by Alison Pick
When the routine is completed for the second time, I need to lie down. I climb the stairs to the blue room with twin beds that was my father’s as a teenager. Granny and Gumper built this house in 1966 and it is full of their belongings from the Old Country. The framed maps of Bohemia, the enormous dark wood armoire. Granny’s parents didn’t escape themselves, but managed to send a large amount of furniture out of occupied Czechoslovakia. It spent the war in two containers in Antwerp. When the furniture arrived and was unpacked, the empty containers were so big that Gumper gave them to friends, one to be used for a hunting camp and the other for a garage.
Delaying my nap, I go into Gumper’s old study and look at the six-pronged menorah pushed to the very back of the shelf.
The carpet, I notice for the first time ever, is covered in a pattern that resembles Stars of David.
I point this out to Dad. He scoffs. I’m seeing things where there’s nothing to see. Why am I so interested in Judaism when it was so “unimportant” to Granny and Gumper?
Over dinner, I drag myself through a long song and dance about how the Judaism I’m studying is different from that of our ancestors, how I’m drawn to it of its own accord.
Very drawn to it.
Dad dips a piece of pork chop into his applesauce. “There’s something I want to ask you about,” he says.
I wait.
“It’s about my portfolio,” he says. “My financial portfolio.”
He launches into a diatribe about his fear that we will mismanage his estate, not out of intent but out of ignorance, and how everything he’s worked for, and everything Gumper worked for, will be lost.
I try not to be discouraged. But clearly I need a new approach to the topic of Judaism.
I stay in North Hatley for a week. My mother cooks me heaping plates of spaghetti Bolognese, and I get out of bed only to float in the emerald swimming pool, with the view of the lake below. I wave at the farmhand haying our field; he has been taking care of the property for decades. In the evenings I watch the satellite TV: Wimbledon, the Summer Olympics. On my last night, Dad joins me for a movie. At the climax, when the children are taken away from their parents, he starts to make sounds. Loud wincing. I look over at him; his hands are balled up, his eyes squinty. “Ouch,” he says. “Ouch, ouch.”
This naming of his emotional pain as a physical symptom is familiar; he did the same thing at church in the difficult year after Gumper’s death. His forehead on the pew, tears leaking from his eyes. Dad is forever leaving movies, walking out of the theatre because, in his own words, he can’t distinguish the real from the made-up, the truth from a story. His own truth from the story.
A friend once asked me, “Who in the world are you most afraid to lose? Don’t censor!”
“My father,” I said.
I will not be able to exist without him in the world.
“Ouch, ouch.” Dad winces, doubled over.
“We can turn it off,” I say.
He sighs with relief.
We sit in the high-backed, leather-covered European armchairs.
“I had the most amazing religious talk of my life,” he tells me. “Just the other day. With Father Gagnon, the Catholic priest.”
“What did he say?”
Dad summarizes: That all religions are the same. That religion is a tool to greater spiritual knowing.
This is his line, the one he learned from his beloved grandmother Ruzenka, that the particular religion doesn’t matter so much as the practice of religion itself. Any religion will do.
Later, after Dad has gone to bed, I watch a rerun of the old TV show Six Feet Under. Brenda, the New Age girlfriend, says to the main character, Nate, “You channel other people’s pain.”
Nate teases her. “Dad always said it was my talent.”
Brenda’s face grows serious. “It is,” she says. “It’s a gift.”
There are babies everywhere: in the small North Hatley post office, on the plane on my way back to Toronto, in the airport. I ogle their plump arms, unable to peel my eyes away. I’m nine weeks pregnant. So nauseous I could weep.
Dr. Singh calls to schedule a checkup. “How was your trip?” she asks brightly when I see her.
“I feel a little … sick.”
She smiles brightly again. “That’s normal!”
It means, she reminds me, that the pregnancy is progressing.
Music Night is scheduled for the first Saturday I’m back. The leafy back porch is crammed with writers. A novelist friend says, “You’re not pregnant, are you?” She eyes my apple juice.
I shake my head emphatically: No.
As though the baby has heard my remonstrance, when I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, I find blood in my underwear. I gape at it in the same way that I gaped at the pink line on the pregnancy test: something of intimate, immediate consequence that at the same time feels as remote as a star. I look away, look back. It’s still there. Not the blood of a menstrual period—not quite—but any blood is reason for consternation.
I bleed steadily for a week, unable to think of anything else. I meet Dr. Singh’s reassurance that spotting is “normal” with flat-out disbelief. I have, by this point, also procured myself a midwife and I call her, too, hoping she’ll be more sympathetic. Finally, in face of my relentless wheedling and cajoling, she agrees to send me for an ultrasound. The technician squirts jelly on my stomach, brandishes her magic wand. “Let’s see if we can hear your baby’s heartbeat,” she says.
Wait.
What?
My baby?
My baby’s heartbeat?
On the screen is a blizzard, fierce wind and snow. And then, a tiny flashing blip, a flicker, like some kind of beacon.
“There it is!” The technician beams, as though she’s never seen this before.
It is stunning in a way I could never have imagined. All this sickness, this exhaustion, has had a purpose. There’s something—someone—inside me. My little baby. Oh! My little baby.
Tears roll down my face, into my ears.
I am sent home with a photo of our dreamer, a whisper of an image as ethereal as the minute being herself. When Degan gets in from work, I tell him what I’ve heard.
“Seriously?” he asks. I can see he only half believes me. He squints at the picture, trying to arrange the grey flecks into something resembling a baby. We lie down on the bed. He presses his face to my tummy. “Hi there, little one,” he murmurs. “I hear your heart is pretty strong. I have to be honest: I don’t know what I’m doing. But I can hardly wait for you to arrive.”
September 8 is my thirty-third birthday. My bleeding eases up. I’m still nauseous, but nothing like before. I’m out of the gates, out of the first trimester, thirteen weeks pregnant to the day. Everyone says now I can relax, which means, I guess, that I can stop worrying about a miscarriage. Only, I haven’t been worrying at all, since I’m not going to have one.
Degan suggests it’s time to share our news more widely. I send an email, and am floored by the many answers that flood back. All at once it’s true: I’m going to be a mother. We’re going to have a child.
two
THE FOLLOWING EVENING is our first JIC class back after the summer. It is held at Toronto’s Holocaust Centre. Degan and I drive up Bathurst Street, which goes on forever, to the part of town I’ve heard referred to as the Gaza Strip. There is an intercom at the parking lot gate, where we have to state our purpose, and a security guard at the front desk. We are issued hot-pink name tags, which we are instructed to wear in full view; a burly man with a mullet asks us to write down our exact time of arrival. The class begins to congregate in a hallway upstairs; people are smiling and waving. Diane approaches with Krista on her chest. “Oh! She got so big!” I say.
Diane grins proudly. “Hi, Krista,” I say, playing with her toes. “Hi! Hi, Krista!” One hand on my stomach, as though linking our “little blastocyst” to the healthy, thriving infant in front of me.
Harriet appears in her
lavender UGGs, surveying us like an unpleasant reminder, like something distasteful she has almost managed to forget over the two months away. She gathers us in front of a huge set of double doors that are like something out of Harry Potter or Narnia, carved with the Hebrew letter shin. “What words start with the letter shin?” she asks.
“Shoah,” says Diane.
“Shalom,” says Tom.
“Shabbat!” Debra shouts.
I catch her eye and smile, and mouth, “Hey!”
She mouths in return, “Welcome back.”
Several more shin words are suggested. It’s as though the doors will swing open to Sesame Street if we stumble across the magic word.
Harriet talks for a very long time about how the Shoah must never happen again. I try to connect her words to Vera, to Oskar and Marianne, but cannot. The whole class shifts uncomfortably. It is hot; there is nowhere to sit down. Finally Harriet pushes a small, well-concealed button on one of the door handles and the huge mechanized doors creak open. We file past a montage of famous European Jews (Modigliani, Einstein, the Rothschilds) and settle onto chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of a large screen. We are shown a half-hour movie called Into the Deep, replete with sinister organ music and black arrows depicting the Nazis moving across the continent. There are stock shots of men in tallitot, dangling from the gallows; piles of spectacles and wristwatches; the row of blank-faced murderers at the Nuremberg Trials. The same items Degan and I have just recently seen behind glass at Auschwitz itself. The mountain of baby shoes brings a lump to my throat, but I swallow and focus, instead, on the back of Diane’s head and on the smaller head of Krista, asleep on her stomach. I cannot go back into that blackness now. I make a little wall of light around myself and shut everything else out.
Unfortunately, though, it is hard to tune out the survivor whose speech is the final item on the evening’s agenda. It is clear from the way Hilda mounts the podium, like a prizefighter entering the ring, that she has given this talk many times. She has props: laminated photos of her relatives who were murdered, an armband with a Star of David—not the original, she tells us, but one she sewed herself for these presentations. Hilda was a girl of fourteen when the war broke out. She spent five years in the forests, starving and running and hiding, surviving against all odds to arrive here in prosperous Thornhill to talk to us tonight. She tells us bluntly of the horrors she endured: Washing in her own urine to keep the boils away. Letting a friend who was labouring in childbirth bite her arm. Why? So the Nazis, directly above the cellar where they were hiding, wouldn’t hear.
“The baby had to be strangled the moment it was born,” she says, looking at us one by one, nonchalant, daring us to react. “If it had the chance to cry, we’d all be discovered.”
Diane pulls Krista closer into her chest.
“Besides,” Hilda says, “we were partisans, starving in the woods. What would we do with a baby?”
Hilda jumps, in her thick accent, from anecdote to anecdote. I see the psychology of the survivor, which I’ve been reading about. Hilda has never left the forest. Each time she talks of it, she goes back. She has a desperate hunger to process the experience, which she attempts to do by recounting it over and over. But no amount of talk can fill the void. I picture Granny in the centre of a crowd at a cocktail party, her cigarette aloft in her manicured fingers, as she holds court over the assembly. I think about the inadequacy of language in the face of experience, and about the fact that in twenty years, the survivors will be gone. I am living in the tiny window of time in which we can hear the testimony from the source. Yet if Vera’s story was hard to imagine, Hilda’s feels completely abstract. My own months of psychic turmoil battle against hers, erecting a defensive barrier. I conjure up the image I’ve seen on the ultrasound screen, our little blinking heartbeat, and focus on it instead of what she is saying.
Hilda has obviously been told she goes on too long, because at several points she asks, “You are tired? You are wanting me to stop?”
But either the rest of the class feels differently or they are better at feigning attention, because they murmur collectively, “No, please continue,” and Hilda launches back into the stream of words from which I fear we will never emerge.
From directly behind me comes a low snort, a snuffle. I turn around in my seat: our instructor, Harriet, is asleep.
After, we congregate in a boardroom upstairs to debrief the session. “We’ll talk about what you’ve just seen in a moment,” Harriet says. “But first, did anyone have a really remarkable summer?”
I put my hand on my belly and whisper to Degan, “Should we tell them?”
He clears his throat. “Well, on the topic of tonight’s class, we visited Auschwitz.”
I wince at his misunderstanding. The last thing I want to do is talk more about the gas chambers. Soon, though, I will be glad he hasn’t shared the real news.
three
WEDNESDAY MORNING my nausea reappears, a stomach sickness more barbed than the one I’ve grown accustomed to. Degan finds me on the bathroom floor with my cheek pressed against the cool tiles. He leads me to bed, tucks me in. “Rest,” he says. “I’ll call you from work. And try to get out for some fresh air.”
I mumble something unintelligible.
“Promise?” he asks.
I nod weakly.
I sleep for three hours, and wake with the intent to do what I’ve been told. My bike has a flat tire, but filling it seems like a manageable goal. Out on the front porch the late-summer air is dense, the edges of everything hazy. I heave my bike down the cement steps to the sidewalk. It feels inordinately heavy. Almost as soon as I start pushing it, I am shaking and perspiring with the effort.
I reach the intersection I’ve been heading for, and realize my destination is still another block away.
I eventually get to the garage, and crouch in front of the counter, hanging on to my stomach, sweat pouring off me. I hobble to the bathroom, where I throw up violently and am granted a few moments of relief. A kind stranger fills my tire with air. Back outside, the day is bright and boiling hot. And then, just as quickly, freezing cold. The hill facing me on the way home looms like a ghoulish apparition. Although I now have two full tires, the hill is way too steep to ride, so I’m again resigned to the Sisyphean task of pushing. My breath is shallow and shaky. I cross with the light. When I at last reach the apartment, I’m confronted by the steep concrete stairs. I have no idea how I manage to get my bike up them. Finally I’m crashed out on the bed. I call Degan and tell him I feel bad. Really bad.
In the week after, he will replay my messages and cry.
Degan arrives home early. He tucks me in and phones our midwife, Hedrey. She tells us to come in to her office the next morning. We’ll see if we can still hear the baby’s heartbeat.
That night I have a fever, low at first but rising. I toss in my sweat-soaked sheets, holding my cramping stomach. I get up to pee and am not surprised to see I have started to bleed again. I fall back into a fitful sleep and wake up just twenty minutes before we’re due at the midwife’s. “Why did you let me sleep so late?” I snap, but I see from Degan’s face it was because he is worried about me; he wanted to let me rest as much as possible.
At the clinic, brimming with toddlers and breastfeeding pillows and women in overalls, Degan checks a book on morning sickness out of the lending library. It has a single, sad-looking soda cracker on the cover.
Maybe I just have really bad morning sickness.
Hedrey greets us with a sombre smile. I lie down in her examining room, decorated to resemble a bedroom with brightly patterned curtains and photos of newborn babies on the walls, so animal in their pink hairless helplessness. Sun slants hotly through the windows. I lift my shirt; Hedrey places her Doppler on my belly.
I wait for the sound of the heartbeat, but there’s nothing. Only the eerie whoosh of my own blood through my veins.
Hedrey averts her eyes, concentrating. She moves the instrument low
er, just above my pubic bone, where my stomach, in the last week, has started to protrude. I can now actually feel the knot of a human there, inside me.
Still nothing from the Doppler. I crumple the edges of my skirt in my wet palms.
Then, suddenly, there it is. The galloping hoofbeats, fast and steady. Da-dun, da-dun, da-dun.
Hedrey beams. “Hello, baby!” And then: “The baby is fine!”
We’re all silent, listening to the heartbeat, relief washing over us. I look over at Degan, his blue eyes wide, full of tears.
The baby is fine. The baby is fine. I repeat this to myself as Degan drives up Bathurst Street. The baby is fine. But such a high fever isn’t good for her. We need to try to bring my temperature down. Hedrey has instructed me to go see Dr. Singh.
Degan stops at a red light, and I call Mum on my cell and give her the update: “The baby is fine!”
But I’m still feeling awful.
I hang up the phone and a paroxysm of pain overwhelms me: jagged little claws grabbing at me from the inside. I hunch over in the passenger seat, my knees tucked up to my chest. A sound escapes my lips, a sound I don’t at first recognize as coming from my own mouth. Degan reaches for me, holds my shoulder awkwardly with one arm while turning the car onto Eglinton with the other. The jabs are sharpening, converging. I cry out again and pull my knees in closer.
In the elevator on the way up to the doctor’s office, I double over involuntarily. The elevator door dings open and I run down the hall to the bathroom, my whole body clenching and squeezing. I throw myself into a stall and slam the door behind me.
When I pull down my pants, my underwear is soaked with blood. In the crotch, a cylinder of thick red jelly.
I crouch over the toilet. Cramps, then a river of shit, then more intense cramps. Not cramps. Contractions. My insides are falling out, big chunks of red splashing beneath me. I bend over with my head between my knees, sweat pouring off me, my body finishing its task of its own accord. I finally manage to stand, minutes or hours later, rising on wobbly legs as though I’ve just been born. The toilet bowl is full of blood, and feces, and something else, which my eyes flinch from. I force myself to look back. I want to see my baby, all thirteen weeks of her—her eyelids, her fingerprints, her ears. But from beneath me there’s a roar: the automatic toilet flushing.
