The Imposter Bride (20 page)

Not long after that I asked Bella again to read me what the girl had written in the notebook. This time she didn’t say
What for?
or tell me there was nothing in it of interest.

“My eyes aren’t what they were,” she said.

But they weren’t so bad, I thought, that she couldn’t read the stacks of Yiddish books and pamphlets that she borrowed every two weeks from the Jewish Public Library.

“The writing is so tiny, hard to make out.” And a lot of it was gibberish, she explained, dreams that wouldn’t make sense to anyone.

She didn’t want to read it to me, in other words. But why?

“Because your grandmother respects other people’s privacy,” Ida Pearl said when I repeated the conversation to her and Elka a few days later. We were in Miss Snowdon, a restaurant a few doors down from Ida’s building, where Elka and I often met Ida if we were doing errands in the neighbourhood.

“No, she doesn’t.” It was no secret that Bella used to make a regular habit of reading Nina’s diaries. That was how she found out Nina was having an affair with a married man when she was still in high school.

“Didn’t you just order cinnamon torte?” Ida asked me sharply as I took a second helping of the complimentary coleslaw and pickles that the restaurant provided to every table.

“It’s okay, Ma, they’ll bring more,” Elka said.

“It’s not a food shortage that concerns me.”

“I’m hungry,” I said, to explain the heap of coleslaw on my plate.

“Then you should have ordered a meal.”

“Maybe I’ll bring it to Mrs. Schoenfeld,” I said. She lived across the street from Elka and Sol, and spoke Yiddish.

“You’ll do no such thing,” Ida said. The sharpness of her reprimand surprised me. “You don’t bring family business to strangers.”

Mrs. Schoenfeld was hardly a stranger—she’d been my piano teacher for years and we saw her in
shul
every Saturday. And since when was the girl a member of our family? According to my father, she wasn’t even my mother’s friend.

“I’ll just have to learn Yiddish myself, then. Since it’s obvious that no one in my family is ever going to read it to me.”

Ida changed the subject now, asked Elka about the colour of the new curtains she had just ordered for her living room. I refrained from taking a third helping of coleslaw to avoid irritating Ida further, but I knew she was still annoyed. I could feel her stiffness. And sure enough, a little later, just as I was scraping the last of the cinnamon whipped cream and shavings of chocolate from my plate, she interrupted her conversation with Elka and turned to me.

“You’re making more out of that diary than there is.”

“Then why won’t anyone read it to me?”

“When you’re engaged to be married I’ll read it to you.”

Sex, I thought. There had to be sex in it. Which made it inaccessible to me for the time being because the only people I knew who could read Yiddish were parents of friends, grandparents, people who’d come from Europe, and the very thought of any of those people reading me anything that even hinted of sex …

“Maybe it’s like Anne Frank’s diary, but with sex scenes,” Carrie said when she was over a few days later. “If it is, it could be a huge bestseller.”

She opened the girl’s notebook and pored over the first entry. I knew that she understood Yiddish because that was the language her parents used between themselves when they wanted to have a conversation that Carrie and her sisters wouldn’t be able to understand, but I had no idea that she could actually read it.

“I start with a dream …”
she said aloud in English. She started working on the next sentence.
“I’m running …”

“Not a dream part,” I interrupted her. “Try to find something better.” Worth her effort, I meant, because to say that Carrie could read Yiddish doesn’t begin to convey just how slowly she had read that first sentence to me, and with what degree of difficulty.

Carrie agreed that other people’s dreams were boring. She flipped through the pages, found another passage and then started:

“Last night I saw … Eva.”
She looked up. “I’m pretty sure that last word is a name. Eva.”

I nodded, could not believe we hadn’t done this before.

“The path I was walking had opened onto a … clearing.”
She looked up again. “There’s a word before
clearing
that I don’t know.”

“It’s okay. Go on.”

“
… and there she was—my dearest, closest, prettiest Eva …
God, she really liked this Eva. Who was she?”

“How would I know?”

“
She
was sitting by the side of a stream, her feet … hanging … in the water, and it was summer again, the forest around her a …
something-or-other … I can’t make out the word …
of greens, the water a different
something-or-other
of sparkling blues and greys.”

“Mixture?” I asked.

“Could be.
She was wearing her favourite summer dress, a light cotton shift in a green as pale as new leaves. Her hair was loose, falling in waves past her shoulders. She was the Eva I had always loved, the friend I had never stopped loving …
Uh-oh.”

“What?” Here it came, I thought: the reason no one would ever read it to me.

“You’re not going to believe this.” She continued:
“My dream repaired the break between us …”

“Another dream?”

“… inserted summer warmth like a ray of sun that pierces a gloomy day.”

Carrie shut the notebook. It had taken her the better part of an hour to read and translate that passage. “It’s just a bunch of dreams.”

“And I thought no one would read it to me because it was sexy.”

“They just didn’t want to bore themselves to death,” Carrie said.

We put the notebook back on the shelf beside my mother’s.

I had come to a dead end. There was nothing else about my mother to find in our home. But at the same time, the compulsion I felt to do that was easing off. My own life was getting busier and more interesting. Happier, even. It was starting to open up more and more, filling up with matters as pressing as whether or not I would be invited to Lina Tessler’s sweet sixteen, or whether Charles Blumenthal liked me or hated me, or whether it was fair that I should have to wait until I was eighteen to learn to drive when Carrie was allowed at sixteen. The separateness I felt in my family continued, but that no longer made me feel unusual. All my friends felt separate from their families now.

When another rock arrived from my mother I felt annoyed by it, uncomfortable. I wondered why she didn’t either write me a letter or leave me alone. I was practically an adult, and she was still sending me these packages like I was a six-year-old who could barely read and would thrill to a pink rock arriving in the mail. And yet there was also something about the rock (a gorgeous banded agate from the north shore of Lake Superior, near Wawa) that touched me, the trouble she took with the wrapping, the careful curves of her handwriting. There was something pathetic about her that both touched and repelled me.

So it wasn’t really longing that drew me to the phone books in the library one afternoon, so much as serendipity. I was doing a research project for school and happened to notice that there were shelves of phone books from cities all across Canada. Saskatoon was the first one that caught my eye. I pulled it off the shelf on a whim, looked under
Kramer, Azerov, Azeroff
. I couldn’t find a Lily with any of those last names, but there was an L. Kramer.

Could it possibly be? I wondered as I jotted it down. My heart raced. Had it been this easy all along? There were phone books from just about every city in Canada, it seemed, a whole long shelf. It would take a while to check each one, and I did have a paper to write, a research paper on the French Revolution that was due at the end of the week, but the French Revolution seemed trivial compared to what I was doing, of almost no consequence at all. I pulled out Lethbridge. Nothing there, but Regina had an L. Kramer.

I was on Winnipeg when I heard, “Ruthie!” I looked up to see my grandmother Bella.

“I thought it was you.”

She was always happy to see me, but never more so, it seemed, than at that minute. Probably because I was at the library rather than hanging around the shopping centre with my friends. She had already looked to see what I was reading. I saw the puzzlement in her face as I stood to give her a kiss.

“Bubby,” I said.

I felt the way I had five years earlier when Elka found the stash of gum and other candy that Carrie and I had stolen and hidden between my bed and the wall. There was no reason to feel that way now, I told myself. What was the crime in looking through a phone book? But my face was hot and I felt an awkwardness entirely out of place in a meeting between a girl and her grandmother in the reading room of a public library.

“Who do you know in Winnipeg?” Bella asked me, because contrary to Ida Pearl’s assertion, Bella didn’t actually have a finely tuned sense of other people’s privacy. If she sensed my awkwardness at the moment, which she had to, that would only be more reason to pry.

“Oh, no one. I’m just taking a break from a paper I’m
researching.” I launched into a long and tedious description of Danton’s fate during the Reign of Terror.

“Who are you looking for in the phone book?”

It was possible she didn’t actually know, that she was asking the question in a purely neutral, curious way, but I felt she did know. What other reason could I have for looking through the phone book of a western Canadian city? What other person might I possibly be looking for?

“My mother,” I said.

She hadn’t known, I realized immediately from her response. Her delight at finding me in her favourite haunt was erased, her expression so serious now it seemed pained.

“I found a few L. Kramers,” I said, just to try to sound normal, to change the look on her face. “I know they’re probably not her.” I didn’t actually know that, was still racing with excitement that one of them might be.

Bella nodded. “Put the phone book away and come outside with me. I want to talk to you about something.”

I was resentful, resistant. I didn’t need or want to hear from her the advice she was going to give me, her warnings about cans of worms and Pandora’s boxes, but I knew there would be another opportunity to continue working my way through the phone books. I put the book away and followed her to the lobby, sat beside her on one of the benches.

“Your mother’s name wasn’t Lily Kramer,” she told me.

Just like that. No preparation, no preamble about having something to tell me that might be confusing, difficult, whatever. Just that. My mother’s name was not what I thought it was.

“Not Lily Kramer. Not Lily Azerov. Not Lily anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Lily Azerov was somebody else’s name that she took at the end of the war. It wasn’t that uncommon,” she added quickly.

I knew it wasn’t that uncommon. I had a friend at school whose father had taken the identity of another person in order to get into Canada. It was a secret I would never breathe to anyone—not even to this day—for fear she and her family could still get deported. But the fact that it wasn’t uncommon wasn’t the point.

“So … what
is
her name?”

That seemed to me to be closer to the point, but Bella shrugged. “She didn’t want anyone to know.”

“But why?”

“Why did she take another name?”

That wasn’t exactly what I had been asking, but I let Bella answer.

“Because she was from Poland, very near to the Soviet border, and I think she was maybe afraid she’d be forced back there when the war ended. The Soviets were the liberators of Poland, don’t forget.”

“But tons of people came over from Poland after the war.” Half my friends’ parents, it seemed.

“Whether she really needed a false identity, I don’t know. I think she probably didn’t, in the end, but maybe she did. I don’t know,” Bella said again. “But she didn’t keep the name Lily once she left you and your father.”

I was just wasting my time looking for a Lily Kramer or a Lily Azerov in the phone books, in other words. “How do you know that?”

“I feel it.” And then, as if sensing my dissatisfaction with that answer: “You can’t explain everything you feel in life.”

I thought about what she had just told me, tried to absorb it.

“But wouldn’t anyone have told me?” If it was really true, is what I meant. I found it hard to believe that my father and Elka and Sol would have withheld such a basic fact from me all these years.

Bella took so long to answer, it was as if she’d never considered the question before. “I think your father wasn’t sure what to do. What was best. For you.”

“So he thought that it was best for me to not know that my mother’s name was fake?”

“I know you don’t understand that now, but maybe you’ll understand it better when you’re a mother yourself.”

“I don’t ever intend to lie outright to my children.”

“No one was lying to you, Ruthie.”

“What would you call it then?”

Bella didn’t answer.

“It’s lying,” I said.

“I shouldn’t have taken it upon myself to tell you. Not without talking to your father about it. But when I saw you with the phone books, and then you told me what you were doing … And you’re sixteen now, not a child any more.”

I didn’t believe her. My father and Elka would not have withheld this from me. But I didn’t disbelieve her either. Why would she make up something like this?

“I probably need to talk to my father,” I said.

She patted my hand. “Nothing’s really different than it’s ever been.”

I looked at her and saw she believed that. So what if my mother’s name had been Selma or Freda rather than Lily? She had still left; I still had never met her; I still had a family who did love me. That’s what Bella meant, I assumed, but if she’d
been speaking Martian it would have made more sense to me at that moment.

“It’s different” was all I said.

Initially I felt a bit of excitement. There was an element of mystery about my mother now that had been lacking before. She wasn’t simply a woman who had cracked, but a woman who had been hiding behind an entirely false identity. And why? Why would she not want her real name to be known, as Bella had said? What was she afraid of? Who was she, if not Lily Azerov Kramer? I would speak to my father, demand he tell me the complete truth, even if it was difficult. It was time now. I was sixteen, no longer a child.