Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (9 page)

“Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief…” The rhymes were new to Sarah’s ears, and she waited, wondering whether she would be ever be able to clear the rope with the same leisurely ease as her classmates.

“In nineteen hundred and forty-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and the waves went higher, and higher, and oooover they went…”

“In nineteen hundred and forty-two…”

“Stupid. It’s fourteen hundred and ninety-two… Nineteen forty-two, that’s now.”

“Yeah, that’s this year. If Columbus sailed the ocean, Hitler would blow him up.”

“Yeah, the Nazis would get him…”

For these girls, whose fathers were too young to have fought in the Great War and too old to fight in the current war, events in Europe seemed vague and distant. They whispered occasionally about Jane, whose father was over in London and had to go underground at night to avoid the bombs, or about this new girl sent to Canada for safety’s sake. When they spoke of these things, they adopted a hushed air of matronly solicitousness that did little to disguise the thrill of pity that coursed through them when they considered those less fortunate, less secure, than themselves. But these were rare moments, soon forgotten when compared to more immediate excitements—Frances had been chosen to play Mary in the Christmas pageant; Bob Lamberts had told Shirley that he liked her.

Their fathers muttered over the evening papers, grumbling at the slow progress of the war. Their mothers knitted socks and saved the fat from the Sunday roast in a jar that sat on the kitchen windowsill, the contents of which were regularly donated to the people who made guns and bombs. At school, Mrs. Heathgate gave the boys and girls an occasional update on events by pointing to places on the big map of Europe at the front of the classroom. But talk at home was largely devoted to the upcoming church social and whether or not the roof would last another winter, while in history class, Mrs. Heathgate spent more time explaining that, in 1492, Christopher Columbus set off in the
Santa Maria
to discover the New World than she did on current events. In 1603, Samuel de Champlain sailed up the St. Lawrence to Quebec. In 1917, thirty-five hundred brave Canadian soldiers lost their lives at Vimy Ridge.

The girls were proud to be Canadian, loyal subjects of the British King. They were certain that the Allies would soon win the war, but had little sense who it was they were fighting. To be sure, Martha had called Sandra Newberger a Kraut last week, and had been forced to apologize by Mrs. Heathgate. And the girls knew they were to hate Germans, pity subject Europeans, and claim their place alongside just nations like Britain. Most of the time, however, they could not conceive of a world that operated differently from their own.

This was a safe and simple place governed by rules on which they could all agree. You were to sing “God Save the King” with gusto every morning and then close your eyes to intone the Lord’s Prayer. And if a Jewish girl did not like that, it was certainly better to put up with it than to draw attention to yourself by leaving the classroom. You were to complete your homework neatly and hand it in promptly, but never
boast about what mark you received. Any girl not wearing a wool vest under her blouse by Canadian Thanksgiving—a Monday early in October—was probably a slut and any girl still wearing one after Queen Victoria’s birthday was only to be pitied.

It was at that time of year, in May, as their vests and sweaters were put away, leaving only their cotton blouses to cover their torsos, that the girls watched carefully for the appearance of brassieres. Sitting in class on a sunny day, you could see through their shirts the telltale strap across the backs of the bigger girls. Clearly, they already needed what Mrs. Heathgate referred to delicately as “a little support.”

“You might want to consider a little support, dear,” she would say quietly after class to any girl whom she felt needed the advice—once she had carefully ensured that no boys were within earshot.

On this subject, if on few others, Rachel Plot had anticipated the embarrassment a new girl in a new school might feel, and that spring, spotting the burgeoning flesh on Sarah’s chest, broached the idea of a bra. In this regard, Rachel was determined to do her duty. Soon after Sarah’s arrival in Toronto, she had raised the subject of her monthlies, noting to herself that the child was small but worrying that the unexpected arrival of blood would add another burden for one who already carried more than her fair share. She found Sarah confused on the subject, unsure whether she was to bleed for one day every week, or one week every month, and she carefully clarified the issue, placing a box of Kotex napkins and an elasticated belt in Sarah’s underwear drawer, reckoning that way she would get used to idea before the time came. She even showed Sarah how to secure the belt and pad, demonstrating as best she could over the
top of her skirt, and tried valiantly to place the spectre of the monthly visitor in a larger picture. Sitting on the white chenille spread that covered Sarah’s narrow bed, she delivered the speech that begins: “When a man and a woman love each other very much… they marry…”

Sarah, who had heard whisperings about blood and babies before, was still not entirely aware that what was being described to her was a conscious act. She considered what Rachel said about eggs and seeds, and wondered, since it was clear from their small glances and light laughs that Rachel and Sam loved each other very much, why there were no babies in the house on Gladstone Avenue. She did not ask, however, but took this, along with information about school coats, skipping rhymes, and Samuel de Champlain, into her heart to ponder.

So, whether it was time or not, that first spring, Rachel again took Sarah to Eaton’s, for a quiet, almost furtive discussion with the lady in the lingerie department. And it was there, standing amongst the stockings and panties, that Sarah saw her mother.

Sophie Bensimon was wearing a drab-coloured belted raincoat and was busy examining a stocking. Her head was turned away from Sarah, so the girl could only catch the faintest corner of her mother’s profile. Yet she knew that this dark, svelte woman was her. There was something in the way she wore the coat, its waist tightly cinched, its shoulders squarely aligned with her own, something even in the way she held the stocking, as though she were interested but unconvinced by it, that summarized for Sarah the wisdom and elegance of her own mother. Sophie radiated a quiet grace
without appearing arrogant, the poise of a woman who could tell the salesgirl that the stocking was certainly not ten denier without giving the least offence. Beside her, Rachel Plot looked stout and poorly dressed.

Sarah’s heart rose. Her stomach felt empty, her head light, her throat dry. She lurched forward, ready to fling herself at the svelte and dark woman and cry, “Maman, here I am.” And yet, at twelve, Sarah’s experiences had already lodged inside her something hard and adult, a measure of what some call realism and others hopelessness. Whatever it was, that thing held her back, silenced the words in her throat, quieted the movement in her limbs, left her standing at Rachel’s side as a stranger rejected a stocking that she had been considering and walked towards the exit.

Sarah was to see her mother again and again over the next years—a woman across the street, a woman boarding a bus, a woman seven rows ahead at the movie theatre, a woman pushing a baby carriage through a park, a woman turning the next corner and hurrying out of sight. Sometimes Sarah even gave chase, following small, dark women until she lost them in crowds; sometimes, she simply stared until the woman, sensing her gaze, turned her head. And then Sarah would see the beloved profile of her mother with its little nose gently tilting up and away from its brief yet full lips dissolve into the pudgy featureless face of someone else. Sometimes, her mistake was ridiculous—why this woman was Chinese; that one old enough to be her grandmother. Other times she seized on one single feature, a sparkling eye, a rouged cheek, and stared only at it, measuring how close a match it was with her mother’s.

At night, alone in her room, Sarah would rail at these ghosts, anger fighting sorrow for a place in her heart, and
momentarily conquering it. “Why did you send me here?” “Why do you get to stay home with Papa?”

And so, as Sarah made friends in the schoolyard and learned to skip double dutch, as she memorized the name of every prime minister since Confederation and sat the Senior Matriculation Examinations, as she joined a Zionist youth group at the urging of a classmate, as she rode the roller coaster and ate cotton candy at the Canadian National Exhibition, as she enrolled in honours French at the University of Toronto, as she took a part-time job shelving books at the University College library, as she kissed a boy she had met at a picnic, and as she laughed with the girls in her class, she remembered that there was something that kept her apart from these events. It was a distance less tangible than the absence of her mother tongue, yet simpler too: Some day, she would go home.

She told Sam and Rachel of her intentions not long before the end of her second year at university. She had saved money from her job at the library, and once classes finished in the first week of May, she would take a trip to Europe. She would spend some time in Paris. She had found an inexpensive pension, where she had booked a room for a month, but could stay longer if necessary. Professor Manfred in the French department had recommended it as clean and quiet, suitable for a North American girl. She hesitated on the words, and finally said simply to Rachel, “I want to know.”

Rachel lowered her head and said nothing. It was Sam who exploded into speech: “You will learn in Europe one word, one word you will learn—Auschwitz.”

Embarrassed by the tears now flowing from his eyes, he left the room, barging out the front door and hurrying off down Gladstone Avenue towards College Street. Sam was slow to anger, more likely to shake his head over the griefs and offences of his life than to raise his voice or his fist. It was not for his own sake that he had yelled at Sarah, but for Rachel’s. He had accepted their childlessness as the will of nature, of God perhaps, if you believed in such things; he had volunteered to take in a refugee child from Europe because this was clearly where duty lay. He had quite consciously tried to be kind, friendly, and sympathetic to Sarah, hugging her in his arms on the way through the door or handing her a package of the honey cake he had brought home from a bakery near the factory where he worked. He had liked the child, she was quiet, she gave no trouble, but he had never hoped nor wished that she were his own. Rachel, he knew, had sometimes had such dreams. More before, back in those futile weeks in 1940 when they had first said yes to Rabbi Cohn, and then again, the second time, in the few days that had separated another phone call from the actual trip to Union Station to greet Sarah. In those times, Rachel had permitted herself a fantasy or two, he could tell by the little vacant smile he would find on her face when he came into the kitchen in the morning or the nervous way in which she pleated her fingers as they rode the streetcar south to the train station.

Not that Rachel had ever presumed, once Sarah had arrived. You couldn’t possibly with that child—her formal manners, her silence, her seriousness kept you at a distance. If your gesture was tentative, if your laugh was the least bit forced, her intelligent gaze would stop you cold, seeming to say, “That’s not love, that’s pity.” And yet to love her properly
was also impossible, for this silence stood between you and her as a gap that could never be fully crossed. And so, over these nine years, as Sarah had grown, there remained this small resentment in the Plot household, this little piece of bitterness, because Sarah Simon somehow refused to become Sarah Plot. Rachel would never speak of it that way, she would never say a word against Sarah, for Sarah’s burden was already too great, Sarah’s pain already unimaginable, yet still, Rachel no longer truly tried to love Sarah.

The subject of Europe was taboo in the house on Gladstone Avenue. When Sarah had arrived in 1942, she had been “sent on ahead” by wealthy Parisian parents “eager to emigrate to Canada or indeed any British protectorate that would afford them entry.” That was how her case was described in the letters received by the Immigrant Aid Society. In 1943, she was a refugee child, saved from the war in Europe, sent to Canada by parents whose “situation surely must be desperate.” That was how the principal at Sarah’s school described her to Miss Laddersmith, who was to be her teacher for her second year in Canada. In 1944, all was silence. As those around her became increasingly aware what must be the fate of Sarah’s parents, they grew too uncomfortable to even whisper about it amongst themselves. Rachel and Sam did not speak of the war, had not seen Rabbi Cohn for over a year now, and quickly turned the page of the newspaper if their eyes lighted on a story of atrocities in Europe. In 1945, British, American, and Soviet soldiers liberated camps where the living looked like the dead and the dead lay in tangled piles that did not look like anything the world had ever seen.

And still in the house on Gladstone Avenue, Rachel and Sam did not speak of the war and Sarah did not tell them that
she had started scanning the posted lists of displaced persons before she had even turned fifteen. In the end, she sought out Rabbi Cohn and, with a defeated maturity that he could barely stomach, asked if inquiries might not be made in Europe to ascertain the fate of her parents.

“I’ve looked on the DP lists. They aren’t there.”

Rachel and Sam eventually knew that Sarah was in correspondence with the Red Cross, for the letters arrived in the old red-tin mailbox that hung underneath the number plate beside the front door. Once Rachel even found it within herself to ask: “Any news?”

“No news,” Sarah replied.

In her first year in their house, Rachel had sometimes caught herself secretly hoping for a letter from Europe that would announce the death of the Bensimons. She guiltily withdrew the thought the moment it entered her head, but never fully repented it. With Sarah’s parents dead, the girl could mourn, and the Plots adopt. She and Sam had believed an adopted child was never really your own, they had talked it over long and hard that week in 1940 after the meeting of the Workers’ Benevolent Association and reached that conclusion, but still, once Sarah was in their midst, Rachel was not so sure. She thought somehow a legal bond might make them closer, happier. But no news ever came and Sarah was twenty now. Despite Sam’s anger on her behalf, Rachel recognized that it was too late. Sarah would never be Rachel’s daughter, and so, as Sam stormed down the street, she lifted her head to the girl and said, “We have done what we can for you. Go to Paris.”