Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (28 page)

It was one morning this November that she felt peaceable enough she could say casually to Daniel, at breakfast,
as she watched him quickly tuck a few pieces of paper into his briefcase:

“Any news from France?”

“No, no news,” was all that he replied.

At his office that morning he found a large package from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, an organization based in New York. It was the Claims Conference to which the Canadian Jewish Congress had directed him, and the envelope was stuffed with information about the process of seeking redress. How to find lost birth certificates. How to produce affidavits establishing presumed death. When to engage local lawyers. How to approach banks. Who might be eligible for reparations from the German government. It included a copy of the form that Daniel had secured from the German Consulate, and that sat, still blank, in his office files.

It was not until February, three months later, that he received a personal reply from the Claims Conference, advising him on Sarah’s case. It was waiting for him at his office on a Tuesday morning when he arrived at work. He would have had it the day before, but he had not been in the office on the Monday. Indeed, he was hard pressed to be there on the Tuesday, but had dragged himself in. He had spent the last three days in bed, nursing his back, which he had wrenched while shovelling out the car to drive to the synagogue Saturday morning. He and Sarah went to
shul
from time to time; his parents liked to see them there; but, in hindsight, they should have left the car at home that day. Lionel and Clara always walked, no matter how cold the weather. Of course, their house was close by. But, like many in a congregation now scattered around town, Sarah and Daniel lived at some remove, and when Rabbi Cohn had
retired a few years back, his successor had quickly agreed that it was permissible to drive on the Sabbath, at least to
shul
. Many of them had been doing so already. So, Daniel had been clearing the driveway when something snapped.

Sarah was still busy upstairs in the bathroom, when he hobbled up the front steps, pushed open the front door, and called out to her.

“Sarah. Come and help me.”

She had the water running and couldn’t hear.

“Sarah,” he yelled with some desperation. “Come down here. I’ve gone and put my back out.”

“What? Is that you?” She stuck her head out from the bathroom and called down the stairs. “Did the car start?” It had snowed heavily the night before but the sky had cleared and the temperature plummeted, leaving the city to dig out in frigid conditions. The thermometer outside Sarah’s kitchen window, which like all Canadian thermometers in those days measured temperature on the Fahrenheit scale, was showing one below.

“It’s not the car, it’s me. Come down here and help me. I’ve hurt my back.”

At the word “hurt,” Sarah ran down the stairs.

“Oh, my God. What’s wrong? Are you all right? What happened?”

Daniel was now kneeling on the vestibule floor, collapsed over the small bench on which they would sit to change in and out of their winter boots. He had not fully closed the front door, and as Sarah hurried towards him, a nasty wind caught it and would have blown it open had not Daniel’s body been there to block it.

“Daniel. You haven’t shut the door properly. What’s happened? What’s wrong with you?” Sarah leaned across
him to push the door shut, and then bent to touch at him worriedly. Her hand grazed his back and he let out a yelp of pain.

“It’s my back. I had a load on the shovel, you know, and I must have twisted something as I was dumping it.”

“What can I do? Can you move? You’ve got to get upstairs to bed. Can you stand up?”

Sarah offered Daniel her hands and he tried to stand, but as he began to move, she noticed that he was still wearing his rubber galoshes over his shoes.

“Your rubbers. You’ll trek snow all over if you don’t take them off.”

“I can’t take them off. Can you?” He sank back down.

She bent awkwardly, not wanting to go down on her knees in her skirt and stockings on the cold linoleum floor, and pulled first one rubber, then the other off the bottom of the shoes that were sticking out from underneath Daniel’s kneeling body. She righted herself, tidied the galoshes away on the boot rack, and turned back to him, extending her hands towards his.

“We’ve got to hire that boy that the Brownings use,” she complained. The neighbours were never to be seen clearing their own driveway; a man with a pickup truck came and did it for them. “This would never have happened if you didn’t always insist on doing everything yourself.”

As Sarah said this, Daniel’s attempt to get upright failed, and he collapsed back on his knees with another moan.

“You’ve got to stand up. What am I going to do? We have to get you upstairs to bed. Maybe I should call the hospital. I am going to go call emergency.” Sarah stepped around him and started towards the phone in the living room.

“Sarah, please. I don’t need a hospital. I just need to
get to bed till it clears. Can you go outside and turn off the engine? I was warming up the car.”

“You mean it’s being running all this time? It shouldn’t be left running. Somebody could just come along and steal it.”

“It will be right where I left it. Turn it off and put the shovel away. I’ll stay here until you come back.”

Sarah hunted for boots and a coat, pulled them on, and hurried out the door. She returned a few minutes later, cold and flustered.

“What are we going to do about the car? There’s still too much snow to get out of the driveway.”

“Let’s worry about the driveway later. Give me a hand and I’ll try again.”

With some grunting and moaning and worried encouragement from Sarah, Daniel made it as far as the stairs. He lifted one foot towards the first step and cried out in agony as the motion of his leg sent reverberations through his lower back. Startled, Sarah reared up in alarm.

“Are you all right? I don’t know what to do. What are we going to do? I just feel sick. This is so horrible. What am I going to do? I think I need to sit down.” Sarah’s voice was rising, and behind Daniel, she darted from one side of the hall to the other with each phrase, like a small animal panicked by a predator.

Daniel held onto the banisters, took a breath, and spoke firmly. “Sarah, go into the kitchen and make us both a cup of tea. I will get upstairs. By the time the pot’s brewed, I’ll be in the bedroom. Then you can come up with the tea and help me get into bed. I just need to get flat on my back, that’s all.”

“Are you sure? I think we should call the hospital. Oh, Daniel, this is so horrible.”

“It’s all right, it will be all right.” Steadying himself with his left hand, Daniel reached out with his right and gently touched Sarah’s sleeve as she hovered beside him. “There’s nothing to worry about. People wrench their backs shovelling snow all the time. It’s just muscular. It will clear up in a day or two.”

“You shouldn’t have shovelled the snow. We should have paid the boy to do it. You don’t think of me. What would happen to me if you were injured?”

“Please make the tea.” Daniel was beginning to realize that climbing the stairs was going to be hard. Not only did he not want Sarah’s help, he did not want her watching. It would only upset her further. She finally retreated to the kitchen, and he spent five agonizing minutes getting to the bedroom, pain shooting through him with every step.

Sarah reappeared, without the tea, a few minutes later.

“Daniel…”

Her voice was hesitant, as though she were a small child about to request a favour. “Daniel, you know how sometimes, when I’m nervous, my period arrives a day or two early. It feels like…”

She hovered at the bedroom door.

“I’ll be fine. You go look after yourself. Just take my shoes off for me, would you, before you go.”

Breathing heavily with the approaching ache of menstruation, Sarah bent down, unlaced Daniel’s good shoes, took off his socks, and pulled off his pants.

“That’s fine. I can get the rest. When you get a second, there’s some Aspirin in the medicine cabinet. Bring me the bottle and a glass of water.”

She pulled back the covers of the bed and hurried off to the bathroom.

She spent most of that weekend in the spare room, racked with menstrual cramps that finally caused her to vomit up the dinner Daniel managed to make for them on Sunday evening. They might have called on Clara or Rachel—both women would have been hurt to know that these children had been in trouble and had not asked for help—but Daniel had his pride as much as Sarah. Instead, they limped through Monday alone, and on Tuesday morning, his back stiff but less painful, Daniel casually asked a neighbour for a hand with the last of the shovelling because he still could not face the walk to the subway. With a path now cleared behind the car, he bent himself carefully forward to slide into the driver’s seat and drove down to the office.

The letter from the Claims Conference was lying on his desk, along with a circular from the provincial Ministry of Health and a few bills. He reached for it first, sliced into the envelope with a paper knife, and began to read.

“Dear Sir: With regards to your letter of November, 25, 1964, describing the case of your wife, Mrs. Sarah Segal, our advice is as follows.”

There was little chance of indemnification from the German government: the first priority of the fund was survivors of the camps who were former German citizens. Reparations paid to the State of Israel recognized the loss of millions of victims who left no heirs, and that state’s burden in integrating the majority of the European DPs. Living heirs of victims were the fund’s lowest priority, and the few awards made thus far had been paid out in cases of extreme financial need. Should Mr. Segal still wish to pursue the case further, his wife would have to make application to the German government before December 31, 1965.

He stared at the letter for a while, reading the New York
address of the Claims Conference, noting the regularly inked letters of the type, until the page began to blur in front of him. He pondered responses but knew his answer. No, there was no point arguing with Sarah about an application to the German government, no point going through all the worry and disagreements it might take to persuade her, if there was little chance of success. Daniel opened a drawer in his desk, flipped through files until he found the correct one, and put the letter into it, dropping along with it the idea of seeking compensation from the Germans. He would redouble his efforts in France, approaching the French Consulate for advice on searching title to the apartment on the Rue de Musset and renewing his requests to the Paris banks.

It was not that Daniel anticipated some huge windfall from a forgotten French savings account or from the German fund, nor thought that money would make Sarah happy. They had no particular need for more money: he knew that within a year or two he would be able to replace the car and could see a not-far-distant future when they would take annual holidays to gentler climes. Rather, he pursued these inquiries because his marriage had not proved all that he expected. What marriage ever does? He had assumed he would have children by now, and that their care and upbringing, along with the fervent, if abstract, love with which he and Sarah had first embraced each other, would prove sufficient for all their emotional needs. When he found that unfinished business haunted them, as he lived the daily grind of Sarah’s seemingly inescapable domestic worries and exaggerated fears, some huge and vague, others specific and mundane, knowing full well that these present sorrows could be expressed only because the greatest sorrow of them all remained unspeakable, he wanted to take action, any action
that might make their marriage as happy as he had assumed it would be the day in 1956 when he had stood beside Sarah under the
chuppah
.

He saw Sarah trying too, at first especially, cooking and loving with commitment if not passion, always hoping for a child, quickly and gamely recovering her optimism each month as her body let loose the dark, thick blood within her. But in their fifth, sixth, seventh, and now their eighth year of marriage, it seemed to him that she grew increasingly anxious as though the only way she could experience life was through fear. Perhaps, over the years, Daniel would recognize how naive was his belief that he could make another human happy, would see that he could no more end Sarah’s grieving than he could stop the cancers that ate away at the dying old folks whom he consigned to the hospital wards, but if so, he did not acknowledge it in their life together, a place where he maintained the facade of contentment with the bedside manner of a true professional.

In his heart, unspoken, he felt their infertility as painfully as she did, knew a child would prove compensation, and sought to bring that about the best way he knew how. Unable to do any more in that department—they had both discreetly been tested; there was no medical impediment that his colleagues could find—he had turned to the paper chase as a kind of action, not in the end wholly futile nor hugely successful, but the only thing he could think of that might help his wife enter into life.

It was the following May, a year after he had made his first inquiries, that he finally got a reply. The letter again came to the office, and filled with the joy of the news and the pleasure of the newly warm weather, he decided to walk home, pushing up Yonge Street at an energetic pace, before
stepping into the pleasant side streets, cutting a street west, then heading another block or two north until he finally fetched up just a few houses away from his own. He could spot his front yard at a glance, for the previous fall Sarah, a lifelong city dweller with little understanding of gardens, had for the first time planted bulbs, seeking advice from a neighbour about the correct day in October to do her digging and the right depth to position these unpromising things that, to her eye, looked only like misshapen onions. Her labours were now colourfully rewarded with white and yellow daffodils, while the closed heads of tulips were just now discernible amongst those flowers’ broad leaves.