Rue des Rosiers E-Book

Rhea Tregebov

• Herausgeber: Wolsak and Wynn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 410

Beschreibung

When Sarah is fired from her Toronto job, a chance stay in Paris opens her up to new direction and purpose. But when she reads the writing on the wall above her local Metro subway station, death to the Jews, shadows from childhood rise again. And as her path crosses that of Laila, a young woman living in an exile remote from the luxuries of 1980s Paris, Sarah stumbles towards to an act of terrorism that may realize her childhood fears.

Leseprobe

About This Book

Shortlisted for the BC and Yukon Book Prize for Fiction

Shortlisted for the Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Fiction

Sarah is the youngest of the three Levine sisters. At twenty-five, she is rudderless, caught in a paralysis that keeps her from seizing her own life.

When Sarah is fired from her Toronto job, a chance stay in Paris opens her up to new direction and purpose. But when she reads the writing on the wall above her local Métro subway station, death to the Jews, shadows from childhood rise again. And as her path crosses that of Laila, a young woman living in an exile remote from the luxuries of 1980s Paris, Sarah stumbles towards to an act of terrorism that may realize her childhood fears.

In this new novel by the author of The Knife Sharpener’s Bell, writing that is both sensual and taut creates a tightly woven, compelling narrative.

Rue des Rosiers

Rhea Tregebov

Contents

Cover

About This Book

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

TORONTO

Lucky Penny – May 1982

Laila

Dirt

Gift

History

Brunswick

Laila

Call

Hardiness Zones

History

Laila

Dance

Home

Work

Call

PARIS

Paris – July 1982

Place des Vosges

Laila

Métro

Closerie des Lilas

Laila

Jeu de Paume

Laila

Luxembourg

Laila

Call

French Lessons

Laila

History

Laila

Dinner

Laila

Lunch

Laila

Rien de Rien

Ni le Mal, Ni le Bien

Laila

TORONTO

Gift – 1984

Author's Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Dedication

For Nancy Richler (1957–2018), a great soul.

Toronto

Lucky Penny

May 1982

There’s a certain weight, a light heft, that she likes. Penny in the right front jean pocket, she can slip her hand in any time, turn it with her thumb between index and middle finger, never lose contact. It’s another perfect spring evening, like yesterday’s, like tomorrow’s. When Gail called, Sarah did a quick palm flip, heads or tails. Heads. Yes. So she’s meeting her sister and a pack of buddies down on Queen Street. Leaving her rooming-house room on Palmerston, the tidy single bed, lopsided dresser, books carefully stacked on the floor, to walk south all the way to Queen, absorbing the city, the evening, the day. Taking the smaller streets, back lanes wherever she can find them, the secret side of the city, raccoon-haunted, private. A scramble of graffiti on garage doors, messages only the writers can read. Roses spilling over broken wooden gates, tin garbage cans rusted into lace.

When she gets down to the wide, raw intersection of Spadina and Queen, it feels too broad. The walk signal to cross to the east side is flashing; she’s not sure there’s time to cross. That heft in her pocket. Another quick palm flip: yes. She hustles across all six lanes, a sedan taking a left heading north leaning on his horn at her. A streetcar shimmies west along Queen, one of the old-fashioned, rusty, red-and-cream models. For a moment she’s distracted by a clunky station wagon trying to parallel park, angling awkwardly into a small spot. The driver, an older guy, looks irritated and frustrated. She figures he doesn’t need an audience and hurries on past. A scraggly American elm sapling is handcuffed to a post as if it’s committed some crime. Poor little elm. The leaves are mostly green, though a few are withered, how often does it get watered? The collar around the trunk is padded to keep it from scarring the bark but the sapling still looks imprisoned, punished –

She hears something, she’s not sure of the sequence, an engine or tire squeal and then a thud, a crash, or a crash and then a thud, a dull, flat, hideous sound.

She can’t look back. She wants to keep looking at the sad little tree because she knows if she turns around, whatever she sees will stay in her. A leaf sighs, perhaps in the aftershock of whatever it is that has happened behind her.

Someone is screaming and screaming. The strength of that scream allows Sarah to turn around, because no one could call that loudly and be badly hurt.

The big station wagon is straddling the sidewalk. It jumped the curb and someone has been caught between the chrome of the fat rear bumper and the storefront behind her, a shoe store. She can see clothing, a beige cotton sweater entangled somehow with the bumper, and she can see an arm, but somehow she can’t resolve the bits she’s seeing into the story of what’s happened. The driver is leaning forward with his head against the steering wheel. He must have seen what his car did, because his head is resolute against the wheel and she can feel how heavy it is to him.

The woman screaming is not whoever has been caught between the car and the wall. She’s a young woman dressed in tight black clothing and her face is whiter than Sarah imagines a face could be and then the woman claps her hand across her mouth to stop the sound and it seems quiet on the sidewalk.

No sound, not a groan, not breath, from the woman caught; Sarah knows now it’s a woman, peripheral vision.

A young man pushes his way into the store next door and she hears him say, Call 911, call 911! and she sees the clerk reaching for a phone from behind the counter. Sarah can’t move, isn’t helping, though she’s had the sense to step back as others have moved forward. She sees a slim woman about her age in green pyjamas, no, that’s not right, green scrubs, she must be a nurse, or a nurse’s aide, giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, something Sarah never learned, thinking that the emergency would be always someplace else, someone else’s.

And now there are sirens, not that much time can have passed but she’s been adrift in the moment. It’s a fire engine, but almost at the same moment she sees an ambulance pulling carefully beside the station wagon and the attendants are quick but careful as well and she knows there’s nothing she can do, nothing for her to do. And she’s not a witness, she didn’t see it. She lets this thought move through her head and then she steps back and back and turns on her heel and walks the half block to the Rivoli, where her sister is waiting for her. The sirens seem to accumulate in her head and she feels herself slip, move into a no-space. But she keeps walking, goes past the sidewalk tables out front and into the dimness of the restaurant. She sees Gail and her friends at a table in the back.

That heft in her pocket. If she’d waited for the next light, if the penny had said no, it could’ve been her. Her emergency.

Gail’s deep in some kind of intense talk but she must sense Sarah – she looks up and waves her over. “So what do you think of the Rivoli? I thought we should try something new, we’re always at the Queen Mum… I think you’ve met Caroline, and this is Sharon and Barb.”

“Have a seat,” one of the women, a stocky redhead, says.

Sarah can’t sit. She doesn’t know what to do with her body.

“Sarah,” the woman says, “you okay?”

She doesn’t have any words.

“Sarah?” Gail turns to her, gets up from the table, moves towards her. And that’s when Gail pulls her against her thin chest, because something must be wrong for Sarah to look like that. And Sarah feels herself pulled into Gail, feels herself slip back into herself, pulled through that fine surface of glass that separates them into the halves they have to be without one another, and she knows, her forehead against Gail’s cheek, that they’re back into the whole they really are, Rorschach inkblots that mean something, anyone can read what they mean. Her sister has her.

The next day the headline in the papers is ‘Freak Accident Kills Pedestrian’ and there’s a picture of the station wagon and police tape but no mention of the woman’s name, just her age, 51, and the age of the driver, 71. The next day Sarah will come back to the sidewalk where it happened because she can’t help herself. Nothing remarkable, the yellow caution tape is gone and the storefront looks unmarred, but there is a man kneeling at the threshold, something reverent in his bearing. He’s fixing the metal doorplate, which must have been injured along with the woman who died.

Laila

My small fist slowly warming the coolness of the iron loop. An oval loop, its stem toothed. The taste of iron when I took it in my mouth, the first thing I knew. I would lean my small head against my mother’s chest. My fist holding the key. It opened the door to our house, the old house, the one we lost. My mother’s voice low, hoarse, the lullaby slow: Everyone we love has gone away. When I come to greet the fig tree, no one is there to ask me in. The good nights now are gone. Everyone we love has gone away. But sorrow never lasts forever. My mother’s voice, hoarse and low.

Dirt

“You spend your whole day in the dirt.” Gail’s fiddling restlessly with the short tufts of her hair.

“I like dirt. I like dirt.” Dirt is something Sarah understands. It makes her feel real.

Gail has set her hands flat and tense on the rough wooden surface of the table. It’s three days since they met at the Rivoli, since Sarah saw but didn’t see the accident, the woman who died. When Gail pulled her against her thin chest, Sarah felt herself slip back into herself. But now Gail’s separate again, and ticked off. With Sarah, as usual.

“Look, I know how hard you work,” her sister is saying. “But what is going on inside your head? Is it some proto-Marxist manual-labour-is-the-only-real-work shit? Or just plain old Protestant-work-ethic shit? Huh?”

Sarah blinks in the sunlight. She can’t explain. What she likes about her job is that she can clear away the weeds and garbage, and make a space where something can grow. That’s why she likes her job. It’s simple. And clear.

She blinks again. There are no curtains, no blinds on the industrial-sized windows in Gail’s apartment. Gail has just moved into this raw loft space south of Queen, a corner one-bedroom, 14 foot ceilings, all open, all light. Complete with a colony of mice, Gail has told Sarah gleefully. There’s no way anyone can keep a place like this really clean, but it doesn’t matter to Gail.

It matters to Sarah. It’s why she can’t hack roommates. The furnished rooms she stays in are hers only, and they’ve always been clean, or at least cleanable. Though it did take her three solid days to scrub this last one down. She even went in for a new coat of paint; the place looked like some kind of crime scene, indecipherable splotches all over the walls evidence of god knows what. But the linoleum is in one piece and the other roomers are elderly types too dejected to be loud.

Her sister is drumming her fingers on the table. Gail is perpetually impatient these days, almost as perpetually outraged. At the weather, the patriarchy, the Falklands War, the Middle East, Sarah. Sarah and her preference for the study of dirt over the study of law. No, make that the practice of dirt over the practice of law. Gail’s a real lawyer now.

“You are bloody wasting your life. You’re twenty-five, for god’s sake. Twenty-five, not eighteen.”

“I know when my birthday was.”

“It’s five years since you finished university and you’re still living in one crappy room after another, taking one crappy job after another. Pardon me. You never did finish university. You’re one credit short of graduating and then you go and quit! One lousy course to complete and you’d have had your BA.”

One lousy course she couldn’t hack. One lousy course that cracked her like an egg. She had to drop it. And anyway, her major was history. What was a BA in history going to do for her?

“God, Sarah, just open your mouth, will you? Can you just say something for once? You know I hate this silent treatment shtick. And would you put that goddamn penny away? Just stop it!”

She didn’t even know she’d taken the penny out of her pocket, was turning and turning it in her fingers. Nervous habit. She sticks it in her pocket, gets up and goes over to the counter, starts attacking the stack of dishes in the sink to calm herself down. She is not getting into a fight with Gail. And she’s not going to start thinking about that damned course again.

“Will you leave my dishes alone? I know I’m a pig. Just leave them.” But Gail doesn’t get up, instead watches as the stack diminishes beneath Sarah’s hands, swift, deft as they always are with anything physical. “Why are you sticking it out in such a dumb job? What are they paying you, anyway? Minimum?”

The handsome rent Gail is paying for her bohemian loft is easily covered by the handsome salary from her job at the law firm. Gail, the newly fledged lawyer. Sarah, on the other hand, has never earned anything more than minimum. Gail is right. Crappy. That’s the adjective. It’s been one crappy job after another. Waitressing, tending bar, even a two-week career as a cocktail waitress at the legendary rooftop bar at the Park Plaza. It’s 18 months now, including layoffs, that she’s been at the City Garden Centre, the longest she’s worked at one job since she left university, left Winnipeg for Toronto. It’s the usual Sarah job: crummy hours, seasonal layoffs, unsafe working conditions. She’s gotten to the point that she likes the smell of the place: the acid tang of pesticides that mixes with the fumes off-gassing from the plastic hoses and cheap watering cans they sell, which in turn mix with the smell of soil and moss and roots, the spice of nasturtium and geranium transplants.

Gary, her crew manager, calls Sarah ‘Mighty Mouse.’ She can heft a 64-quart bag of soil if she does it right, and she always does, bending at the knees, spine straight. She just grazes 5 feet and 100 pounds, but she’s always been strong and the job has made her stronger.

She’s studied up about plants and growing conditions and flowering seasons, and now Gary will send customers to her for recommendations. The rest of the crew isn’t interested in looking stuff up, getting to know the plants, but nobody minds getting their hands dirty. Sarah likes that, likes losing herself working with her hands, letting the days melt into her work. She gets to be in her body, that strong little machine that’s always willing to take on more work. That’s why she’s sticking with this particular crappy, minimum wage, dead-end job. At least till the next coin toss. She fingers the penny in her jeans pocket.

Gail picks at the rough edge of the table, sighs. “When’s your famous boyfriend back?”

“Michael’s back tomorrow.”

“So you’re not objecting to me calling him your boyfriend today?”

Sarah doesn’t answer.

“Lucky dude gets five days in Paris on an expense account. I’m working for the wrong law firm. Has he been there before?”

Never. Sarah shakes her head.

Gail tips her chair back, runs her fingers again through her hair. “I got a call from Rose last night.”

Sarah stops doing the dishes, turns around. The room gets smaller. Rose.

“It must have been only 11:00 in Winnipeg, but when the phone rang at midnight, I nearly jumped out of my skin. She wasn’t too bad. I mean, there’ve been times I couldn’t even understand what she was trying to say, but last night she was mostly coherent. She went on for a while about her job; she sounded really worried they won’t take her back. I get that – she was pretty erratic before David finally convinced her to take sick leave.”

The last time Sarah saw their big sister Rose, in Winnipeg, she was just beginning to show. Or at least to show to anyone who knew how willowy Rose usually was – the slight bow to her belly evident only to someone who knew how concave it normally was. When they were little, Sarah would cuddle against her, her head fitting neatly in the inverse pillow of her big sister’s stomach, the rise and fall of Rose’s breathing a lullaby.

“I called Mom this morning. She was making rhubarb preserves. I had to listen to a lot about the preserves before she’d say anything about Rose. When I finally got her to talk, she told me that David really wants Rose to get onto antidepressants. Now. Their GP is on board, says it’s urgent. Even Mom and Dad are pretty much convinced. But Rose is refusing to take anything, she says she doesn’t want to be drugged.”

Sarah’s finished the dishes and now there’s nothing for her to do. She sits back down at the table.

“I don’t know, Sarah, she just can’t seem to get over it.” Gail’s frowning, picking at the table again.

It. The baby.

Just because Gail doesn’t want kids doesn’t mean Rose shouldn’t.

And Rose did. She and David were always deciding things, planning, and they’d had this pregnancy all figured out. Rose would have three whole months paid maternity leave, thank you Unemployment Insurance. Pat, their mom, empty-nested and eager to jump back into her role as the perfect mother, was set to babysit three days a week when Rose did go back to work. It was all planned out.

They really wanted that baby.

“The GP says she has to go on antidepressants.” Gail’s voice has gone flat. “It’s clinical depression, he says, not just her feeling down.”

It’s the first Sarah’s heard of the expression.

Gail puts on her smart-big-sister-to-dumb-little-sister voice. “Clinical depression is the medical term for a depression that isn’t just a mood. There’s an actual chemical imbalance that impairs brain function. She’s sick. Physically. That’s why they want to put her on antidepressants.”

“Do you think she should go on medication?”

“I don’t know,” Gail says. “She might be getting better. She didn’t sound as bad as last time, I don’t think. David told Mom that Rose is sleeping a bit better. I don’t know… Maybe she should try a course of medication, just to help get her over this hump. But she’ll get over it. It was just a miscarriage. She can have more kids. The doctor told them it was insignificant in terms of her fertility.”

Just a miscarriage. Insignificant. Rose loved that baby already. It was almost full term. And then she had to carry it for weeks, weeks, waiting to give birth to a dead baby. How is it possible in the twentieth century that a woman has to carry this dead thing in her for weeks, and modern science can’t just take it away, let her bury it, let her bury what she hoped for, what she already loved? “She loved that baby, Gail.”

Sarah sees the look on Gail’s face, knows she’s picked the wrong word, knows what’s coming.

“Just what exactly are you saying?” Gail’s starting to flush. “Are you saying a foetus is a person? You, of all people?”

Is Gail going to pick a fight? Is she going to start up on a woman’s right to choose now? When they’re talking about Rose? “No. But I’m saying she loved that baby before it was born. It almost was born.”

“It wasn’t a baby, Sarah! You can’t call it a baby when it’s still in utero!”

There’s no point trying to talk this out with Gail, whose face has gone a deep dusky rose, her narrow chest rising hard with each breath.

“For fuck sake, Sarah, where would you be if you hadn’t had a safe abortion when you were a teenager? What the hell is wrong with you?”

She should know better than to try talking to her impossible sister. Sarah gets up from the table, starts wiping down Gail’s counter, swabbing the rings under the detergent bottle, the crumbs under the toaster. She has to do something. She has to be doing something. She can feel Gail fuming behind her, but she won’t turn around, she won’t look back.

The abortion’s become this cautionary tale Sarah tells herself, told her boyfriend Michael when they met a year and a half ago, two sentences: when I was sixteen and having sex for the first time I got pregnant. I had a safe abortion at the Morgentaler Clinic in Montreal. On the Spadina streetcar home from Gail’s, she wonders what would have happened if the story had been different, if she hadn’t gotten the abortion.

Sarah watches a kid at the back of the streetcar playing air guitar with a buddy. Her highschool boyfriend, Nick, played lead guitar in a band he’d put together. She loved to watch his mouth while he played, he had to hold his mouth just so, really hard and tight, as if he were holding the music back, keeping it inside. Their best song, “Gloria,” the one they practised over and over, only had three chords. The chorus spelled out the letters – gee-el-oh-are-I-ay – so that they were almost words, almost meant something. Gloria made the boy feel good, all right, but what the hell did she feel? Gail no doubt would have a lot to say about that omission, about the repression of female sexuality.

At sixteen Sarah knew almost nothing about sex, even the basic mechanics were fuzzy. No real sex-ed in schools in those days. And Pat, her mom, for all her being the perfect cookies-in-the-oven, kitchen-floor-gleaming mom, was too embarrassed to ever give Sarah the birds-and-bees talk. She was too shy to ask Rose, and Gail didn’t seem interested in boys. So it was all hit or miss. Sarah tried looking sex up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the basement, but all she managed to find were a lot of colour diagrams of internal organs.

Nick waged a steady campaign for going all the way. He knew Sarah didn’t mean to be a cockteaser, but she was leading him on. And he told her about blue balls, how if they just kept fooling around but she didn’t let him have sex, this mysterious awful painful thing would happen to him. She’d had no idea boys were so fragile – they were supposed to be the tough ones. Sarah didn’t like the pressure. And she really didn’t want to get pregnant. So part of her thought, no way. Go find yourself a girl who’s easy, Nick.

But a bigger part wanted to go along.

And it wasn’t because of Nick’s dumb arguments. It was because before Nick, and his hands, and his mouth, there were times she felt like one of those cheap chocolate Easter eggs, so hollow with loneliness she could break. So finally one day, on the sofa in the rec room, they did it. After, she asked Nick if he shouldn’t use a safe next time, he could get a safe, couldn’t he? At a drugstore? He said wearing a condom was like washing your feet with your socks on: it wouldn’t be any fun for him. So a few days later Sarah went on her own to the Mount Carmel Clinic to get condoms. Mount Carmel. It sounded like a candy bar. The Clinic was great. Everybody knew you could get birth-control information and pregnancy tests and condoms there, and they wouldn’t tell anyone. But she never did work up the nerve to ask Nick to use them. They used the rhythm method, because what were the odds, Nick said.

Good, as it happened. They must have been having sex for almost a month and the box of condoms still hadn’t been opened. And she was late.

She kept thinking she couldn’t be pregnant so soon, they’d only had sex five, maybe six times. Then another day and another went by with no period. How was she going to finish school if she was knocked up? What was she supposed to do with a baby? Sarah remembers the crazy little conversations, bargains she started making in her head: she’d never do it with anyone ever again as long as she got away with it just this once. She’d run away from home, live on the streets, hide in someone’s barn. Not tell anyone and give birth in a field, like those women in China, leave the baby on church steps, synagogue steps.

Nothing in her wanted this.

She told Nick she was almost ten days late. She could go back to the Clinic, he told her, she could get a test. And the Clinic could give her a referral for an abortion, if she was pregnant and decided she didn’t want it. Abortion was legal in New York. And there was the Morgentaler clinic in Montreal. Sarah knew she was too young, she couldn’t have a baby. She couldn’t tell her parents, she was too scared. But she could tell her big sister Rose. She’d tell Rose because Rose would know what to do, Rose would tell her what to do.

Which she did. Which was to get an abortion.

The truth is, for all that the story is boiled down now to two tidy sentences, Sarah has this ghost count in her head, how old her kid would be if she hadn’t had the abortion. Boy or girl, she doesn’t know, could they even tell the sex that early? But she didn’t ask.

Eight. The kid would be eight. Briefly her mind flits to a gawky kid, good at baseball, track and field, like her. Good at maths, like her.

She stops herself. The streetcar bumps along the tracks heading north up Spadina. Sarah hauls on the window to open it, she needs the breeze on her face.

Where would she be if she hadn’t had access to a safe abortion, what would she be? She sure wouldn’t be her sister Gail, who even as a teenager was way too smart to get knocked up. Her sister the crackerjack newly minted lawyer, the success. No. And not Rose either, the perfect sister, who waited until everything was in place – the devoted husband, the stable job – before she got pregnant with the kid she decided to have, wanted to have.

If Sarah hadn’t had the abortion, she’d be what she is now, a loser scraping by on minimum wage. And on top of that, she’d be a single mom in some basement dive in Winnipeg.

And how would she feel about the son or daughter who’d kept her from graduating high school?

She can’t imagine not loving a kid.

Gift

Paris. Michael is back from Paris, his first time in Paris. City of light. City of romance. In fact, Sarah beat him to Paris. She was there once, for four days. Her boyfriend-of-the-month, Reuben, asked her to come back-packing through Europe on $10 a day with a side trip to Israel. The penny said yes. Four days in Paris. She remembers how dirty it was, how glorious. The mystery of bidets in the bathroom of the grungy little hotel, frîtes on the street in the Latin Quarter. With French mustard. Reuben got some sort of crotch rot from the dirty sheets, a fungus. The whole place made him nervous. But she loved it. Maybe partly because her French was pretty good even then. And it’s better now. She figures she hasn’t had much in the way of a vacation since she was twenty and backpacking. Five years.

She’s over at Michael’s apartment, the sweet two-storey, two-bedroom on Howland he keeps asking her to move into. He’s back from Paris and here’s his trophy, a gift. The package is wrapped in pale blue tissue paper, a seal of a deeper blue closing the folds. Un p’tit paquet cadeau. His grin wide. The salesclerks always offer to gift-wrap stuff. She starts nibbling at the seal with her fingernails. Her nails are always trimmed close for work or she can’t keep them clean.

Michael takes the package, opens it for her: a skirt in polished cotton a deep blue, almost indigo, with little slashes of black patterning it. Cotton, but such a fine weave that it feels like silk. The salesclerk thought it would fit: he told the clerk Sarah was trés petite. He holds it against Sarah’s waist, testing for size.

She likes it. Of course she does. But Michael probably paid more for the skirt than she’s spent on clothes in a whole year. In the top drawer of the dresser in her rooming-house room, Sarah keeps a spiral-bound notebook to record expenses: newspaper 50¢; subway tokens $8; laundry $2.75; lunch 95¢. Beside it a column of running totals, which she does in her head. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. She can pay all her bills but it’s tight, she needs to keep track. And she always pays her share. She doesn’t want to owe him anything.

He pulls her up for a kiss. The skirt was expensive, yes, he tells her. Shockingly, obscenely expensive.

She likes Michael’s mouth. A taste of peppermint, a taste of salt. The kiss continues and for moments they both forget about the gift, then she draws away, steps back, looks at it again.

He slides his fingers inside the waistband of her jeans. He wants her to try it on. She unzips the jeans, steps into the skirt. Tugs at the fabric belt, ties a bow at the front. Trés petite. He steers her to the narrow full-length mirror hung on the closet door.

She’s not sure about the woman in the mirror. She looks at her hands – clean, but rough-looking, a bit chewed at the knuckles with nicks and scratches from the job. She looks up again, this slight, graceful woman; the lines of the skirt making her a bit fuller, giving some amplitude to the small self she’s used to, the one that doesn’t take up too much room.

His hands slip back into the waistband of the skirt. “I missed you.” He takes her to sit on the bed, puts his mouth against her neck. “Stay the night this time. The whole night. I don’t want you to go home.” Now the beautiful skirt is pooled on the hardwood floor. All right. All right. She’ll relent this time, stay through to morning, whatever it costs.

The sisters used to play a game: if you were a dog, what kind of dog would you be? Sarah would be a Jack Russell, Gail and Rose agreed instantly. Sarah argued for a border collie because she liked how smart they were, but the other two wouldn’t have it, they knew she was the muscle and spunk of a Jack Russell. And that meant Gail had to be a Jack Russell too. Peas in a pod. People often thought they were twins, despite the twenty months between them. The big debate was about Rose. If she were a redhead, Rose Red, she’d be an Irish setter, but she wasn’t a redhead, all three of them were brunettes. The two younger sisters thought Afghan, they wanted lean and elegant and perfect, and wasn’t that Rose, even before her growth spurt, before she rose above them, 5'7" at the least? She wasn’t tough in the same way as them, Rose, not interested in softball or track. What she did love was dance, and her long limbs lent themselves easily to it. Back then, Rose was never the centre of a clique but never at the edges either. Not an anxious joiner like Gail, always jockeying for status, and not a loner like Sarah. It was easy for Rose, she was easy in the world, comfortable in her skin. That’s how it seemed to Sarah.

Sarah never minded not having much in the way of friends, because Rose and Gail were pretty much all she needed. She remembers the three of them squeezed into the double bed Rose reigned over, the oldest sister getting her own room. The three of them head to toe, toe to head, cuddling each other’s feet, which they pretended were wriggling babies. Making sister sandwiches, fighting about who got to be the meat. Squeezed tight against each other, squealing, squished and happy. Rose always supremely in the lead, framing the stories, setting the rules of the games. Winter Sundays, the three of them making grilled cheese sandwiches under the broiler, slices cut from the huge blocks of Bothwell cheddar their father brought home from the factory. Rose in charge, supervising the timing so the cheese was just the perfect melted gold with patches of light brown. The three of them in the long summer evenings of Winnipeg, playing Kick the Can and Hide & Seek in the backyards and alleys, in the rectangles of their neighbourhood. And always being found.

They were all always found.

Now Sarah thinks maybe it’s Gail who’s the border collie. She’s certainly smart enough. But is it Gail or is it Sarah who has that need to herd, keep things together, at least where it comes to the sisters? Sarah, the youngest, who can never let the thread go too far or too loose, or she’ll feel herself slip. The thread stretching so far now. Maybe that’s what she is, a bulldog. Dog with a bone. Won’t ever let anything go.

Not her sister. She is not going to lose Rose. Not if she has to breathe for her; not if she has to make her want to live.

She is never going to lose Rose because without Rose she doesn’t know who she is.

Michael’s been back from Paris three days now, but they’re still hungry for each other. So much so that he’s managed to persuade her to stay the night twice in a row. She knows it drives him nuts when she leaves, as she usually does, in the middle of the night. Though he sleeps like the dead, never stirs when she slips out of bed to walk the 15 minutes from his place to hers, he hates waking up without her. She can’t explain why she doesn’t like to stay, not even to herself. Just knows she’ll wake up at 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 afraid of that old terror, afraid of being afraid. Just like she used to when she had one of her nightmares, the ones that started when she was just a kid. She’ll wake and start to feel herself freezing over, feel it coming over her, and she’ll have to get up, get dressed, do something, to keep herself from the dream. Save herself. She’ll have to prove to herself that she can get up, get dressed, leave the apartment and walk down the street to her own room. She’ll walk under the shadows of trees through the dark streets that belong to her, not afraid, fall into her bed and sleep till morning.

She can’t talk to Michael about this. Doesn’t talk much at all, but tonight, after two nights where she made herself stay with him, where she didn’t in fact wake up but slept beside him through the night, she finds herself telling him about the sisters and their games, their dog selves. “You’re not a Jack Russell,” he says, running a finger along the definition of her ribs, her tight little stomach, following the curve of a bicep. “You’re a whippet. Purebred.”

“Purebred Jewish,” she tells him.

“Purebred Jewess.”

“Don’t, Michael…”

“What?”

“I hate that word.”

“Why?”

“Because it feels full of hate.”

He sits up in bed. “Oh for god’s sake, Sarah. What now? Why is Jew okay but not Jewess?”

Jew. The word swells to fill her mouth, the room. Jew isn’t okay. She can’t even say Jew to herself without feeling the hate soak through that single syllable, without feeling the word, the hate, obliterate her. And she hates herself for letting that feeling go into her.

“Sarah? Fill me in here; cut me some slack.”

Of course he doesn’t get it. Michael’s a blank slate when it comes to these gradations of hatred, self- and otherwise. He grew up in some WASP hick town in British Columbia and until he got to university, he’d never even met anyone who was Jewish. She’s no good with this kind of stuff. Gail’s the one who could explain how the colonized mind internalizes oppressive negative social stereotypes. But she’s not Gail.

“Sarah? Please don’t go into your silent routine again.”

“I… it’s… Look.” She takes a breath. “Michael. I have trouble even with Jew.” He can’t stop himself from wincing. “Yeah, it’s wrong. But I always hear the slur. Hear all this weight behind the word: history, the war. I can’t separate it out. And then that ess: Jewess, Negress. It always seems to mean less. And I feel a smirk there. Like the marker for sex is a marker of sexiness.” She rubs the heel of her hand against her forehead.

“Okay. I get it.”

“Good,” she says. Does he get it? She may have made a dent or he may just be more confused. No point belabouring it. “So, if I’m a whippet, what are you? A golden retriever?” She touches his fine blond curls, trimmed short for the office. He relaxes back against the pillow, smiles.

“I’m a mutt,” he says. English, Scottish, Irish, an Icelandic great-grandmother, he’s reeled out the Scott family tree for her. His family’s butchers, bakers and candlestick makers a match for her Old Country tinkers and tailors. “Purebred nothing. Good breeding stock.” Then he curls himself around Sarah and in what seems like seconds, he’s asleep.

History

The dreams got worse. She remembers the first time; she was little, she must have been four or five. Someone important was visiting from Chicago. Her mother had fussed for days, baking, cooking, tidying the already tidy house. Rose had to sleep on the folding cot between the twin beds in Sarah and Gail’s bedroom so the visitor could have Rose’s big bed. Sarah remembers playing with the brass catches on the suitcase she found on Rose’s bed – they snapped open and shut in such a satisfying way – until her mother told her to stop for goodness’ sake. Sarah watched from the doorway as the visitor and her father sat on the living room sofa and talked and talked about something, a river of names, Chaya, Moishe, Manya, Lev, Basya, Reva, Avramele. A beautiful lady, her smooth blonde hair carefully framing her face, who would slip into and out of Yiddish, not just names but shreds of stories that unspooled, soaked into the fabric of the room. Shah, Sarah’s father would say softly, his hand on the visitor’s arm, when the English words rose loud, di kinder. The children shouldn’t hear. Her father, rigid and tender; the visitor’s hands pulling at the buttons on the dusty-gold wool sofa till one came off. She held it in her palm, silent, until Sarah’s mother came into the room to tell the woman it was all right, it could be sewn right back on. Everything could be fixed.

Who were they, Sarah asked, who were all these people with the funny names? The visitor’s hands frozen in her lap. Your family, she said. Aunts and uncles, cousins. My brothers and sister, she said, all lost, all gone. Gone where, Sarah asked. Gone. Dead. Murdered. Shah, her father said, shah, not now.

Sarah woke that night, both sisters breathing beside her, woke from a dream of someone, something on the other side of the door of the house on Rupertsland, her house, but not her house. Someone at the door of her room that was not her room. She didn’t know what house, what room, where she was, someplace far away. Someone or thing at the door coming to take them all. She was awake but wasn’t awake. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t move: something at the door, something pressing on her chest so that she couldn’t breathe. Something in the room with her that she almost saw, and it wanted to hurt her. To hurt her sisters, breathing beside her. And she couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything, not to save herself, not to save them.

At last the feeling receded and when she was able to gasp, to make a sound, Rose rolled over sleepily in the cot beside her, patted her hand. It’s all right, it’s all right. Go back to sleep.

That was the first one. The dreams, these waking nightmares, went on, intermittent but repeated, dreams that held her paralyzed, that she would wake from and not be awake. It must have been years before Sarah learned the woman from Chicago, Sosha, was a relative, a second or third cousin of Abe’s. That visit was the only time Sarah remembers hearing her family speak directly about the Holocaust, as if there were some sort of holiness around it that wasn’t supposed to be put in words. No words beyond the implied, insistent never again, never forget. But there were also the second-hand stories from friends at Hebrew school whose parents, like Sosha, weren’t lucky, weren’t born here like Sarah’s parents: Dad said he hid in a barn. For the whole war? I don’t know. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Months, I think. Maybe years. Or they killed my mother’s cousin, he was only a baby. Who killed him? Where? The Nazis, of course. I think it was in Poland. Things that happened outside of history, outside of time and place and cause and effect, that happened in the alternate universe of the Holocaust.

There were stories too from Sarah’s teachers at Talmud Torah School, many of them survivors. And then, in grade five, from the darkened claustrophobia of the school auditorium, the sour sombre voice of the narrator of the documentary, the film she watched but didn’t allow herself to remember, though she couldn’t let go of the wavering images, the naked dead more bones than flesh, strewn like pick-up sticks. The ungainly, abject bodies of middle-aged women, also naked, the broad landscapes of their backs, the soft arcs of the folds of belly, holding on to each other, standing at the edge of a pit. Alive at the moment the photo was taken, but not for long. The lampshade made of human skin, its perverse translucence. Images that were not real, except that they were real. Images of real people and any one of them could have been related to her, any one of them could have been her, if she’d been alive back then, if she’d been there, in that place outside of place, time outside of time.

By the time she started university, the dreams were sparse, almost forgotten. Spring of her second year at the University of Manitoba, she checked the catalogue for the September course offerings. The course description for a Twentieth Century History class tacked to the bulletin board outside the office read: Holocaust History. Destruction of the Jews of Europe. Topics include anti-Semitism, the rise of Nazism, treatment of Jews within Germany between 1933 and 1939, plans for the ‘final solution’ and their execution, life and death within the concentration camps. Lengthy readings, some of them emotionally taxing. Not recommended for freshmen.

The destruction of the Jews of Europe, this was a story that she wanted to know, one that belonged to her. She wanted to have a way of framing herself, of claiming more than the four words: never forget, never again. More than faded waking nightmares. If she had facts, comprehension, maybe there would be something she could do with them.

The first day of class, September. Among the twenty or so students, a woman who looked to be somewhere in her fifties, sitting at the back of the class. She was a bit heavy, stocky more than fat, and her strong, round face was carefully made up, framed in tidy blonde curls. She was sitting very straight, in a tailored dove-grey pantsuit, her hands quiet in her lap.

The instructor, Prof. Koenig, was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered. His hair was blond, crew-cut, his posture almost military, though there was something immediately gentle about him as well. A hint of an accent but his English was very clear as he welcomed the students to class, congratulated them on their courage for enrolling. Uneasy glances among the students at this, half-stifled laughter. He went on to explain that this was an experimental course, that Judaic Studies in conjunction with the History Department had helped sponsor him to teach it on a trial basis.

“What is a Jew?” Prof. Koenig asked. “This is a question Jewish philosophers and thinkers have been asking themselves over the centuries on behalf of the Jewish people. The answers have been rich, nuanced, and varied. In the context of Nazi anti-Semitism, however, the question was asked to a different purpose. I believe a pertinent opening point for this course would be to examine how, in the early stages of the rise of Nazism, the answer to this question was formulated.”

Prof. Koenig put up a colour reproduction on the overhead projector. At first it looked like a diagram of molecules, something from Sarah’s grade 12 chemistry textbook: pairs of circles that linked to other circles. Some were open, some had red crosses, some were filled or partially filled with black or grey tones. The heading at the top in German, Die Nürnberger Gesetze, The Nuremberg Laws.

The Nuremberg Laws codified the Nazi’s anti-Semitic policies. The chart showed the pseudo-scientific method used to identify Jews. Prof. Koenig gently tapped the screen with a wooden pointer. A person who had four German grandparents was considered to be Deutschblütiger, of ‘German or kindred blood.’ A person who had three or four grandparents who were Jewish was considered to be a Jude, a Jew. In between were those categorized as Mischlinge, mongrels of ‘mixed blood.’

False science. False categories. What is a Jew?

Criteria were further established to distinguish more finely between Jews and Mischlinge: affiliation with a Jewish religious community, marriage to another Jew, whether one’s parents were married or one was born outside of wedlock, the dates of marriage and birth. These refinements were necessary to establish racial ‘purity.’

If you were a Jew, what kind of Jew would you be? This was what the chart wanted to establish. A true Jew, a full Jew, a half Jew of the first or the second degree? These were categories that subsumed every other thing you were. You were a Jew by blood, not belief; blood was what counted. Converting didn’t necessarily save you. Atheism didn’t save you. Jewish blood. Were you Jewish to your bones? Were you Jewish in your flesh? Under the Nuremberg laws, back in 1935, before the war had even begun, a Jew wasn’t a German citizen, a Jew couldn’t marry a non-Jew, a Jewish doctor couldn’t treat non-Jews, a Jewish lawyer couldn’t practise law. And soon, these gradations of identity would determine not just your civil rights, but whether you lived or died.

“I’d like to continue today’s lecture with an introduction to the final solution, Nazi double-speak for the annihilation of the global Jewish population. In the six years of the war,” Prof. Koenig said, “the Nazis in fact did a remarkably effective job of approaching their goal.” His voice was tight, dry. Prof. Koenig positioned a new chart on the overhead projector. As he placed it, his hand enlarged, Sarah could see the thick gold wedding ring he wore, the faint blond hair on his knuckles.

Historic Jewish Population

1935

16,728,000

1945

11,000,000

1950

11,297,000

1955

11,800,000

1960

12,079,000

1970

12,585,000

“We have all heard the figure, six million. But how do we interpret this loss? Let’s start with a statistical evaluation. The approximately six million killed through the programs of the final solution represented almost thirty-six percent of the global Jewish population at the time. How quickly the Nazis were achieving their objective, even though the large Jewish population in North America, which had for decades been a refuge for Jewish immigration, was not directly affected.