The County of Birches

by Judith Kalman

  Mummy doesn’t get it. “It’s not enough she made my brother’s children into gentiles, now she wants ours too?”

  What does Mummy mean? All Auntie Christine has promised is a real English Christmas. Her voice sounded rich with offering and self-importance: holly and fruitcake, minces, Christmas pudding. There will be a tree and, of course, presents. She gave me a wink before leaving: “Maybe even one for you, Dana.” I look forward to Christmas crackers that pull apart with a bang.

  Something besides the wreath is gnawing at my mother. She’s been promoted at the factory. Lots of people without English work there. Mummy’s English is good now, and in addition to her Hungarian, Czech and Russian, she picked up German and Polish in the concentration camp. She is moved into the office to translate letters. This is good as far as I can tell, better than fitting televisions. But Mummy is a teacher. The promotion is an insult. No matter how well she knows the language, her accent prevents her from teaching the children of the English.

  Uncle Larry tutors children after school to earn more money.

  “Imagine, making a man work two jobs so you can wear sparkles in your ears!” In Hungary only gypsies pierced their ears. Mummy can’t accept that Uncle Larry has so departed from his origins, even his prejudices have been affected. “What kind of people care more for stones than for the life of a man?”

  Auntie Christine’s efforts to make us welcome seem to me innocent enough. It is my mother who’s ungracious. “She thinks she is better,” Mummy scorns, “because of what she wears.”

  As the holidays approach, Lili makes it her job to guide me through the Christmas story. Inexplicably, it seems to me, I have been selected to play Mary in my infant-school play. I know what I am, a little Jewish girl, the child of survivors of the war. And I know who Mary was, the mother of Jesus, that other God who was just a person. And I know I am the wrong child for the role, in all of that school for children of privilege.

  Lili tells me why I’ve been chosen for the lead. As Mary I have just to look holy, I don’t have to speak. I won’t stumble over English. I’m actually the perfect child for a part that is just a pose. At school I rarely move about. I have told Lili about the German shepherd that ranges freely through the playrooms. I stay glued in my seat, tracking its progress. If I act like a statue, perhaps the bristly beast, its long tongue hanging from a permanently open maw, will leave me alone. Lili says the teacher knows I can be counted on not to move in the live tableau of the crèche, while the rest of the class tells the story and sings carols behind me.

  Lillian wants to help me by sharing what she knows. I’m her little sister after all, and our parents aren’t equipped for this. She tells me the story she has heard at Christ Church School about the star and the shepherds and the family in flight. They were escaping, she says, like us. They wanted to go somewhere safe. She says it will help me understand what I’m doing up there.

  It does not. I refuse to understand what I find indigestible. I don’t know why my parents in that audience of families on stacking chairs wave at me with pride. I don’t know why being mum and stupid with a veil on my head is considered an achievement. I don’t understand how they can applaud me as the Mother of God when she means nothing to them and it is all a lie.

  I harden with anger that cements my performance. The Mother of God is a stony little statue. A white sheet has been draped over me, held by a band across my forehead. An icy truth grips my heart, fat and crystal clear like one of Auntie Christine’s rings. I can learn to be just like the British, or remain with the fancy urns locked away in High Banks.

  * * *

  On Christmas day the table at Auntie Christine’s is extended to seat the two families. It’s piled high with platters my cousins corral down at their end. There’s laughter: “How is it the food always gravitates to the boys’ end of the table?”

  Aglow in a blue blaze, the Christmas pudding emits an aroma that is spicy and strange. A pale blue halo hovers over the dark mound. It looks ugly, yet burns in a heavenly colour like the sky. Auntie Christine presents it with pomp, like a birthday cake. A homely brown pile, mysterious, aflame.

  “Try it,” the cousins coax, giggling and elbowing each other. So dark and dense, smelling sweet and pungent. I find the candied fruit inside and chew the mass energetically. Sticky and glutinous and strange, but I eat almost anything. Sweetly hot and hard to work with my small jaws. Around me laughter tinkles like the pretty glasses.

  Suddenly my eyes gush wet, and my mother is yelling.

  “What! What have you done to yourself now!” Her alarm and anger, often one, throw her into panic. “What’s the matter?”

  I can’t speak. The metallic jarring in my teeth has spread into my jaw.

  “How much?” a cousin laughs. “Pull it out. Is it a shilling?”

  “No, it looks like just a penny’s worth,” quips another.

  My tongue curls away from the horrid metal taste.

  “It’s only the Christmas money,” Auntie Christine reassures us.

  Mummy refuses to understand. She demands an explanation. “What do you mean money? There are coins in the food? You have put money in the food! On purpose?”

  My mother’s indignation feels like a balm. The others have all laughed. She’s standing beside the table, trembling. “It is amusing, yes, to break the teeth of a child?”

  “Sarah, Sarah, it’s nothing but a custom.” Uncle Larry strokes her arm, gently tugging her back down.

  But she pulls away and snaps at Uncle Larry in a way I have heard her speak only to us. “It is a fine tradition you have now, Laci, that laughs when a child is hurt.”

  Apu refills the glasses, pained that my mother can’t control her wrath. These people have helped us. They are family, her family, all we have left. Lili, too, squirms in her chair, mortified by my mother’s outburst. Mummy is ungrateful. She is unkind and ungenerous and grasping.

  I open to my mother’s anger as to the sun. I feel released, as if a gate has swung clear before me. Excavating the mess in my mouth, I admire the currency it has yielded. I feel rich and very full as though she has made me a present.

  MONAHAN AVENUE

  The usual clouds hang above Monahan Avenue. My mother shuts the heavy door behind us and looks up to check for rain. It is typically chilly, the sky weighted with damp that hasn’t yet materialized. Mummy takes my hand and leads me down the road. Under my cardigan I wear a new, crisp black overall with a little pink posy stitched on the bib. It’s nice wearing something new, like on a special occasion, only this is different. We walk down to the bus stop, which means the hospital must be in London, or somewhere beyond my infant-school or the greengrocer’s. My mother carries a small suitcase with some of my things. The houses descend like stairs to the bottom of the street. I feel them urging me downhill, saying, “Get along now, Dana. Out you go.” Mummy says I’ll be gone a few days.

  My mother was gone a week when she disappeared into a hospital. It went so fast, like a holiday afternoon, not like a week at infant-school that yawns towards what feels like an ever-receding weekend. I trace the silky stitching of the posy on my pants’ bib over and over as we walk down the road. Pink and delicate and pretty. I’m not sure why I’m going. I don’t feel anything hurting me. My mother has explained that the operation must be done in a hospital, just like when she had her stones. My mother’s stones came from eating good things like butter and cream. She wouldn’t be so stupid as to eat stones, but she got them just the same. I don’t feel what I imagine as the cold clammy weight of stones in my stomach. I have been caught scooping butter out of the dish on the kitchen table so many times it’s now kept in the icebox, but I don’t think my parents would actually send me away because of that.

  “Just a few days,” Mummy assures me, “and you’ll be all better.”

  I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve done something wrong. It must have something to do with what the nurse at my infant-school called Mummy in to talk about. The shame of it,
having your mother called in, but no one ever accused me of anything. There was some talk about the way it’s done here in England. Every child must have his tonsils taken out. But it’s so vague and bleary. I don’t know what tonsils are. Not like stones that you can see.

  I have the sense of being deliberately kept in the dark. Maybe my mother thinks I will make less trouble if I don’t know why I must be sent away. Certainly I would be less tractable if I knew that I would be in hospital for two whole weeks. Two weeks. What largesse on the part of the British. My mother is not in the habit of explaining things in detail. She assumes my sister and I are quick enough to pick up whatever we need to know. What we don’t understand is probably best not clarified until we are ready to learn it for ourselves. She adheres to a method of child rearing that on the one hand treats us like miniature adults, and on the other trains us like a higher form of pet.

  We walk slowly down Monahan Avenue. The houses tip me forward, but my heels dig back. My mother uncharacteristically slows down, matching her stride to mine. Usually she’s in a hurry. At home, in her kitchen, I stand clear of my own accord. Mummy doesn’t take the time to warn me she’s about to whisk a hot pan off the stove. She is quick, purposeful and sure in all her movements. When Apu stayed home during my mother’s illness, he didn’t take chances. Overly careful, he told me to back away when he stood the iron on its end so he could check the oven. I knew very well the iron was hot, but I liked my father’s attentiveness.

  It was like a holiday being alone with my father. He didn’t make me go to infant-school every day or shoo me outside. Apu pushed the iron methodically back and forth, and talked to me softly about the old times on his family’s estate. It reminded me of the way he used to talk to Lili back in Hungary when I was still hardly more than a baby. Finally I was old enough to receive the same attention. I liked the scorched smell of hot cotton more than the mustiness of wet wool. I liked the way he included me: what should we have for dinner, the casserole from Auntie or the dish brought by the mother of Lili’s school friend? In Hungary my father never did chores since he was home only on weekends, more like a guest. He looked funny wearing Mummy’s apron tied high over his middle, and the laundry stacked up beside him in little rolled logs to keep damp. Should we go meet Lili on her way home from school? he asked. All his suggestions were delightfully out of the norm.

  As we walked hand-in-hand, Apu told me about that other world like a fairy land, so full of all that was good. His home before the war was called the Rákóczi Tanya. When he said the name it sounded big and important, like London or Budapest. Bigger—the centre of the universe. As a boy he had driven between family estates in carriages and sleighs pulled by matched pairs of horses, and he and his brothers were pampered with wet nurses, governesses, tutors and—this impressed me most vividly—teddy bears made from the winter fur of hares. The phrase “winter fur” suggested all that was splendidly old-fashioned and fine. By the time Lili met up with us he was launched into the description of a holiday feast. Did we know that at Passover sometimes more than thirty guests had gathered around his beloved mother’s table?

  Back in our dim kitchen, Apu passed the broom over the cold floor in systematic sweeps, still talking about the festive meals he had enjoyed, listing each dish served on silver platters embossed with the family initials. I pictured steaming aromas rising like vapours of love. The dank chill of our kitchen warmed with the melodious flow of his voice. The cold melted like stiff cloth under the kiss of his iron.

  “What’s happened?” Mummy asked when she returned home from the hospital. She sensed the different atmosphere right away, even as she pulled off her hat and gloves. It made me realize she’d lost nothing of her sternness, removed stones notwithstanding. Apu took her in his arms, but she was impatient to look things over. He managed to hold her just long enough to pass me a conspiratorial wink over her shoulder.

  I’m not convinced that I really need an operation. I think instead that I am being sent to the hospital to learn a lesson. My mother had a scar to attest to why she had been away. I pestered her until she showed me the angry red line running up her belly. Like a thermometer, I thought, showing when she might boil over. The new overall feels stiff and scratchy on my legs, so I take comfort in the pink posy that is delicate and fine. I finger it as we go.

  * * *

  A nurse all starchy white takes us up to the ward. Instantly I recognize the two rows of beds facing each other, just like the picture in my Madeline storybook. Two rows of beds for children without parents. From each bed a child stares at me as I hold the hand of my mother. They may have no parents, but I do, and mine do not want me. They can see that I’m being rejected.

  “We’re all full up this week,” says the nurse. “It’ll be the crib for you, love. You’ll fit yet.”

  Crib. This is sheer humiliation. Mortified, I whisper to my mother, “But I’m four and a half. That’s just for babies.”

  “Never mind,” she answers loudly in Hungarian so everyone will hear that we’re not like them, “you’ll just be a few days. When you come home your throat will be all better.”

  I’m so ashamed in that room among strange children to be thrust in a crib, so humiliatingly set apart, that I don’t notice what she says about a sore throat or coming home again.

  My mother comes to see me every day. In between visits, the time stretches interminably. Painfully shy in my crib, I don’t speak to anyone but the nurses. Since I am quiet and well behaved, I’m left mostly alone.

  Mummy brings treats and books and reads to me each afternoon after her shift at the factory. One day she pulls from her satchel a beautiful surprise.

  “Look what Lili sent you.” Lili doesn’t like toys. Her imagination quickens to words on a page. Since she learned to read English, books are her chief amusement. She has sent her best doll. I think no less of the gesture because she rarely plays with it. I’m still honoured to be entrusted with the doll’s safekeeping.

  “Lili can’t come to see you because they don’t let children who aren’t sick into the hospital.” This is another of the incomprehensible contradictions I have come to expect. I’m here all the time although I’m not sick, but my not-sick sister cannot come to visit even once.

  “Lili says you may play with her doll while you’re here, as long as you promise to look after it.”

  Oh, I will. I stroke the doll’s coarse hair as though it were an angel’s.

  “And Apu sends his love.”

  It is my mother who visits me each day; why never Apu? She brings fruit and biscuits and storybooks. There is always a special tidbit from my father.

  “Apu is very busy. The garden has to be tidied up after winter, and there isn’t much time for that when he gets home from work. Look, he sent you a macaroon.”

  I assume that my father stays away on account of the unnamed offence by which I have obviously let him down. I feel responsible for his absence. But mostly I blame my mother for leaving me each day.

  “Bad mother.” I greet her with this charge when she comes in the next afternoon. “You’re a bad mother. Apu wouldn’t leave me here. If he knew I didn’t like it, he’d come and get me.”

  My mother’s eyes narrow. “Oh yes, your precious father who can never do any wrong. You girls think he is so perfect. But your father is afraid. He is a coward, I tell you. Afraid to see his baby in a hospital. Do you think I like having to say good-bye to you day after day? You think this doesn’t hurt me too? I do the hard part and he gets all the love!”

  My breath is an intake so sharp I cannot use it. I want to leap at my mother and slap her harsh mouth.

  “Afraid?” It has taken me a moment to locate the thought, but now it looms large and glaring. “Afraid of what?” Panicking, I demand, “What’s going to happen?”

  But my mother has decided it’s best to put the outburst behind us. She pulls up a chair beside my bed, and opens the storybook. “Calm down,” she says, “or the nurses will think we’re fighti
ng. Do you remember what happened to Noddy yesterday? Think. Who picked him up in the scooter? What colour was it? So, we will read a little more. Listen carefully, and I will give you a treat when we have finished.”

  I watch the children in the ward roll in and out on special beds. They sleep a lot when they come back. Then the nurse brings them ice cream. You don’t get the ice cream until you’ve rolled away and returned. So I wait. I’ve figured out that in due course I will get to roll out and have ice cream too.

  When I finally go it’s like I’m dreaming. Awake, yet dreaming. Strange to be carried and conveyed like a thing. Not unpleasant, not having to propel yourself. Double doors swing out as I sail through. More double doors. Poof—they exhale softly behind me.

  “Night-night, love,” says a disembodied voice. Then it’s too late to resist the mask that shuts me down.

  Darkness grabs me like a pillow against which I struggle to breathe and wake. It must be night. This dawns on me briefly before the searing in my neck closes out further thought. I try to scream but can’t. My mouth feels severed from my throat by piercing knives. I grope for the crib bars but they aren’t there. My hands open and close on nothing. I find nothing to grab onto. I can’t locate my voice. I’d disappear into the black night, a free-floating pain, were it not for these knives in my throat that pin me to the mattress. The ice cream when it comes is cold and numbing. Sometimes it’s pink, sometimes it’s white. It hardly matters because it has no taste.

  * * *

  As my mother helps me dress, I’m surprised the overall still fits. It feels a long time ago that I wore it, when I was much smaller. I’ve changed since then. Monahan Avenue too has changed. It’s a lot brighter. The street is bathed in sunlight, a bright uncommon English sunshine. The heat makes the uphill harder work. The cloth of my overall clings to my skin. I’ve taken my suitcase from Mummy and it bumps heavily against my leg. Inside, Lili’s doll lies safely swaddled in my underclothes. I drag the bag up the steep hill but won’t let my mother take it. It’s my burden. It belongs to me.