by Alison Pick
“Okay.”
“And I am not.”
“Right.”
I wait her out some more.
“I, too, have considered conversion,” she says. “And decided against it.”
Her husband! Jewish! The light bulbs are popping: Charlotte is a person! With a life beyond these doors, beyond me.
Charlotte has debated becoming Jewish.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say. “I mean, that makes sense. I understand.”
She opens her mouth to speak. For a moment I think she is about to tell me something else personal, something else about herself, but my excitement at her revealing herself to me morphs quickly into dread. I don’t want to know a thing. I need her to be anonymous. Yet she only says, “We’d better wrap up. We’re almost out of time.” And as soon as the chance is taken away, I am disappointed. I want to be her friend, her confidante. I want to know everything.
That night I watch another video of Vera—not the Shoah Project, but one filmed by Dad, who travelled to Newark, New Jersey, to interview her. In the Shoah Project interview, Vera seemed to identify strongly as a Jew, but in this conversation with my father, she tries to distance herself. Talking about the dirty Polish Jews from the shtetl. How they lived such a different life from her own. How there is only one other Jewish family in her building, and she doesn’t have much to do with them.
She begins talking about “bread that Jews eat”—but she can’t think of the word.
Dad, who is interviewing her, keeps saying, “Matzah?”
“Challah,” I say to the screen.
“Matzah?” Dad asks.
“Challah!” I shout.
But Vera never gets it.
Context is everything. Faced with the Shoah Foundation’s interviewer, she was apologetic about her lack of Jewish education. She could not go to religious school since there wasn’t one in her hometown, and her grandfather taught her only some of what she should know. “Not enough, unfortunately,” she said, with genuine regret in her voice. Now, though, she wants none of it. Her voice is small and sad. She touches the bangles on her wrist. I wonder if they are the same bracelets her son sent me after her death, the ones that I accidentally left at a bar when we were living out east. I remember the panic I felt, arriving home drunk and tired and realizing my cold wrist was bare. I called; the barmaid said the lost-and-found box was empty. I went down the next morning, and she let me parse the green and amber bottles, dig among the containers of lemon wedges and maraschino cherries. My hand landed on two big copper hoops, and I couldn’t believe it when they revealed themselves not as bracelets but as earrings, someone else’s lost jewellery, looking so much like my own.
I never found those bracelets, and it still bothers me, still niggles at me late at night. A loss—unlike the other losses—that is bearable. Two copper bangles. A loss I can hold.
twenty-one
WATCHING VERA’S INTERVIEW confirms my desire to go to Auschwitz. I will be in Europe for a literary festival that will pay for my ticket, and Degan and I have scraped together enough for him to come along. It may be a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
Still, money is tight. I dig through the mail, looking for some notice of a grant, some kind of sign that I’ll be able to finish writing my novel. My bank account is drying up, with no source of income on the horizon. I tear open a promising-looking envelope, but it is just one of Mum’s famous newspaper clippings, an article from The Globe and Mail about Ashkenazai Jewish women being at a significantly higher risk for carrying the BRCA breast cancer gene than the rest of the population. One in forty-four versus one in four hundred, in fact.
Women’s College Hospital is running a study, including testing for the gene.
Degan looks over my shoulder at the article. “You should get the test.”
“Wouldn’t it be awesome if I had it?”
He bugs out his eyes.
“Not the disease,” I clarify. “Genetic proof that I’m a Jew.”
What have I been reduced to?
There is a phone number at the bottom of the article if you want to volunteer for the study. I dial it. A woman with an Australian accent answers, and I tell her why I’m calling.
“You’re Jewish?” she asks.
“My father is.”
“That’s fine.”
“My mother is not.”
“That’s fine,” she says again.
She takes my info. They’ll contact me. That is all.
I’ve reached the final draft of my novel Far to Go and I edit obsessively, trying to make sure all the clues line up, all the threads resolve neatly, with subtlety and surprise. I’m at my desk working when the woman from the breast cancer study calls back the next morning. I recognize her accent right away. “We’ve had an opening for this afternoon,” she says. She pauses, and I hear her reading from the schedule under her breath. “Would one o’clock work for you?”
“Sure,” I say, surprised that the appointment has panned out so effortlessly.
“Remember to bring the history of cancer in your extended family.”
“Only my father is Jewish,” I tell her again, in case she did not understood the first time we talked.
“Great,” she says. “Just remember the medical history.”
I hang up the phone feeling teary about being accepted, a kind of sadness that is mostly, I realize, hormonal. So, no baby again this month.
I close the document, save it, then save a second time for good measure. I go outside and unlock my bike. It’s a short ride down to the hospital. I am shown into a windowless boardroom. Two heavily made-up women are talking about a nanny who drowned in a pool in Thornhill.
There are six packages of forms to fill out, pages and pages of questions about my health, my relatives’ health, my family history. Do I have kids? Have I had cancer? Am I worried I’ll get it? One question asks whether I want to be notified of my results. I tick yes.
I am asked to indicate whether both parents are Jewish or just one, but not which parent. Genetically, there is no difference.
My blood, the doctor tells me when eventually I am shown in, will be tested for mutations commonly found in the Ashkenazi Jewish population. I roll up my sleeve to the place, I think, where the numbered tattoo would have been. He brandishes a needle; I offer him my arm.
That night Degan and I go to dinner at a friend’s apartment. A bunch of poets and novelists are there, and my editor Lynn. I give her a little update on the novel. Everyone drifts out onto the deck, where talk turns to television and to cats. We mix cocktails under summer’s green canopy and watch the raccoons try to open the garbage containers. I only have one drink, plus an extra sip of Degan’s, but when I wake up the next morning, I’m wrung out like a rag. I rarely miss a morning at my desk, but now I just want to stay in bed. I’m probably about to get my period; my breasts are awfully sore.
And then it occurs to me.
I leap out of bed, jump on my bike and race down to the drugstore to buy a pregnancy test. Back at the apartment, I peel back the foil, squat over the toilet and take aim. One line means the test is negative; two means it’s positive. The first line appears, a turtle inching slowly toward the finish line. Then, five seconds later, like an arrow showing progress toward a fundraising goal, a second line inches up the screen.
I look away, count slowly to ten, look back. The second line is still there.
I pull my pants up halfway but forget to do the button: I race around the apartment looking for my phone, one hand holding my jeans up. “I’m having a baby!” I shout to the air. I pull clothes out of drawers, empty all my purses onto the bed. Finally I find the phone in plain view on the top of my dresser and reach Degan right away. “Hey!” I say, breathless. There are horns in the background, traffic.
“I’m on my bike,” he says.
“And talking on the phone at the same time?” The father of my unborn child is endangering his life. “Pull over,” I order.
“I
’m fine—it’s a side street.”
“No, really. Pull over.”
There’s the sound of some fumbling, gears changing.
“I have some news.”
“Okay?”
“I think I’m pregnant!”
“Because your boobs hurt?”
He doubts me. To his credit, he’s heard this before. “I took a test,” I say, smug.
Loud horns in the background.
“I thought you were on a side street.”
“You’re serious?” he asks.
Degan begins to take slow, deep breaths, a kind of precautionary Lamaze. I check the second pink line to make sure it hasn’t disappeared. “Holy shit,” I say, over and over.
“Breathe with me,” Degan says. “Breathe.”
I pass the next half-hour, while I wait for him to get home, by looking at other people’s babies on Facebook. I check out Diane and baby Krista from our class. I am trying to imagine one of those fat, drooly creatures actually belonging to us. To me. I look online for midwives. The websites advise calling as early as possible because spaces are limited, but I can’t muster the faith to actually pick up the phone. It’s too surreal, too abstract. I count ahead to my due date, “forty weeks from the first day of your last period”: March 21.
Thirty-eight more weeks to finish my novel.
Degan arrives home and I lunge at him, holding the stick out in front of me like a crazy person. “I’m crazy, aren’t I.”
He peers at it. “Yes. And pregnant.” He holds the stick up, squinting. We giggle at the absurdity.
“Let’s buy a house,” I say suddenly. The market is abysmal, but we both agree instantly that we’re willing to shoulder the debt. Our old lives slipping farther from view, like a small boat at the edge of the horizon.
“She’ll be born in March,” I say. “It’s perfect. We’ll spend the summer outside.”
“She?”
“It’s a girl,” I say, and Degan grins. His confidence in me complete.
He looks at the ceiling, cursing softly and with pleasure. Then all at once he starts rummaging madly through his bag. “I just remembered,” he says. “I have something for you.”
He holds out an envelope; I open it tentatively. Inside is a CD of Don Giovanni and tickets for the Prague State Opera House.
“Oh,” I say. “I kind of forgot about our trip.”
“Let’s listen to it!”
“To what?”
“The CD,” Degan says.
“I wonder if I’m allowed to travel.”
“I love Don Giovanni,” Degan says.
I can see he’s in shock, but I’m pregnant. Opera is the last thing on my mind.
“Hey,” I say, trying to distract him. “I think I saw a blessing in one of our textbooks for finding out about conception.”
“And that would apply to us how?”
More giggling. But the truth is slowly becoming real.
I pull down the stack of heavy books from the top of the piano. The Contents page in On the Doorposts of Your Home, which has a swirly New Age pink-and-purple cover, lists a prayer called On Learning of a Pregnancy. We thumb through the pages.
“Here it is,” I say.
“Should we?” he asks.
I laugh.
“Let’s do it,” Degan says.
We stand shoulder to shoulder and recite the first part together: “ ‘We stand humbled before the Power of Creation with joy and fear …’ ”
(With fear! With fear!)
I read the lines assigned to the WOMAN: “ ‘Deep inside me a seed is growing. I am at once afraid and filled with ecstasy …’ ”
Afraid! Yes!
Also embarrassed. The prayer feels silly, like we are auditioning for a child’s school pageant or a commercial for natural deodorant.
Degan reads for the MAN: “ ‘I stand with you in awe before the wonder of existence …’ ”
I can see from his face, though, that he’s still thinking about his opera tickets. There’s a long paragraph in transliterated Hebrew: I wonder what it means.
On the opposite page is a blessing to say upon a miscarriage, but I am not worried about my baby’s viability. Little wings tremble in my belly. That night I dream about a filament, buzzing brightly in the centre of a bulb.
I visit my doctor, Dr. Singh. Her hair is pulled into the high bouncy ponytail of a cheerleader. She tests my urine, confirms the double line’s augury.
“We’re going to Europe,” I tell her.
“When?”
“On Friday!”
Surely this isn’t allowed. “Am I okay to travel? To fly?” I ask.
“So long as you feel up for it.”
I feel up for it, I tell her. I feel fantastic.
There are things I have wanted in my life, things I have longed for. To have a book published. To meet a partner. But this particular longing to be a mother is different. Only in its consummation do I realize its extent, like a vast continent whose hinterlands I’ve purposefully ignored. I’ve spent the past decade bracing against pregnancy, trying not to capitulate to its allure. The abnegation has gone on so long that I have come to believe myself incapable. Only now that I am pregnant and therefore undeniably fertile can I acknowledge how I long for a child. There is nothing I want more in the world’s farthest reaches.
We spend the next couple of days getting ready for our trip. Degan cleans the kitchen and I tidy the bedroom for our subletters. I fight my impulse to hide the Sabbath candlesticks, the tzedakah box emblazoned with the Star of David, the books by Martin Gilbert. Most people are good, I reassure myself. I’m safe.
Degan reads aloud to me from the guidebook about the Jewish Quarter in Vienna: it was a hotbed for antisemitism, yes, but also an epicentre for Jewish culture before the war.
Vienna, I’ve always thought, would make a nice name for a girl. And the V would go well with Degan’s last name, Davis.
twenty-two
I’M MYSELF, AN AVERAGE WOMAN boarding a plane, and then all at once, I’m someone else. Somewhere high over the Atlantic a transformation occurs, sudden and complete, an eclipse of the moon, a slap across the face. “It’s just jet lag,” I tell Degan when we land in Austria. I gesture to some cracked plastic chairs at the back of the arrivals lounge. “Can we just stop here for a quick rest?”
I’m so tired he has to drag me out of the airport by my arm. I fall asleep the second the taxi starts moving, so I see nothing of where we are, where we’re going. The taxi drops us off in the middle of a concrete square. It’s five in the morning; everything is closed. I lie like a dishrag in the front lobby of a tanning salon while Degan figures out the directions to our hotel.
When we get there, I sleep for fifteen hours. When I wake, Degan is dressed and shaved. He hands me a coffee—I flinch and push it away, acutely nauseous.
His eyes widen. Never in the decade he’s known me have I refused coffee.
We visit the rooms where Sigmund Freud saw patients, and the bustling Naschmarkt. Degan tours Schubert’s apartment while I sleep in the stairwell outside. When he emerges, he mistakes me, briefly, for a vagrant. At dinner I scarf down three-quarters of a roast chicken and a huge plate of spaghetti. Six weeks pregnant. The hunger is for the new person I’m growing inside me, and the new self, the mother I’ll become.
The Jewish Quarter is marked on our map with a Star of David. On Friday we take the bus down, looking for a place to make Shabbat. We have to stop and ask directions. In our single day here, Degan has learned enough German to be mistaken for a native speaker. The man he stops gives long directions, pointing and gesticulating. Degan nods and smiles, although he doesn’t understand a word.
The synagogue, when we finally find it, is flush with a row of office buildings. It is distinguished only by two guards outside the door.
Where are we from? the larger bald one asks. Are we part of the Jewish community in Toronto? Can he see our passports? How are we related?
“We’r
e married,” I say.
He’s looking back and forth between the passports, his brow furrowed.
“Oh!” I say. “Our papers say we’re single. We just got married a month ago.”
“Mazel tov,” the guard says, but he isn’t done with the interrogation.
Have we ever been to Israel? Do we celebrate Shabbos and the High Holidays?
He turns to whisper something to the other guard; I see he has a bug in his ear.
Several metres away is a third guard, a machine gun slung over his shoulder. I clench with indignation and then I remember the terrorist attack described in the guidebook, in which thirty people were wounded and two killed while they were attending a bar mitzvah service here in 1981.
Finally we’re granted access. As we enter, we hear the woman behind us in line pleading with the guard. “I’m a Jew,” she cries. “I just want to pray.”
Inside the synagogue, I climb a stairway to the balcony, where the women are segregated. Four teenage girls in hats and long skirts are looking down into the synagogue proper, where there are maybe forty men, most with black hats and beards. These men are wandering up the aisles toward the bimah, draping their arms over the backs of pews, chatting with their neighbours. I locate the top of Degan’s head and watch him find a seat. It’s hard to tell whether the service has started or not. Eventually the rabbi rallies the troops, turning to his Torah and calling out page numbers in Hebrew. He bobs back and forth at the waist as he chants, pumping his fist in the air like a teenager at a rock concert. The bimah is crawling with little boys with long ringlets beside their ears. They cling to the tassels of the rabbi’s tallit, then try to crawl completely beneath the prayer shawl.
It dawns on me that the rabbi is their father. They are here with him at work.
The service is, mercifully, in English, to accommodate an unusually large number of visitors to the city. Still, I feel irrelevant, segregated in the rafters. The rabbi looks up at the women once during the service, and once he addresses us directly, making sure we all have siddurs. Otherwise, he speaks to the men. He talks about Tisha B’Av, the annual fast day that is approaching. It commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, tragedies that occurred on the same Hebrew date but 655 years apart. How could the bereft Jews possibly mark such events? Three suggestions were put forward, but it was the third suggestion that took, that at Jewish weddings a glass be broken. “At almost every Jewish wedding a glass is broken,” the rabbi says. “Why?”
