The County of Birches

by Judith Kalman

  Apu started with legends about his ancestors in the early nineteenth century and then, in more detail, moved through the generations of growth and burgeoning until his own birth at the beginning of our era. Here the plots split, mutated, multiplied. Stories of influence, renown, wealth and affliction. It seemed unlikely there’d be enough weeks in the religious school year to get through them all. He drew a picture of a clan, familial but worldly, large enough to have included the devout and the emancipated, the orthodox as well as apostate, all of them unswervingly Jewish. In the centre was my father, the willful child, bold adolescent, brave young man, daring adult. Be as I once was, he wished to say, not the defeated immigrant you have known. I imagined table-wide loaves of love, a palpable yeasty fragrance, and ached for that certainty we had all lost, of belonging to a place and a people.

  Once begun, the stories spilled from my father as though they were inscribed in an internal script that he had only to turn on and play. I succumbed to the melody of his voice, its modulated, well-formed sentences, the line of narrative illustrated with references to the Bible. His Hungarian was literary and I didn’t catch all of it, but the formality of the language resounded in its rhythms, and the underlying sadness of the story, however lightly it began, created depth he didn’t have to engineer. Each week he picked up from where he had left off, always at a new chapter that would unroll like a carpet runner, from beginning to end, by the time he had to get up to leave.

  At St. Lawrence Apu pushed open the red swing door in the rear of the bus, and glanced back at me before disembarking. This was where his journey ended, from the grand estates of central, prewar Europe to working-class St. Lawrence, Montreal’s great divide. He’d lacked the confidence to continue. English started here, shoddy at first—Sam’s Shoe Repair, a sign read; another, even dingier, The Philatelist—then drew strength from cosmopolitan downtown to the affluence of Westmount. St. Lawrence Boulevard’s seediness dismayed me. Apu deserved better. But so he believed of me. As the bus pulled from the curb, I looked out the streaked window. He had stopped to search for my face one more time before the bus lurched off. Through smears of city grime, I met my father’s eye. Then he touched the brim of his hat to me, releasing me on my way.

  The sound of my father’s voice on those Saturday morning bus rides forged something permanent in me, only the lesser part of which was Jewish. Apu always regretted this as his failing. In his view, the lost beautiful world had derived its vitality from Jewish tradition. But the vision I formed of Apu’s clannish, populous relations was of a singular inclusiveness. He lived each day by the same precept, one foot in the present, the other in the past, unable even now to let go anyone he had loved. It suggested to me how Apu was able to give up settling among the Jews in Montreal’s west end in order to live side by side with his in-laws, Cimi-néni and Uncle André, albeit distinct from one another, intolerant of their differences, fractious, yet cleaving together, the bond of a shared past too rare to risk for principle.

  The kind of Jew I wasn’t to become might have withstood the stares of the other passengers on the crowded bus, who hung above us from the overhead rail. But I was acutely tuned to their distaste for the foreign, older man who spoke too loudly in an offensively strange tongue to a girl who was likely his granddaughter. The bus didn’t exist for him; nor did its passengers populate his universe. There were just me and him and the people he had loved more than his life. It felt all wrong. The wrong place, too public for so personal an accounting. And too mean for sacred recollections under the smoky exhalations of strangers who were so removed from his experience they could have come from the moon, they had as little sense of his worth. I felt a collision, a hard unabsorbable impact between our location in lowly transit and the elevated world my father hoped to transport me back to. For that, he would have had to stand at a lectern or a pulpit, at least to have held forth from a winged armchair in his own domain; not here under stony stares that took his elegant language for an insult, nor when he let himself be disgorged onto the penny-grubbingness of St. Lawrence Boulevard.

  None of that mattered to Apu. Where or when, it was all the same. Least of all did he care how he was perceived; that was my bone to worry. Apu was simply a tool, his function memory. Why else had the Lord spared him?

  When he spoke on the Sherbrooke Street bus on those Saturday mornings, I would stare at my father’s soft, broad hands folded over his briefcase. The case, a gun-metal colour, was made from a synthetic material that didn’t bend or show internal pressures. Not that there was much pressing against the case from within. Its contents were always the same: the Montreal Gazette, a cream cheese on rye sandwich, two apples, and a package of chocolate-covered cream puffs Mummy took as a personal affront to her superior baking. I chose to think the war had not so much reduced but distilled my father to these painfully simple needs. His index finger tapped once or twice on the hard side of the briefcase as he made clear his meaning. It was a big-knuckled, stubby digit. Its nail was shallow, square, cut close and to a point. Large blue veins crossed the backs of his hands, highly arched with the flow of thick blood. I watched the veins rise and fall as he drummed his fingers. The blood coursed deliberately from one hand to the other. I knew he could have spilled that blood himself, without the help of Hitler—in grief, or rage, or self-loathing—and I believed in my father’s mysterious capacity for love.

  THE MAKING OF A JEW

  When we first came to Montreal, we lived on the middle floor of a three-storey apartment block in Ville St. Michel, a working-class neighbourhood in the east end. A school with an asphalt playground sprawled across the street. In the back, spiral fire escapes unwound into a gravel lot. It was an adjustment after the elegant house we had been loaned in England, with the huge garden my father had tended lovingly in exchange.

  Apu liked to take us to the Botanical Gardens at the corner of Sherbrooke Street and Pie-IX. This was his favourite spot during our two years in Ville St. Michel, before he and Mummy had a garden. He would put me and Lillian onto the little caterpillar-like train that circled the grounds. While we lurched past sculpted hedgerows, he and Mummy strolled among the roses and manicured beds.

  I liked the little train with its linked open-air cars, and its red and white plastic streamers flapping in the tepid air we stirred. Lillian and I would swing past our parents, and I waved enthusiastically, exhilarated by the novel sensation of leaving them in our dust.

  Lillian hated it. I didn’t realize then that she was homesick for England. Something in her turned in the afternoon’s heat. The Botanical Gardens stretched flat and endless, without modulation. The drone of traffic from the busy thoroughfares put a lie to humming birds and bees, and produced a smell of exhaust that wafted over the sun-bleached beds. If the gardens were supposed to pass for natural beauty, this place was a sorry substitute for the grand green world she had adopted across the ocean. She hated being here, especially with me attached to her like a boil.

  I didn’t take her distress seriously. I thought it must be wonderful to be my big, smart sister, authority on all subjects. In England she had taught me how to pronounce the words of the new language correctly. Now I wanted to absorb everything else she was learning, and pestered her relentlessly. What was her school like? Who were her friends? Whom did she like best, and why were they better? I wanted her to explain her classes, describe her teachers. Why did they teach this and not that?

  “Why were you born?” she spat out, before regretting it.

  The words didn’t upset me. Words in our family were hurled about freely. But I was perplexed that she had brought up the topic.

  “Lili, are you sure you don’t know?”

  “Not again.”

  “Lili?”

  “Can’t you leave me alone.”

  “But don’t you really know why?”

  “How many times do I have to keep telling you?” she sighed. “We were accidents, mistakes. Why won’t you get that through your head?”

 
; Mistakes? She couldn’t have been further from the truth, but I hadn’t found a way yet to convince her. The mistake came before us. Everything had gone terribly wrong because of the war. The world was tipped off balance by all our poor dead, who had made the terrible mistake of slipping off en masse and throwing everything out of kilter. We weren’t the accident. We were here on purpose to put things Right. That’s why Lillian was so smart, so accomplished, and why I had to live up to her example.

  “That’s not true, Lili.”

  “Grow up,” she said, surprising me again, this time by swiping at her eyes.

  I wished with all my heart that I could oblige her, but I was only six then, and Lillian as many years older than me. And she had been jumped two years further ahead at school. We couldn’t have been playmates any more than I could ever hope to catch up to her. Once we moved to Ville d’Anjou, the suburbs, I resorted to my school friends, my dolls, my sewing and the books Lillian gave me. It was flattering that eventually she thought enough of my potential to become my intellectual coach, but the books she chose were often tiresome. As soon as I could read speedily, I preferred the Hardy Boys, but politely slogged through the British schoolgirl series that used to arrive for Lillian in the parcels from our relatives overseas: The Secret of the Abbey, The Abbess’s Foundlings, The Abbey Girls at School. Lillian couldn’t get over leaving England.

  I was more in my element surrounded by fraying fabric scraps and spools of different-coloured thread, toiling over tiny, poorly cut vestments and jabbing my fingers with needles I tried to push through wads of wool. Sometimes, after arduous hours, I would have to discard the garment I had laboured into a mess.

  “Put it away. Try it again tomorrow!” Mummy would yell from the kitchen on hearing my howls.

  I shut my door and started over, unable to let it alone, much like Lillian couldn’t stop plying me with books to alter my point of view. I put off reading her offerings until any further delay would have threatened the peace between us. Closing the cover after making it through to the end, I’d say to Mummy, “There. It’s done. Two hundred and thirty-three pages.”

  “Was it a good book?”

  “Two hundred and thirty-three pages.”

  “Here,” Lillian said after her next visit to the library. She was obviously satisfied with herself for doing me this good turn. “This is great.” She passed me a book called Stormy Petrel. “I can’t believe I found it here. The book jacket is exactly the same as the one I read in Purley.”

  On the jacket, a seabird hovered in the foreground of a British coastal scene, the colours predictably bruised as I remembered the English sky. I couldn’t understand why this one thing that was so obvious seemed to elude my knowledgeable sister: England had been temporary, on loan like the big house we had occupied. All that opulent stuff reminded Lillian of what had belonged to our parents’ families but had vanished in the war, along with the aunts and uncles and grandparents we had never met. We weren’t meant to get it back.

  I looked forward to the parcels from England with excitement. My best dolls had come out of those trans-Atlantic boxes, their hair so dense and firmly packed I could comb it as much as I wanted without pulling out a thread. Lillian approached each package hesitantly, afraid that it would fail to return to her what she hoped for most, the smell and feel and comfort of what she’d loved. After four years, she savoured the last traces of her British accent, still lit up at any reminder of that weather-beaten isle.

  Stormy Petrel. “Petrol? Are you sure it’s the same book?” I asked skeptically, doubting the reliability of her memory. Even an English book wouldn’t try to spin a yarn, I thought, out of gasoline. “How many pages?”

  * * *

  The boy who arrived at the Ville d’Anjou house to take my sister to their high school graduation prom was infamous among us as the barely audible mumble on the telephone.

  I answered the phone the first time he called.

  “Mm spk ln,” I heard, barely distinguishing a human timbre.

  “Pardon me?” I asked. Before the days of obscene phone calls, children were instructed to politely ask a muffled mumble on the line to repeat itself.

  If anything, the voice receded. “Mm In,” it dropped to an expiring sigh.

  “Who? You want to talk to who?” I shouted encouragement.

  “Li…” gasped the caller, and I could tell that was final.

  “Oh! Lillian! Lillian?” Understanding flooded me with a wave of excitement. The garble on the line was a boy.

  “Lili!” I called, dashing outside where Lillian was studying in the sun. “There’s a boy on the phone! A boy! Lili, a boy wants to talk to you!”

  “What?” said Mummy coming up from the basement, her arms laden with wet laundry to hang outside, but already alert to something afoot. “A what?”

  The “what” was called Alan (“What do his parents do? Where do they come from? What does he want from you?” demanded Mummy, implying an ulterior motive), and it took two or three more calls before he managed to get out that he was asking her to the prom. We had heard mention of this name off and on during Lillian’s three years at Mountview High. Alan Bradshaw of the math prize one year, the science prize another. Alan Bradshaw who had broken his nose while quarterbacking the one football game Lillian had been allowed to stay late after school to watch. “But now you see what goes on,” clucked Apu, “a rough and brutal sport that’s no place for decent girls.”

  Until now they had managed to keep Lillian away from school dances. She was too young, younger than the others. She might be taken advantage of, Apu added in a lower register, which so infuriated Lillian she flung down her napkin and left her supper uneaten on her plate. But a graduation prom in all reasonableness could not be avoided after Lillian had worked so hard to finish high school two years ahead of her age group. Was it really necessary, though, to go to this dance with a date? Laney Henderson’s father would be happy, they were sure of it, to drive Laney and Lillian to the party and bring them home at a suitable hour. In the end, my parents grudgingly relented. The date would be allowed if the choked voice on the line made a fully corporeal appearance a half hour before departure so Mummy and Apu could get a good look at him, and, of course, if he promised to bring Lili home by midnight. Lillian’s mouth opened in a reflex protest, then she thought better of it.

  “Don’t go calling him back right away,” Mummy warned. “Keep him guessing until he’s so worked up he calls himself.”

  Skilled, direct and proving to be wonderfully effective at interrogation, Mummy wasted no time during Alan’s pre-prom interview to elicit some salient facts from his mumbled, monosyllabic answers. Short as these were, Apu couldn’t decipher anything the boy said. Alan aimed his few words at the floor, where they got lost under the busybody patter of my feet. But Mummy managed to extract a few nuggets she stored away to share with Apu later. The boy came from Montreal North. He was seventeen years old, the only son of a Canadian serviceman and his British war bride—“Like Christine,” she explained after Alan had left, referring to her brother’s wife in England.

  How Auntie Christine qualified as a war bride wasn’t altogether clear to me.

  “Mummy, Auntie Christine is British, and she never moved away from England. Uncle Larry’s the one who left Hungary and joined her. Wouldn’t that make him a war groom?”

  “Thank you, Miss Know-everything, for getting me off the track. You think your father and I don’t remember plenty about these British types, hoity-toity, too good to lift a finger. Your Auntie Christine was nothing but an orphan, who knows what kind of people she came from, but she had to have a ring even on her pinky.”

  Alan had said his father was a draftsman; his mother stayed home. Mummy’s supercilious utterance, “Hmph,” expressed confirmation of her suspicions. If Alan’s family didn’t have more money than we did—and why would they when Montreal North was no Shangri-la?—his mother must be pretentious and lazy.

  Satisfied that she had gotte
n to the essence of his background, Mummy had let the boy get up. At his full height, Alan would have been tall, but because he hung his head so he wouldn’t have to meet anyone’s eye, you didn’t get the effect of his real measure. Even from my low vantage point, looking up into his bashful face, I hadn’t succeeded in making eye contact. Apu held out his hand to seal the masculine pact regarding Lillian’s curfew, but the boy just eased his weight from one leg to the other. A few awkward moments passed before he realized what was expected of him. Then he extended his hand with snaillike reluctance towards Apu, glancing up briefly at the wall behind my father.

  “Did you see that!” Apu spluttered after Lillian and her date were finally released. “The children here are not raised to shake a person’s hand!”

  Mummy and Apu never ceased being amazed and appalled by the social gracelessness of the Canadian children Lillian and I brought to the house. Children who didn’t know better than to walk right in without wiping their feet or taking off their shoes. Children who didn’t say hello when they met our parents, or worse still, good-bye and thank you when they left. Children who didn’t always answer when they were spoken to or, when asked to dinner, never once offered to help clear the table. “What do you think?” Mummy would shrug, insulted by what she interpreted as a lack of respect. “How can you expect the children to behave politely if they haven’t been properly raised?”

  Proper upbringing was a cultural deficiency here in Canada. The adults were overly familiar, lapsing into the use of Mummy and Apu’s first names before they were invited to do so. And the children were untutored in simple formal courtesies. Good rearing was an attribute of which Lillian and I felt more than well endowed.

  It went without saying that the son of a draftsman from Montreal North wasn’t Jewish. Montreal North was like a previous but tawdry incarnation of the east-end suburb where we now lived. Ville d’Anjou had siphoned the upwardly mobile from the communities of the east end with its promise of spaciousness. We would have been surprised to learn of any Jew but ourselves who lived east of Pie-IX Boulevard. But nothing in our household went without comment.