“But do we ask death to take us? No! Not even in our darkest moments! To die is to give Hitler victory.”
Panting from her exertions, satisfied that she’s finally made an impression, Lisa stomps away. Toni sits on the edge of the bed in a daze, unable to run after her mother and tell her the blow was unjustified. Her mother has all the ammunition. Be grateful, her mother says. What Toni is grateful for, what she likes best about her so-called beautiful room, is the door that shuts her parents out (if only it had a lock), the roller blind, the bed covers into which she can tunnel. She never really cared for the pale pink of the walls, the ivory-coloured furniture, the flounced curtains, none of which were of her own choosing. Sometimes she imagines herself a space alien, kidnapped by earthlings and wrenched from her small, one-person planet (they are reading Le Petit Prince in French class) to be imprisoned in an atmosphere where she can’t properly breathe.
Now, shrugging on her duffel coat, she gallops downstairs and outside to roam the snowbound streets, her left cheek carrying the memory of her mother’s slap. She tries to envision the lost Ida, with whom there was something terribly wrong and whose ghost her father sees when he looks at his daughter now. Perhaps Ida, like Toni, was an oversized grasshopper of a girl, clumsy, conspicuous. Perhaps they all tried to hide when the Nazis came, but Ida’s impossible feet stuck out from under the bed, causing the family’s downfall.
Toni won’t, can’t, ask for clarity about Ida. She has learned over the years that certain corners must not be poked into, for the result will be hard, blank silence or a punishing burst of emotion. Every so often, as today, a detail pops up like a Punch-and-Judy puppet, dances briefly in the stage lights of conversation and vanishes back into the shadows of the forbidden. Toni thinks she might have heard before that Ida was a problem in some way, but she can’t be sure. She forgets bits of her parents’ stories. They have the power of being always shockingly fresh and depressingly familiar.
Instead of dwelling on Ida, her mind turns to the Anne Frank story she’s been reading. She imagines her and Anne together in that attic, Anne’s lovely brown eyes gazing at Toni with helpless appeal as the Nazis approach. Toni flings a hand grenade into the Gestapo men’s faces, killing them instantly, and at the same time blows a hole in the wall through which she carries the swooning Anne to a rowboat in the canal. The scenarios change half a dozen times as Toni stomps along the icy sidewalks, while the crowds of shoppers and buildings barely register in her vision. But suddenly the bubble of fantasy bursts and she finds herself far up Decarie Boulevard, miles from home, feeling like the empty paper bag that’s being blown along the gutter. She longs desperately to leap into another body, another existence, but there’s nothing but this stick-figure of a self. She stops in the lobby of an apartment building to warm up her cold ears for a few moments. The lobby is dark and shabby, with battered mailboxes and tracks of slush on the buckling tiled floor. A gloomy silence presses down.
“I wish I was dead,” she yells and flees out the door, the echoes of her own voice chasing her through the gathering dusk.
chapter 7
Dear Diary,
I’m 15 now and still a mess and it makes me want to jump off a cliff or stick a dagger in my heart. I wish I had a gun. My favourite books are: To Kill a Mockingbird, Quo Vadis, The Three Musketeers, and Kon-Tiki. I wish I could travel the South Seas in a raft like that guy Heyerdahl. ’Bye for now. Love and other indoor sports, T.
The diary goes beneath the corner of the carpet that’s under the bed to keep it safe from Lisa’s prying eyes. Even so, Toni imagines the diary in her mother’s hands, the naked words exposed to her mother’s pained and scornful scrutiny. Lisa has a nose for secrets and a knack for schemes to make Toni miserable. She arrives home with a brochure that’s become slightly crumpled in its journey from the hand of Mrs Rajinsky at the Jewish Y to Mrs Shmelzer, to Lisa’s purse.
Lisa smoothes out the folds, flattening the pamphlet against the dining room table so that Toni can admire the glossy black-and-white photo of a posed shot of about a hundred kids and teenagers arranged in a wide semi-circle, youngest in the front, oldest in the back, angled slightly so they all fit in. They wear a uniform of sorts; dark pants, crisp white shirt, neckerchief with a crest. Some kids also wear an Israeli-style, thimble-shaped hat low on their foreheads. One and all, the faces look depressingly cheerful. Despite the grainy quality of the photo and the creases in the paper, the group’s smiling eagerness and togetherness shines through. Beneath the picture the caption trumpets, “Camp Tikvah: Nourishing Jewish souls in the heart of the Laurentians.”
And the blurb exults, “An opportunity for Jewish boys and girls from various backgrounds to meet and live together in healthy, happy surroundings. They will form a bond with Israel, gain a love of our people and heritage, build lifelong friendships.” Inside the brochure, more promises, including “swimming, canoeing, arts and crafts, ping-pong, drama, socials, Israeli dancing, to name just a few of our exciting activities. Kosher meals planned by a home economics teacher … the pristine waters of Lac Sainte-Cecile.”
Toni’s chest tightens and a dreary gloom presses against the back of her eyes. She knows everything she needs to know about these Camp Tikvah kids. She can feel their easy camaraderie through the page, how they’ve grown up together, gone to the same schools, belonged to the same clubs, danced the Twist at the same bar mitzvahs. They have aunts and uncles or Hebrew school teachers or friends of friends in common. They form a smooth wall of cemented bonds while she, Toni, remains loose debris. Bad enough to be an oddball at school, where at least she’s found her niche, become used to her spot on the margins. She couldn’t bear to start all over again in another hostile environment. No point in voicing such thoughts to her mother, though. To do so would unleash another lecture about what real hardship and starting over means: war, horror, DP camp, wandering through countries, coming here with nothing, and learning a new language. Her parents think fitting in means having money in the bank, a roof over your head, and a textbook grasp of English.
“I’m not going,” Toni says, crossing her arms over her chest.
“What do you mean?”
The bright, expectant look in her mother’s eyes dims to incredulity. “Have you even read the brochure? What they offer? Swimming, canoeing … ”
“I don’t want to go to camp.”
“Well, you can’t moon around here all summer again.”
“I won’t moon around.”
“Look at you. Pale as goat cheese. Miserable and lonely. You think I don’t know how lonely you are? You think I don’t hear you sniffling in your room? It breaks a mother’s heart.”
Toni is shocked into silence at the thought of her mother, ears cocked by the bedroom door, for how else would she know? How else would Lisa be aware of Toni weeping quietly into her pillow at night? Toni tries to summon her anger, but her mother, leaning across the table with her face full of outrage and a mother’s heartbreak sucks the life out of Toni’s unvoiced reproaches.
“You have no friends,” Lisa continues, merciless and accusing. “At camp you’d make friends.”
“I have Judy,” Toni counters, without much conviction.
Toni has chummed around with Judy Rothstein off and on since grade eight. Judy is cross-eyed, brainy, talks a mile a minute, and has odd obsessions such as Catherine the Great, Lewis Carroll’s nonsense rhymes (many of which she’s memorized), ghoulish songs, her restaurant napkin collection, scratching doodles on her skin with a needle, and lighting fires in ashtrays. They do have fun together sometimes when they lock themselves in a dark basement room at Judy’s place, eat raw weiners straight from the cellophane package, and howl out the words to the Lizzie Borden rhyme: Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks. They sterilize a needle in a candle flame and play X-O on their arms, and Judy, oblivious to pain, often pricks deeply enough into her own flesh to draw blood. Out in the world, Judy likes to pretend she’s a madwoman, mutterin
g the “Jabberwocky” poem on the bus or in the school hallways, relishing the startled looks she garners. For years, Toni has wavered in her feelings toward Judy between admiration and protectiveness, on the one hand, and horrified embarrassment on the other. Her friend doesn’t seem to realize when she’s gone too far, and Toni can’t help but wonder whether Judy just pretends or really is crazy after all. Toni resolved to give Judy the shake by her fifteenth birthday, but that birthday came and went three weeks ago and nothing has changed. Toni is as dependent as ever on wacko-Judy for company.
“The Rothstein girl!” Lisa scoffs. “She’s not normal.”
“So what?” Toni growls, though normality is what she longs for and what eludes her because of Judy’s friendship, along with her own freakish body and general weirdness.
“You can do better. Anyway, she’s going to Girl Guide camp this summer. Haven’t you heard?”
Toni has heard. Judy told her the news quite cheerfully. She said she looked forward to campfires and learning to tie knots and would probably be able to apply her new knowledge to crafting a hangman’s noose. Toni briefly toyed with the idea of asking to go to the Girl Guide camp too, but the thought of a whole community of Judys made her think twice. A summer without her old standby pal, without anyone at all, seems equally unbearable.
When her father comes home and reads the brochure, he sighs over the price of the camp—$400 for the two months—but his lips curl in a wan smile at the magic words, “lake,” “country,” “Laurentians,” “fresh air.” Julius remembers the rambles he took in his youth through the Vienna woods, the cool breezes, scent of pine, troops of children in knickerbockers singing wandering songs as they marched along the path. The word “wander” has a different meaning in German than in English, although it’s spelled almost the same, he tells Toni. The English word has connotations of being lost, whereas the German suggests freedom and exploration.
“Edelweiss, edelweiss,” Toni trills mockingly, but Julius hasn’t even heard of the saccharine Julie Andrews musical set in the Austrian Alps, and the irony goes right over his head.
“They make a big deal about Israel at this camp,” she says. “Listen to this: ‘Some of our best and brightest have gone on to make Aliyah.’ Is that what you want? That I’m brainwashed to leave home and live in Israel?”
He gives Toni a sidelong glance.
“You don’t have to swallow every word they say. Enjoy the mountains and the lake. Learn to swim. That’s what I’m paying for.”
“Of course you must visit Israel some day,” Lisa says as she sails into the living room and plops down into her corner of the couch. “It’s a wonderful place.”
Instead of her usual housedress, she’s wearing a blue T-shirt and white peddle-pushers, as if she herself were getting ready for the Tikvah experience. A kerchief twisted into a turban caps her head because she’s put some new stuff into her hair and it needs to seep in. A sheen of cold cream glistens on her cheeks and a smug, everything’s-settled smile sits upon her lips.
“Can you imagine a country where everyone around you is Jewish? The policemen, the bus drivers, the radio announcers, the government officials, the …”
Lisa’s hands grope in the air as she searches her mind for more categories of Jews.
“The Santa Clauses!” Toni offers and guffaws.
“You see? She has no Jewish pride,” Lisa says accusingly to Julius, who has picked up the Montreal Star and begun to scan the headlines through the bottoms of his bifocals. Toni knows he’s not as enthusiastic a Zionist as Lisa is. He grudgingly makes annual donations to various Jewish organizations and wonders how much really goes to planting trees in the ancestral land and how much into the schnorers’ pockets. “Israel is a necessary evil,” he sometimes says, quoting Einstein. What he means is that, though the establishment of the state was a practical necessity after the war, a country chock-full of fellow Jews holds no great appeal for him. He also worries about Israel’s vulnerability. He’s not keen on so many Jews being gathered together on one miserable spit of land amidst a sea of hostile Arabs. Beginner’s luck is how he regards Israel’s successes in battle so far.
“What’s so great about being Jewish?” Toni demands. “I mean why is it a bigger deal than being left-handed or having a name that starts with ‘T’?”
Her own words strike her as a brilliant, self-evident heresy, like the child’s revelation that the emperor had no clothes.
Lisa glares, speechless for once.
“Jewish, shmoo-ish!” Toni adds. The phrase pleases her and she repeats it more loudly. “Jewish, shmoo-ish!”
“Shame on you! Shame! To spit on your own people!”
“I’m not spitting. I’m just saying—”
“After all the sufferings of so many millions!”
Lisa rears up on the couch. Her finger jabs at Toni, seated cross-legged on the carpet. “In my wanderings, in those years when we were hunted like animals, I met a few Jews who—”
Oh, here it comes. The damning tone, the deluge of stories.
“—never could say a good word about their own kind.”
“What’s so great about it? That’s all I’m trying to—”
“Believe me, these are the most pitiful of people. Not the ones burnt in the ovens. No! Not them.”
“What does Jewish mean anyway? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s, it’s …”
“…blessed compared to those others, the self-haters, the ones without a soul.”
“It’s just a stupid word.”
Toni is walking around in circles now, plucking at her hair, hardly aware of what she’s saying, just wanting to drown out her mother’s voice. Out of the corner of her eye she sees her father’s face twisted in a grimace. His hands push at the air in front of him. He gets up and rushes off down the hall, and in his haste leaves one slipper behind so that he walks to his study with a lop-sided shuffle. Before Lisa can begin blaming Toni for upsetting her father, she decamps too. She makes sure to slam her bedroom door extra hard.
Some time later comes a gentle knock. She’s surprised to hear her father call her name. He enters and sits on the edge of the bed and strokes her forehead with his long, tapered fingers.
“Your mother puts things in extreme terms sometimes, but all in all she is right. One must have pride.”
“I’m not ashamed. You both don’t understand.” Toni kicks the foot of the bedstead. “I just don’t see why I have to call myself Jewish. I’m not religious and neither are either of you.”
“It’s much more than religion and you know that. We have a history, a culture, so many great—”
“Okay, okay. So I can read Jewish books. And English books, and French. And Chinese, if I want. There’s culture everywhere. What does that have to do with being something. What if I just want to be an ordinary Canadian?”
Julius sighs and tugs at his goatee. And then comes that soft, dry, helpless click produced at the back of his throat when he swallows, a sound that’s like a tickle in the small of her back where she can’t reach and that makes her want to jump out of her skin and makes the desire to kick him almost irresistible. She can’t, of course, because he’s delicate, her papa, he wouldn’t fight back, he’d run away, and it’s been such a long time since he’s sat at the edge of her bed like this. And she doesn’t want her papa to leave.
“I once thought exactly as you do,” he says at last. “I considered myself a citizen of the world. Vienna was a cosmopolitan city. I read English papers, listened to Italian opera, drank French wine, went to a nightclub where good Austrian citizens applauded Yiddish wit.”
He draws himself up as he speaks, his voice swells with the rhythm of his story, speaking to her equal-to-equal, instantly erasing that volcano of irritation within her that was about to erupt. Suddenly she’s full of wonder at that younger man she glimpses: clever, carefree, and at ease in a place of mystery called a nightclub.
“I voted for the socialists who promised that all mankind
would be as one if only the filthy capitalists could be toppled from power. And then, one day, there were no more filthy capitalists. Only filthy Jews. No. No. I know what you want to say. You are thinking: ‘This is so negative. Why must we allow others to define us?’”
He holds a raised palm in the air, as if to stop her in mid-protest, though no such objection has occurred to her.
“And you are right, in principle. But the world does not operate in principle. In the end, you cannot choose whether to be Jewish or not. You can only choose how you will be Jewish. Those ordinary Canadians you mention, they have their Christmas trees and their churches and their Thanksgiving dinners. Everyone belongs to a tribe of some sort. Like it or not, and I don’t, that is human nature. When the Nazis ordered the Jews of Germany to wear the yellow Star of David, one of our leaders said, ‘Wear the yellow star with pride.’ A bit quixotic, no? To make a mark of shame into a badge of honour? Not very effective. But noble, nonetheless.”
Julius smiles broadly so that the gold tooth at the back of his mouth winks at Toni.
“When the day comes that race and nationality are meaningless everywhere in the world, then you can choose to be nothing in particular. In the meantime, you can’t throw away your Jewishness like an old coat. First of all, as I have explained, the goyim won’t let you. But more important, you must be proud of who you are for your own sake. You must not renounce your people. To do so is to live without honour. It is to lose your soul, as your mother says.”
He cradles his chin and looks down at her gravely, the evening light reflecting off his glasses and the taut skin of his bald head. She tries to fathom this old-fashioned word, “honour.” She rather likes the grand sound of it and how her father suddenly appears to her a bit like Yul Brynner in The King and I. At the same time, the unfairness of what he has said sinks in. You cannot choose. Isn’t that always what grownups say?
And so, her fate is sealed. Toni allows herself to be dragged by her mother to buy new shorts, T-shirts, a bathing suit, and a plain white bathing cap (she will not wear the one covered with yellow rubber daisies) for summer camp.
Girl Unwrapped Page 8
