country, and German only on his mother’s side, he’d not suffered as she had since arriving in Canada. In the odd calculus that was her ability to know and to judge those around her, she felt he’d not yet earned the position from which she viewed the world and its array of miseries. She was not cynical, simply a realist, she might have stated when she began to look upon his optimism with condescension and, when the issue finally began to rise between them, contempt. There was no note of falsehood about him. It was simply his incomplete grasp of the real world that gnawed at her, now only a year into their marriage. She’d loved him for this at first, charmed by those qualities that would soon irritate her. Of course you could not argue the fact that life amounted to little more than a cruel test of the will, all so perfectly articulated by the war that had brought them together. Nor did he try. Her husband was no fool, she knew that. In fact, he was in many respects more able than her, confident and practical, and warm in a way she wasn’t with their son. But it was his naïveté that failed her understanding of the times they lived in, and for which she began to silently condemn him.
By midsummer she and the blind father had exchanged a word or two—simple, formal, and always in their broken English. The shame and embarrassment she’d felt during those first feedings were no longer there. Even the sight and touch of the child’s grotesque hands did not repel her anymore. She always washed her breast after the child was finished, though, continuing the practice into the last days of summer, but not so rigorously as she once had. The father sometimes held his daughter’s hand while she nursed, his own fingers hovering close to Lina’s breast, and in time this too did not bother her.
Every day he wanted to tell her that he didn’t belong here, not rightfully, and to share what they had in common—their language, their history of betrayals—and though he was so much older than her, he imagined they could speak as equals, each affected in their own way by the war. He wanted to tell her about the solitude and the sorrow that tore at his heart every night, and the fear he felt at the thought of raising this child now withou
t her mother. He’d known only deprivation and survival these last years. It was the simple things he yearned for. He needed to hear and to speak his own language again, and to share the truth of his story with someone who’d not judge or report or condemn him. Once, through a closed door, he heard her singing a German lullaby to his daughter. He paused before entering the room, taken by such profound nostalgia and remorse that he almost wept.
He wondered why this silent young woman who’d done nothing to deserve the fate that trapped her here seemed to harbour no resentment towards him or his sickly daughter. But the secret stayed unspoken between them as the late-summer days grew shorter and the early-afternoon sun drew its shadows over the estate lawns. Sometimes he liked to imagine the surprise she’d feel if he suddenly spoke to her in the language they shared—the immediate thrill that would seize her, and then the confusion, and at last the fear when he finally told her his incredible story.
1960
My brother and I were always in school when the scientists came to make their annual inspection at Mercy House. It was never easy for German kids like us to cut class in those days. But this was something we wouldn’t have missed for the world. We’d meet at the bike racks at recess when word came that the trucks they always arrived in had been spotted on Main Street and ride down to the old mansion by the lake, where we’d find a dozen or more boys already milling around, waiting nervously for the show to begin.
Mercy House was set a short distance back from the gravel laneway that our teachers liked to refer to as Sanctuary Road, this for the fact that the hospice was home to the last of the evacuees who’d been delivered to our town years ago to receive the sort of medical attention that was in short supply in England after the war. We had our own names for that narrow tree-lined drive that we didn’t share with our teachers. Blind Man’s Alley was one. Or Radiation Row. These were some of the place names my brother, Thomas, and I lifted from the comic books we liked to read back then. But we’d never seen a comic book with a house as mysterious or frightening as this one.
It was an old English-style country mansion half-covered in creepers and ivy and bordered on three sides (the fourth opened onto Lake Ontario) by a mossy fieldstone wall just high enough to make it difficult for kids like us to peer over. On those chilly spring afternoons after ditching school we laid our bikes at the side of the road and found a foothold on the wall, where we watched and waited for the inspectors to begin unloading the two big canvas-topped ZIL-157s they’d parked at the bottom of the drive, not far from the brass-knockered door that was the main entrance to the house. Those trucks, like so many other things we depended on back then, were a gift from the Soviet Union, our lifeline and protector against the threats that surrounded us now, since the end of that disastrous war. We saw and felt the Russian presence all around us in those days—in household appliances and automobiles and in the doctors who served in the medical centres in town. Usually the inspectors spoke decent English, but on this particular day, mixed with the sound of the waves rolling over the pebbled shore at the bottom of the property, we heard them speaking their impenetrable language as they donned protective suits and retrieved their tools from the backs of the trucks, none more expressive or alarming than the Geiger counters they pulled like swords from their grey cloth sheaths.
These strange devices were silent as a stick of wood when we first saw them but crackled to life when they were deployed over a certain patch of ground, sending a bolt of excitement through our hearts. Each man had one of these instruments. It was a small grey box connected by a cord to a wand that, from where we watched, peering over the stone wall, looked like some variation on the clothes iron our mother used on our shirts and pants. We couldn’t see the faces of the inspectors who wielded these tools. They wore black rain slickers and boots and gloves and white masks over their noses and mouths.
After sweeping the grounds (this was the word some of the older boys used to describe the process—sweeping), they filed up the stone steps to where they were greeted by two nursing sisters and a man dressed in a dark suit. From this distance we had no clear view of the faces of those who greeted the visitors, but we knew them to be the keepers of the house. They passed documents back and forth for signing, and then the door was closed behind them and there, inside the hospice, they stayed for an hour or more performing duties that set our imaginations on a fearful tear. Now and then one of the men came back outside carrying a grey sample bag in each hand, or to retrieve an item from the back of one of the trucks. It was an agonizing hour we passed as we waited, our anticipation holding us rooted like trees to the ground.
When the team emerged from the house they stowed their gear, stripped off their protective suits, and got back into their trucks. The ZIL-157s were thunderously loud things, like the war they’d been harvested from. When their motors were turned over, the air vibrated, and as they rolled through the gates, one of the men might lower the passenger-side window and call out something to us in Russian, which sent a shiver down our spines. No one among us understood what was said. But we all knew enough to be captured by the strangeness of the afternoon.
We spat nervously and rubbed our hands together while we watched the trucks drive away up the road. The older boys smoked cigarettes and bounced the front tires of their Spitfire two-speed racers against the gravel, and after the trucks turned right on Main Street they made brave declarations about Queen and Country and promised they’d rather crunch a cyanide pill between their teeth than let themselves get turned into a mass of human jelly like the poor souls trapped behind those stone walls. Shaken and exhilarated, Thomas and I kept our mouths shut and slipped away unnoticed.
We rode our bikes back to school and tried to disappear into the anonymity of our day, hopeful that our teachers would forgive the lies we’d rehearsed to explain our absences (they never did), and over the days to come we waited for the local paper to publish the results of the inspection. We knew what they’d say. It was the same every year—the hospice and grounds declared safe, no traces of radiation found. But we could not be tricked, for the certainty of our beliefs bordered on the superstitious. What we knew in our hearts could not be so easily dismissed. We knew what we’d seen and heard—those Geiger counters chattering as clearly as crickets in a garden. There was no question you’d burn like an egg in a frying pan if you got too close to that property for too long, and though the poor blind souls holed up in there might be taking their sweet time dying, dying they were, and no one could do a thing about it.
The fact that our mother had done her Service of Atonement at Mercy House and survived the ordeal didn’t allay our fears or disarm our superstitions. It gave us a more immediate and intimate connection to its history than the other boys had, though. We knew its background, too, of course—that, for example, the Order of the Sisters of Saint Joseph had come up from Pennsylvania in 1847 to meet the first waves of Irish Famine immigrants that were arriving then in their miserable coffin ships to the north shore of Lake Ontario. We knew they’d tended to the sick and the dying in the fever sheds on Richmond Street in Toronto, only an hour west, and at the Hotel Dieu and in MacDonald Park in Kingston—two hours east—many themselves succumbing to the typhus. Yet despite these losses the Order continued on in the province for years; and in 1944, five generations later, it acquired the abandoned Raymar estate in the town where we grew up and turned it into the hospice for those blinded on that terrible day in London, and where our mother had worked for the first five years of her new life in Canada.
She was two months pregnant with my brother when her service began in November 1944 and had no training or particular interest in health care or the blind, specifically. There was a position to be filled at Mercy House after the passing of the Atonement Act. It was as simple as that, she said. As a non-preferred immigrant she was removed from her private employment as a domestic and placed at the hospice to serve the mandatory term that befell any German newcomer back then. She reported to the house carry
ing the one small suitcase that contained her few possessions, and there she stayed for the duration of her term, enjoying only the limited freedom of spousal privilege—meaning she could live off-premises with her new husband. The sisters and medical staff who ran their lives referred to her and the others as atonement girls, those young German women whose guilt by association was never in doubt. They were expected to perform their duties unfailingly and in absolute silence, and to have no contact whatever with the wards of the house.
At its peak as many as ninety people resided at Mercy House, but my mother saw very little of them. She spent her time in the kitchen and laundry doing jobs that kept her confined to the basement and scullery, far removed from the patients who would have protested, and perhaps violently so, against the idea of one of the German girls coming anywhere near them. Her state of mind worsened when she finally confirmed her pregnancy. She would have accepted any posting to get away from the illness that was in those early years slowly emptying the house—even a posting in the dangerous far north, she told us, anything to leave from there—but the nursing sisters, unmoved by her condition, turned down her repeated requests for a transfer, unwavering in their determination that all penitents must be made to pay their due.
A second German girl had stayed on at Mercy House during a pregnancy, and her child had been born with no deformities whatever. This young woman had put her faith in the folk remedies for the prevention and cure for radiation sickness that were widely held at the time. If you stuck to the protocols, she told my mother, the unborn would stand at least a decent chance. She’d taken powdered charcoal and bee pollen in her tea during her pregnancy, liberally spread sunscreen on her abdomen and face and arms before every shift, and scrubbed herself head to toe—sometimes to the point of bleeding—at the end of the day.
As determined as she was terrified, my mother followed a similar regimen during her pregnancy with my brother. She wore gloves when handling the laundry—bedsheets and pillow cases were thought to be especially hazardous—and washed her hands in bleach a half-dozen times a day. She did everything possible to protect my brother from the terrors she and our father saw on The World in Action reels that screened ahead of the feature at the Playhouse on Main Street, where later as a family we watched the Vincent Price and Boris Karloff movies we loved so much. Over the span of her first pregnancy, and later, with me, she went to bed every night fearing the worst, her hands stripped and burning from the cruel protocols she subjected herself to. It seemed her efforts were not in vain. In May 1945 Thomas was born healthy and perfect, thank goodness, and on a bright August morning two years later I followed, kicking and screaming, into this strange new world.
