The Imposter Bride (24 page)

None of which she told her mother later as she wept in Ida’s arms. It was enough that she had thrown herself at a man who didn’t want her. To have to recount it in all its humiliating detail was too much and would only irritate her mother, who had no patience for histrionics, which was how she referred to Elka’s every response to being alive. Her mother would only end up lecturing her. Criticizing her. As if everything was her fault. As if she had asked to be born. Already Ida had placed a hand on each of Elka’s shoulders and had pushed her—gently, yes, but it was still a push—away from her bosom, where Elka had been nestling. She was holding her at arm’s length and examining her in that way she had that was never prelude to a smile of pleasure or even satisfaction. Any minute now she would comment on Elka’s dress, as if Elka didn’t already know that it was creased and plastered to her skin. As if she hadn’t already figured out that linen is not the fabric of choice for an occasion that’s likely to leave one drenched with sweat. Or maybe it would be her mascara that Ida would start with, the mascara she was not allowed to wear that was now collecting in black pools and running down her cheeks.

Was it possible that Elka could really be as stupid about
men as it appeared at this moment? Ida wondered as she looked at her daughter’s miserable face. Could her judgment really be as impaired as it seemed, her instincts as treacherous as Ida feared?

Like you were so smart
, Elka would fling back at her if she could read the thoughts running through Ida’s mind. Ida had not been smart, of course. She had been stupid, disastrously so, but in her own defence she could at least point to the fact that she had been alone in the world when she fell for Arthur Krakauer. She had been new in a country where she didn’t understand the language, alone in a city that she had never wanted to come to, where nobody knew who she was or to whom she had once belonged. She had left Antwerp feeling that her life was over. She had shared all of the nervousness of her fellow passengers on the crossing of the Atlantic but none of their hopeful anticipation. For them Canada was to be their new beginning, but for Ida it represented her place of exile. Her Elba, she had thought on the voyage over. Her Siberia, she decided when she saw where she had arrived.

The ship had landed in Halifax, which looked to her like no more than a shabby outpost wedged between a dark forest and the sea. She had boarded a train immediately upon passing through immigration and reclaiming her one bag of belongings, and it was at that point that her trepidation sank into a heavier feeling of depression. She had come to a wilderness, she realized as the train rolled through an endless monotony of trees, and it was one that had neither the magic of the fairytale forests she had imagined as a child, nor the promise of redemption implicit in the wildernesses of Exodus and other biblical ordeals. There was no magic here, she thought. Certainly no promise of redemption of any sort. There was just
forest, trees stretching as far as the eye could see, relieved now and then by outcroppings of rock, forbidding escarpments and the occasional bog or lake. Those signs of human habitation that she did see merely deepened her depression: intermittent towns and settlements that were mere specks in the eye of the desolation that surrounded them. Weariness overtook her. She closed her eyes and slept, but it was a heavy sleep that did not restore her. When the stirrings within the car alerted her that they were approaching Montreal, the sight of the city did not lift her spirits despite the clots of grey buildings as densely built as those she’d left behind, and the traffic—both human and vehicular—that crowded the streets. She saw the forested mountain behind the downtown core, a rump of the same forest she had been travelling through since disembarking at Halifax. It rose like a tumour in the midst of the city, like a remnant of a bad dream that persists in the day.

In retrospect, she knew she should have taken herself in hand at that moment. She should not have allowed her imagination to overheat and distort reality in that way. She was not in exile from her life, she should have told herself; this was her life now. And the forest she had passed through was simply that: a forest. It was more excessive, to be sure, than the forests she had known in Europe, but that’s all it was: excessive. Overdone. It was not the desolate wilderness that she had imbued with all manner of mystical and symbolic meaning, meaning that polluted her first impressions of the city that was henceforth to be her home. But she had not taken herself in hand, nor had there been anyone wiser or more level-headed to lead her out of the morass of her own depression. As she realized she was about to step into a city in which her life or death would be of no consequence to anyone who walked its
streets, she felt as empty as the landscape she had had to travel through to arrive there. This was her state of mind when she stepped off the train in Montreal. Was it any wonder then that she was so susceptible to the charms of the first flesh-and-blood man who smiled at her?

But it should not have been that way for Elka, she thought. Elka had never stepped foot outside the city of her birth, let alone her country and language, and she would never know what it was to be alone in the world. Not if Ida could help it. And yet she obviously felt herself alone. Ida knew that, had known it for years, but was at a loss as to how to make it not be so. Ida knew that Elka felt a loneliness so extreme that her own life felt to her like an exile. And that it was a feeling she would never dare express to her mother, for fear of Ida’s disdain, her dismissive irritation that Elka could even think of comparing the trivial struggles of her own life with those her mother had endured and overcome.

“Go wash your face,” Ida said, “and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

LILY HAD LOOKED OUT
onto the same forest as Ida Pearl on the train to Montreal, though to different effect. It was July when she landed in Halifax, but even in the sunny sparkle of that day she too had seen the darkness of the surrounding landscape—greens so deep they shaded into bluish black, a sea that had more grey than blue. But it was relief to her: the dark palette of the landscape, the cool wash of northern light. Restful, after the brash, harsh sun of Palestine.

She was exhausted by the time she finished all the formalities
of arrival and embarked on the train for Montreal, so she slept for several hours, saw nothing of Halifax and its outskirts. She slept until awakened by the screech and thrust of the train shuddering to a stop. The stop was too abrupt for it to have been planned; she did not expect to see the platform of a station, people with suitcases waiting for the train to pull in. But neither did she expect what she saw: a moon-washed plain on which a multitude of gnarled forms rose out of a dense low-lying fog. It was an eerie sight—already there were nervous mutterings among the other passengers.

“Not a place one feels inclined to linger,” the man in the seat beside her said, his words so inflected with Polish pronunciation and intonation that she didn’t immediately recognize them as English.

“It’s just a bog,” she responded. In another soil these same trees would grow straight and tall, she thought, and yet, there was beauty in this too, in the sheer persistence of these twisted forms.

“I can see that it’s a bog.” His tone conveyed his affront that she should think he hadn’t been able to discern that fact for himself. “The question is why we have come to a halt in such a location.”

His English was so precise yet so difficult to understand that she wondered if he had learned it entirely from books. He left his seat to investigate and would no doubt return in a few minutes to tell her, in the most pompous locution possible, that he was unable to find out where they were or why they had stopped. In the meantime she kept her forehead pressed to the window, oddly comforted by the gnarled figures that loomed like tormented crones in the moonlight, the blanket of fog that heaved and shifted like a living thing.

“No one knows anything,” she heard her neighbour say a few minutes later, as he resettled himself heavily beside her. “Not why we have stopped here in this decidedly unprepossessing landscape. Not when we might begin to move forward again towards our respective destinations.”

She turned to him. “It’s the fog.”

“I don’t think so, my dear. It takes more than a little fog to bring a train of this size to a halt.”

Did he think the size of the train had any bearing on whether the engineer could see the track in front of him? Did he think she was his
dear
? She pressed her forehead to the window again and, as she cupped her hands around her eyes to block out the light from the compartment that obscured her view outside, she felt a peculiar sensation, a flood of memory in the form of sensation, though she had never set eyes on this landscape before: the rotting, sweet smell of the river she had floated down with her father on summer nights like this, the heavy air filled with the buzzing, gnawing sounds of the marsh, the rhythmic splash of her father’s oar, a surfacing fish, a diving frog or bird. She was at once in her seat with her forehead pressed against the hard, cool smoothness of the window, and deep within the scene she gazed onto; at once on the train heading to the stranger she was about to marry, and in her father’s flat-bottomed boat, gliding soundlessly past the gnarled, looming trees.

The train lurched, then began rolling forward.

“As I said,” her neighbour intoned.

She closed her eyes and drifted off again to sleep, and when she awoke later all she could see was her own reflection in the blackness of the window. The car was quiet now. Even her neighbour had fallen asleep. She slept again, and when the light of dawn woke her they were in a landscape of cultivated
fields, a patchwork of greens and yellows with a wide grey river running through it.

Her neighbour was pouring hot tea from a Thermos and, seeing that she was awake, he pulled another cup from his bag and offered her some. “You slept well?” he asked.

“Well enough.” The tea was strong and sweet and surprisingly, pleasingly hot. “And you?”

“Not at all. I don’t sleep any more.”

She remembered the snores that had woken her a few times in the night, but refrained from smiling, nodded instead in a sympathetic way.

“You’re going to Montreal?” he asked.

She nodded again.

“Winnipeg,” he said, though she hadn’t asked his destination, didn’t care. “Boris Ziblow,” he said, extending his large, beefy hand, which she shook, noting the calluses on his palm, calluses like those her own father had once pressed against the smoother palms of those people whose social circles he was trying to penetrate.

“Lily Azerov,” she said.

“Very nice to meet you, Lily Azerov.”

That he didn’t ask where she was from seemed to her more a matter of tact than disinterest. They finished their tea in silence and she excused herself to freshen up.

“So tell me,” he said when she returned. “Do you have anyone meeting you in Montreal? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“My fiancé.”

“Ah,” he said, as if that changed something. As if he had been planning to propose marriage.

And why not, she thought. She knew about as much about
him at this point as she knew about the man who would be picking her up at the station in Montreal. More, in some ways. And they were sharing a cup of morning tea after having spent the night together, in a manner of speaking.

“You knew him from before?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Ah,” he said again, and with that a feeling of dread filled her about who and what exactly was waiting for her.

“I’ve heard it’s a lovely city,” he said.

“Winnipeg?”

He smiled. “Winnipeg too. But I meant Montreal.”

It suddenly seemed silly to her to be speaking to a man from her own country in a language that was foreign to both of them. “I hope you’re right,” she said in Polish.

He smiled, answered her in Polish: “And if I’m not?”

She smiled too and they both shrugged at the same moment. He pulled out a bag of almonds and offered her some. She realized how hungry she was as she ate the first few. She hadn’t eaten since noon of the day before. As she saw him watching her, though, she slowed her chewing, then refused his offer of more.

“There’s no shame in being hungry,” he said in a voice so kind that he seemed a different person from the pompous windbag of the night before.

She took a few more almonds, then accepted a second cup of tea.

“I had a friend who moved to Canada,” she told him. “This was several years before the war, when we were still in school. I pitied her terribly at the time. We all did. Having to leave her friends, her house. We went to see her off at
the station. She was crying so much she threw up. I told her she could live with me and my family, that she didn’t have to go. She threw her arms around me as if I had saved her life, but she went with her family and I never heard from her again. I interpreted her silence as a sign that she was so happy that she had forgotten all about us, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe she was so unhappy that she had to force herself to forget all about us.” Why this ridiculous outpouring? she wondered.

“Neither of your interpretations is correct,” Boris said, with a smile so benevolent she was willing to believe him. “She never forgot you.”

“Oh, I don’t know … I was wondering last night if maybe I’ll meet her again here, though I don’t even know what city she went to—it was a meaningless detail at the time. I’d like to see her, I think. Though, of course, she might not even recognize me. And she has a whole new life, by now, after all.”

Boris placed his hand on hers for a moment, his hand that was just like her father’s had been, the slight pressure of his calluses as familiar as a face she had known and loved.

“Do you have anyone in Winnipeg?” she asked.

“A cousin of my father’s that I’ve never met.”

She nodded. They watched the passing landscape.

“It’s a good country,” Boris said at one point.

“And if it’s not?”

His answering smile was rueful.