Immigrant City

by David Bezmozgis

  “Agnes,” I said, “can I ask you one more, possibly very stupid, question?”

  “Ask whatever you like.”

  The question was gratuitous and indulgent, but I persisted anyway.

  “I didn’t know that he was or was not a Jew,” she replied.

  When we parted at the front door, Agnes regretted if I was disappointed with my visit and that she’d been unable to provide me with the information I’d sought. She had tried, in advance of my arrival, to locate a video she’d shot of her mother and my grandfather together—her mother playing the kokle and my grandfather singing. But she’d been unable to find it. She pledged to try again and to call me once she did. I could return and we’d watch the video together.

  * * *

  It was dusk when I rode home to my wife and daughters. Under the darkening canopy of trees, I flowed along residential streets as though indistinguishable from my thoughts.

  What had I learned from Agnes? My grandfather had visited Lauma at her home. They’d sung parochial songs and talked about things Agnes could not recount. When it was no longer advisable, he’d stopped coming. That was the sum of what Agnes had given me. And after Agnes, the trail went cold. There was nobody else who could shed light on what had motivated my grandfather to keep visiting Lauma in her reduced state. She was a sick woman. It wasn’t as if they were engaged in some love affair. And even if they had been, what would have been the harm? She was a widow; he was a widower. Why choose to withhold it from us? Unless his intention was to withhold for the sake of withholding. To have something altogether his own. A secret like a muscle built up for his own delectation, which nobody else could see but which he could flex and feel. A sense of firmness in the core, when everything else was deteriorating. A small claim to autonomy or wildness in the face of neutralizing domesticity. Or was I ascribing my own impulses to him? In life, I’d never thought him capable of reasoning this way. But what did I know about the limits of his mind? Apparently, not enough. And apparently, that was how it would remain. I would have to resign myself to it.

  At home I was drawn into the eddies of our evening ritual. There were grievances to adjudicate and half-hearted punishments to mete out. There was bargaining and cajoling over math homework and piano practice, interspersed with earnest and playful affections. There was fitful conversation, dinner, dishes, toilet and bedtime. All the while, looking at the faces of my wife and children, I felt the attenuated weight of my grandfather’s secret. It was a small fraction of what he must have felt. He’d kept a secret while I was keeping the secret of a secret—and one I understood only partially and imperfectly. Maybe because of that—because there really wasn’t anything definitive to say—I didn’t tell my wife where I’d been or what I’d been doing. Or it may have been out of a sense of fealty to my grandfather, as though, as his only male grandchild, I had an obligation to keep faith with him in death as I’d kept faith with him in life. When nobody else could summon the patience, I’d listened to exhaustive recollections about his beloved pre-war Baltinava. And his repeated accounts of being wounded at the front and his long and arduous recuperation. Were someone to ask me, I could name the surgeon who saved my grandfather’s arm. Posterity would know him as Dr. Dubinsky.

  To regain our psychological equilibrium after the rigours of bedtime, my wife and I repaired to our individual screens, she in our bedroom, I downstairs in my office. After ingesting my dose of the day’s cultural and political news, I checked my email and found a message from Ruta Gulbis. Its subject line read: “Your grandfather.”

  Hi David,

  You were just at my mom’s house. I’m sending you the video. I don’t know what she told you, but it probably wasn’t the truth.

  Ruta Gulbis

  780-404-8001

  I clicked on the file and encountered Lauma sitting on the sofa in Agnes’s living room. She wore a grey skirt and pale-yellow sweater. In her lap she cradled a kokle. Her expression was vaguely fearful, as if she expected to be scolded for some indeterminate offence. A woman’s voice sounded off-screen, presumably Agnes’s, saying something in Latvian. Lauma didn’t so much as twitch. A moment later my grandfather walked stiffly into the frame and sat near Lauma. He wore burgundy house slippers, dark trousers and a striped shirt with a blue tie under a blue-and-red argyle vest he’d favoured. As Lauma watched him take his seat, her expression changed from anxious to impassive. My grandfather glanced at her, as if to ascertain her mind, and turned calmly to face the camera. Agnes spoke again and he nodded. The camera then zoomed in on his face, immediately zoomed out, adjusted focus and jerkily panned over and down to reframe him and Lauma so they were centred on the screen. All the while, my grandfather appeared and behaved exactly like himself, patient and obedient. I felt a powerful rush of feeling surge up in me, which manifested itself, surprisingly, in Yiddish. My mind formed the phrase: Berl, vos tostu? It translated, not harshly but endearingly, as “Berl, what are you doing?” It was an echo of the way my relatives—my father, my uncle—would greet my grandfather in his apartment or at one of our houses. Before switching to Russian, they’d offer one or another phrase in Yiddish, delivered mostly in jest, like an acknowledgement of their legacy membership in a quaint but defunct club. Meanwhile, in the video, Lauma’s fingers started moving across the strings of the instrument. She played a short introductory passage, and then my grandfather launched into the lyrics with his strong, confident voice. It was a happy, jaunty tune—odd in the context. Even though I was ignorant of most things Latvian, I recognized it. It told of a little rooster impatient to wake the sleepy village girls. I’d heard my grandfather sing it before, in the guise of Latvia’s national folk song. I watched him and Lauma perform it to completion, whereupon Lauma removed her hands from the kokle and Agnes applauded. Agnes then uttered what sounded like a request for another song, but Lauma rose from the sofa. My grandfather also began to rise when the video abruptly ended.

  I sat quietly for a minute, the black screen before me, and considered exactly how I would proceed. It was nearly ten o’clock. Ruta had written not a full hour earlier.

  Modern technology furnished too many alternatives and confused what should have been a simple matter. I wanted to speak to Ruta. But when did I want to inform her that I wanted to speak to her? And then when did I actually want to speak to her? And what was appropriate based on the timing and the content of her email? Each succeeding question didn’t so much bring me closer to an answer as cause me to despise myself and the culture I lived in. In the end I composed the following text: “Hi Ruta. It’s David. Thank you for the video.”

  Immediately, I saw the ellipsis blink in the respondent’s bubble.

  I told my wife I was going for a walk and sat on a bench in the park near our house. During the day the park teemed with nannies and children. Plastic playground equipment had been installed atop a spongy surface, and a set of swings fixed over a sandpit. Beyond the playground were an open field, a knoll, a mix of young and mature trees where dogs ran and relieved themselves, sternly warned to keep clear of the children. At night, these same dogs streaked unrestrained across the entire park while their owners chatted. Sometimes teenagers got high and behaved obnoxiously on the swings. During warmer months, shadowy characters hunched at the edge of the park, and in the mornings parents and dog owners found spent condoms and hypodermic needles. As I waited for Ruta, I had the park mostly to myself. Occasionally someone walked or cycled past. In a far corner, dog tags tinkled around the glow of a cellphone.

  From the bench I could see cars turn from the main road onto our street. I inferred which was Ruta’s—a silver Dodge Ram pickup with Alberta plates that slowed several houses before ours and crept forward. I went to meet her where she parked. Through the window, she appeared younger than I’d originally thought, closer to thirty than forty. She met my eyes briefly, then leaned across the passenger seat to retrieve something. As Agnes had conceded, Ruta was beautiful, but grimly or antagonistically so, as if she rega
rded her looks as a gift she’d been unable to decline or destroy. She opened the door and swung around to face me. Her blond hair fell loosely over the collar of a plaid shirt. She wore faded jeans and rested her scuffed brown leather boots on the truck’s running board.

  “Where do you want to talk?” she asked.

  “Probably not across from my bedroom window.”

  “You didn’t tell your wife?”

  “What’s there to tell?”

  I retreated a step and turned in the direction of the park. Ruta swept her purse off the seat, hopped down and shut the door. We walked wordlessly to the bench I’d occupied while waiting for her.

  Once we’d sat, she rummaged in her purse for a cigarette and a lighter. Sparking the flame, she said, “I hope you’re not expecting me to jerk you off or anything.”

  “It hadn’t crossed my mind,” I said.

  “Really?” she replied mordantly, and lit her cigarette. “I was in Alberta for almost ten years working in the oil sands. You probably read all sorts of shit about it. Most of it was true. Guys propositioned me all the time. Not just me, but any woman with a pulse. In the work camps and on the job sites, you could be offered hundreds or even thousands of dollars to jerk someone off or blow them. It could be the labourers, the cooks, the security guards, the supervisors, oil executives, even cops. I never did, in case you’re wondering. Not because I’m a prude or a feminist or anything, but because I respect myself and demand to be respected for what I can do. Which is a lot more than jerking people off.”

  To substantiate her point, Ruta rifled through her purse for her phone and showed me photographs similar to the one I’d seen in her mother’s kitchen: her beside or inside large machines. As she swiped through the images, I noted that she had exceptionally well-formed hands, the fingers long and slender, though the nails were trimmed or bitten to the quick. There was also something manic about the play of her hands that seeped increasingly into the pitch of her voice. She lingered on a shot she’d taken through the windshield of an excavator depicting the colossal raw expanses of the bitumen mines. Her job had been to clear the land of overburden—layers of worthless rock and dirt that rested atop the valuable resource. She proudly displayed a series of pictures of a trailer home she’d bought. She’d been paid handsomely for her work but had sunk much of her money into the trailer at the peak of the market. Then the price of oil tanked and work became precarious. And then, in the spring, the wildfire struck and reduced her home to a pile of toxic ash. She’d been forced to flee, just like her grandparents from the Red Army, snatching only a few possessions and driving her truck through the flames. The only refuge she could afford while waiting for the insurance company to process her claim—which they were in no hurry to do—was in her mother’s house. Ironically, it was a desire to escape her mother’s house and seek her independence that had compelled her to go to Alberta in the first place. Now she was stranded there and even more miserable than she’d been before.

  In the time she spoke, Ruta didn’t provide me an opening to say a word, and I felt a growing and desperate need to leave—as if for the sake of my sanity. I sensed that I had finally arrived at the stage Knut had warned me about, and I feared that anything Ruta might say about my grandfather—true or false—would do me harm. I’d pursued the mystery faithfully and lovingly, but it was clear to me now that people either didn’t know, wouldn’t say or couldn’t be trusted to speak sense.

  I rose from the bench and said something to this effect as diplomatically as I could.

  Ruta responded with a look of naked, childlike hurt—a look that declared that I’d joined the ranks of all the people who’d disappointed her in life.

  “I was trying to form a human connection,” she said. “But if you can’t handle that kind of intimacy, I’m not going to force it on you. I respect your choice. But it doesn’t change my intentions. I came here to repay my family’s debt to your grandfather and to Jewish people.”

  Once more she dug into her purse and this time pulled out a sealed, white letter-size envelope, which she then extended to me.

  “You can do what you want with it. Open it. Don’t open it. Throw it into one of the garbage cans with the diapers and dog shit. It’s up to you.”

  I accepted it and turned to go. Ruta remained where she was, smoking her cigarette. But before I’d gone very far, she called after me.

  “Did my mother say anything about the child my grandmother left behind in Latvia?”

  “She didn’t,” I said, though my tone made clear that the existence of the child wasn’t a revelation to me.

  “Did she show you the drawing of my grandmother’s cat?”

  “She did.”

  “Did you happen to ask why she took her fucking cat and not her child?”

  It would have been impossible to ask, but I felt stupid that it hadn’t even occurred to me.

  “My grandmother was very beautiful and very weak. My grandfather ruled her life. If he decided they weren’t going to take her Jewish bastard, then guess what, her Jewish bastard got left behind.”

  Ruta looked at me defiantly, as if, having dangled such provocative bait, she dared me to keep walking. I felt a shiver of disdain pass through me.

  I held up the envelope. “What’s in it?”

  “Our family history.”

  “I know about it.”

  “Then you know about it,” she replied.

  In reproach, I tore the envelope open where I stood. It contained a single photocopy, which I read by the light of my phone. One side was a typed and notarized document in Latvian; the other side bore a handwritten English translation.

  I, Berls Singers, born in Baltinava, Latvia, the sole surviving heir of my parents, Natans and Fruma Singers, declare that my family was dispossessed of property by the Soviet occupiers in the form of two houses at 7 and 20 Darza Street and a leather store at 5 Tirgus Street. I assert my rights to have the properties restored to me and their deeds transferred to Mara Smiltnieks, my biological daughter from Lauma Gulbis, née Smiltnieks.

  Signed this 17th day of February 2001 in Toronto, Canada.

  I looked up to find Ruta eyeing me boldly, as if we were now implicitly joined in profound and painful feeling.

  “My mother was never going to tell you.”

  The anger I’d felt drained away and was replaced by a weary pity.

  “To protect Mara? So I didn’t go after the houses and the store?”

  “You had a right to know.”

  I walked slowly back to the bench and sat beside her.

  “We knew, but we believed she was my grandfather’s brother’s.”

  “Not according to what your grandfather wrote here.”

  “If he wrote it out of charity, better to write daughter rather than niece. There’s nobody left to deny it.”

  “You’re denying it.”

  “Ruta, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s all past. You can believe whatever you want.”

  “Thanks, so can you.”

  “I try not to believe what I want to believe.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said with exasperation. “Why did you even text me?”

  “I don’t know. I thought there would be more.”

  She reached into her purse again for cigarettes. Deliberately averting her eyes from me, she lit one and gazed out at the park.

  I reflected on the tortuous circumstances that had brought us together. Something had happened a long time ago between people who were no longer alive and whom we would be the last to know. For flawed and powerful reasons, we assigned too much importance to it, even as we didn’t really know what it was.

  Had our grandparents loved each other but suppressed their feelings for the sake of the brother with the dent in his head? Had they coveted each other, as proscribed by the Bible? Or had they simply, in the terror-eros of war, submitted to a spontaneous passion?

  Through green fields, insuperable Aryans advanced. Of one hundred Jewish families
in Baltinava, three fled. The others perished. Perhaps at Ruta’s grandfather’s hand. In the shadow of the crimson reckoning, Lauma looked into her daughter’s face for the last time and left.

  On my phone were pictures I’d taken of my girls at Georgian Bay. They posed in their swimsuits on the white sand, in the glare of the sun; the dark, shallow lake spread out behind them, stands of birch and pine describing the coast. The setting evoked the summers I’d spent as a boy on the Baltic shore. My memory of them now was visceral and ephemeral, like a deep breath. I brought up the photos and offered them to Ruta. She took the phone from my hand and studied them carefully. From across the park, a girl shrieked. The sound whisked through the night like an arrow that landed between us, narrowly missing its mark. Ruta and I startled and looked to each other as if we might embrace or leap to each other’s defence. The sincerity of the feeling gripped us and then released as the girl’s shriek spiralled into laughter.

  Childhood

  AS A TREAT, on the way to the appointment, they stopped at an Indian restaurant, and Mark Berman listened to his son pronounce the items on the menu. That they had made it this far was already a feat, since it meant they’d managed to leave the house, walk down to the main street and board a bus filled with people, some of whose bodies gave off strange scents. Along the way, there had been tears, but they were mostly symbolic, the boy’s means of asserting himself.

  In the restaurant, Reuben was happier and behaved like a little adult, summoning the courage to glance at the waiter when he placed his order. A year before, he wouldn’t have set foot in this restaurant, couldn’t have been convinced to try the alien food, and would have answered the waiter by looking at the tablecloth. Some combination of time and enzymes had eased him. The boy was eight, and he was doing better. There were lots of reasons to be optimistic. He was a proficient reader in both English and French. He could amuse himself for hours, concocting stories and creating intricate drawings. He remembered the lyrics to seemingly every song he’d ever heard and, using his index fingers, could tease their melodies out on the piano. He was physically robust and could swim and ice-skate and do karate. Sometimes, boys from his class invited him to their houses; other times, they invited themselves over to his. Mark would encounter them in the kitchen—funny, eager boys named for English monarchs and biblical prophets—opening cupboards in search of snacks. But many mornings, when he dropped his son at school, he’d see these same boys in a fizzy little scrum and his son tentative to approach, lurking on the periphery, gazing absently about, with none of them taking note of him. There were also fits of temper. A relentless argumentativeness. Extreme sensitivities to sense phenomena—a phantom smell in the car, dishes with unsightly patterns, the textures of clothing. Mutating phobias—of the bin under the sink for the kitchen waste, a malevolence in a tree at the playground, getting caught outside in the rain. And absent-mindedness—lost shoes and lunch boxes, perpetually forgotten homework—and an otherworldly spaciness, minutes like eons when he stood holding his underpants while reading a book he’d read before.