1979

by Ray Robertson

  Friday: school done for the week; newspapers delivered for the day; wet boots taken off at the door; Dad sitting in a kitchen chair pulled up in front of the glowing oven watching the roast beef sweat its way to cooked completion, him still smelling like the medical-grade Green Soap he used to clean his clients’ skin before and after he applied their tattoo. Friday night roast beef (with cooked-in potatoes, carrots, and onions) was a Mom tradition, the week’s one big family meal with leftovers for sandwiches on Monday. Dad’s roast beef was good, but it wasn’t Mom’s—was tender, but not fall-off-your-fork tender; was moist, but not melt-in-your-mouth moist. Dad inherited the tradition, but not the recipe. Nevertheless, “How was school?” “Okay.” “Where are you going?” “My room.” “Dinner in half an hour.” “Okay.” “If you see your sister, let her know.” “All right.” It smelled good all the way upstairs, all the way behind my closed bedroom door. It smelled like home.

  After dinner, back in my room, I’d write down everything I’d eaten in a pocket-sized red coiled notebook I called my Journal of Consumption. In the short time since I started my newspaper route it felt as if I’d had more contact with more people than I’d had in my entire life up to that point. People who knew me as the boy who came back from the dead. Dad and Julie didn’t count—they weren’t people, they were my family. The newspaper and the radio might have called me a miracle, but you’re never a miracle to those who know you. But when Mr. Gibson or Mr. Brown or somebody else talked to me like I was supposed to know the answer to something when I didn’t even understand the question, I felt guilty, I felt phony, I felt like a fraud. We weren’t Catholic and I wasn’t entirely sure what Lent was, but I decided that, instead of fasting, I’d eat and drink what I ordinarily did, but would record everything in my journal for forty days. It was inconvenient, it was boring, it felt like a chore: it was ideal.

  After writing down what I’d eaten for dinner, I’d listen to records and read and think about girls I was too afraid to talk to, although mostly I’d wait for it to get dark. Dad didn’t really acknowledge weekends, went to bed at eleven o’clock every night, and I’d descend on our small living room (TV, coffee table, couch, Dad’s easy chair) just before ten, right after The Rockford Files. That, and Colombo, were the only shows he made a point to watch. I’d sprawl on the couch and pretend to care about the ABC Friday Night Movie or Dallas until his patience was worn down by the stupidity on the screen and my determined silence, and he’d say, “Well, that’s it for me. Twelve o’clock and the idiot box goes off, okay, Tom?” After that, all I had to do was get through the news at eleven before Benny Hill came on at 11:30.

  Benny Hill wasn’t actually funny, but humour wasn’t why I watched it. I watched it because of the garter-belted, spiked-heeled, half-naked women, particularly the ones at the sped-up end of the show who alternatively chased/were chased around and around, jiggling and wiggling but always just out of reach. The bra section in the Sears catalogue was okay, but the women on Benny Hill always wore sleek black stockings along with their crammed black bras and towering black heels. Besides, they actually moved, just like real women. Not that my own experience of real women extended much beyond one anxious-but-exhilarating afternoon of sweaty hand-holding with Jennifer Gordon at the roller rink (Phil Brown told her I liked her and she held out her hand to me as she sailed past) and the embarrassing-but-blissful single instance when, in Mrs. Newbury’s art class, I turned my head at the exact, gloriously fortuitous moment she was leaning over my shoulder to get a better look at my macaroni-and-glitter-and-white-glue collage. Shockingly soft; comfortingly large; surprisingly warm: her right breast pressed against my unsuspecting cheek was an earthy epiphany, a two-second—tops—lesson in the universal language of flesh pressed to flesh.

  Not as good as the actual fleshy thing but better, at least, than the laugh-track-goosed peepshow that was Benny Hill, were the women in the movies that came on after midnight on TFO, the French public television station. Because I was supposed to be in bed by the time they came on, I’d turn off the sound, which wasn’t much of a sacrifice because I couldn’t understand what most of the actors were saying anyway. These films were different from the movies you saw at the Capitol Theatre downtown or on the Movie of the Week on regular TV. There weren’t car chases or explosions or murders to be solved or monsters to be defeated, the actors mostly simply hanging around looking either sad or nervous and talking—always talking, talking, talking. Sometimes you had to sit through half an hour or more of people doing nothing other than having conversations before you got what you stayed up for: a conversation that led to a kiss, a kiss that took a man and a woman into a bedroom, a bedroom where clothes would fall to the floor and the couple into bed, and, at last, a five- or ten-second vision of a bare breast or buttocks (hopefully a woman’s). You’d be tired on Saturday morning, you’d tell yourself it wasn’t worth it, but you’d do it again the following Friday night anyhow, just like you knew you would.

  Saturday, collection day, Mrs. Wakowski’s house was always my last stop. Mrs. Wakowski was an Auschwitz survivor, had a blue tattoo on her left forearm that was just a bunch of numbers with a letter B before them. She was only about ten years older than my mom, but looked like she could have been her mother. Her hair was black and streaked with silver, as if her head had been grazed on both sides by lightning, while her eyes were always red, as if she’d just been crying. Sometimes she’d be talking to you normally in her thick accent, and then, if she got too excited, would rub her hands together and start talking in Polish. Even if you did happen to speak Polish it would have been almost impossible to understand her, her tongue moving as quickly as her hands. Her husband, who’d survived the war in the Polish resistance and was a brick layer, had died a long, painful death from cerebral arteriosclerosis, and Mrs. Wakowski worked as a cook at a nursing home after she came to Canada until she slipped on some grease at work and one of her legs had to be amputated. Now she stayed at home and worried about her four teenaged daughters.

  Born a year apart, the Wakowski girls were all tall with long legs and long straight brown hair except for the youngest, who was a redhead, and they were always laughing together or screaming at each other or riding away from home on their ten speeds with their rear ends raised in the air. They never spoke Polish and they rolled their eyes when their mother warned them in her heavy accent about wearing their jean shorts too short or going out with boys in cars or how during the war people didn’t pay attention to who their friends were and look what happened to some of them. Mrs. Wakowski was the one who’d been in a Nazi death camp and who had only one leg and who’d sometimes get so agitated when she was speaking that spit would fly from her mouth, but it was her daughters who made me feel uncomfortable.

  “Ah, it is Thomas,” Mrs. Wakowski said as she let me in. No one, not even my mother or a teacher, ever called me Thomas.

  “Collecting, Mrs. Wakowski.”

  “Yes, yes, you are coming for your money, yes. But first you sit down and we talk to each other a bit first, yes?”

  Mrs. Wakowski was my last collection, so spending ten minutes talking to her wasn’t so bad. Besides, as soon as I sat down at the plastic-covered kitchen table she would warm up a couple of cabbage rolls, and spread two pieces of dark brown bread with a thick layer of real butter for me. We ate Wonder Bread and Imperial margarine at home, but rye bread and butter were good too, especially for sopping up the rich tomato sauce from the cabbage rolls. Mrs. Wakowski would talk to me with her back turned while she hobbled around the kitchen on her single crutch to make up my plate.

  “I hope everyone paid their debts to you today as they were supposed to do.”

  I’d told Mrs. Wakowski about the man who refused to pay me $5.58. He lived alone in a small shabby house he’d inherited from his mother and didn’t go to work and always had a stubby brown beer bottle stuck in his hand and, depending on how early in the day he’d started drinking, was e
ither aggressively friendly (badgering me about how many girlfriends I had or who my favourite Toronto Maple Leaf was even though I told him I was a Red Wing fan) or sneeringly silent, even when I explained to him that I couldn’t punch a hole in my collection card unless he paid me for not just that week’s delivery but the two weeks before that. When he still didn’t say anything, just kept standing there on his rickety front porch slugging from his bottle of beer and looking like he was waiting for me to confess something, and I decided to pull the same silent treatment, he finally said, “Fuck off.” I heard him, but I didn’t understand. “You’re not getting any of my fucking money you little piece of shit, so get the fuck off my fucking porch before I fucking throw you off.” I hadn’t told Mrs. Wakowski about all the fucks.

  “I collected from everybody. I’ve just got you left and then I’m done.”

  “Ah hah! Always the business man,” she said, putting my plate on the table before me. “You would like some milk too, yes?”

  “No thanks, I’m not really thirsty.” Even if I had been, milk was for staying healthy, not for slaking thirst; Hawaiian Punch or Freshie or, my new favourite, C Plus, was for when you wanted something cold and quick.

  Mrs. Wakowksi poured me a large glass of milk anyway and placed it beside my plate before sitting down across the table. I ate and drank while she watched me. Mrs. Wakowski seemed to be always either cooking or reheating something or setting the table or doing the dishes or preserving vegetables like rhubarb from her garden, but I don’t remember her ever eating anything herself. She said that when she was “in the camp” all they ever had was water and bread and turnips. You’d think that after that you’d want to eat everything, and a lot of it, but cup after cup of black tea was all I ever saw her put in her mouth.

  I knew it wasn’t good table manners, but I set down my fork and pulled my coiled notebook and pen out of my shirt pocket; I’d discovered that if I didn’t immediately write down what I ate, I’d sometimes forget and then feel guilty for not remembering. Then I’d feel mad because making up what I ate wasn’t the point.

  “Now what is this you are doing?” Mrs. Wakowski said.

  “I’m keeping a record of everything I eat.”

  “This is for school or something like?”

  “No. I’m just doing it.”

  “And what is the reason for this?”

  I put the notebook and pen back in my pocket and picked up my fork again, carved off a big piece of cabbage roll. Food, I’d discovered, tasted better once I’d recorded it. “I don’t know,” I lied. “Maybe just to see if I can do it.”

  This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Wakowski. She pursed her lips and nodded slowly as she continued to watch me eat. Mrs. Wakowski was a Catholic, the only one I knew—at school, some of the kids called them “Catlickers”—and even the walls of her kitchen were covered with crucifixes and framed pictures of the last supper and Jesus on the cross and a portrait of the Pope. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” I said. Being around Mrs. Wakowski, like being around Mom, made me think about God.

  “How should I know until you ask me?”

  “I mean, I don’t know if you’d want to tell me. It’d be okay if you didn’t.”

  “You ask me, I let you know if I want to tell you, yes?”

  I’d finished the cabbage rolls and used what was left of the bread to soak up the leftover sauce, which also gave me a good reason not to look at Mrs. Wakowski while I asked her what I wanted to know. “We studied the Nazis in history class so I know what they did to the people they didn’t like, like the Jews.”

  “Not just the Jews,” she said, back straightening and fingers tightening around the handle on her crutch.

  I didn’t want Mrs. Wakowski to start shooting spit and talking in loud Polish, so, “Right, right, not just the Jews,” I said. “All sorts of people, I know, they hated all sorts of people.” She loosened the grip on her crutch but still sat erect, as if she were strapped to the back of the chair.

  “What I wanted to ask,” I said, my bread all gone now and my plate wiped clean, “was how do you still believe in God and everything”—I motioned to the walls around us—“when such bad things happened to you and everybody else?”

  Even though I’d prayed when I was lost and my prayer had been answered and I was saved and everyone said it was a miracle, I still didn’t know if I believed in God. Not really. That time in the sewer had been my one and only prayer session. Why would you pray if you didn’t need something?

  Mrs. Wakowski relaxed her posture, rested her thin arms on the Formica table. I couldn’t help but stare at the blue line of numbers on her forearm. “Do you believe in God, Thomas?”

  “My mother does,” I said.

  “This is good for your mother, but I ask about you.”

  “I wasn’t brought up religious.”

  “Who said anything about religion? I ask you about God.”

  I looked up from Mrs. Wakowski’s concentration camp number to the picture of Jesus wilting on the wooden cross, blood dripping from the nails in the middle of his hands and feet. “I asked you first,” I said.

  Mrs. Wakowski patted my hand resting on the kitchen table; used the edge of the table to push herself up without her crutch; winked at me. “We both know the bad things that happen to us, don’t we, Thomas? You such a little boy and lost in the dark underneath the ground. Yes, I remember that. And yet here we both are. You and I, we are survivors. We understand what this means, don’t we? We keep going and we keep what was ours still ours. That is what we do. Yes?”

  “I guess.”

  “Yes.”

  I drank the glass of milk I didn’t ask for.

  Polish Immigrant and Auschwitz Survivor Loves Canada—with Reservations

  “People Are Very Nice, but Is Wrong They Don’t Know How Fortunate They Are, Yes?”

  DR. MENGELE POINTS left and the family portrait goes missing…

  The Germans, understandably. Expertly functioning, very efficient machines that kill—that is what a German is. And not just kill—who enjoy killing. Not enough to extinguish mothers, fathers, children—entire families—the enemy had to be humiliated on the way to extinction, the final affront a mass grave for those deemed not human enough to deserve the dignity of their own hole in the earth. Leading up to that all-but-inevitable day, beatings for daring to not follow a command in German, a language you didn’t understand; four-hour roll calls in snowstorms or cold rain or blazing heat, the prisoners malnourished and attired in little more than rags and wounding wooden shoes; beer-breathing creeping rapists in the barracks after midnight, pick your own lobster from the tank and gorge on the sweetest, freshest meat and throw away the empty shell when you’re done.

  But worse were certain Poles—the indigenous, German-appointed Kapos—who thought they’d be saved if they aided their Nazi masters, who ordered around their own and spied on their own and gleefully battered their own. For just the rumour of reprieve or an extra piece of bread or another few ounces of soup or—most shamefully—the opportunity to be a feared and venerated figure among their fellow prisoners, grateful slaves, eager traitors, honoured Judases. To suffer but to know that we are us and they are them was still to suffer, but when the orders and insults arrived in your own tongue, the suffering was worse. First the body, then the soul: the ancient order. Then the communal hole.

  But not for Eva Wakowski. She was fortunate to be young and strong when she’d arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of ’44 and was lucky enough to work in the kitchen and so could sometimes steal food, and because her Kapo would usually rather rape her than beat her, was still alive—if only barely—when the camp was liberated. Thank merciful God. Some lost their faith because of the Nazis. Both of Eva’s parents, two grandmothers, and three of her four siblings were erased from her life. God was not going to be one more thing the Germans would take from her.


  Liberation and slow normalization not so slowly followed by socialization, Soviet style, the Russians different from the Germans in being less methodical in their attempt to crush the Polish people, but equally determined. The history of Poland: waking up to foreigners in heavy boots standing on your throat telling you you’re welcome. After years of her husband and her planning and saving and bribing and hoping, Canada, at last, in 1967 of all years, a baby country’s first-century birthday. Chatham, Ontario, wasn’t much like Vancouver or Montreal or Toronto, the cities Eva and her husband had read about and looked at pictures of and talked about late into the night, but it was Canada, the true north strong and free, and not just in the anthem either. Work, school, religion, politics: do what you want just as long as you pay your taxes and don’t bother anyone else. Freedom in fact and not just in slogan.

  And, yes, after twelve years, truly her home and native land. Except why do people who have the right to vote not use it? People die for this right. Except why do people who are able to work not work? Hard work can bring a better life. Except why do young people who are given the chance to educate themselves and improve themselves and have a happier life than their parents not do so? Wisdom should not be wasted. Except why, if you wake up in the morning and there is food in the refrigerator and your children are healthy and there is a job for you to go to and a home to come back to and your own bed to sleep in at night and no one to tell you what to think or do the next day or the day after that, are people sad or slothful or drunkards or feel as if they somehow deserve more, that someone or something owes them happiness?