When Harpo woke up some time later, he wasn’t sure where he was, but he wasn’t worried either. This wasn’t an unusual state. Sleeping was his favourite pastime. He often drifted off during the day, and always in the strangest places. He looked around, saw the owner of the lodge sitting across from him. Sam. Harpo remembered him from behind the desk when he’d checked in. Sam, the husband of the woman that he’d been chasing for days.
Harpo realized that his arm was still under the cushion, under his bottom. He must have left it in there and fallen asleep. Now he couldn’t feel it at all. He couldn’t move it either. He yanked it out with his other hand, and it weighed more than a house, and you couldn’t get gangrene from this, Minnie had told him once, or else all the restless sleepers in New York would be walking around limbless. Abruptly, he remembered why his arm had been there in the first place. He’d been searching for Ayala’s letter. The strange love note was stuck behind the cushion, where he must have dropped it. Harpo shifted to sit on top of it.
Sam looked up.
Harpo wiggled his fingers, and it was a good thing he could do it now too, because he didn’t know what to say. Usually, he just said whatever popped into his head, but he couldn’t say what he was thinking now. Sam couldn’t know about his wife’s affair, about the letter probably addressed to that other man. What had he been called? Simon? Oh, and Harpo had been thinking about Ayala’s hips as well. Not now. But earlier. He’d planned to find Ayala’s room, had thought about finding a bed or some quiet spot, lying down with her, and—he certainly couldn’t say that. Harpo raised his tingly arm again, supporting it with the other hand.
Sam nodded, so Harpo smiled and raised his hand again. Sam smiled and put down his newspaper. Harpo smiled and Sam smiled, and Harpo felt like bounding over to Sam’s newspaper and ripping it to shreds. He might do it too, if they did this smile routine one more time. He’d rip up the paper, then dive behind the sofa and catapult the balled up pieces right into Sam’s coffee mug.
“I’m going to Russia,” Harpo said quickly.
“Are you?” This time, Sam folded the newspaper neatly and put in on the table. Harpo made himself nod and think some more normal thoughts. He pictured a ship.
“Well, you’ll probably go on a passenger boat,” said Sam, and Harpo looked up, his mental picture of a boat rocking. “Frankly, I think that you should. Travel in a bit of comfort. You won’t regret it.”
“You swam?” said Harpo.
“We came over on a boat carrying coal dust. The captain was the second cousin of a partner of mine and he got us passage on board without too much fuss about papers and exit visas. We had some, but maybe not very good ones. It was a rough crossing.”
“Do you have any advice about visiting Russia?”
Sam scratched his beard. “Eat borscht,” he said. “It’s not the same here. And find someone who bakes. That’s my advice. I think you should eat.”
Harpo leaned forward. “Tell me more.”
“You like food?”
“I love food,” said Harpo. “My father—his name was Frenchie—he cooked. It was great. He was the greatest. I don’t know how he did it. We were poor. But still. He managed. I used to stab my brothers with forks over his dinner rolls.”
“Just my kind of man,” said Sam. “I’d stab a man for a piece of mandelbrot. It’s a hard fact to face, but I believe I would. Do you like coffee? Have some. My Ayala makes it herself. She roasts the chicory, or whatever it is she can get her hands on these days, and whatever she finds, she makes it taste good.”
“That’s like Frenchie,” said Harpo, and it felt good to tell someone about him, to say his name out loud again. “Frenchie was a magician.”
“I think I read that in the newspaper.” Sam’s expression wasn’t pitying. It was something else. Wistful maybe. Wistful! “They wrote many wonderful things about him.”
“You read about my father?”
“I would have liked to have met him.”
Harpo liked this man. He liked Sam a lot. “Frenchie would have loved meeting you too.”
He wouldn’t sleep with Ayala. That was out of the question. What had he even been thinking? He reached under the cushion again and crumpled the love note he’d found. Maybe he could find the letter, make amends for his intentions, for every time he’d gone through with it in the past. And if he did, then maybe that would prove something. Maybe he could show himself that he was capable of having a family. He’d run straight home to Susan.
Sam started to say something else when there was a noise outside, and two little girls scrambled into the room, Blima and another one, a smaller kid, three or four years old at the most, a streak of shiny blond hair and gleaming black shoes. She tore through the room, put her head in Sam’s lap, and he hoisted her up by the hips until she was upside down and her legs were dangling.
“These are my girls,” said Sam. “Blima and Sonja.”
The upside-down girl wriggled, and her father set her down and patted her backside, and she disappeared behind the chair with Blima. Sam was beaming.
“And what are you two up to?” asked Harpo.
Blima climbed onto the back of the easy chair, like a monkey. “We hid our toys. So that way, when we find them again, it’s like we’re getting a present all over again.”
“That’s clever.”
“It’s called Second Present.”
“And where do you have these treasure hunts? In this room?”
“Not only here.” Blima brushed her father’s hair around her finger, made a little ringlet. Then the little one popped up beside her. They made a lovely picture. They had such different complexions. One was light, the other dark, but both had those beautiful red cheeks.
“Other places?”
“Yeah,” said Blima. “We hide stuff other places too.”
“Where else?” Harpo remembered the cozy little room where they played cards in great blue clouds of cigar smoke. He squished his love note again. “In that room with all the doors?”
Blima ducked behind the chair.
That room wasn’t used that often during the daytime. She’d have lots of privacy to hide things there. And it had lots of chairs and hiding spaces too. He’d look there next. “I like that room,” he said. “It’s a great place to hide things, I think. It’s like it’s the centre of a maze.”
“That’s because Dad built things all around it,” came a reply from behind the easy chair. Blima. Blima the monkey.
“It’s peaceful in there,” said Harpo.
“I don’t go in that room,” said Blima.
“Never?” asked Harpo.
“Blima’s right,” said Sam. “I hate that room.”
“Why?” asked Harpo, but the girls didn’t wait for an answer. They ran out, Blima first, then the smaller kid tearing right after her. They must know this one. They must have heard it before.
“There are no windows,” said Sam. “I built rooms on all sides of it, and I forgot windows. So it’s stuffy. You could suffocate in there.”
“Have you considered punching holes in the walls?” asked Harpo.
“That’s brilliant,” said Sam. “Except instead of punching, how about we saw? Girls? Blima? Sonja? Where are my helpers? Where did they go? Come, girls, we’re going to redecorate.”
“Right now?” Harpo quickly stuffed the crumpled love note into his pocket.
Sam stood. “If I can get my girls to hold the wall straight, then why not right now?”
“I’ll help,” said Harpo.
“You will?” Sam clapped Harpo on the back and ushered him out of the room. “This is perfect, because I’ve been looking for something to do with my hands.”
“This is an important project,” said Sam, as he led Harpo and the girls into the garage where Harpo had found Blima last night. “Here’s why. The room of doors has one important piece in it. It looks just like a vegetable cart. In fact, it is a vegetable cart.”
Sam was assembling tools, and the girls were circling around them, like Blima was a tetherball and just didn’t want to get too close. Sonja just stuck by Blima, her little shadow.
“This is the cart that we pushed from Russia to France,” said Sam, “and we even smuggled it on the boat to Canada. I’ve always wanted guests to gather around it, so that we can talk about it, and tell them about our journey, the good parts anyway, the exciting things. But nobody goes in that room except to smoke or suffocate or gamble so it’s just ended up pressed against the wall, behind a folding chair.”
Blima opened a tool case and took out a hammer. It looked absurdly oversized in her little hands.
“Blima,” said Sam. “Blima was there. We had to leave in the middle of the night. Remember, Blima? A man came and pounded on the door. He said it wasn’t safe anymore. The Jews had to get out. We’d been found out, us and some others, maybe. He gave us some things and told us to leave quickly.”
Blima pounded at the sand.
“We went straight to Avi the fishman and stole his cart. We pretended to be vegetable vendors, travelling from town to town. Gypsies, Jews, we’re all the same to them. So we got away, a great adventure.”
At this, Blima crept to the tool case again, a tiny little 83rd streeter casing the joint. She took a pair of pliers and shoved them inside her sleeve. Crab claws. Adorable. Blima the monkey was now a crab.
“We stole vegetables from the fields as we were walking,” Sam was saying. “But that was only part of the disguise. Inside the cart, that’s where we’d put our valuable things. I’d built in a secret compartment. You can still see it if you really look.”
Harpo sat heavily on the tool box. Sam had everything. He had a vegetable cart. A tool kit. Saws, a work table, work benches, a whole exodus story of his very own. But that story was a scary one, Harpo realized with a start. Sam was telling it like an adventure, but he remembered creeping through empty corridors in the middle of the night. Harpo’s family had to do that too, bundled in clothes, carrying all the family’s possessions as they slipped down the echoey stairwells. And they’d just had eviction notices. He wouldn’t have wanted to hear pounding in the middle of the night. “Did you get much out of Russia?” he asked.
Blima came so close now that Sam was able to hook her around the waist. He pulled her into his arms and kissed the top of her head. “It should have been more difficult,” he said, “but we got lucky. It all seems a bit miraculous to me now.”
Blima wriggled away. Her expression made Harpo pause, desolate like it had been in the window, despite the monstrous snapping fingers. Harpo watched her sadly put the pliers back in the box.
Sam caught him watching her. “Do you think you want a family?”
“I do want my family back,” said Harpo. “Our movie was a bust, and my brothers are moving on. If my parents were around, they’d say you can’t break up the team.”
“I meant children,” said Sam. “Your own family.”
“Oh.” Harpo did want that. For the first time, he realized that this was the thing he really wanted—to be a family man just like Frenchie. But what if he couldn’t pull it off? Well, that’s what this experiment was for—if he could help this family, that would mean he was mature enough to have his own.
“I suggest you try it. Rent a wife and some children for a while. See how the whole thing strikes you.”
“I like your family.”
“I wouldn’t part with them.” Sam was looking through his tool bag, and Sonja was helping by sprinkling sand and pebbles on his shoes. She had a very serious expression. “I’ve regretted a lot of things in my life, but never that. I’ve never regretted one second with my Blima or my Sonja.”
“Do you think I should have kids?” he asked Blima, and that did it, that got her attention.
“Of course you should,” she said. “Also, you should get married.”
“It’s shocking that you’re not married yet,” said the little one.
“Okay.” Sam flung his tool bag across his shoulder. “We’re off. I need my helpers.”
Blima scurried out of the room.
“You’re not helping, Blima?” asked Sam.
“I’m very busy today,” came the careful reply from just outside. “I just don’t have time. If you’d have given me some advance notice, then I might have made arrangements.”
“And what about my Sonja?”
But Sonja had already run after her sister. “You have to give us notice,” she called behind her.
Harpo scrambled to meet Blima in the doorway. He knelt.
“We have a very busy day today,” she whispered.
“Second Present?”
“Also, Finding Stuff. It’s our job to go into the rooms when guests check out. If there’s anything left to collect, we have to show our parents, and sometimes we get to keep it if nobody wires to get it back.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility.”
“We also have to mail away for samples, watch for the ice truck, and across the street, there’s a little girl whose face is white like the moon. I didn’t talk to her yet, but sometimes I wave.”
Harpo held the wall that was moving back and forth as Sam pulled on the saw. Would the whole thing just crumble? The entire lodgehouse might fall right down on top of them. He shouldn’t have suggested this. In his defense, people usually knew better than to listen to his ideas.
Sam pulled the saw out of the wall and inspected his work. “This was a great idea, Harpo.”
“I was just thinking the opposite.”
“This should be good enough.”
“What should?”
But it was too late. Sam had already turned back to the wall. He gave it a punch, and the whole thing cracked inward, jaggedly. Then he pushed. Then he turned and leaned all his weight against it. Then the wall gave a cough of sawdust and gave up, and a chunk the size of an oven fell into the next room over. Harpo caught Sam before he could fall after it.
“Well,” said Sam.
Harpo didn’t know what to say.
The dust was clearing and revealing an uneven hole, one of those irregular shapes he could never identify in Miss Flatto’s second grade class. Harpo leaned closer, and hooked his fingers through to feel the edges, all the revealed strata of wall stuff— plaster, wood, some other things he couldn’t even guess at. Strata, meaning layers, seven down the Tuesday before last. This was uncanny. Also, this wall was thick. Walls couldn’t be this thick everywhere. He could swear that he and his brothers had punched through a bunch of them racing around the tenements back in New York. They’d run right through them, hit a wall and continued into the next room over, the next apartment over sometimes, having left vaguely person-shaped holes in clapboard roughly the width of paper.
“Well,” Sam said again.
“This place is well built,” said Harpo.
Sam picked his way through the wreckage. “That’s funny. I built this wall. I did it myself when we first moved in. But for the life of me, I don’t remember using anything except a couple planks of wood.”
“You built this wall?”
“I know that I had nails and glue maybe?” Sam ran his hands down the jagged edge. “I don’t remember any of this other stuff. Well. Miracles happen all the time.”
“Miracles?” said Harpo, not understanding, not seeing how a wall can grow inwardly. “The miracle of clapboard and insulation?”
“I think that’s my favourite thing about Canada. Miracles happen far more often here than they did in the old country, and it’s funny too because the old country was the place of prophets and golems and saints. But I guess everyone has to move on sometime.”
Harpo stepped back and looked at the window. His fingers and toes tingled. It didn’t look miraculous to him. It also didn’t look like a window. It looked like a hole in the wall. This wasn’t how he imagined it would go, but then what had he thought would happen? They hadn’t even brought a ruler.
“We just have to make it look a touch more presentable.” Sam rubbed his hands on his pants. “That should be easy enough. We can do it later. After lunch maybe.”
“We just had lunch,” said Harpo.
“Let’s have another one,” said Sam. “Suddenly, I feel like a bologna sandwich. Then we’ll just have to wait for another miracle. I’m telling you—they happen all the time.”
Harpo found Blima hovering near the room of doors. “I don’t think that my mother is going to like that window,” she said.
“I’ll fix it.” Harpo sat right in the doorway. “Don’t you worry about a thing.” Blima scrambled over to sit beside him, and Harpo offered her half the sandwich Sam had given him. She pulled out a slice of bologna, then handed the rest back.
“I like it though.” She cuddled into his side, rolled her bologna into a cigar shape, then pretended to smoke it like Groucho.
“Hey,” he whispered. “I found a letter.” He pried the sofa note out of his pocket. “It was in the room with all the windows.”
Blima carefully flattened it out. “A love letter!” she said. “Sonja must have put it there for Second Present.”
“It’s not your mother’s letter, though,” said Harpo. “Is it? Could that have belonged to your mother?”
“No,” said Blima, and she tucked the letter inside her waistband, hid it under a shirt. “It’s from a guest. Her name was Malka, it says.”
“Did you hide one of your mother’s letters two nights ago?”
Blima’s eyes widened. They were big like dish plates, bigger. “How did you know that? Except it wasn’t two nights ago. It was, maybe, two hundred nights ago. Or one thousand.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t just the other day?”
“I thought that I’d forget the whole thing happened, but I didn’t. I just feel worse every single day.”
“Oh.” Harpo leaned his head back against the wall. Suddenly, he didn’t know what was happening here at all. “Do you remember anything from when you were little? From back in Russia?”
Blima nodded gravely. “I remember everything.”