Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (21 page)

“This is Daniel Segal,” she announced and fell silent.

“Mrs. Simon, nice to meet you,” Daniel boomed with his habitual self-confidence, moving forward with an outstretched hand. There was a small but painful silence before Rachel corrected him.

“It’s Rachel Plot.” She rallied and tried something friendlier: “You must call me Rachel. Everyone does. That’s what Sarah calls me.” It was true, as Sarah’s stay with the Plots had lengthened, “Mr. and Mrs. Plot” seemed increasingly odd while “Mother” and “Father” had never been possible, so she called Sam and Rachel just that.

“Nice to meet you,” Daniel repeated, while Sarah still said nothing.

“Sarah tells me you are going to be a doctor,” Rachel continued. “Your parents must be very proud.”

By the time he and Sarah reached the door to leave, Daniel had already pieced things together. Certainly, Sarah had never said, “Pick me up at my parents’ place,” nor “My parents would love to meet you,” but had, he now recalled, talked vaguely of “the house.” Her slightly formal, even foreign, way of speaking, her quietness, her resolution, Daniel now thought he understood them.

He said nothing that night, nor on their second date. It was on their third, on a warm evening towards the end of that summer, that he quietly asked, “How long have you lived with the Plots?” They were dining in a Yonge Street restaurant, which he had chosen because he couldn’t picture Sarah eating in some kosher deli at College and Spadina, but where he was spending two weeks’ allowance on a meal they both merely picked at. The weather was muggy, dampening the appetite; she was nervous; he had already eaten at home because he did not want to confess his stupid plan to his mother.

Sarah pushed a boiled potato to one side of her plate, and replied in an unemotional voice, “Since I was about twelve.”

“And before that?” Daniel was cautious, but felt that after his mistake at the Plots’ and this expensive dinner he had some rights to the knowledge. “In Europe,” he prompted.

Sarah avoided telling people her life history. Cheerful questioners tended to be embarrassed when she explained her loss and fell silent or, worse yet, made a fuss over her the way you might pet a married woman who has just revealed that she is pregnant or a bright student who announces she has won a big scholarship, a kind of attention that in turn deeply embarrassed Sarah. Her friends, and there were few who considered themselves close ones, accepted the long frontier
Sarah seemed to extend before herself and knew that their friendship did not include a passport with which to cross it. Of course, she had told the story sometimes. Other students, their parents, colleagues at the library, people would ask, “Where do you come from?” “Who is your family?” And Sarah had learned how to explain her antecedents as neutrally as possible. It was that quiet, unembellished version she now delivered.

“I grew up in Paris. My father was a lawyer there. When the Germans invaded France, my parents sent me here. I am not related to the Plots, they just gave me a place to live.”

Sarah dreaded the question that usually followed this recital. In the two years since her trip to Paris, the shame of admitting the truth seemed not significantly less than the shame she had used to feel when she could say only, “I don’t know.” Once, in her second year shortly before the trip to France, a particularly dense girl from Lisa’s history class had pushed further, exploding in comic outrage, “How can you not know?” and only ceded the point when Lisa squelched her with a fierce look.

But Daniel knew better than to ask these questions. As Sarah finished her brief tale, he reached a hand across the table and covered hers, saying, “We will try to find better things to speak of.”

Sarah never liked it when people took the liberty of touching her and withdrew her hand from underneath his.

Even in the best of times, Sarah hated September. It was a month of lost hope, of sorrowful realism, of back-to-school, knee socks, and notebooks. It was the time when the summer light, after the long hazy afternoons of August, achieved
such a clarity and intensity you knew this had to be its last days. It seemed that things could happen in the summertime, that life might change, that lightness might prevail, then September arrived, bringing with it an aching disappointment and mute sense of loss.

It had been the month, in 1942, when Sarah had been forced to recognize that her visit to Toronto was not some exotic summer holiday: she was not going home this year. Starting school that autumn, not long before the October of her twelfth birthday, had seemed so wrong to her, at best an unpleasant compromise demanded by the circumstances and at worst a betrayal of her parents. For eleven years now, it had proved impossible for her to fully enter into this other life as though it might be a natural one. Each September marked another year between her and her past, yet no change of feeling, no progress in her life. The gap quietly appalled her: to cross it was to abandon her parents; to stay on this side was to forgo the adult cares and pleasures that must of necessity fill the future if she was to have any future at all.

This particular September was the month she had to recognize that it was more than three weeks since Daniel had telephoned, and that he probably would not call again. As she wept silently one afternoon in her room, she simultaneously indulged her heartbreak and questioned it. Had she really fallen in love with Daniel Segal, or was it simply that his silence echoed with other losses? Her griefs seemed confused and indistinguishable from each other, all melting into the aching passage of September sunlight that passed clearly through the window and filled the room.

There was a hesitant knock at the door. Sarah sniffled, wiped her face, and swallowed.

“Yes…” To her ears, her voice sounded firm enough.

“Sarah, I am just having a cup of tea, dear. Come down to the kitchen and join me, won’t you?”

“Oh, no thank you, Rachel. I’m fine just now.”

“You’re sure? No harm in a cup of tea.”

Sarah felt anger rising within her. No harm in a cup of tea, but no cure, either. Why could Rachel not leave her alone, always hovering, worrying, plying her with cake and cookies, stuffing her with kasha and kugel. Not that Rachel ever voiced her anxiety, no, that wasn’t her way, just the silence of a martyr. It was so unjust. She was a silly woman, she didn’t understand.

“No. Thank you.” As Sarah said the words harshly, guilt flooded in to mix with her anger. She was unfair to Rachel, always unfair.

“Thank you,” she tried again, more gently. “I just want to be alone for a bit.”

Rachel’s footsteps retreated.

At dinner that night, Sarah, although she had barely considered the idea until that moment, tried an announcement: “Lisa and I might get an apartment.”

Stung, Rachel looked up from her food and began to protest—“But this is your…”—when a fierce glance from Sam silenced her. She stopped, swallowed, thought for a moment, and then said firmly, “You are welcome here as long as you like.” Sam concentrated on cutting the gristle away from his meat and said nothing.

All that summer and autumn, the crews were still digging a great trench east of Yonge Street, desperate to finish before the frost arrived, praying they would not run into rock.
Three years before they had encountered a wall of limestone between Front Street and Queen and been forced to use explosives, warning the citizens beforehand but startling the unprepared birds, who turned the sky above into a chaotic mass of squawking and swirling whenever a charge exploded. Now, the men were working well north of Carlton Street, and the progress was slow, safe, and steady, with steam shovels and jackhammers where they could but often by hand with shovel and pickaxe where the drawings showed they would find some hidden wire or pipe. Inch by inch of asphalt and stone, yard by yard of rubble and soil, they cleared it all, shovelling it into trucks which then dumped their loads into the lake at the east end of the harbour, creating acres of land where one day new streets and buildings would rise. By Remembrance Day, the engineers were breathing down their necks, demanding of the foremen when the work would be done, and on their long shifts the cold and the damp seemed almost unbearable to the men who dug. But once all the wires and pipes were safely exposed, the planking laid over their heads, and the streets reopened to traffic, the diggers discovered that the wind that now whipped down Yonge Street did not blow underground. They felt secure in their newly created cave, and pitied the chaps working north of them in the open cuts up to Eglinton. They were happy with their progress. They had reached Bloor Street before Christmas, right on schedule, and could soon invite the concrete finishers and the electricians to join them underground. By March, the track gangs, who had been working their way up and down the line for almost a year now, were panting to lay the last rails. In May, the new Toronto subway opened.

It ran from Union Station at the southern edge of downtown, not far from the lakeshore, uphill all the way to
Eglinton Avenue. It would replace the clanging and shunting of the Yonge streetcar with a smoother and softer vibration, whisking the bankers and stockbrokers home to the tree-lined streets and imposing houses of Rosedale while the secretaries travelled a few stops further north, to the six-storey red-brick apartment buildings on the side streets off Eglinton. It was a huge source of pride to Toronto, for its rival Montreal, long acknowledged as the more important Canadian city, the seat of finance and culture, the port of entry for immigrants, did not have a subway yet. Paris, London, New York—real cities—teemed with underground life and could move millions of inhabitants from place to place without ever coming up for air. Toronto was growing, pushing forward, the war was ancient history, almost ten years now since it had finished, and the future beckoned.

For Sarah, the opening of the subway was a distraction, an event to which she could look forward. It seemed to her right that it should open in May, for if September were her least favourite month, May was her most. She felt unaccustomedly lighthearted in those days before the subway opened, debating with Rachel whether they should try to join the crowds for the ribbon cutting at Union Station on the Friday, or wait until Saturday, the first official day of business, to take a ride. Would Sam be willing to leave the store for a half-hour and drive them over to Yonge Street, or would they have to take the Bloor streetcar eastward from Gladstone Avenue to reach the new subway line? “It will be there again the next day, and the day after that,” Sam told Rachel as she pondered the best hour to enter the subway that first day, but unlike her husband, most people embraced this new thing with fervour. Even Lisa, who had got engaged
at Christmas, could be distracted from her wedding preparations to join them. The women had agreed they would enter the subway at Bloor Street, ride south to Union Station, turn around, and retrace their route, riding all the way northwards to Eglinton and then south again to Bloor. It would be like a game, a fairground ride, this trip to nowhere in particular, and Sarah felt as excited as a child who has been promised a great treat.

She slept badly that night, unable to settle into unconsciousness, and she awoke feeling groggy with that annoying tickle at the back of the throat that precedes a bad head cold. She felt no better after breakfast, but was determined not to miss the fun, and set off in the car with Sam, Rachel, and Lisa, who had arrived at the house all breathless with excitement at the crowds she had seen on the street, the balloons, the children dressed in their Sunday best. The day was warm for May, as though nature knew that pleasant weather was required for the event. Sitting with Lisa in the back seat as Sam inched his way through the Saturday traffic, Sarah grew uncomfortably hot. By the time Sam dropped them at Yonge Street, she was feeling decidedly feverish and looked with dismay at the long queue that had formed outside the subway entrance.

“Oh, dear, perhaps Sam was right. We’ll have to wait for hours,” Rachel said, looking back towards the car.

But by now Sam had pulled away from the curb and turned southwards away from them, so there seemed no choice but to join the line. Certainly, Lisa was not to be disappointed and pushed her way through the crowd to question the uniformed officials supervising the queue. She returned to tell them it would only be a quarter-hour before they would board a train, her optimistic assumption that this
was a reasonable wait stilling any opposition they might have expressed.

They joined what seemed to be an immobile crowd of people backed up Bloor Street and soon found dozens more had arrived behind them. The waiting made Sarah feel hotter still and the scratch in her throat was becoming painful, but it was also making her listless and reluctant to speak, so she did not find the energy to protest and insist they turn back. Half an hour later, with feet aching from standing on the pavement, they were only beginning to file down the new subway steps to the fare collector’s glass booth, but once through the turnstile, the crowd finally began to move, pressing towards the platform. There it seemed less crowded than out on the street—Lisa reasoned that the collector’s booth had created a bottleneck—and now the women stood near the front of the platform with room around them to breathe in the peculiar air of the underground. It was warm and not unpleasant, slightly dusty but slightly sweet, and as a current quivered lightly, then picked up speed and rushed towards them through the tunnel heralding an approaching train, there was added to it an almost yeasty smell as though someone were baking bread further down the line.

Sarah, cooler now, breathed in deeply.

She was standing on the platform, a platform punctuated with green wooden benches, looking down at the dirty concrete under her feet which were laced into black leather school shoes, collapsing her girlish body inwards to match the slope of the white-tiled wall against which she was leaning, the wall that curved up towards the exuberantly floral lettering announcing the stop “La Muette,” and warm air rushed into the station, bringing with it a pleasant odour that somehow simultaneously reminded one of coal dust and
fresh pastries, and her mother was standing beside her, holding her hand as the train approached, with its file of green cars, and its one red car for the first-class passengers, and Sophie Bensimon warned,
“Attention, Sarah,”
as the Paris Métro came nearer and nearer.