Harrowing (17 page)

She broke one of the loaves in half and handed a piece to Dov.

“Unless you change, Dov Adler, this will be the last thing I ever make for you.”

She got to her feet and picked up a shabby suitcase concealed underneath the table.

“Good-bye, Dov.”

She approached the front door. Wild-eyed, my father looked around himself, saw my mother as if beholding her for the first time in his life. As he’d often repeated to me, he explained that at that moment, she was the most beautiful person in the world to him. She appeared like an angel, with a halo of bright light about her golden head. He couldn’t lose her. So he leapt onto her, pinned her arms by her sides and knocked her down with a humungous kiss. Her suitcase plunked to the floor and she melted into his arms.

I like to believe that I was conceived that night. I wouldn’t know if that was exactly when it happened, but approximately nine months later I, Annasuya Rose Biederman Adler – thus named in honour of my father’s rollicking, Flower Power days – arrived in the world, full of protests and screams on a dreary autumn afternoon, already hating my life and all the suffering that was still to follow. Shrieking with rage and fury as if somehow I had already divined that what awaited me was going to be anything but fun and games.

Now I pulled myself into a tight ball next to Fayge Biederman Adler’s grave and just rocked myself for a while.

“You don’t know how hard it’s been, Mama,” I repeated, swaying back and forth in front of the tombstone. “Raising Romeo all by myself. Trying to hold a job down and juggle work and daycare and all those expenses as well. The times we didn’t have anything to eat, and I had to choose between buying formula for Romeo or lunch for
me.
The times daycare was closed, and I had to tote Romeo along to work with me and risk losing my job. And then later, when Romeo was older, sometimes I had to leave him all alone at home while I went to work, because I didn’t have enough money to pay a babysitter. I’d spend the whole day on tenterhooks, biting my nails, terrified something would happen to Romeo, or the police would find out and take Romeo away from me.”

I glanced down at my nails. They were still bitten and dog-eared in spite of the perpetually chipping lacquer.

“Yes, I know it was hard for you. Starting a new life from scratch, without any family to help you out. But at least you had Daddy. And Daddy had a job. At least you could stay at home and devote all your time to
me.
You never had to leave me alone so you could put food on the table, and worry the whole day long that something could happen to me. And I didn’t have any family to help me out either. You know Daddy left me, don’t you? You know he just abandoned me and flew away to Australia and forgot all about me. Just left me alone with a baby. Without a partner. Just like that.

“I love him but, fuck it, Mama. He left me at the time when I needed him the most.”

I waited to hear a sound, a sighing on the wind, the fluttering of birds or the gossamer trail of butterfly wings. Something, anything. Any sign that could indicate to me that my mother had heard me, that she was near.

But there was nothing.

“You said you’d watch over me always, Mama,” I whispered, and reached out to stroke the cold, hard stone.

I remembered that time, several years ago now, when, driven mad by grief and the shock of losing my mother so unexpectedly, I’d crawled out of my habitual shell of scepticism, reached out and contacted a famous medium. I’d heard that he had come to town all the way from California and was offering a limited number of sessions. There were only a handful of places available with Sergei Gozzoli, and I’d dashed him a desperate email. Thousands had clamoured for that treasured hour with him but somehow, as if moved by a miracle, my email was one of the chosen few.

I was certain it was the result of my mother’s loving, capable hands, pulling invisible strings behind the veil and moving heaven and earth so I could speak with her one last time. Either that, or my guardian angels were on my side for once.

Damian, my partner at that time, glowered over me, hostile and suspicious, as I ostensibly prepared for work that morning and bundled one-year-old Romeo into his stroller for his trip to the daycare.

“Why are you bringing the stroller?” Damian growled. “The daycare’s just down the street. You can’t carry him that short distance?”

I shook my head, and he grabbed my arm fiercely in an iron grip.

“Are you that flaccid?” he spat out, squeezing my arm without mercy. “Don’t got no muscles in there or what? You telling me you’re a damn flat bloody sissy?”

I pulled away from him without answering and busied myself with preparing Romeo’s things. Damian’s resounding slap across my cheek stunned me out of my reverie.

“Answer when I speak to you, damn it!” he screamed. “Dunno what the hell I’m doing with such a lazy fat cow like you, woman.”

I smacked my purse over the handles of the pushchair, letting it dangle in any old way, and dragged Romeo out the door as fast as his baby legs would carry him.

“It’s my stroller. I can take it whenever I want,” I hissed, defiant.

Damian made a beeline for the door as I slammed it into his face. Without waiting to see what he would do next, I dashed down the stairs huffing with pushchair and toddler in tow, hailing towards the entryway as if fire goaded at my heels, panting so hard I could scarcely gulp the air down fast enough as I ran. I only dared to stop once we were out on the sidewalk.

At that time, we were living with Damian in his apartment in the west end on Bloor Street, in one of those typical brick affairs that housed a store on the ground floor and a series of residences above it, just around the corner from Dundas West station. With relief, I hurried Romeo through the swinging glass doors of the station, past the tacky adjoining McDonald’s with its omnipresent beggars, out of sight of Damian’s possible prying eyes.

Normally I left Romeo at daycare in our neighbourhood before going to work and stopped by to pick him up during my lunch break. Then back to daycare again while I finished my afternoon shift. But today I decided to bring Romeo with me, lest I arrived too late at the daycare to pick him up, since I didn’t know how long the session with Sergei Gozzoli would last. Of course Damian knew nothing about my plans. I could just imagine his disdainful face, lips curled up in a sneer of contempt, if he’d known what I was up to.

“A medium?” he would have vociferated with a snarl in his customary fashion. “You’re gonna spend your hard-earned bucks on
that
sorta hocus-pocus? You know ghosts don’t exist. They’re nothing but an old wives’ tale to scare the shit outta li’l kids. You know that after we die we just go out like a candle flame, don’t you? We’re just extinguished forever. K.O. Caput. Fizz. Don’t tell me you actually believe in that fucking God stuff, do you? God don’t exist, and you know it. If he did I’d be richer’n a lawyer and we’d all be living in a palace. Not in this fucking hole in the wall with me slaving my bloody hands off all night in a factory.”

Well, but that was only
Damian’s
opinion. I
knew
God existed. Beyond the shadow of a doubt. Otherwise, how could you explain that my grandparents had survived to walk out of a land worse than hell on their own two feet?

Once downtown, with Romeo now cosily cuddled in his pram, I struggled to drag the heavy contraption out the door and onto the sidewalk. That row with Damian was making me late for my appointment, and I couldn’t afford to waste a single precious minute of my allotted time with the famed medium.

Before stepping from the station, I pulled out my clunky, fold-up mobile – the latest rage back in the day – and dialled the phone number of the office where I was temping. I stammered out some mumbled excuse about how Romeo was sick with flu so I couldn’t work that day, sighing with relief when my boss accepted my convenient lie with nothing more than a casual “and take care of that adorable cutie pie for me, will you”.

I pocketed the mobile and headed for the door, casting desperate glances at my watch. The wind buffeted my face like a slap as I stepped outside. Like the slap Damian had dealt me so viciously earlier that morning. Unconsciously, I brought my hand up and touched my cheek where I could still feel the sting of Damian’s palm against bruised, tender skin.

I’d barely taken three steps, shoving the pram before me in a frazzled rush, before the heavens opened up into one of those massive, late-autumn deluges so characteristic of this time of the year. I paused only long enough to slip the plastic cover around Romeo, snuggling it tight around the stiff metal casing of the stroller before continuing onwards.

Romeo gurgled contentedly underneath his blanket, then clapped his hands with delight as he surveyed the oppressive, leaden sky. Lulled by the monotonous drumming of raindrops on plastic, he fell backwards cushily into his cushions and was soon completely out of it.

I didn’t have time to stop and pushed ahead doggedly with my heart pounding like a fist in my throat, heedless of the downpour, shoulders hunched and head bowed in stoic anonymity on the deserted sidewalk as the rain stung my eyes and dripped from my hair, a mournful, melancholy day for one of the saddest moments of my life.

The light, between-seasons jacket I was wearing did hardly a thing to protect me from the storm and by the time we reached the hotel where Sergei Gozzoli was staying, I was soaked through to the skin.

Both the pushchair and I were such a pathetic mess I was certain the cheery receptionist would shoo us out. But instead, as soon as I pronounced the medium’s name, he smiled at me and waved us in with an expression of such pitying sympathy, that I could literally read his thoughts as clearly as if they were stamped all over his forehead in bold-face:
Poor thing, there goes another of those hapless, gullible oafs who’ve lost someone close to them. She looks too young to have lost anyone. I wonder who she wants to speak to.

Sergei Gozzoli was waiting for us in the doorway of his room, apparently alerted by the receptionist. He ushered us in, his elbows sticking out gawkily, and indicated a shaded corner for me to park the pushchair.

“What do I have to do so he won’t wake up? Should I speak softly? Does he like stuffed toys?” he mumbled, shifting from foot to foot. I could tell he was trying to be helpful but didn’t have the faintest idea how to act around a baby. He waved his hands self-consciously in the air. “He doesn’t scream a lot, does he? Is he going to scream now? Maybe you should stick a pacifier into his mouth?”

I merely nodded and glanced at Romeo’s sleeping figure, thinking the medium clearly had no idea and thanking my lucky stars that Romeo was such a tranquil tot who never stirred up a ruckus even when wide awake. Sergei turned his back towards me, mumbling to himself, and proceeded to ignore me and avoid my gaze.

I peeled off my streaming jacket and cast about for someplace to hang it, but since Sergei limited himself to plonking himself onto his bed without another word, his gaze off somewhere in the hinterland, I ended up draping it over a shabby wooden chair.

“Sorry to leave puddles all over your room,” I murmured in a monotone, bristling at this senseless small talk but feeling compelled to continue on with it anyways, to fill the awkward silence. I got the distinct feeling I was merely talking to myself.

Sergei suddenly seemed to come down from heaven and notice that I was there. He shrugged.

“Ah, um, yes, but we’re in a hotel, right? They’ve got cleaners, right?” He glanced around as if in a bit of a daze. “Doesn’t bother me. It’s not
your
fault. Besides which, I don’t have to clean up here,” he added. “One of the perks of staying in a hotel.”

He turned his back abruptly to me again and began to paw through a dark blue nylon satchel on his bed. I studied him surreptitiously. He was tall and angular, bony as a broom, with his face covered by a grizzly, copper-tinted beard. A worn and faded sweater, about two sizes too baggy for him, hung from his knobby frame. He didn’t invite me to sit down or issue any instructions and, at a loss for anything better to do, I crumpled into another wooden chair as shabby as the first.

I pulled a recording device from my purse and placed it on the table.

“You don’t mind if I record our session, do you?”

Sergei shrugged again.

“Fine by me,” he replied succinctly, as curt as ever, then turned back to his nylon bag.

I wondered how he’d ever managed to make it as such a renowned professional.

I clasped my hands on the table in front of me, still dripping water into puddles underneath my chair in the sepulchral silence, and waited.

Pale light gleamed in through the cheerless window smeared dirty grey. Sheets of rain washed mournfully over the panes, which looked out onto someplace dank and dismal, with a dreary, hypnotic drizzling.

I just sat there. I didn’t know what to do, because Sergei continued to ignore me. I fidgeted nervously, clasping and unclasping my hands on the table. So jittery I didn’t even realize I was soaking wet and frozen until I started shivering convulsively, involuntarily, as much from my nerves as from the cold. The damp air, tinged with ice, penetrated through my drenched velvet sweater and chilled me to the bone. I felt as if someone were clenching gelid fists in my stomach.

At last, Sergei snitched a sketchbook and a strip of charcoal from his bag and turned towards me, his expression transfixed, staring wildly into some point in space as if observing invisible Martians. I couldn’t help following his gaze and glancing at the wall above my head.

Clunkily, he lowered himself back onto the edge of his bed and began to pass his arm over the sketchbook with wide sweeping motions.

“I like to doodle while I work,” he explained in a barely audible whisper, his eyes darting about from side to side, furtively. “It helps me to concentrate and focus.”

He looked up at me and smiled, unexpectedly. The smile softened his angular features, made him more human. I realized he was probably just shy, not anti-social.

“I’m-I’m afraid I’m not much of a people person,” he stammered out, then coughed awkwardly. “It might sound weird but... it’s almost easier for me to talk with people on the other side than to talk with living human beings. People on the other side don’t rant or rage or scream at me.”

He let out a silly giggle. Then he adopted a more serious expression.