Maudit Juif

I sift through layers of a muddy lake until I settle at the bottom. There are no bubbles floating up to offer me hope. My heart slows down. I cross my legs and sit and sit. Sometimes I stretch my legs out. The water surrounding reminds me of my childhood room, that stream of light coursing from a ceiling corner to a pinpoint on my skin, except this water presses down on each pore, soaking me through and through. I wait. I am always waiting: for Caroline to wake up; for Caroline’s lids to become heavy with sleep; to walk through the house when hush is a sound; to be alone; not to be alone.

I love gladiolas. Also ferns. Wild flowers. Every week I order gladiolas for each of our main rooms, even the ones without furniture. Young Brothers delivers all the fruit and vegetables and replaces flowers and plants that die from drowning or drought. Last week I added up the grocery tab, including the butcher, and it came to three hundred and fifty a week.

“My banker says we’re overdrawn by one thousand every month,” Abie says and I say “oh” and “I’ll try to do better.” He’s a head hunter now and I think it suits him since he’s always talking about hunters and farmers. “Not everyone can be a hunter,” he says. When we go to those fast food places he says “Repeat” and “Is there someone here who speaks English?” I don’t stand in line with him anymore. Usually I wait in the car and refuse to go in. “You forget where you came from,” I say. “You spoke Yiddish on the farm until you moved to the city.” He reminds me that my grandparents were Russian peasants and my father is the son of a shoemaker. “Exactly,” I say.

I know my roots. Challah bread and the wind-up menorah, Sunday dinners and weekly visits to my grandmothers, kasha knishes and garlic bread, the Voice of Women and Tommy Douglas, dressmakers and Acapulco, the Bolshoi and the Soviet Army Chorus, Angelina in her blue and white striped uniform receiving the day’s instructions from my mother, Borden’s milkman in his brown uniform, my mother ordering meat from NDG butchers, the bald vegetable man, the gardener bringing flats of burgundy leaves and posies in primary colours for my mother to choose from, deliveries from Steinberg’s, our green station wagon for those rare trips to the supermarket.

Abie was born in a DP camp outside Munich. After the war his mother, dressed as a nun, travelled from Poland to Siberia in search of her husband whom she had just married before he was sent away, and she, along with thirty-six others hid in the cave. One thousand days underground. Abie says he’s going to rewrite the Baba’s book. He says that after seders and weddings. In Canada, three brothers, one sister, and their respective families lived in a four-room farmhouse in Chateguay─each family to one room. At mealtimes the children would sit at the big table in the kitchen and grab food from platters of steaming potatoes, corn, and cabbage.

When I tell Abie he has no manners, he tells me another farm story. He also tells me how his mother used to scream out in her sleep every night, and when his family moved to the duplex on De La Peltie, how he and Mendel were chased by chain-wielding gangs yelling “Maudit Juif,” how they’d ambush the nuns, pelting them with snowballs, and how he’d stand, even in winter, on his back balcony so he could hear Oscar Peterson play piano. And then his family moved to the bungalow on Robinson Avenue while the uncles had their split-level custom houses in Hampstead. We both like money─Abie because he never had enough and I because we always had more than enough.

Copyright Janice Colman 2009