by Alison Pick
I don’t have the heart to tell him that Dr. Singh reminds me of the last baby we lost.
Dr. Sokol flips through his papers and pulls out my results. “Good news or bad news?” he asks.
My stomach falls. “Good?”
“Your beta levels are stable.”
I exhale, but not too far. “What’s the bad news?”
“They’re not rising the way I’d like them to. They’re just sort of sitting there.” He wrinkles his forehead and pushes his thumbs into his temples. “It’d be nice to know where this is going,” he says. “Are you pregnant or not. We’ll take some more blood today.”
“Okay,” I say, my voice flat.
“There’s nothing else. Unless you have any questions.”
“No.”
I turn to leave, then turn back toward him. “Chag Sameach,” I say.
He looks at me properly for the first time, his eyebrows protruding above his glasses.
“To you, too,” he says. “I’ll call you when I know.”
We spend the evening curled up with Thai takeout watching Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall. Annie, the Gentile, brings her Jewish boyfriend home for dinner. There is a parody of her family in the dining room: polite restraint, long silences interspersed with comments about other people’s illnesses. It might as well be my parents’ table.
There is a shot of Annie’s mother looking slantwise at Woody Allen and seeing, in his place, an Orthodox man with a black hat and sideburns.
After, we lie in bed; Degan puts his head under the covers and presses his mouth to my belly. “Hi, you,” he says to the baby. “How’s it going? I’ve got some things to tell you.”
He lowers his voice; I can’t hear what he’s saying. The whispering goes on for a long time. When he’s satisfied, he raises his voice again so I can hear. “Okay,” he says. He wraps up the conversation with, “Sweet dreams. Laila tov.”
He relaxes his head against my stomach; I stroke his hair. The pregnancy is so precarious. And with such a good father waiting in the wings.
Degan leaves for work the next morning and I prop myself up in bed with the laptop on my legs. I still haven’t watched the second half of Vera’s Shoah Project interview. I haven’t been able to bring myself to, but suddenly—who knows why—I have the courage.
I begin at the place in the interview where Vera describes the living conditions in Auschwitz. She tells the camera about the daily food ration: “coffee” (black water), a tiny crust, very rarely margarine. The so-called soup had all manner of debris in it.
They were slowly starving. Once, she says, they were allowed to write and mail two cards each, saying, “I am healthy and fine,” in exchange for bread.
The dreaded “selections” were made by several Nazis, including Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. Mengele, of the mice inserted into mouths and vaginas. Mengele, who would make a mother hold her newborn while the child starved. “They were the meanest men,” Vera says to the camera. But here her voice trails off, unable to find more words. Because, indeed, mean is not even close to adequate.
Eventually, in March of 1944, Vera’s mother, Ella Kafka, was selected for “work.”
“I asked the Nazis to take me, instead,” Vera says. “My mother was old.” Here she smiles ruefully, telling the camera, “She was fifty-six. Her body wouldn’t withstand it.”
Of course, it was not “work” that Ella was being chosen for.
Vera doesn’t say explicitly what happened to her mother but returns, instead, to that chasm in the psyche between knowing and not knowing, consciousness and willed ignorance. She says, “An engineer we knew said it was impossible. They couldn’t destroy five thousand people at a time.” She gazes at the viewer. “So naive we were.”
In June of 1944, the Germans needed manpower. They were losing the war. There would be a selection of men for bona fide work. Knowing it could save him, Vera tried to sneak her son, Jan, onto the work transport. She managed to get Jan behind the main gate, but a quarter of an hour later he was back. The chance lost.
I pull my laptop in closer to my chest, as though I could somehow hold Vera, give her comfort.
Vera soldiers on in the face of the questions. Her face betrays a heartbreaking eagerness to please, a gratitude that finally someone is listening, and a young, foolish hope that maybe now something can be done. She tells the camera that on July 3 there was another selection. The Germans were getting desperate; now even women would be used in the war effort; even Jewish women. Those who were chosen had to stand five to a line. Vera heard the commander shout, “I am missing one!”
A beat.
He pointed to her. “You go!”
A second beat. A skip in time.
“I can’t,” she said. “I have children.”
“I said go!”
Vera looks intently, piercingly, into the camera. “He slapped me. He beat me,” she says, her eyes wide. “I wanted to run, but there were SS, dogs. What could I do?”
She asks this of the viewer not rhetorically but genuinely, desperately, as though she could go back and act differently if she could finally figure out the answer. “Tell me, what could I do?”
A long silence.
“It was the worst time of my life,” Vera says. “You are half-crazy in a situation like that.”
“Where were your children?” the interviewer asks.
Vera looks into the lens as if to say, Have you not understood what I have been telling you?
“In the barracks without me,” she answers.
“Her thought process dwindled, ceased,” writes William Styron in Sophie’s Choice.
She could not believe any of this. She could not believe she was now kneeling on the hurtful, abraiding concrete, drawing her children toward her so smotheringly tight that she felt their flesh might be engrafted to hers even through layers of clothes. Her disbelief was total, deranged.
There was nothing Vera could do. She was taken from her children.
She doesn’t bother to tell the camera what happened to a child in Auschwitz who had no protection from a parent.
The rest of Vera’s story feels somehow irrelevant. The worst thing has already happened.
Her children are killed, but Vera survives against all odds. She is moved to a labour camp near Danzig and is brutally beaten. In January she is evacuated because the Russians are approaching. She walks in the snow for two months, wearing clogs. One night it’s snowing so hard that she and some other women are able to hide in a ditch. The march continues on without them. They stumble through the storm to a barn. The heat in the pig stalls is heaven. They are so hungry they eat straw.
The Russians, their eventual liberators, cannot distinguish the victims from the perpetrators and treat everyone the same. “They were like animals,” Vera says, several times, and her emphasis somehow implies sexual degradation, rape, but she leaves the particulars to the listener’s imagination.
There are more months of struggle. Vera finds her way back to Czechoslovakia. At the end of the war a man in a truck is driving around looking for a Vera Lowenbach.
“It’s me,” she tells him.
The man doesn’t believe her: she looks too old.
The same thing happens when she meets the mother of an old school friend. “I’m Vera Bondy,” she says, using her maiden name.
“You must be Ruzenka Bondy,” the woman replies, referring to Vera’s aunt, to Gumper’s mother. A woman fifty years older than Vera.
At the end of the tape, the disembodied voice of the interviewer wants to know if Vera has anything else to say.
“Pardon?”
“Do you think about the Holocaust often?”
“Yes. You can never forget it. Mostly I just socialize with people who were there.”
“Is there anything else you want to say?”
Her pause is imbued with futility, both desperate and resigned.
What is left to say? What could she possibly say?
“I just reall
y hope that nobody should experience something like this again,” she answers finally. Her words scrubbed completely clean of meaning.
twelve
DEGAN AND I SPEND AN UNEVENTFUL New Year’s at the cabin. The smell of the wood stove makes my stomach lurch, as does Degan’s aftershave and the mere sight of a single dirty dish in the sink. Nausea. A good sign.
I read trashy magazines on the sofa, popping Diclectin, the drug prescribed for morning sickness, like candy. Degan sits on the armchair opposite me with Martin Gilbert’s biography of Winston Churchill on his lap. He reads to me about Churchill’s friendship with the Jews, and how he sought to support them during the war. Vera’s brother Friedl was one of them. He fled mainland Europe and worked with the Royal Air Force. The Nazis found out, and as payback, his father, Hermann—Vera’s father, too—was beaten and tortured.
The diabetic father whose insulin was taken away.
Daddy.
Meanwhile, in today’s news, Israel has begun an attack on Gaza. Bombs, a ground invasion. The Palestinians can’t get across the border. Their diesel supply is cut off, their drinking water compromised. The Israeli defence minister says it won’t be a short operation.
We drive back to the city. Degan spends the first week of January with his eyes glued to the TV. “Unbelievable,” he curses. “Sickening.”
I’m pulling on pyjamas for bed when my phone rings. Dr. Sokol’s voice is bright. My HCG level has gone from 14,108 last Wednesday to 43,980 this Monday.
“HCG …?”
“Human chorionic gonadotropin.”
“So my beta levels?”
He laughs. “It’s good news.”
Later, I check my email. Harriet has written Rabbi Klein, copying us. “Mazel tov! Degan and Alison have completed all the requirements for the JIC. It was a pleasure to work with them.”
We’re done.
thirteen
THE MOST CONFUSING PART of my thwarted desire to become Jewish is the mounting evidence that I already am. In January, out of the blue, my father is awarded money from a claims tribunal that returns assets stolen from victims of the Holocaust. Dad emails me, appending the formal deed, and then writes to my sister, Emily, and me that he wants the two of us to share this award, as we are the furthest away in generations and age from the victim. The deed pertains specifically to the accounts of Friedrich Bondy. I battle against my psychic inertia over the names of dead relatives and pull down the family tree Dad gave me for Christmas. No wonder I’m confused: there were two Friedls, Vera’s brother, who worked for the RAF, and Vera and Gumper’s uncle. The claim pertains to the latter. He lived in Vienna from 1914 until March of 1938, when he fled to Zurich, then London, then finally New York. We have pictures of Uncle Friedl, grey-haired and lolling on the beach, and my cousin Lucy has an old dressing gown that belonged to him. He used to visit his sister, Ruzenka, at the Wylie cottage in North Hatley. Even though Uncle Friedl was almost deaf, Granny remembers him sitting on the porch reading symphony scores.
“A true gentleman,” Dad says. “Who do you know today who can read a symphony score?”
I smile.
Dad: “Other than Degan.”
Friedl was married briefly to a woman named Auguste Furth, otherwise known as Gusti, about whom Vera, his niece, had a little rhyme: Gusti je tlousty.
Dad translates this variously as “Gusty is tubby,” “Gusti is roly-poly” and, finally, “Gusti has a fat ass.”
“Keep this memory alive,” Dad writes. “Love, Dad.”
I burn through Friedl’s money quickly, and pretty soon I’m scraping around in the dregs of my bank account. Then, in early March, an envelope from the Canada Council for the Arts arrives with the results of my grant application. I know from years of experience that if the envelope is thin, it contains a single page rejecting the application. If, on the other hand, the envelope is thick, it contains acceptance forms to be signed and returned.
The envelope is thick.
I walk downtown in the late-winter sunshine, floating a half-inch above the pavement. Far to Go will be my fourth book, so I’ve qualified for the heftier sum afforded to “mid-career writers.” The grant, the equivalent of about half a year’s salary for a social worker, maybe, is enough for me to live on for years. I could live off it for the rest of my life if I had to.
The windows along Bloor Street are shiny in the bright afternoon and I consider the goods I might buy. I think of fancy groceries: marinated artichoke hearts, creamy French cheeses I am not allowed to eat while pregnant. I am ogling a wedge of Camembert when my cell vibrates in my pocket.
My agent’s number pops up. “Hello?”
She says something I can’t make out.
“Just a sec,” I say. I duck into the front hall of Brunswick House; the smell of spilled beer and, beneath that, vomit, radiates off the stained carpeted stairs. It’s dark, and my eyes need a moment to adjust. I sit on the bottom stair. “Okay,” I say, “go ahead.”
“We’ve had an offer on your book!”
“Oh?” I am cautious, bracing myself, but Anne is excited. She tells me the number. I have to ask her to repeat it to be sure I’ve heard her correctly.
“That’s good, right?”
“In this climate? It’s amazing.”
I touch my belly, round with our son. I have suddenly “popped,” my stomach going from paunchy to visibly pregnant between days. There’s a solid lump of something inside me, a solid mass of person.
Walking home, I can’t stop grinning.
That night I dream I am naked, and huge, my pregnant belly dripping fat drops of water as I rise from the mikvah.
At twenty weeks, Degan and I go downtown for the big ultrasound, the one that reveals the health of the baby and, if we want, its sex. Degan is asked to stay in the waiting room; he’ll be called in at the end. I undress and lie on my back, then I shift and wince, the baby falling back against my spine.
The technician has dyed blond hair and a thick Slavic accent. She brandishes her wand and globs my stomach with jelly. I cannot help but think of the last ultrasound: “the fetus and the egg sac entirely absent.”
“Baby look good!” the technician says right away, but she seems to be moving the wand across my belly for an awfully long time.
“Is everything okay?” I finally ask.
“Baby flopped over,” she says, bending at the waist and touching her toes to demonstrate. I can see the dark roots at her scalp. She straightens. “Baby make me work to get the pictures.” She laughs, oblivious to my anxiety.
I nod.
She pauses, a sly little smile cresting her face.
“You want to know the sex?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Okay. We wait until your husband is here. But already have I seen something.”
Something. A penis.
I take a deep breath and instinctively put a palm flat on my heart. The baby is a boy. I’ve known it from the start. Still, my chest contracts. I don’t buy the argument that circumcision isn’t painful. I don’t want to inflict trauma on my newborn child. And now my conversion—if I convert—may only last one generation. This boy, if he marries a Gentile, will have children who are back where I started. Whereas with a girl, those children would be taken care of.
The technician is happily chatting away to the baby. “You straighten out for me, baby. Otherwise Daddy will to be angry when he come in!”
She sighs, both exasperated and pleased, as though the baby is demonstrating his precociousness already. “Only I see one in twenty babies in this position,” she says, folding in half at her waist to demonstrate a second time.
At last she gets the pictures she needs. Word goes out to Degan; he sprints into the room and sits down, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his palms. He is bent toward the screen, staring as though at some marvellous sporting event. The technician moves the wand around my belly, showing us first the walls of the uterus, then the placenta. Our little swimmer twists his head
toward us. Degan swears under his breath, in awe. He wipes his sleeve over his eyes. “Look at that sweet little lentil.”
As though to show off, the baby starts moving his lips, making perfect little nursing motions around a nipple he is already dreaming.
We gasp with pleasure. “Did you see that?” Degan asks.
I nod.
The technician turns to Degan. “You want to know the sex?”
I’ve already said yes, but in her world, Daddy gets the final word.
Degan affirms. She points to the screen. “You see here?”
He squints. “A penis?”
She laughs. “A little coffee bean.”
Degan clears his throat. “We’re pregnant with a coffee bean?”
I squint, too, but I can’t make anything out.
“A vulva,” the technician finally says. “You no see?” She points again, and the fuzzy image swims into focus. Neither of us moves. We are glued to the screen, helpless in its glow, in the image of our future that it offers.
“Okay,” the technician says. “We get good pictures. All finish.”
We continue to stare, our eyes wide.
“All done!” She claps her hands.
Finally she angles behind us, a hand on each of our backs. She gently pushes me off the table and nudges Degan up to standing.
We get as far as the foyer of the office building before we have to sit back down on a plastic bench, trying to absorb the news. Degan is beaming. “I’m so happy,” he keeps saying. His relationship with his father was difficult; he thinks his love for a daughter will be cleaner, clearer. But I feel grief for our little boy. I’m saying goodbye to a son I’ve only imagined—which doesn’t make the goodbye much easier. Still, I realize that I, too, am getting what I wanted; it’s suddenly clear that expecting a boy was defensive, a way of steeling myself against disappointment. I want a girl. I’ve always wanted a girl. The baby turns her somersaults, so everything inside me is moving all at once. I think of the life I want to give her. Of my dream of climbing out of the mikvah, my belly leading the way. If I can convert, she, too, will be Jewish, and her children will be Jewish. Now is our time.
