The Imposter Bride (13 page)

“Elka!” she shouted, as if Elka were somewhere out of reach, rather than hovering, as she was, just behind her mother in the dimly lit back recess of the shop.

“What!” Elka jumped, startled by the sudden harshness in her mother’s voice, half afraid she was about to be ordered to run down the street after the woman that Ida had all but called a thief, in order to bring back the stone that Ida had all but accused her of stealing.

“The counter’s filthy. A disgrace. Did you not even bother to wipe it down this morning?”

“I’m sorry.” Elka managed to convey in those three spare syllables all the injustice she felt at the false accusation—the counter was merely dusty, not filthy—as well as at the many equally wounding injustices she had suffered in her life thus far, the betrayal by Sol merely the most recent.

He had told that woman everything, she thought again, as she wiped down the counter. My mother’s background, our
private business … He ran from his date with me, the impression of his lips still warm on my forehead, to tell her everything I’d confided. She imagined Sol and Lily at a café somewhere, a smoky café with a long brass bar and windows hung with lace curtains. The sort of café she’d seen only in posters. A chic café, in other words, not like any of the snack bars, soda shops and delis that she frequented. She saw them deep in conversation, their heads inclined towards each other, a carafe of red wine between them. Did they share a laugh at my expense? she wondered. Were they amused by the silly teenage girl running to tell her secrets to the first man who pretended to take an interest in her? She heard them whispering, heard them laughing at the childish girl who had a crush on Sol.

SOL HAD NOT RUN
home to Lily immediately after his date with Elka. He had walked instead through the humid city streets for hours, precisely to put off the moment he would have to return to the home that he temporarily shared with Lily. Thoughts of Lily had been muted during the hours he’d spent with Elka, but only muted, never absent, and now he faced another night on the cot behind the piano in the living room, his interim “bedroom” until Nathan found an apartment for himself and his new wife. Sol would lie for hours sleepless, sweating, aware of Lily’s presence just behind the closed door of the bedroom, or down the hall, through the open window of the kitchen that opened onto the fire escape stairs, where she spent part of every night, smoking and staring into space.

He stopped in at a snack bar. The coffee there was scalding and like acid in his mouth, but he drank it anyway, thinking it
might clear his mind. Then he drank a second cup, and he might have drunk a third had a girl not slid onto the stool beside him remarking that he looked like he needed cheering up.

“Thanks but no thanks,” he said, glancing her way only long enough to take in the heavy makeup and puffy skin around the eyes and jaw. He smiled to soften the rejection, though he knew her concern for him was only professional, and she sidled up closer, misunderstanding his smile as indecision.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You won’t be if you take me home.”

He left a dime beside his empty cup, and a dollar for the girl, and left.

“Hey, mister.” He heard the sound of high heels trotting after him. He turned and she was right behind him, holding out his dollar. “I’m not a charity case,” she said. “Just lonely.”

Now he was thoroughly depressed as well as agitated. At the pathetic pride of the girl who either was or wasn’t a whore, at the uselessness of his own instincts which he had once believed would carry him to a better life.

He thought about Elka with fondness. There was a spirit to the girl despite the superficial first impression she gave of a personality soured by resentment. And she had brains as well, and certainly was pretty, with her brown eyes and adorable dimples. On a feature by feature basis she could even be said to be prettier than Lily, but he couldn’t deny the terrible pull he felt towards Lily, the battle he was fighting within himself. It was a battle that would only worsen the moment he stepped into his home, and then intensify in the long hours to follow.

She was there, of course. He sensed it the moment he stepped into the dark stillness that was the front hall of his home. It had been warm outside but inside it was stifling,
the heat of the day trapped within the close walls. And it was dark, the single yellow bulb in the ceiling fixture casting a dusk in the long, narrow hallway. Beyond the stagnant shadow, though, he felt her presence. Beyond the stillness of the hall and the staleness of the air closing in around him. In the kitchen at the end of the hall a window was open to the night, and beyond that open window through which no air or light passed, she waited, a folded figure on the stairs.

He took off his shoes so as not to wake his mother or Nathan and walked as lightly as he could down the hallway. He felt the smooth warmth of the linoleum under his feet, the hideous brown linoleum with its blooms of pink roses that his mother still waxed faithfully every week. He passed the opening to the living room, where his mother was asleep on the fold-out sofa, passed the closed door of the bedroom, behind which his brother also slept.

When he reached the kitchen he saw her through the open window. She was sitting just as he’d known she would be, smoking a cigarette, staring into the night. He knew he should leave. He knew he should walk back down the hallway to the living room he shared with his mother at night, to his cot behind the piano, the hated piano that had been a gift to his sister, Nina, from a man who couldn’t give her a ring because he’d given one already to the woman he would never leave despite Nina’s many and varied charms. But Sol had done that already. Every night since the wedding he had exchanged no more than brief greetings and superficial chit-chat with Lily, retiring immediately to his cot, where he had lain restlessly, miserably, his condition not improving, only worsening. Tonight he took a beer out of the icebox, slipped through the window and sat down beside Lily.

She didn’t move, didn’t greet him, just continued to sit there
as she had been, staring out into space and smoking her cigarette as if she were still alone and undisturbed. Now he was at a loss. Had she greeted him, as basic decency dictated she should have, he could have returned her greeting in kind. Then one thing could have led to another, to a simple inquiry on his part, for example, about how her day had been, a brief response followed by a similar inquiry on her part. A normal conversation, in other words, which might lay the groundwork for further normalization of the relationship between them. But there was no greeting from Lily, just the cold wall of her indifference.

“Does Nathan know you smoke?” he asked finally, a less-than-stellar opening, to which she dragged deeply on her cigarette and turned her head away from him to exhale.

She thought if she ignored him he would leave. What man would stay when a woman made it as clear as she was making it that she didn’t want him there? What man would insinuate himself into a woman’s private moment, as he just had, practically depositing himself onto her lap? The same man, she supposed, who would invite a woman to cross two oceans to marry him and then leave her at the station because she didn’t suit his mood on the day of her arrival.

Sol floundered, unsure how to proceed. He had planned to tell Lily how his date had gone. Wasn’t that what a normal brother-in-law would do? Wouldn’t he tell his slightly older sister-in-law about a young woman he found attractive? And wouldn’t that offered confidence typically solicit a teasing and sisterly smile? He had thought so when he mentioned it to her the night before, but Lily hadn’t even seemed to hear him.

“Filthy habit,” he said, lighting up a cigarette of his own. He glanced at her to see if she’d caught his tone, which was meant to be humorous.

She looked out to the backs of the houses across the way, a sight as familiar to her by now as the four walls of her bedroom. It was quiet this time of night, and mostly dark, but there was one room where the light was always on no matter how late she stayed up. Who was in that room? she wondered. An insomniac like herself? A poet at his work? A harried woman who did piecework in her kitchen while the rest of her family slept? Night after night she wondered about that light, that other sleepless soul keeping her company in an existence that felt more like a vigil than a life.

“The girl I took out tonight … You know that mother-daughter pair who came to your wedding? Ida Pearl and Elka Krakauer?”

Lily shrugged. “I was introduced to a lot of people that night.”

“They weren’t invited.”

“But you just said they were there.”

“They were, but not because anyone invited them. It seems that Ida Pearl—the mother—had a cousin with the same name as yours, and I guess she hoped, you know, when she heard—”

Now Lily looked at Sol. “A cousin?”

“Back in Europe. And I guess when she heard about you arriving—”

“But how would she have heard?” Lily interrupted him, her indifference replaced now by a sudden tension. “Who would have told her?”

“I don’t know. I think a customer of hers had heard—”

“Heard what? Who are these people?”

“Lily, relax.” Sheesh, he thought. Talk about tightly wound. “It was just a simple mix-up. Ida Pearl’s maiden name was Azerov. Like yours. And she had a cousin Lily. So when she heard that you had arrived in Montreal, that you were
marrying my brother, I guess she thought maybe … But it was just a coincidence, you having the same name. She saw that right away.”

“Who are these people?” Lily asked again.

“The daughter is the girl I took out tonight. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you.”

“And what did she say, exactly?” Lily asked.

“I already told you.”

“Tell me again.”

Sol repeated what Elka had told him, about her mother having heard from a customer about the arrival of a refugee by the name of Lily Azerov, her mother’s hope that the bride might turn out to be her cousin. A mistaken hope.

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal,” Lily repeated, as if learning a new phrase. She looked away, trying to absorb this. Could it possibly be coincidence? she wondered. Another Azerov, another Lily?

“For all I know it’s a cockamamie story. She told me another story tonight about how her mother was a famous diamond cutter.”

Lily turned to him sharply. “A diamond cutter?”

“The best in all of Antwerp, apparently. Who were the best in the entire world, didn’t you know?”

Lily turned away from him again, but not before Sol had seen a face so stricken that a sickening feeling took hold of him.

It was no coincidence, then, Lily thought. She closed her eyes. To calm herself. For a moment’s rest and reprieve from what Sol had just told her.

“I think you may be making too big a deal of this,” Sol said. And when she didn’t respond: “It’s not like it’s a crime to have the same name as someone’s cousin.”

Isn’t it? she thought as she turned to him again. She knew it was not a customer who had told Ida Pearl about her arrival in Montreal. It had to have been the girl’s cousin that she had gone to see her first day in Tel Aviv. Sonya Nemetz must have written to her relative in Montreal, this Ida Pearl Krakauer, about the unexpected visit she’d received.

“Did you … know her cousin?” It was instinct that made Sol ask, her expression when he told her of the coincidence of names, the heightened tension and alertness he sensed.

“No,” she said, with an answering instinct to hide anything that might endanger her until she had a better sense of what she faced.

She had not planned to go visit the cousin in Tel Aviv, had not even planned to keep the name. She had taken the name for one purpose, and one purpose only: as a temporary mantle under which she could slip across borders that might otherwise be closed to her.

But then that terrible moment of her arrival in Palestine, the cavern opening within her as she recognized that this was it, this arrival, that this was both the culmination and beginning of all that she had struggled so hard to reach: this bleak dawn, this gaping emptiness that was now, and from now on, her life. There had been no one to meet her, of course. No one waiting. Nowhere to go. She had stepped into a café and had sat there, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. For how long? She couldn’t say. The waiter informed her they were closing. A lie, she suspected, a ploy to move her on. But to where, and to whom? The waiter looked at her as if he knew she had no place to go, no one she belonged to or who belonged to her. She stood up, walked outside. She turned left. There was a bus. “Tel Aviv?” she asked the driver. “Where in Tel Aviv?”
She oriented herself towards the only feature that rose from the wasteland within her, a name and address from the notebook she had taken:
Sonya Nemetz, Rehov Hayarkon 7, Tel Aviv
.

It was madness, she knew. Desperation. But it had propelled her forward when she might have fallen back. And it hadn’t felt like deception at the time. Not entirely. The name Lily Azerov had seeped into her during the months that she had worn it. It had grown tendrils and found a foothold in the scoured wasteland of her life, taken root. She answered to that name and only to that name; there was no one left who had known her by any other. And yet she knew it was deception. It was madness.

She remembered the keenness with which Sonya had looked into her face, searching, hoping despite her doubt, despite the evidence of hope’s futility that was standing right in front of her. And with that memory, another rose, another person looking at her, another woman with the same desperate keenness.

“I remember that Krakauer woman now,” she said to Sol, though it was not the woman she remembered, but the look, a fleeting impression she had noted at her wedding but dismissed—she had seen that look so often by then. “I remember how she looked at me when I was dancing.”
That look
—that’s how she thought of it. “I’ve seen it in so many others, the way she looked at me.” In Europe, in the chaos after the war, on the roads, in the train stations, in the centres they set up. And then in Palestine as well, once she arrived there. But how to explain it to Sol? It was the look of people desperate to find some trace of their dead, following rumours, even the faintest hints of rumours, in the hope … almost always futile in the end, of course.