Girl Unwrapped (7 page)

“Listen to me,
Bubbele
, it was like this. A nasty little man at the consulate—an anti-Semite, you could see it in his eyes—tried to get in our way. ‘Wrong papers,’ he said. ‘Stateless.’ Of course we were stateless! Who wasn’t stateless? I stormed out of his office and slammed the door behind me. I threw myself at the feet of the consul himself. ‘Madam, you must not upset yourself,’ he said. A proper gentleman.”

The moral of the story? Never deal with underlings. Too much caution can kill you. And: Your father needs a fire lit under him.

But no, it was like this. Julius takes the opportunity while Lisa’s in the bathroom to explain what really happened.

“There were quotas, even after the war. The Canadians wanted immigrants with certain trades, like furriers, hat-makers, garment workers. The fact that your mother could sew wasn’t good enough because the men, the breadwinners, had to find jobs. A crowd grew unruly in the embassy corridor—not just Jews, regular Italians and DPs from all over. They didn’t understand the procedures, they didn’t know English. Some got hysterical. I put myself forward as an interpreter for the overwhelmed official and was able to calm the mob, and so I made a good impression. The official put me on the list.”

And the moral? Keep your head. Don’t act rashly. And: Your mother gets carried away.

Confusion buzzes in Toni’s head. Even the cuckoo seems overwhelmed. He peeps feebly, retreats slowly behind his door to the sound of groaning springs. What does it matter how they got to Canada? What matters is that the family is here now and not moving ever again, plain and simple. What matters is the adventures of a plucky little horse in old London town. While Black Beauty pulls an overloaded cart up a hill, Lisa ambushes Julius in the corridor.

“An investment in a house is money in the bank.”

“Ha! Money
for
the bank. The
bank
will own the house.”

He retreats into his study. She follows and pushes open the door he closed so firmly behind him. She is like a terrier with a bone. But he is made of unyielding material, like wood turned to stone through eons of sediment.

One evening, planting herself in front of the television screen and blocking out the announcer on the news, Lisa yells, “And, by the way, another thing, in case you haven’t noticed. My clock is ticking. I’m running out of time.”

“Time for what?” Toni asks, wrenching herself away from her book. Two horses have been talking about what it’s like to have a bit in your mouth, and Toni can feel the cold, cruel iron against her own tongue. Yet she is forced to lift her eyes from the page by the mystery in her mother’s words, the sound of a desperate plea.

Lisa glares at Julius, a look of smouldering resentment, while he regards her with a strange mixture of pity, apology, and pained embarrassment.

“Time for what?” Toni asks again. Neither of them answer.

A story in the
Montreal Star
changes everything. Her parents lean over the front page spread out on the kitchen table. Julius sits, Lisa stands by his side looking over his shoulder, her jaw clamped shut. There’s a deadly stillness in the room. No sound except the rustle of the paper and the dull ticking of the old, brown clock.

Still in her pyjamas, Toni watches their curved backs. She creeps forward and peeks at the paper. There is a picture of a balding man in a dark suit, with thick, dark-rimmed glasses like her father’s, standing with his head turned sideways and slightly raised as if someone is talking to him and he’s listening very carefully to each word. Behind him, a man with a peaked cap like a policeman’s sits on a chair looking bored. Above the photo, the headline reads: “Court’s Authority Challenged as Eichmann Trial Begins.” A smaller headline states: “Nation Aware Israeli State Also on Trial.”

“They should hang him from the nearest lamppost,” Lisa growls with animal fury. “They should hang him upside down and use his head for a football.”

“Hush. That would be wrong,” Julius says. He rakes his fingers across the furrows in his brow. “Eichmann must have a fair trial. Due process. The Israelis have to prove we are a civilized people. There’s enough controversy already about the abduction. The government says it wasn’t the Mossad that did it. Volunteers, they say. But everyone knows.”

“Right they were to hunt him down. He’d still be dancing in Argentina if they hadn’t.”

“The defence says the judges are biased and the court has no authority and Israel has no jurisdiction. Listen to this: ‘Since Israel did not exist at the time of the alleged offences, it has no jurisdiction to hear the case.’ They will have to make an iron-tight case, otherwise he’ll become a martyr.”

“That monster, a martyr? What are you saying, you of all people?
Mutti, Mutti
, listen to this madman, he defends Satan.”

“Hush, hush, don’t excite yourself. I’m just saying how the world might see it.”

“Who cares what the
farshtunkene
world thinks?”

“We can never ignore what the
farshtunkene
world thinks.”

He speaks quietly. He touches her arm, then takes her hand, balled into a fist at her side, and encloses it within his long fingers. He does all this without removing his eyes from the paper.

“Who’s Eichmann?” Toni asks.

Her father’s head shoots up. He whisks the newspaper off the table and refolds it into a small package. “Go, go, go. Get dressed. You’ll be late for school.”

When Toni returns, her mother has dismantled the burners on the stove and scrubs the tarnished rims with Dutch cleanser, as she always does when particularly upset. Her father eats scrambled eggs and toast, chewing with his usual care, but his eyes are unfocussed, and a bit of egg is caught in the bristles of his goatee. Lisa brings more toast to the table. She too seems lost in brooding silence. Neither of them takes notice of the rogue bit of egg in his beard.

There are no more fights. There are murmurs and long silences behind the wall that separates Toni’s bedroom from that of her parents. One Saturday morning, Toni finds her mother in her flannelette housecoat humming happily as she tends to her plants.

“Grow. I command you to grow. It is spring, and you must grow,” she warbles to the African violets lined up along the windowsill. Her flushed face appears softer and more rested than it has for a long time. More astonishing for Toni is to see her father emerge from the master bedroom still in his rumpled pyjamas. Usually he’s up and dressed before anyone else. The open V-neck shows the crinkled black hairs on the white skin of his chest. He seems a bit sheepish to have slept so long, but also, like her mother, unaccountably cheerful. When he’s been to the bathroom and put on his Saturday clothes—pressed pants, white shirt, grey wool cardigan—and is seated at the dinette, Lisa plants a kiss on his bald head. She brings the newspaper, but instead of handing it to him, as usual, she spreads it out in front of herself, open to the classifieds. Her finger runs down the columns of ads.

“‘Three-bedroom upper, bath, kitchen, sun porch. Parking available,’” she reads aloud. “A sun porch would be nice for my plants.”

“What’s going on?”

Toni looks from her mother to her father, sipping his coffee contentedly. Avoiding Toni’s eyes for a moment, her father clears his throat and tugs his goatee, while an embarrassed grin plays at the corners of his mouth.

“We have come to a compromise,” he says. “We’ll look for a duplex in Snowdon. The prices in Snowdon are still quite reasonable. Especially for a duplex.”

“What!”

“No harm in looking.” Her father lifts his palms in the air, the gesture half hopeful, half surrender.

Toni turns from her father to her mother.

“Snowdon is a good neighbourhood,” Lisa declares. “Not so good as Côte Saint-Luc or Saint Laurent, but still … Nice stores, synagogues, schools, a Jewish Y.”

“What about my friends?”

“High time you made new ones. Enough with those hooligans.”

“What about the Mountain?”

“The Mountain? The Mountain is not going anywhere. You’re never far from the Mountain in this city.”

“Papa,” she chokes. He waves his hands in front of his face.
Don’t
start, don’t spoil things.
He seems not the least bit perturbed that they are about to fall off the edge of the world by leaving the only home she has ever known.

On a blustery Sunday morning in mid-March, the three of them go duplex hunting in Snowdon, strolling long blocks lined with squat one- and two-storey buildings and mature trees. Julius and Lisa stop to admire large balconies, picture windows overlooking neat front yards with waist-high clipped hedges and fir trees standing like sentinels on either side of walkways. Although the lawns still lie brown and battered after the long winter, her parents seem not to notice. They absorb all with keen, possessive eyes.

“A bit of the Bauhaus there,” says Julius, pointing to a curved overhang above an entrance.

“No clutter on the balconies. Not like in the old neighbourhood,” says Lisa.

The old neighbourhood.
Already the ground has shifted under Toni’s feet. To her, this Snowdon is all cold, dreary sameness and strangeness; neat, boxy-looking houses, secretive blinds, sober, too-quiet streets without alleys, courtyards, vacant lots, or woods. Even the trees—big, bare-limbed maples plastered against an overcast sky—are tidy and tame. She lags behind while her parents surge ahead, eager to behold what wonders await them in the next house.

They come to a rectangular building divided into two mirror-image duplexes, with wide stone steps and blue-painted front doors, each door set with three rectangular panels of glass. Lisa checks her newspaper clipping. Yes, this is the one. They enter a tiny lobby, climb the stairs to the upper apartment. The owners haven’t moved yet. The housewife—a breathless, exuberant woman wearing black stretch pants, a white turtleneck, and hair that looks like it came out of a spray can—welcomes them with a toothy smile. She ignores Lisa’s attempt at a formal introduction and Julius’s graceful removal of his hat.

“Hey, come on in, make yourselves at home,” she sings, as if they are all old pals.

They stumble out of their boots and tramp in sock feet over a plastic runner and onto the powder blue wall-to-wall carpet of the living room. There’s a plush, white, plastic-covered couch and matching armchairs, a shiny-wood hi-fi set, and the biggest TV Toni has ever seen. The room is bright and airless and Lisa harrumphs as if to say,
These
Canadians, they never open their windows.
Toni is suddenly aware of how stiff and foreign her parents seem, how grating their accents compared to the woman’s easy drawl. She is aware of her father’s long unshod feet stepping carefully over the carpets and polished floors. At home he always wears closed-back slippers.

Lisa pokes her head into closets, sniffs, checking for unacceptable smells. In the bathroom, she wrinkles her nose at a whiff of sweetish air freshener but otherwise seems satisfied. She comments approvingly on the spaciousness of the rooms, the cute breakfast nook in the kitchen, the gleaming electric range:
You don’t have to strike a match
to light a gas burner
. The woman smiles back at Lisa in a pitying way to hear of something so backward as gas. When they reach the bedroom belonging to the household’s teenaged daughter, Toni hangs back because, though the girl is out at the moment, she could suddenly return and stare with frosty astonishment at this strange kid peering in at her things: the white plastic portable record player and stack of 45s, the pictures of the idols—Elvis Presley, Richard Chamberlain, Bobby Vinton—on the walls. Toni can’t get out of there fast enough. Back on the street a couple of boys around her age have started a game of pitch and catch. One of them glances over briefly, and the blankness in his eyes tells Toni what he sees—a nonentity. He doesn’t know Toni is a tomboy and wouldn’t care if he did. A tomboy doesn’t fit in Snowdon.

Next stop is the Jewish Y. It takes up a whole block on Westbury Avenue, bustles with activity and resonates with voices in the big, marble-tiled lobby. A large glass case displays an assortment of trophies, and all the important men who donated money to the Y gaze down from a gallery of portraits on the wall. There are also faded black-and-white photos of athletes. One shot shows a group of women wearing long skirts down to their ankles, cardigans, funny hats with ear flaps, and lipsticked smiles. The caption reads, “Ladies Hockey Team, 1925.”

“Baloney. How can they be hockey players?” Toni says loudly to her father, but he’s busy studying a display titled “Our Community Is 80 Years Young.” Lisa meanwhile has disappeared into an office to ask about programs. She returns clutching a bouquet of coloured, mimeographed sheets. So much going on: an Israeli coffee house, a Purim party, folk dancing lessons for boys and girls.

“I’m
not
taking folk dancing.”

Her mother and father look at each other over her head in a meaningful way. She bolts out of the building. She doesn’t know those two people who call after her. They don’t belong to her, nor she to them. She belongs nowhere and with no one anymore.

When the phone rings at supper time, Lisa leaps from her chair to answer it. She prances back into the kitchen, eyes aglow.

“They’ve agreed to our terms. We’ve got it.”

Without bothering to tell Toni what’s been agreed to, she pirouettes around the room, then hauls a startled Julius to his feet and makes him polka with her up and down the hall. The transformation of her parents into prancing ponies is almost as unsettling as the announcement that finally bursts from Lisa’s breathless lips:

“We move the first of May.”

Toni attacks the lukewarm potato dumpling on her plate. Have they forgotten the importance of eating food when it’s hot? Is everything to be upside down from now on? Someone has to maintain proper order. Toni tries. Over the next weeks, while her parents are busy, busy, working overtime to earn some extra dollars, Toni comes home promptly after school to bring the empty apartment back to life. She waters the plants, straightens cushions, puts casseroles in the oven, gives the stopped cuckoo clock a tap so that the pendulum resumes its back-and-forth journey and the kitchen is filled with the familiar tick-tock. Despite all her efforts, home becomes transformed into a place of chaos. Cardboard boxes from Steinberg’s crowd the hall and are gradually filled with newspaper-wrapped knick-knacks, dishes, towels, clothes. Cupboards stand open, exposing naked hooks and yellowed shelving paper. Blank rectangles of emptiness stare from walls denuded of pictures. A vast machinery of change is in motion. All protests are useless, ridiculous, like Wile E. Coyote churning his legs in mid-air above the vast canyon that he pretends not to see, because as soon as he does, he will drop like a stone.