307

After my discharge from the army, I returned to Toronto, but my mother’s worried eyes pursued me even through the locked door of my bedroom, so I made plans to move to Montreal. ‘I’ll only be able to start over where no one knows me,’ I told her and my dad.

I meant what I said, and I was pretty sure that they believed me, but in truth I didn’t know what starting over might mean.

‘So you think you’ll go back to university in Montreal?’ Mom asked.

‘Sure, once I’m settled,’ I told her in a reassuring voice. But I couldn’t imagine I’d ever sit in a classroom again.

Since I was a kid, I’d been certain that I’d move to my father’s hometown when the time came to leave Toronto; the dry heat and towering red cliffs around Moab, Utah, always made me feel as if I’d arrived in paradise. So I surprised myself by choosing Montreal. In part, I was afraid of leaving Canada again so soon after coming home from Europe, but I also secretly believed that I hadn’t done enough to earn all the warm light and colour of the desert.

My first lodgings in Montreal during that summer of 1945 were at the Pension Honfleur, a gritty flophouse on the rue Drolet where I shared a bathroom with a colossal Ukrainian boxer named Fedir Petriv. Fedir dyed his hair with shoe polish, flossed his gold-capped teeth at breakfast and smelled in the day like talcum powder and in the evening like bourbon. After a week of timing my comings and goings to avoid what he called his kitten taps on my chin, I was able to rent a one-bedroom apartment above the Patisserie Les Anges two blocks down the street. I chose a French-speaking area of the 308city because I didn’t want to understand casual conversations, had no desire to make any friends and didn’t want to risk bumping into anyone from home – or worse, from the army.

The neighbourhood streets were potholed and dirty, and a lot of the shops were woefully neglected, but it was an area of Montreal that seemed perfectly frank about life’s difficulties, which was a relief. Homeless old men – clochards – in moth-eaten sweaters and fraying trench coats seemed always to be drinking beer or wine by the post office on the rue Saint-Hubert, and the oldest of them – a white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed leprechaun with a map of red veins on his cheeks – welcomed me to his territory by giving me the wilted pink carnation from his lapel when I handed him my spare change. I particularly admired the local kids and how they flew by on rusted bikes and roller skates, shrieking and giggling, communing with the god of danger that they had every right to worship at their age. On Saturday nights, I’d occasionally see a fist fight outside one of the scruffy, down-on-their-luck bars or hear some foul-mouthed commotion involving a sequined hooker, and it was then that our streets seemed the perfect locale for a blood-drenched film about Montreal mobsters and lowlifes. But in the daytime, with crowds flocking to the fruit-and-vegetable stalls in the Jean-Talon Market and clustering around bargain bins on the rue Saint-Hubert, I could more easily imagine a rags-to-riches Hollywood musical starring Bing Crosby and Judy Garland.

I was fairly certain that everyone who took notice of me pegged me as a lonely drifter or a mild-mannered nutcase, which was just how I wanted it. The only drawback to my new neighbourhood was the stench that often soured the air and made my nostrils itch; as the clochards explained to me, the nearby quarries had all been turned into garbage dumps in recent years.309

My bedroom had only one small window facing north, so that it had the tranquil and isolated feeling of a cloister. In compensation for the darkness, the rent was next to nothing and the landlady – Madame Fourier – agreed to have the cracked white enamel in the bathroom sink fixed right away. I bought a scarred wooden desk and wicker chairs at a nearby pawn shop, and I found a serviceable mattress and clean blankets at the big, bleach-scented Salvation Army store on Sherbrooke Street. At a Chinese shop just a block away, red and green rice-paper lanterns were hanging in the window, and I was certain I’d seen them before, but I couldn’t place where. Had Mom lit our porch with them when I was little? I hung them from the cracked ceiling in my bedroom, and gazing at the gentle, unambitious mixture of light they spread across my bed made me certain I had my own home for the first time.

My dad came to visit me a few weeks after my move and said my flat looked and smelled like an opium den, but he meant it with good humour. Over the spaghetti lunch he made us the next afternoon, he asked me to join him in the moonflower ceremony at sundown. His father – a Navajo healer – had taught it to him.

We drank Dad’s bitter elixir out of a mason jar while sitting on the front steps of my apartment house. The billowy clouds coming in from the west started revolving around me a half hour later, and my tongue seemed to turn into a rubbery little lizard. Dad helped me up to my flat and handed me a glass of water, then began smoking his pipe like a demon and chanting in Navajo. Sometime after he asked me to take a few puffs, time slowed down, and the walls added their resonant, cello-like voices to his, and their low, purposeful, dirge-like singing continued even when he grew silent.

Dad had spoken to me in Navajo as a boy, so I knew that he and the walls and even now the ceiling were asking the spirits of the moonflower to descend from out of their canyons in the sky along 310the cord we’d extended to them with our hearts. Their supplicating voices exhorted the spirits to be gracious and merciful to us, as well.

I soon began to see fluttering lights everywhere I looked – emerald green and yellow – and when the hundreds of points of radiance grew tails and snouts and horns, I broke out into a cold sweat. Dad gripped my hand tight and assured me that they were sentinels from the world of our ancestors sent to watch over us, and that they didn’t sting or bite. A number of them soon crowded around a piece of bread on the cutting board I kept by the sink, though it seemed more curiosity than hunger that drew them there.

When I went to the window for air, I saw a great stone arch in the distance, and the sky was the blue of fantasy summers, and I discovered that I was outside, in the Utah desert, and the sun was like burning metal against my face. A little while later, a cool rush of air shook me, and wings beat up by my ears, and I was flying over the main street in Moab. In the window of a shop was an ancient silver-and-turquoise necklace of stylised squash blossoms, but when I glided into the store I discovered I was in my room in Montreal. My father waved to me, and I turned back from a bird into a man, and I saw that I was back at my window.

‘You all right?’ asked Dad, and he patted my back.

‘I was flying,’ I told him.

‘Yeah, I could see that in your eyes.’

A short time later, while I was washing my face at the sink, everything in my vision went white, even when I closed my eyes. I’d have never believed it possible.

I thought I might be blinded, but Dad said that the whiteness was the gate to another world. ‘Walk forward in your mind,’ he told me, gripping my shoulders, and when I did, the stark brilliance deepened to a black so complete that it seemed endless and eternal.

I knew that Kokopelli was hiding somewhere in that darkness 311because I could hear him playing his reed flute. And I knew, too – though I didn’t know how – that I had entered the world that awaits us after death.

My body had grown chilled and heavy, so my father helped me into bed. After Kokopelli’s melody faded to silence, I sensed someone beside me, staring. When I turned, I expected to see my father, but a little boy with great black eyes gazed back at me. Had I already fallen asleep?

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

He shook his head as if he dared not say and stood up, and he walked forward. As I watched him, I saw that my apartment was just outside the wire fence of Bergen-Belsen. I wondered why I hadn’t realised that earlier, and I understood now that the camp would forever accompany me. The boy – who looked to be seven or eight years old – summoned me forward through the gate with a wave, but I shook my head and said I wouldn’t enter there ever again. Without speaking, he told me that he would go on alone – I could hear his thoughts – and as he walked among the starving prisoners, it seemed that the muddy ground and the wooden cabins and the barbed wire and everything in the camp was made of the same element. And that element was betrayal.

‘I hadn’t known,’ I called to him. And what I meant was, I hadn’t known that it was possible for men and women to betray nature itself.

 

I awakened after sunrise. My father was standing at my stove, stirring scrambled eggs. He was bare-chested, and he’d tied his long dark hair into a ponytail. ‘Welcome back, son,’ he said with the quick and eager smile that I’ve always associated with him. He’d made us strong coffee and handed me a cup. We ate while seated together on my bed. While I was wolfing down my eggs, he asked if I recalled what I’d told him the night before.312

‘No, I don’t remember saying much of anything.’

He said that I’d described a bit what I’d seen in the death camp and told me that he understood me better now and that he would help me. He made me promise to call him once a week even if I didn’t want to. He explained that the spirit of his father and other Navajo shamans would enter his voice and find a way to heal me.

‘Over the phone?’ I asked sceptically.

‘If I can hear you, they can,’ he replied with a good-natured laugh. ‘And they will know what to do. Don’t forget, they’ve had to deal with a great deal of cruelty.’

He didn’t need to add that the American government had murdered tens of thousands of our ancestors – millions if we included the other tribes – and forced them onto reservations.

Dad took me out for pizza that afternoon and then we walked to his car, so he could get back home that night. Once he was settled in the driver seat, he said he understood that I needed time on my own, without being watched. He reached into his coat pocket and handed me a bolo tie of a Navajo kachina to protect me.

‘It’s from your mom,’ he said.

The kachina had turquoise eyes and a headdress of red coral. ‘She sees even in the moonflower darkness,’ he said, ‘and I expect she’ll send you a warning if you’re about to take a misstep.’

He pinched my cheek and told me I could use a shave, and his eyes moistened, and I knew it was because I was a man now and there was less that he could do for me than he’d hoped. ‘When you’re feeling down, tell yourself that you and I and your mother are one. You understand?’

After he left, I sat by my window, and my father’s great love for me made me want to weep, but I didn’t permit myself to do so. Before I could give way to tears, I needed to apologise to all the living and the dead that I had seen – especially all those tormented 313and starved prisoners that had been tossed into the burial pits I’d helped to dig.

Mom and Dad and I are one. When I was particularly depressed – unable even to get out of bed – I told that to myself, though it didn’t seem to do me much good.

The slightest rumble of a truck or birdcall would tug me out of sleep, and I ended up with insomnia, so I was often lying in the dark, or reading a cheap paperback, and sometimes I’d listen to street conversations in French. Il est vraiment sympa … C’est une très belle maison … Words clung to my thoughts as if to summon me out into the world, but I wanted only to stay home.

Sometimes I’d picture myself finding refuge at a farmhouse at the edge of the sea, and after a while I realised that across all that cold grey water was my previous life.

My high-school French teacher was named Zotique Groleau, but behind his back we called him Monsieur Exotique Go Slow, because he was from Paris and had straggly grey hair that he often wore under the burgundy-coloured beret of French paratroopers. Also, he had a bum right leg and walked with a limp, especially during the winter. I was very curious about his long, pensive pauses, which made me think he was recalling his youth, but I’d never found the courage to talk to him about anything but conjugations and tenses. Now that I heard French all the time, I often wondered if he was still teaching. And if he forgave me for being such a poor student. It seemed sometimes as if I had learned nothing in high school or my one year of university that might have prepared me for what I saw in Europe. But very probably there’s no preparation for mass murder.

One particularly warm dawn, I went for a walk down the rue de Bellechasse in only my pyjama bottoms and carpet-slippers. An old woman peeling an orange asked me in French and then 314in English if I was lost, though I think what she really meant was, Do you want me to call a doctor?

She was built like a bulldog and had two blue clothespins attached to the collar of her apron.

‘Non, merci,’ I replied, though I wanted to say, I think I’ve just got to keep walking.

A few blocks further on, I found a red vinyl armchair amid a pile of junk on the sidewalk, waiting for the garbage pick-up. A calico cat with fearful eyes was sitting on its arm; it hissed at me as if I had murder on my mind and dashed away. A half-filled box of pastels was under its seat cushion, and written on the cover in blue was the name Guy Mercier.

I wondered right away what the name of the boy I’d seen during my moonflower vision might have been – the young man with the big black eyes and hair cut in bangs.

I pictured Guy as fair and tiny, and he wore big tortoiseshell glasses. I saw him lying on his bed beside his lazy old Persian cat, drawing them both. But I could tell just by thinking of his name that Guy had not lived to adulthood. Then, when I picked the box up, it seemed scented with my dad’s particular brand of pipe tobacco, which seemed impossible. I grew dizzy and troubled, and I sat down on the sidewalk to keep from falling.

After a while, I remembered that my father had told me that the moonflower spirits might come to me again on occasion and give me their insights. So I closed my eyes and welcomed them, and the dizziness soon subsided, but I never figured out what they wanted to tell me, unless it was simply that I ought to take the pastels home with me.

All the way home, I daydreamed of little blonde Guy in his hospital room, and I saw the ashen, downturned faces of his parents, and I knew they were thinking of all that their son would never 315become. Most of all, he’d wanted to be a pilot. And because I could see the dark hollows around his eyes so clearly, and hear him asking his grandmother for chocolate, and understand everything he said in French, I suspected that I was losing my mind.

I began drawing colourful landscapes on the walls of my apartment. A tree was a single green-and-blue curve, the horizon a long yellow line. I was trying to see if I could evoke and even shape my feelings about the world with just the slightest of gestures.

After covering one entire wall with my landscapes, I realised I had adopted a coded language of colour.

Red = fear

Sky blue = peace

Purple = wisdom

Olive green = relief

Yellow = longing

Burgundy = mystery

A little later, I began to draw only anger. That was a surprise; I hadn’t known I was hiding any.

My anger was brown and black. Shadings of midnight blue turned it to rage; dark green turned it to sputtering, mindless, self-loathing fury.

I was reading a book about ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum at the time, and I drew Mount Vesuvius behind my bed as a brownheaded cyclops with a wrinkled blue eye. He was spewing burning rain over the townspeople.

The molten rain was orange and red. The people of Herculaneum folded themselves around their sons and daughters to shield them, but their air became so hot that it scalded their lungs. Sometimes, there is simply no escape. That was the moral I took from what I drew.

When I told my father about the deaths I’d depicted, he told me to walk east, toward the sun, every morning, and west in the 316evening. He said that my drawings of the victims of Vesuvius were telling me that hunkering down and curling over my hopes was the wrong strategy. He taught me prayers to the sun god and told me to chant them in my spirit voice when I was walking. As for Mom, she had realised that trying to cheer me up on the phone wasn’t going to work, so she channelled her love into packages of food, mostly dried mushrooms and tomatoes that she had learned to make herself. She also started sending me her favourite novels.

Over my first months in Montreal, I often tried to get the shopgirls that worked on the rue Saint-Hubert into bed, but my courage would vanish while I was chatting with them. The first of the girls to agree to venture home with me worked at a sad little women’s clothing shop named La Femme Moderne and had grown up in Trois-Rivières. She was slender and slow-talking, and she wore bright red lipstick, and she sniffled a lot because of her allergies. In profile, she looked like Olive Oyl from the Popeye comic strip. After we made love, she touched the cyclops I’d painted behind my bed with her hesitant fingertips. I understood then that I’d created him as a warning to all those who entered my flat.

‘He’s not so bad – it’s me you’ve got to worry about,’ I told her, but she thought I was joking and started to giggle.

Cerberus … I drew him on the inside of my door as an additional warning. His thrashing canine head dripped rabid saliva. When I’d finished the high curve of his whip-like tail, I thought, Did the Greeks get you all wrong? Were you only trying to protect the dead from further harm and humiliation?

I walked toward the sun every morning, as Dad had recommended, but thunderclouds packed my head, and I could feel the flaming rain falling inside me nearly all the time. I was sure that it had been coming down ever since I first caught sight of Belsen and that it would never cease.317

Everything I drew with my pastels – even the burnt-out wooden synagogue I’d seen near Kraków – seemed a reflection of something inside me, a mirror image of all that was broken or ruined in my mind, and that would never to be repaired.

Outside and inside share the same horizon, and that horizon is me, I wrote above Cerberus, and I wondered why I hadn’t understood that earlier.

The second of the girls I managed to get into my bed told me she thought I was handsome and funny, but I told her I wasn’t ready to date anyone on a steady basis.

‘You don’t like me?’ she asked sadly.

‘No, it’s not you. It’s me. We like to believe that we can recover from anything, but we can’t.’

‘Recover from what?’ she asked.

‘I wish I could explain, but I can’t,’ I told her.

A secret … After we made love, the desire to end my life washed over me. I imagined myself slitting my wrists and blood-painting more victims of Vesuvius on the walls of my bedroom until I lost consciousness. That was the real reason I didn’t want her coming back.

A few days later, I sought help in my drawings for the first time; I sketched a little blue finch perched on the roof of the domed synagogue in Bialystok. I figured I was waiting for the old rabbi to come out and spot me above him and teach me the prayer of apology I needed so badly. Once I had spoken it in the language of birds, I would ask him to take me in his hands and toss me high in the air and send me back across the ocean to my childhood.

But I knew that he couldn’t come out to me; the Nazis had locked him and two thousand other Jews from the city in the building and set it ablaze.

I began to add myself to some of my previous landscapes. I 318drew myself as a crimson-coloured fish swimming in a sluggish river bordered by mangroves and a bobcat leaning over the rim of a sunlit canyon. I was always alone. I was always waiting.

Sooner or later, someone holy will find me, I thought – the Paiute prophet Wovoka, or maybe Saint Francis, or …

Or even Marian Anderson.

Was Marian Anderson a strange choice as my saviour? Probably, but she was the first person to teach me that the human voice can soar into places of the heart where nothing else can go.

Mom was a sixth-grade teacher at the Allenby Public School in Toronto, and she started me and her students on poetry with the Old Testament and Marian Anderson’s ‘Ave Maria’. And then she played us Negro spirituals like ‘Go Down Moses’ and ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’.

I painted Marian on my bedroom door, with her arms raised over her head, summoning the new Creation that I needed so badly.

When I told my dad about her in our weekly phone call, he said, ‘Yes, son, you should join your voice to hers like you and I used to do.’

To give me that advice, my father used the speech rhythm of the shamans, which was slow and precise. He often spoke in Navajo, because he couldn’t find the English translations for what he wished to say.

‘Do you have enough money to buy a record player?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, but I lied. I was running low. Soon, I’d have to find work.

Three days later, a short, middle-aged man with stiff grey hair and a hooked nose knocked on my door. He said his name was Darryl and that he and my father had worked together at the Toronto Brick Company before I was born. He was carrying a big 319box. In it was a record player. I invited him inside but he said he was double-parked and couldn’t stay.

‘How did my father know I was lying?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, maybe you haven’t yet learned how to lie convincingly,’ he said, and with an affecting, high-pitched laugh, he added, ‘A couple more years in Montreal, and it’ll come more naturally.’

I called up my father to thank him, but he wasn’t home. My mom got me talking about the vegetarian cookbook she was organising to raise money for her synagogue. It was her way of reminding me to eat well, and I assured her that I was making soups with her dried vegetables. In all that she didn’t dare tell me, I sensed the length and breadth of her hopes for me, and I tried not to be oppressed by them, but I failed.

 

After I finished my book on Herculaneum, I started an anthology of short stories by Willa Cather that I’d found in a charity shop just around the corner from my flat. I was reading it by the light of my mom’s menorah – her parting gift to me – and drifting off toward sleep when I came to the following paragraph in ‘Flavia and Her Artists’:

‘Laughing, Flavia started the ponies, and the colossal woman, standing in the middle of the dusty road, took off her wide hat and waved them a farewell which, in scope of gesture, recalled the salute of a plumed cavalier.’

I don’t remember standing up, but I do remember the feeling of something warm brushing against my thoughts. A man’s hand?

I picked up a pastel from my desk and slashed two orange lines and then a third. They seemed to form a long feather, and I imagined it floating down into my hands. So I filled in its contours 320with tight strokes of white and black pastel, then smudged them together. I turned the orange to russet by rubbing in a little brown.

Russet and grey – it seemed a mix of fear, anger and melancholy.

The next day, I sketched a line under the feather, and a little while later, I turned the line into the outlines of a fedora. I surprised myself then by drawing a woman’s gaunt profile under the hat. In the story I told myself about her in bed that night, she’d put it on to cover her hair, which had begun falling out. I imagined that she was dying, and she wished to tell me her last wishes, but she didn’t believe that I would understand her Yiddish.

 

I didn’t think much about the woman I’d drawn until about fifteen months later, in the late winter of 1947. By then, scores of scruffy Italian immigrants had settled in my neighbourhood. The men who hadn’t yet found jobs stood around on street corners, their cheeks and chins unshaven, smoking and murmuring and scoffing. I was working as a waiter at the Fiore d’Italia, a home-style restaurant owned by a Sicilian family just a few blocks from my apartment.

I’d moved on from creating frescoes on my walls to paintings on canvas, and though I’d decided to make street scenes in Montreal my overarching project, some vestige of Bergen-Belsen would suddenly appear – leaving poisoned clots of paint – in even the most tranquil of cityscapes.

Some days, I woke up oppressed by the knowledge that I was doing very little with my life that anyone would consider useful. On such mornings, I sensed that I was drifting toward a future of failure and frustration. I still spoke to my father every weekend, and it was reassuring to hear his voice, but my relationship with my mother had degenerated. In the awkward silences that punctuated our conversation, I sensed her desperation for me to come home, but that was the one thing I couldn’t do.321

After my evening shift at the restaurant, I generally headed straight back to my flat, but one particular Friday night in early March, I walked past it, drawn by the full moon. Its glow was so soft and near that it seemed to be the kind-hearted and benevolent moon god that my grandfather had told me about when I was little.

I turned left on the rue Dante because I heard singing coming from just down the street, and it sounded like gospel music. Crusted snow and sheets of ice covered the sidewalk and streets – it was a frigid night. My steps were brittle but sure.

After I passed the first houses, the voices faded. Were the moonflower spirits playing tricks on me? That’s what I assumed, since the only song that I could hear now – faintly, from a top-floor apartment – sounded like a big-hearted French crooner wooing his sweetheart.

I’d never been on the rue Dante before, and at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Laurent, I discovered a billiard parlour with a pink-and-green neon sign reading bar billard le troubadour. It was still open, and I wouldn’t have normally gone in, since I didn’t play pool, but I figured that a mulled wine or grog would be just the thing to warm me up.

The bar was smoky and smelled faintly of marijuana, which I was able to identify because I had gone to a jazz club downtown on a few occasions. The bulky metal ceiling lamps made the green felt of the pool tables look electrified. Two scruffy-looking young men were playing at the table farthest from me, and an old man wearing a fuzzy cap was seated on one of the stools at the back, snoozing. At the bar was a boisterous, slump-backed group of middle-aged drinking buddies, and at the far end, around its curve, sat two young women, both in tight skirts and dark stockings, and wearing way too much make-up.

The place had the lonesome, forgotten feel of an Edward 322Hopper painting. I shuffled up to the bar and used my pidgin French to order a grog.

I sat on one of the stools near the snoozing old man until a young guy whom I hadn’t noticed before – had he been in the bathroom when I’d entered? – sauntered up and asked me something in French that I didn’t catch. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

‘I don’t speak French,’ I told him with an apologetic nod.

‘I ask if you want to play billiards with me,’ he said with a thick accent. His if was eef and billiards sounded like beeyar. He smiled in an inviting way, but I hesitated. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I promise you I will not take your money!’ He introduced himself as Shelly, and I told him my name.

‘It is nice to meet you, George,’ he said.

The French way he pronounced my name – that soft initial G – pleased me, perhaps because it convinced me that I was having an adventure outside my usual territory. Very soon, I discovered that he could speak English only in the present and future tenses. ‘The past is beyond my comprehension,’ he told me, laughing freely.

When he took off his jacket to reveal his T-shirt, I saw that he was lean and strong. His dark eyes had the longest lashes I’d ever seen, and his short, curly hair shimmered under the lights over the pool tables. As he racked the billiard balls, he asked me if I was studying at McGill, and I told him that I was a waiter at Il Fiore d’Italia on the rue Saint-Hubert.

‘Merde!’ he exclaimed. ‘When you come in, I am sure you are from McGill!’ he said with an irritated twist to his lips.

‘Maybe I’ll go back to school one day, but not just yet,’ I told him.

In reply to his other questions, I said that I was from Toronto and had moved to Montreal a year and a half earlier, after my stint in the army.323

Shelly told me he was a gardener at the Montreal Botanical Garden. He said he loved his job because he was able to work outside most of the day, and because the young women who came to admire the flowers were in such a relaxed mood that they didn’t mind him flirting with them. After we started playing billiards, he jerked his hand back and forth along his cue stick and said that two weeks earlier he’d fucked a girl from Calgary in the palm greenhouse. ‘Jane,’ he said. ‘That is her name. She is a princess in the rodeo.’

He told me that the scent of moist, fertile life of the palm greenhouse made it the best place in the world for sex.

‘You ever fuck in a greenhouse?’ he asked me as he lined up a shot.

‘No,’ I said.

He sent the cue ball shooting across the table. ‘I am shit tonight!’ he snarled when it failed to send the ball he’d been aiming at into the side pocket.

As I scanned the table to see which ball I ought to try for, he put a stick of gum in his mouth and said, ‘When I’m with a girl who wants a second guy, I invite you. Tu vas adorer!’

There seemed to be something bigger than life about Shelly, and unflappable, too – as if he would perform his heart out even if only one person were watching. I was especially impressed by how he could talk with a cigarette dangling from his lips and wield his cue behind his back to make trick shots. In the film I imagined about Montreal mobsters, he quickly took on one of the starring roles – the up-and-coming young hustler who planned to sneak off to Hollywood with his girl as soon as he’d siphoned off enough money from his bosses to buy a big house on the beach.

After he’d beaten me at billiards, I confessed that I was a bit drunk and needed to get to bed, since I was working the next 324afternoon and evening, and he told me he’d walk me home – ‘To make sure you not get lost,’ he said.

As we started off, he asked where I lived, and when I told him my address, he stopped in his tracks and told me in a shocked voice that he lived just around the corner. In fact, we had to pass his apartment house to get to mine.

When we reached his place, he said, ‘This is my home. Top floor.’

‘So your place is the one with the bright blue curtains?’ I asked, pointing at the flat I meant. It was too dark to see the colour of the curtains, but I’d noticed them before.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You like them?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I make them myself!’ he said, beaming.

‘You sew?’ I asked – astonished.

‘Bien sûr. Saves money. And I’m good at it.’

A billiard champ and hothouse gigolo who sewed his own curtains … That made me laugh pretty hard.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

‘You! You defy expectations,’ I told him.

‘At least I’m good for something,’ he said with a mischievous smile.

I told him I could make it home from there, but he wanted to see my place. Inside my flat, he turned in an astonished circle around the living room. ‘So all these crazy drawings … you make them?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘What is their meaning?’

‘I haven’t got a clue.’

‘You must have une idée,’ he insisted.

‘They’re places I’ve seen,’ I added. ‘Landscapes inside me.’325

I figured that if I couldn’t sound confident, like him, at least I could seem mysterious. He nodded pensively, as if he knew exactly what I meant. When he noticed my mother’s menorah standing on my desk, he picked it up. ‘You a Jew?’ he asked.

‘I’m half-Jewish. My mother’s Jewish and my father is Navajo.’

‘Navajo?’ he asked.

‘An Indian tribe.’

‘Ah, oui! That’s fantastic!’

‘Is it?’

‘Absolument! Wow!’

‘But there are hardly any of us left,’ I pointed out.

‘Yeah, I know – it’s a crime what they do to you.’

‘And what’s your heritage?’ I asked.

‘Me, I’m Jewish – a hundred and fifty percent.’

‘Why the extra fifty?’

‘For the ones the Nazis kill,’ he said, and his eyes – catching mine – were deadly serious.

He put down the menorah and took both my hands, and he swung them between us – like a child’s game – and to my surprise, he leaned in to kiss me. I pushed him away, but he grabbed my shoulders and said, ‘Ecoute, mon ami, je sais ce que tu veux.’

It was true that I’d been semi-hard most of the evening and that I found him very attractive, but the idea of actually acting on my hidden desires had always terrified me, so I frowned and replied, ‘How the hell do you know what I want?’

He pointed to his eyes, then mine. ‘I see your thoughts.’

‘And what do they look like?’

‘They’re skinny. And scared. They prefer to be cachées. But you do not need to hide them. I like you a lot. And I’m very good at fucking.’

‘But I’m not interested in …’326

‘Please, George, you not waste more time. You must learn to do what you want. I will help.’ I discovered his mouth tasted of tobacco, whiskey and the cinnamon gum he’d been chewing.

When he gripped my cock in his rough hand and gave it a squeeze, my heart began to race. ‘You like that, don’t you?’ he whispered up at my ear, then gave it a lick.

I nodded, but he didn’t grin as if I were a conquest, as I might have expected. He caressed my cheek and said, ‘George, everything is okay. I just want to make you happy.’ He showed me a generous smile. ‘Tu es très beaux, tu sais?’

‘I’ve never been with a man before,’ I whispered.

‘Then you come to the right place,’ he said with a proud grin, and he dropped to his knees and took me in his mouth, which seemed the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

‘This seems wrong,’ I told him.

‘Au contraire, ta queue est parfaite!’ he said. He licked the tip of my cock. ‘She tastes like ice cream!’ He raised a finger of teaching. ‘You need to listen to your cock and not your head.’

A few minutes later, when he entered me, it burned.

‘I will not move,’ he said. ‘The pain will go away. Tu vas voir.’

‘Maybe I don’t want it to go away,’ I told him. ‘Maybe I want you to hurt me.’

‘And maybe you’re a little meshugge,’ he said, which made both of us laugh, and that seemed a good sign.

Lying on my belly with Shelly inside me, I gave up on trying to control who I was and where I was headed, and I was able to relax for the first time since I’d entered Bergen-Belsen. But the hollow after he’d come inside me and pulled out was devastating, and I began to sob.

Shelly kissed my hands and said he was sorry if he’d hurt me, 327and I wanted to say he hadn’t, but the tears were dripping from my eyes, and I thought, So this is what it means to start over.

 

That night I went to sleep in the arms of a man for the first time. The bristle of his chest hair against my back seemed unlikely and wondrous – and the answer to questions I’d never dared ask. Even his snoring seemed beautiful.

We both called in sick the next morning, and we made love on and off all day, and all my previous sexual experiences seemed delicate and pale in comparison. That evening, we went to a movie – The Best Years of Our Lives – and we held hands in the dark and both started weeping at the same tender moments. Looking back across my life, I decided that I’d never had a true friend before.

We made love once more that night, and I woke up just after dawn to discover Shelly was studying the hollow-cheeked woman in the fedora that I’d drawn shortly after I moved in. He was naked, and I saw that if I were to sketch him, I’d start with the sleek, powerful curve of his back and his amazing eyelashes, and he would be scarlet, amber and burgundy, the colours of fear, longing and mystery.

‘You like my work?’ I asked.

When he turned, his face was pale. ‘I think I know her,’ he said in a menacing whisper.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, sitting up.

‘She has a hat … it’s the same. Et tu as dessiné son profil.’

‘My French should be better by now, but it isn’t.’

‘You make her profile,’ he said.

‘Whose?’

‘Tia Graça. She is married to my uncle – my father’s brother. Tia … it means “aunt” in Ladino.’328

After Shelly explained to me about the origins of Ladino, I said, ‘Well, in any case, it’s just a drawing I made. It’s not anyone special.’

‘Nothing is just a drawing,’ he said as if nothing could have been more obvious. He found his cigarettes on my desk and lit one.

‘Where does your aunt live?’ I asked.

‘Dead. They all are. I go to Poland just after the war. My parents, my aunts and uncles … I find no one.’ He drew in urgently on his cigarette, clearly wishing he could have told me a different story.

‘But what were they doing in Poland? I don’t understand.’

‘My family is from Poland. I grow up in Warsaw.’

‘So you’re not from Quebec?’

‘No, of course, not.’

‘Then how do you speak French so fluently?’

‘My mother is born in France. I escape the Warsaw ghetto and go to Algérie. I work there while the war … while she is going, then come to Canada. My accent isn’t Quebecois. You cannot hear the difference?’ he asked disbelievingly.

‘No, I’m sorry – I guess my ear isn’t very good.’

He sat on the edge of my mattress. He put his hand on my leg and squeezed it. His fingers were icy. ‘Please, you must tell me about this woman you draw,’ he said pleadingly.

I explained about sketching the feather and the hat and finally the hollow-cheeked woman. I said that I had the feeling that she was wearing a hat because her hair was falling out. And that she needed to tell me her last wishes.

‘Last wishes?’ he asked.

‘What she needs to tell me – or have me do for her – before dying.’

‘So what are they?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. She didn’t say. Maybe she knew I wouldn’t understand her Yiddish.’329

He looked back at her for a time. ‘Typhoid fever,’ he said definitively.

‘What about it?’

‘It makes the hair … the hair fall. I read about it. The people in the camps have diseases.’

‘Look, Shelly, I don’t know if she was ill. I don’t know anything about who she was.’ I shrugged. ‘I make up things about the people and things I draw. They’re just stories.’

He looked at me as if my reply were wholly insufficient. And maybe a bit stupid, too.

‘When I’m working, images just come to me,’ I insisted. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘Are you telling the truth?’ he asked.

‘Of course, I am.’ But I wasn’t – not entirely; I was aware that I’d drawn her because I’d seen so many dying prisoners at Bergen-Belsen.

He stood up and walked to the window. In profile, he looked as if he were readying himself for a battle. When he turned, he said, ‘I live so close. We can see my apartment. And you draw Tia Graça. That means something.’

‘What’s it mean?’

‘I don’t know. I need to think about it.’

I was tempted to tell Shelly that I’d been present for the liberation of a Nazi camp, but I didn’t want to venture anywhere near that hell ever again, so I took him out for coffee at the Fiore d’Italia, where we wouldn’t be able to discuss serious matters.

That night, after we’d made love, I was lying on my back, drifting off. He was caressing my chest and telling me in a resentful mixture of French and English that his father had kicked him out of the house when he was sixteen, for sleeping with a girl and her older brother who lived in the flat above theirs.330

‘Both of them at the same time?’ I asked.

‘Oui, bien sûr. Porquoi pas?’

‘I don’t know. It seems … risky.’

‘It is not risky,’ he scoffed. ‘Brother and sister both like me. So why choose?’

My laugh came tinged with envy. ‘I guess that’s logical,’ I said.

‘Tia Graça, she saves me,’ he told me.

Shelly explained that his aunt had permitted him to stay with her and her husband for as long as he wanted. He’d ended up living with them for two years. ‘They become my second parents,’ he said. ‘And Benni, he is just six years old. He becomes my little brother. I read stories to him. And we talk of all the voyages we take. So many hours we have together of voyages-rêves.’

‘Where did you want to go?’

‘I want to go south … to the sun. To Italy, Spain, Greece … Portugal. Our ancestors are from Portugal. I tell Benni, “I take you there one day. We live on the beach, we eat lots of fish.” But the boy is crazy for Egypt. He wants to see the pyramids and the Nile and all those statues of gods – you know, with the heads of birds.’ Shelly flapped his arms. ‘The kid wants to fly!’

So maybe the sluggish river I’ve drawn in my living room is the Nile, I thought with a sense of arrival, but then a moment later it seemed a silly notion.

When I looked at Shelly, his eyes were troubled. ‘George, if Benni is dead too …’ He wiped a hand back through his hair. ‘I not go on.’

I sat up and took his shoulder. ‘Listen, let’s talk of other things. And let’s have some sherry as a treat. My dad gave me a bottle and it’ll calm you down.’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t want to be calm! I want 331to find Benni and my sister and everyone else.’ He switched on the reading light on my night table.

He wouldn’t look at me, so I apologised for trying to divert his attention. ‘What’s your sister’s name?’ I asked.

‘Esther.’

‘And how old would she be now?’

‘Nineteen.’ He gazed down, puzzling something out. At length, he said, ‘You know, George, if anyone survive, it would be Benni.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s alive in my dreams.’

‘And that means he made it?’

‘If he is not alive, I think I dream he is dead.’

What he said reminded me of a quote from Willa Cather that I’d written down in my journal. I got the book out from the bottom drawer of my night table. ‘It does not matter much whom we live with in this world,’ I read, ‘but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.’

‘Absolument,’ he said with a knowing nod, but he stood up and stubbed out his cigarette as if he were angry with himself. Almost right away, he tapped out another one from his pack. ‘Sometimes I wake in the night,’ he said, ‘and I’m sure I’m in Warsaw. I start to go to his room, but then I remember I’m in Canada. And I feel …’ Shelly searched for the right words while swirling his foot over the floor. ‘I feel that the night, it is falling on me.’ He patted his chest. ‘I cannot breathe.’

‘Where is Benni in your dreams?’ I asked.

Shelly lit his cigarette and funnelled the smoke up toward the ceiling. ‘I don’t know. I think in Poland – maybe Warsaw.’

His lips had begun to tremble, so I fetched him a glass of the sherry I’d offered him earlier. As I handed it to him, I said, ‘When 332you went back to Warsaw, did you leave your address with the people you knew – and who knew Benni?’

He pinched a bit of tobacco from his tongue. ‘No, I do not have an address yet. I am trying to make it to Canada. I speak to only two men from the old days – Nowak and Wieczorek. Before the war, Nowak owns a shop that sells fabric. But there is not much decent fabric, so he sells fruit.’

‘And Wieczorek?’

‘He’s a baker. He looks like hell, but he is alive. I buy him beer to celebrate.’

‘Could they tell you anything about Benni or his family?’

‘No, nothing.’

Shelly sat back against the windowsill and took a sip of his sherry, then stuck out his tongue and made a sound of disgust. ‘Trop doux!’ he told me.

‘I’ve got rum. Would you like that better?’

‘Yes, please,’ he said like a hopeful schoolboy, which made me laugh.

How easy it was to imagine Shelly as a ten-year-old terror charming everyone in sight!

I took my rum from the bottom drawer of my dresser. After I filled a shot glass for him, he sniffed it and smiled. ‘Ah, oui!’ he enthused. He knocked it back in one gulp like a gunslinger, then asked for more. He downed it in the same fashion and held out his glass once again.

‘You sure?’ I asked.

‘George, I survive the Nazis, so I think I survive your rum,’ he said, rolling his eyes. This time, however, he took tiny, grateful sips. I sat down again on my bed.

‘I tell Nowak and Wieczorek to tell my parents or Benni or anyone who comes home that I am alive,’ he said. ‘I say that they find me through the French Embassy in Montreal.’333

‘And they agreed to do that?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but … they are frightened. Nobody talks openly because the Red Army is all over the place. But they seem like they will help if they can.’

‘When exactly did you speak to them?’

‘Right after the war ends – in the middle of June, 1945. Then I visit a distant cousin in Łódź. His dad is Polish, his mom is half-Jewish. But she is dead. His family is … très dans le coup. Religious Catholics.’

‘What’s dans le coup mean?’

‘When you know all the right people. And my cousin, Tymon, he is still living in a très chic apartment on Piotrkowska Street – which means that he probably joins the Communist Party and works with the Soviets. But I don’t ask – I cannot risk irritating him. Anyway, he does not want to receive me because I am a Jew. But I push the door open. He promises to write to me at the embassy in Montreal if my parents or Benni or Esther … if they find him. But he wants a lot of money, so I give it to him.’

‘What an asshole!’

Shelly shrugged. ‘To have Esther or Benni back, I give him anything he wants.’

Shelly sat down next to me. He put his half-full shot glass on my night table and pulled his knees up by his chest as if he were chilled. ‘I come to Montreal in early July, and I go to the French Consulate. I write my address. And I give them a list of my family members. I ask them to send the list to the embassy in Poland when it opens. You see, it is closed when I am in Warsaw – no ambassador, nobody. Then I take a bus to New York. I go to the American Joint Distribution Committee. I give a man there my address in Montreal, and my phone – and another list of my family relations. He tells me he has a friend who will go to Poland in a 334month. But when I speak to him after that month, he says his friend finds no one on my list.’

‘It sounds like you did everything you could,’ I said.

‘Maybe. But I have this strange certitude that Benni is alive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘George, this is a bit peculiar.’

‘Peculiar in what way?’

‘Benni, when he is little, I sometimes hear him in my head. Or maybe I just think I hear him. I don’t know. I don’t care. He hears me too. It is like a game. We are like twins. You know, twins who know where each of them is. So now, every night before I go to sleep, I say, “Listen, Benni, I wait for you at the Portuguese synagogue on Stanley Street. I stay all Saturday afternoon.” And I tell him, “If you can’t come on Saturday, Rabbi Jonathan, he knows me. He will bring you to me. Or, if you prefer, you go to the Botanical Garden. Everybody there knows me. And if you have trouble, go to the main train station and ask where is Stanley Street.”’

‘When you’re talking to Benni, what language do you speak?’ I asked.

‘Yiddish. He doesn’t speak French. Sometimes I add a few words of Ladino, too.’

Shelly handed me his shot glass. ‘Finish it,’ he said.

My drinking out of the same glass made him smile at me warmly. It seemed a seal over our friendship – and his way of rewarding me for not raising doubts about him and Benni hearing each other’s thoughts.

‘Sometimes I speak to Benni at night for many hours,’ he added. ‘Because maybe he is alone, still hiding somewhere. Maybe he has no one to talk to. I know it is silly, George, but I think my words, they travel at night much better … more rapidly.’ He laughed as if he were close to tears. ‘It’s like I’m a radio station and he’s a receiver.’335

‘Shelly,’ I said, ‘if Benni thinks you’re dead, he might not be listening for your voice. He might not try to find you.’

‘Yes, it’s true. But I don’t know what else to do.’

He stood up again and gazed out my window as if searching for another strategy. I surprised myself by thinking, Meeting Shelly and helping him find Benni is why I turned down the rue Dante. And then a few seconds later, an even stranger thought made me jump to my feet and step to Shelly: It’s why I came to Montreal.

He gripped my hand and smiled at me as if his only other choice were to start sobbing, and I think it was at that moment that all my resistance to him dropped away, like old clothes that were too tight on me and that I’d never wanted in the first place.

‘When I was in the army, they sent me to Europe,’ I said, though my voice seemed to be coming from far away. ‘I ended up at Bergen-Belsen. I was there for the liberation of the camp.’

His eyes caught mine and held them for a long time, and I saw hope in them, which worried me. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I told him, ‘but I don’t remember seeing Benni or your aunt. Maybe I did, but I wouldn’t have known who they were. I didn’t know who anyone was. The inmates were starving. And their faces … They weren’t like normal faces. It was like they’d been hollowed out. You could see the outlines of everyone’s skull. I don’t think I’d have recognised my own mother if she’d been in the camp.’

He took my hand and placed it flat against his chest, so that his racing heartbeat was in my palm. ‘You feel that, George?’ he asked in a challenging voice.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘If anyone is alive, I must find them like my heart keeps beating. I have no choice.’

‘I understand. I didn’t tell you right away about Belsen, 336because … it was a nightmare, and it’s always with me, and it pulls me very far down … I’m sorry.’

‘Oui, je comprends. But what I need to tell you is that I promise you that my aunt has a hat just like the one you draw.’

I took my hand back because I didn’t want to give him false hopes. ‘Shelly, no one held on to any hats in the camp. The prisoners were in rags. Or naked. You don’t understand.’

‘Then explain to me.’

As I spoke of Belsen, the stench of death entered me. When I grew sick, Shelly sat with me on the floor of my bathroom and rubbed my back as I leaned over the toilet.

‘What a fucking mess I am,’ I said when I was done.

‘You’ll be okay,’ he told me.

‘No, I won’t,’ I replied. ‘I’m not who I used to be, and I’ll never be that person again. And to tell you the truth, I don’t want to be.’ I spoke angrily, but in truth it seemed like a triumph to be able to say aloud that Bergen-Belsen had changed me forever – and that I wouldn’t want it to be any other way. After all, who would want to remain the same after digging burial pits for a thousand goat-ribbed Jews and Gypsies who’d been abandoned by the world?

 

When I awakened in the night, I went to pee and a chilling memory made me moan aloud. I sat with Shelly a long time – overwhelmed by my need for him – before nudging him awake.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘An English officer took a velvet hat from the commandant’s wife. It had a black veil in front.’

He sat up. ‘And a feather?’

‘No.’

‘But listen, the officer, he handed the hat to a young woman … an inmate. She’d asked for it. Shelly, she was … Imagine a skeleton 337in pyjamas. With eyes … experienced, sensitive eyes, like an old woman in a Rembrandt painting. But her shoulders were like coat hangers. And her arms were so horribly slender, like … like bamboo.’

Shelly winced. In a fearful voice, he asked, ‘What does she do with the hat?’

‘She spit on it and threw it down. But the force that took … She started coughing up blood. And it seemed like she was going to collapse, so I steadied her, and our eyes, they met, which turned me to stone. Because I saw that she knew she was dying. Do you understand? Liberation had come too late for her. We were too slow! It was our fault. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was. I wanted to apologise on behalf of everyone in the whole world – on behalf of the sun and moon and stars. It seemed what I had to do – it was the role fate had given me. But my voice was deep down in my throat, and enclosed in something thick – maybe my fear of her. She spit up blood again, so I ran off for a doctor, but by the time I got back, she was lying on her back, and her eyes were closed. A friend of hers – a tiny old man with a blanket over his shoulders, bald, with dull grey eyes – was sitting over her, rocking back and forth. I checked her pulse, but she was gone.’

Shelly gripped my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’d forgotten her, but I can see now that she’s the woman that I tried to sketch. Though I didn’t do a very good job.’

‘No, you do good. Your painting is important.’

‘Maybe, but what I mean to say … She’s not your aunt, she’s the woman who made me want to apologise to everyone.’

‘Unless that woman is my aunt.’

‘Shelly, I’m sorry, but that’s pretty much impossible. What are the chances of my meeting her in Germany, then becoming friends with you in Montreal?’

‘George, it is the death camps that are impossible! Who can 338believe so many millions are murdered? But to see my aunt and then meet me … Je suis desolé, ce n’est pas du tout impossible. Things like that, they happen all the time.’

‘My dad would say you think like a Navajo,’ I said with a quick and tender smile.

‘That sounds pretty wonderful!’ he replied in a pleased voice.

It was the first time anyone I knew had taken Dad’s compliment as it was intended. But I didn’t tell him that because my last moments with the woman who might have been his aunt were throbbing urgently inside my head.

‘What’s wrong?’ questioned Shelly, and he took my hand.

When I didn’t reply, he kissed it twice and placed it over his heart again, and now it seemed the most intimate gesture anyone had ever shown me.

This man is the most open and generous person I’ve ever met, I thought.

‘When I told the woman that I’d get a doctor to examine her,’ I said, ‘she held me back for a second, and she looked at me as if she wanted to speak, but she never said a word. Though now … I think I know what she wanted to tell me – what her last wish was. It seems obvious.’

‘What is it?’

‘She wanted to say, “Don’t forget me.”’

Shelly shook his head and whispered bitterly. ‘Mon Dieu, this is all too much.’

‘The thing is,’ I added. ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean it as a curse – as something that would condemn me. But I think that’s what it has become.’

 

The next day, my father called just before I left for work. I joked playfully with him for the first time in months, and, in an excited 339voice, he said, ‘Something’s changed in you – you sound as if you’ve been flying over Moab again.’

His affectionate and relieved laugh made me want to throw my arms around him. ‘I’ve made a friend named Shelly,’ I announced.

‘What’s she like?’ he asked.

I wanted to correct the pronoun he’d used – I could feel the word he sitting under my tongue, but I said instead, ‘She works at the Botanical Garden.’

‘I bet she’s pretty, too.’

‘Yeah, very.’

I felt a downward movement inside me as I spoke – as though my disappointment in myself were a kind of fatal gravity – but how could I tell my father or anyone else what starting over had come to mean?

Shelly and I slept together several times a week over the rest of that winter and into the start of spring. He preferred my apartment to his and kept a week’s worth of clothing in my dresser so that he could stay with me whenever he wanted. He also brought over three extra pillows, since he needed to build a nest around himself in bed in order to fall asleep.

On occasion, we made love in his palm greenhouse, after closing time, and the humid scent of growth around us was as intoxicating as he said it would be. Amid the tree ferns and orchids, we must have looked like characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his favourite Shakespeare play.

I started accompanying Shelly to the Portuguese synagogue every Saturday afternoon. We’d bring along paperback novels and sit in one of the pews at the back in case Benni had somehow heard Shelly’s instructions for him and found his way to Montreal.

Sometimes we’d converse with Rabbi Jonathan in his cluttered office before leaving. He was a stocky, balding, simian-looking man, 340with hairy ears and a boyish laugh, and he had a deep knowledge of Jewish lore. He was seventy-two years old and originally from Bristol, England, but he could trace his family back to the south of Spain in the fifteenth century. Once, when I asked him for a prayer for forgiveness, he said in a stunned aristocratic voice, ‘My dear boy, at your age, what do you need to be forgiven for so badly?’

‘I didn’t do all I could to help a good friend,’ I said, and though that was a lie, it also seemed a deeper form of truth.

‘Then you must ask forgiveness from that friend,’ he said.

‘I do, but it doesn’t seem enough.’

‘Tell me what you want to say and I’ll write it out in Hebrew.’

We settled on the following words: I regret all that I did not do, and all I did not say, and all that no one did or said, and I ask for your forgiveness.

Every Friday evening at the descent of the Sabbath, I’d recite that prayer while lighting my candles. Shelly would often join me, and our voices sounded so right together, and powerful, too – as if our simple words were sustaining the earth itself – that I would think, This prayer is also why I entered the billiard parlour. And yet I knew that it still wasn’t enough to earn me forgiveness. And that nothing ever would be.

 

Shelly had warned me on a number of occasions that it would be impossible for him to stay faithful to me or anyone else, but I didn’t believe him until he got a few days off in early April and drove down to New York City with a big-breasted Quebecoise bookkeeper named Florence that he’d recently met. He called me from a gas station near the American border to tell me he’d be away for a few days. In the background, I could hear Florence telling him she was hungry.

Over the five days that Shelly was gone, I circled like a vulture 341around my humiliation. Nights were the worst; the bright blue sheets we’d bought together seemed as if they were made of wrapping paper, and I’d wake from panicked dreams of having failed a school exam with a throbbing head and a sour-tasting tongue, as if I were coming down with the flu. While waiting tables, I’d picture how I’d shout at Shelly the next time I saw him – and give him an ultimatum. But when he called me up on the afternoon of his return, he apologised for hurting me and invited me to join him in the palm greenhouse. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I simply got the bus to the Botanical Garden, and we made love just after closing time.

From that day on, I knew that our relationship would probably end in tears, at least for me, but I proved a hope-making creature; I came to believe that he would choose me – and me alone – in the end.

In early June, Shelly and I went camping in Mont-Tremblant Provincial Park. We picked a meadow carpeted with yellow and purple crocuses, by a jade-coloured lake where we could fish. We cooked up our trout in his heavy iron skillet every evening. Temperatures dipped below freezing at night, but we’d brought along sleeping bags he’d borrowed from a friend and cuddled together in our tent. At night, the loons called out as if asking the sky spirits to tell them their secrets, and the great expanse of stars – endless and silent – often questioned me about what I wished to accomplish in my life. I surprised myself by thinking that I’d apply to McGill for entry in the fall. I’d study art, and I’d paint all I’d seen in Europe. It would be my way of honouring all the dead and dying who never got to tell anyone their last wishes.

Gazing up at the Milky Way, trying to fathom the distance between there and here, I knew that it would be my life project.

On our last night in the park, I fell asleep shortly after supper, 342while sitting by our campfire, and the moonflower whiteness opened over me. When I walked forward this time, I came to the gate of Bergen-Belsen that was always just outside my apartment in Montreal. I sensed a concerned gaze behind me, and I expected to see Shelly, but when I turned, a boy with thick black hair and huge dark eyes waved to me. He was cloaked by shadows. And he was in danger.

A yellow star was sewn near the collar of his oversized coat. I knew right away he was Benni.

Far beyond him, a freight train was moving silently through a German forest, and its steam billowed upward, seemingly anxious to hide the sky. I was aware that Jews were locked on the train, and that they were headed toward death. The only question was: would Benni be forced to get aboard at its next stop?

He walked to me and took from his coat pocket my mother’s kachina and put it around my neck. ‘Elle m’a conduit ici,’ he told me in French, and then in English: ‘She led me here.’

A great swell of gratitude to my mother rose inside me, and I realised I’d been unfair to her. I knew, as well, that Benni would be safe – Mom’s kachina would save him from having to board the train.

The full moon was now shimmering just behind Benni, so I could see him clearly. He was a few years older than when I’d last seen him in my mind; bristles covered his chin and top lip. His jacket was the brown woollen one that Shelly wore on winter evenings.

I pointed out the moon to him because its radiance was tinged blue, and I told him it was the colour of watchfulness. ‘Shelly and I will keep waiting for you at the synagogue every Saturday,’ I promised.

‘Quelle synagogue?’ he asked.343

‘À Montreal.’

‘Mon Dieu, c’est très loin!’

When I heard stirring behind me, I turned, and my father held out his pipe to me, and I took a few puffs. Dad smiled at me as if to reassure me that Benni would be all right. I wanted to tell him that Mom’s kachina had led the boy to me, but I woke with Shelly shaking my shoulder. He held a lantern in his other hand, and its glaring light seemed to be the same as the moonflower’s.

The light that overwhelms me is inside me, I thought.

Shelly was staring down at me, worried. ‘You talk in your sleep,’ he said.

‘Where am I?’ I asked.

‘By the lake. With me.’

‘What did I say?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure. I hear only one thing clearly – “À Montreal.”’

If Shelly hadn’t heard me talking in my sleep, I might have forgotten my dream forever, but I remembered all of it in a single instant. The moon I’d seen seemed to deserve my thanks because it had enabled me to see Benni clearly.

My legs were aching, so I asked Shelly to help me up. Once I was standing, I reached for the kachina around my neck and gave her a squeeze. Her turquoise crown pressed into my palm, and the prick of its points seemed to wake me further – and to alert me to the possibility that Benni knew where I was and had heard me speaking to him.

Benni can see my dreams, I thought. He knows who I am. He sees that I’m with Shelly.

‘George, tell me what you’re thinking,’ Shelly said insistently.

‘I told Benni that we’ll always wait for him at the synagogue,’ I replied.

‘You speak to Benni?’344

‘I think he’s been inside me for months. Maybe since I met you. Waiting for me. I think he hides in the moonflower brightness.’

‘In what?’

‘Moonflower … It grows in the desert. The Navajo make the leaves into a mild hallucinogen.’

Shelly put down the lantern. ‘Tell me about Benni,’ he said.

‘He’s inside me,’ I said, and I told Shelly exactly what he’d told me.

He made his hands into fists and said determinedly, ‘Oui, I understand now.’

‘Understand what?’

‘You are my chance to find Benni! You find Le Troubadour because you must help me.’

Shelly’s purposeful eyes told me that he had reached the same conclusion as I had about why I’d moved to Montreal, which meant that we were either exhibiting the same symptoms of madness or were both right. ‘Shelly, why me?’ I asked. ‘Why has Benni picked me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, and then he flinched. ‘You know, maybe it’s not Benni who … provokes you to dream of him,’ he said in a conspiratorial voice. ‘Maybe another person looks for you and counts on you. Someone who loves me and Benni. Someone who is dead.’

‘Who?’

‘Tia Graça.’

 

In the morning, Shelly and I headed back to Montreal in his old Chevy. He chain-smoked and drove too fast. I kept my window open and listened to a jazz station on the radio.

We got gas at a Sinclair station in Sainte-Adèle. A red-headed attendant with a tattoo of a bare-breasted, dark-haired lollapalooza on his forearm filled up the tank.345

‘Canada is an odd country,’ Shelly told me as he looked from the attendant up to the big green brontosaurus on the station’s sign.

‘Odder than Poland?’ I asked.

‘Maybe, but it’s also safer, which is all that counts.’

When we got back in the car, he turned to me and laughed bitterly. ‘If the Nazis succeed, we are extinct – like the dinosaurs.’ He shook his head dejectedly. ‘You know, George, I make a big mistake. I should take Esther and Benni with me when I escape from Warsaw.’

I questioned him about whether he really thought he could have made it to Algiers while watching over two kids, but he started up the car and didn’t reply. About forty-five minutes later, we reached the outskirts of the city, and he asked, ‘Are you sure that Benni tells you that Montreal is très loin?’

‘Yes.’

When we stopped at an intersection, I guessed from his stern, inward-facing profile that he was picturing his cousin fighting for his life. Fifteen minutes later, he pulled up in front of my apartment.

‘I need you in Poland with me,’ he said definitively.

‘What do you mean?’

‘A week ago, a friend tells me that Holocaust survivors are free to leave Poland. I check, and it is true – Jews have no need of a passport. The Kremlin lets them go. So I’m going back to look for Esther and Benni. And my other family members too. If any of them are still alive, I bring them to Montreal.’

‘I don’t understand – what does the Kremlin have to do with the Jews still living in Poland?’

He showed me a scandalised expression. ‘George, don’t you read about what’s happening in Europe?’

‘Not if I can help it.’

‘The Soviets run Poland. It’s an Etat fantoche.’346

‘What’s an Etat fantoche?’

‘A government that is a marionette.’ Shelly made a dangling motion with his hand. ‘Stalin and his friends have the strings.’

‘I’m sorry, Shelly, but I’m not returning to Europe – not ever. I promised myself that.’

He put his hand on my leg and squeezed. ‘You must come with me. I will not find a way to locate Benni – not alone.’

‘Shelly, I don’t speak any Polish or Yiddish. I’ll be of no use to you.’

‘George, you won’t be in danger. We be together. And we won’t visit any of the camps.’

‘No, I can’t do it. The only things for me there are too many dead people – and even worse, all those collaborators who wanted to turn you and me into dinosaurs.’

 

I started a sketch of Benni that night, before my internal image of him could fade. It took me three days to get it right. When I handed it to Shelly, I said, ‘Show this to people who might have seen your cousin.’

He studied my drawing. ‘Is his face truly so slender?’ he asked.

‘He’s growing up,’ I said. ‘He’s becoming a man – at least he is inside me.’

‘He’d be sixteen now – almost seventeen. C’est incroyable! And Esther, she will be twenty-one in November.’

We huddled together under my bedsheets as if we were children planning a perilous adventure, and he told me how he’d take a boat from America to England and then continue on to Poland.

He said he’d already spoken to a number of Jewish friends about trying to locate their relatives in Poland and written out a list of their names and addresses. These friends would be pooling their money together to pay for his trip. He’d get a bus down to 347New York and board the Queen Mary there. He had a ticket for its departure on August 7th.

‘I don’t know when I return,’ he told me.

That hit me hard. But the depth of my despair was nothing compared to his; after making love that night, he surrounded himself with his pillows and turned on his belly and began to sob.

‘Are you angry at me?’ I asked.

‘Oui, but mostly I’m mad at myself,’ he replied without looking at me.

I reminded him that he’d have probably been caught by the Germans if he’d had his sister and cousin with him when he fled Warsaw.

He turned to me long enough to say, ‘So I should stay with them. I go with them to the death camps. They must be so scared. I could help them.’

I took away one of his pillows and lay down beside him. I put my hand atop his head and told him what a wonderful and generous heart he had. He shook his head and said that wasn’t true, but he didn’t push me away. His eyes were red and tender.

‘If you had stayed,’ I said gently, ‘you wouldn’t be with me now. I’m glad you didn’t die. And whatever you find in Poland, I want you to come back to me. I will wait for you for as long as it takes.’

He nodded and took my hand and kissed it. Then he closed his eyes. I turned off the lights and spooned up behind him, and in a little while he was asleep, which seemed a great blessing.

 

Three weeks before his departure for New York, Shelly quit work at the Botanical Garden, and a few days after that he stopped coming over to see me or inviting me to his place. I phoned him several times a day but never got an answer. I figured he was punishing me for refusing to accompany him to Poland. I was 348desperate to explain myself to him again and ask his forgiveness, so I went round to his flat both before and after work, and I shouted through his door that I was certain he was home, but he wouldn’t let me in.

Ten days before his scheduled departure, his downstairs neighbour, a forty-something woman with close-cut, hennaed hair stopped me as I was leaving the building and told me with a scowl that the le sale Juif – the dirty Jew – who’d lived upstairs had moved out a few days earlier and that she didn’t want me making any more noise in her building.

I could think of no reply equal to my contempt for her, so I simply left.

The thought that I’d never see Shelly again sent me into a frenzy, especially because I’d heard of Jews who’d returned home and been murdered by the Poles who’d taken possession of their homes. Mom had also told me about a recent pogrom in a small city between Warsaw and Kraków named Kielce. In July of 1946, forty-two Holocaust survivors who’d returned to their apartments and houses there were beaten and shot by soldiers, police officers and townspeople.

I rushed around to the restaurants where Shelly and I ate supper on my evenings off and left messages for him. And every night after work, I went to Le Troubadour. I waited hours for him each time, but he never showed up.

Eight days before he was scheduled to leave for New York, I stayed up until early morning, sketching him feverishly all over the walls of my bedroom. In my final drawing – was it the one I’d needed to make all along? – I portrayed him as an inmate at Bergen-Belsen. His chest was sunken and his powerful hands hung down on bamboo-slender arms. He held a book in his hands – Germinal, by his beloved Émile Zola.349

It made me sick to see Shelly so debilitated, so I covered him over with white paint.

The next night, at just past three in the morning, something heavy crashed in the hallway outside my flat.

‘Oui!’ Shelly groaned through the door. ‘C’est moi.’

When I opened it, he fell into my arms. His eyes were bloodshot and he hadn’t shaved. His breath was a fetid mix of rum and cigarettes.

He told me in a slurred and raspy voice – mostly in French – that he was terrified of returning to Poland.

‘Because of the Poles who might hurt you?’ I asked.

‘No, I don’t give a damn about the Poles!’ he shouted.

‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s all that will not be in Warsaw.’ He wiped spittle from his mouth, then swirled his hand in the air like a magician. ‘All the things I loved are disparus – gone!’ He hung his head. ‘Mon Dieu, I detest my life. Do you understand, George – it’s just so very stupid!’

Until then, I’d thought of Shelly as utterly unstoppable – the hero of the gangster film I had in my head. Looking at his desolate face, however, my heart seemed to tumble in my chest.

‘Only you can find Benni!’ he told me, pawing at me.

‘That’s not true,’ I said.

‘George, I won’t go without you!’ He slipped out of his old brown coat – the one Benni had been wearing in my dream – and threw it to the floor.

Terror gripped me. I shivered and went all rigid, needing to defend myself against emotions too dark to allow back into my mind. ‘Shelly, we’ve discussed all this,’ I declared. ‘It’s impossible. I’m sorry. If there were any other—’

‘Tia Graça needs you!’ he cut in. ‘That’s what she tells you, remember? “Don’t forget me!”’ He jabbed his finger into my 350chest with drunken fury. ‘She means now! Tu ne comprends pas?’ Glowering, he said, ‘George, if you don’t find Benni, it means that you forget her! Worse than that, you … Oh, what’s the fucking word?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and I shook my head to indicate that I didn’t want to go on with this conversation.

‘You fail at everything!’ he shouted. Sensing he’d wounded me badly, he continued his onslaught. ‘Yes, you fail her and you fail me! Et encore pire, you fail yourself!’

The slow poison of his condemnation made me gaze away. When I could assemble a few coherent thoughts, I went to my stove and started to boil water.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked. When I didn’t answer, he stepped up beside me and pushed me so hard that I had to reach out to the wall to keep from falling. ‘I hate you!’ he shouted.

His face looked possessed. I thought he might curse me or spit at me. I sensed that what I did with my life from now on depended on the next words we addressed to each other. But I didn’t want to say anything that might give him hope, because I couldn’t go back to Europe.

In the glare from my ceiling lanterns, I noticed how badly he was sweating. And that he’d been crying. I stepped up to him and felt his moist forehead. He was burning up.

‘You need to get into bed,’ I said. ‘I’ll make you some hot tea.’

‘George, the last thing I want is tea!’

‘Shelly, I can’t go. In any case, it’s too late for me to get a place on the Queen Mary.’

He shook his head with drunken abandon. ‘No, it’s not – I book a room for two. In case you decide to come.’

‘But that must cost a fortune.’

‘I paid for it with my own savings. And it’s only money. It means nothing.’351

‘And what about a visa? Canadians must need one to get into Poland.’

‘I bribe a man at the Polish Consulate for mine. He’ll take money for yours too.’ His expression turned resentful, ‘Besides, I already tell you, the Polish government wants the Jews to leave. Don’t you understand? They want you and me to find Benni and bring him here!’ He caressed my cheek. ‘George, je te jure. I will protect you. Nothing bad will happen!’

I got out a bag of my father’s Navajo herbs. ‘Shelly, you’ve got a fever. You’ve got to rest.’

He closed his eyes and bowed his head – a sign of resignation and defeat – which made me shiver. I went to him and started to lead him to my bed, but with an angry grunt, he struggled free, catching me a blow on my bottom lip, which started to bleed.

‘Oh, merde!’ He reached for my shoulder, but I slapped it away.

Coherent thoughts failed to form for a time. I felt as if I were standing in a no man’s land between Canada and Europe, which made me tremble. I went to the bathroom to calm down and wash my lip. At length, Shelly shuffled to the doorway. His expression was regretful and his arms hung loosely by his side, as in the last sketch I’d done of him. I noticed again how powerful his hands were. He’ll squeeze the life out of anyone who tries to hurt him back in Poland, I thought, and it seemed a very good thing. Except that I couldn’t be absolutely sure that he wouldn’t lash out at me again, which is why I said coldly, ‘No more violence. I won’t take that from you or anyone else.’

Tears slid down his cheeks and he said in a hoarse whisper, ‘I never do that again. I promise. I’m so sorry.’ He took a deep breath and confessed with a moan that he couldn’t stop picturing Benni and Esther dying of starvation in a Nazi death camp, which was when I felt a latch of forgiveness opening inside me. He raised 352his hands into a position of prayer and asked meekly, ‘Can I hold you?’ His eyes were desolate.

When I nodded, he put his arms around me and kissed me. I kissed him back and then rested my head against his chest. We’ve dispelled the barriers between us, I thought with a deep sense of relief.

When we separated, I saw that his lips were smeared with blood, which seemed a sign from far beyond this time and place – from out of the ancient Navajo stories that my dad had told me as a child, in fact. My bottom lip was swelling up by then, so I continued to wash it at my sink. Shelly watched me with apprehensive eyes. When I returned to him, he apologised for a second time for hurting me. ‘Please don’t be mad at me,’ he pleaded.

‘I’m not. I’m just upset – with you, with me, with everything.’

‘I feel not so good,’ he said.

‘Because you’ve given yourself a fever.’

He’d become completely pliable by then, like a little boy who’d been forced to stay up way past his bedtime, so I sat him down and took off his trousers and socks.

‘George, you are my best friend,’ he said as if it were a sudden revelation.

I walked him into my bedroom, got him under the covers and made his nest of pillows around his chest. He said he needed to stay awake and talk to me, but I told him he had to go to sleep. ‘I’m in charge tonight,’ I said.

‘Do you want to fuck me?’ he asked. ‘You can, you know – anytime you want.’

‘Christ, Shelly, do you always think about sex?’

‘No, of course, not!’ he said in an irate voice.

I was glad now to have argued so violently with him – it seemed 353a test we’d passed. ‘I want you to drink some Navajo tea,’ I told him. ‘And then you need to go to sleep.’

‘Whatever you say, cheri.’

After he’d had his tea, he whispered, ‘If I go alone, I die.’

I was seated on the bed, with my hand in his. ‘You’re not going to die,’ I said. ‘You’re going to come back to me in Montreal.’

He gazed past me with resigned eyes, as if he were looking at his destiny.

‘You’ll be fine,’ I told him. I moved the blanket up to his chin. ‘Now close your eyes.’ He did as I asked. I combed his sweaty hair off his forehead with my hand and chanted a Navajo prayer, and after just a few minutes, he was sound asleep. I switched off the lights and took off my clothes and eased in beside him.

My need to protect the troubled man I loved became an ache in my gut, deep and resolute. And I felt that pain altering everything I’d intended to do with my life.

 

I woke at just after dawn, feeling as though the immense blue sky over Moab were waiting for me to open my curtains. If I return to Europe, will that same munificent firmament be there, too? I wondered.

After I’d made us coffee, and while I was frying us some French toast, Shelly stirred and stretched his arms over his head. ‘George?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘Do I come here last night?’

‘You stumbled up the stairs and crashed into my door.’

He grimaced. ‘Je ne me rappelle pas. No memory.’

‘You were pretty sauced.’

He gazed beyond me at whatever he remembered about the 354night before, but didn’t find anything he considered important enough to tell me. ‘Merde, my head, she is painful!’ he said.

‘I’m not surprised she is painful,’ I told him. ‘You ought to treat her better!’

He laughed, his eyes gleaming with affection. I put the back of my hand to his forehead, which was cool. ‘Your fever is gone,’ I said.

I went to my first-aid box and took out my bottle of camphor and drizzled it on a tea towel. ‘My God, what is that?’ Shelly said, and he pinched his nose closed.

‘It’s my mother’s cure. Tie it around your head.’

‘Does it work?’

‘Shush!’

He knotted the towel around his head and breathed in deeply. ‘What a smell!’ he said, and with a provocative grin, he added, ‘So your mother, she gets drunk a lot?’

‘No, but my grandfather liked his schnapps.’ I went back to the stove. ‘I’ll have the coffee ready in a couple of minutes. That’ll help too.’ A little later, at my signal, he kicked his legs over the side of the bed, and I handed him his steaming mug. He watched me finishing up the French toast without speaking, but he smiled at me gratefully, and I realised that something had changed between us overnight; something honest and permanent that had started to grow between us. I thought, I’ll tell Mom and Dad about him now, and however they react will be all right, because I’ve found my way forward.

As he took himself a cup of coffee, Shelly told me in a tentative voice – as if tiptoeing into murky waters – about his great-grandmother Rosa, and how she was able to see people’s souls.

‘See them how?’ I asked.

‘Through their eyes. Pretty strange, no?’

‘I’ve heard stranger.’355

‘Like what?’

‘Like that Coyote is very strong in me. My dad tells me that all the time.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘For the Navajo, the god that plays tricks on everybody is a coyote.’

‘Okay, so maybe the Navajo are a little odd too,’ he said in a serious voice, though a moment later, he laughed in a big, theatrical burst.

I asked him what souls looked like.

‘Rosa says they look like living flames,’ he replied.

Shelly said that the soul-flame could flare up and set off sparks at times of great emotion, and it could also die down at moments of hopelessness. He said that each individual soul was aligned to the north, south, east or west, depending on its particular nature. In rare instances, it could also face up or down. From the increasing depth in his voice, I could tell that he was building toward a revelation, and I thought he’d reached it when he said, ‘But Benni’s soul is even more insolite.’

‘What’s insolite?’

‘Mon Dieu, your French is without hope,’ he said, grunting. ‘It means peculiar … unusual.’

I slid the toast from my skillet onto two big plates. ‘Why is his unusual?’ I asked.

‘His soul changes direction. For example, when he is with me, it faces east – like mine. At least, this is what Rosa tells me.’

‘And what does that mean – a soul facing east?’ I asked.

‘East belongs to the sunrise. So we are optimists. We keep going no matter what happens.’

‘And you keep fucking, too,’ I suggested.

‘Oui, c’est important, quand même,’ he told me with the smile of a little boy who is greatly loved.356

‘And for people whose soul faces west?’

‘They absorb light from the setting sun. They are habitually melancholic and pessimistic.’

I sat next to Shelly on my bed and started eating. While gazing around my room – at the jumble of clothing on my armchair, the tower of paperbacks on my desk, my red and green lanterns – I thought, That something wonderful can take place in this little nowhereland means that I can have the life I want.

How is it that one thought can make us aware that we can do what we never believed possible? For I knew at that moment that I would accompany Shelly to Poland.

‘Benni, he is one in a million,’ Shelly told me as if he were still astonished by the notion.

‘Because his soul faces different directions?’ I asked.

‘It even looks up and down,’ he said, taking a big bite of his French toast.

‘Looks?’

‘The soul sees things, it observes – even when we sleep.’ He pointed to my eyes with the tines of his fork. ‘The soul, she watches.’

‘Which means exactly what in Benni’s case?’

‘He can see things – strange things.’ Shelly leaned close to me and whispered, ‘Rosa tells me that Benni can see a little bit of God’s hidden life.’

‘Does God have a hidden life?’ I asked.

Shelly snorted. ‘George, where is your head? Everything that lives has a hidden life!’

‘But you told me once you don’t believe in God.’

‘That’s true. But I believe in Rosa!’

‘So what does Rosa think that God does in his hidden life?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea,’ he said with a shrug.357

Something in the constrained way he faced down and resumed eating gave me to believe that he was feigning ignorance. It was the first time that I considered that there was a deep level of mystical understanding in Shelly – an inheritance from Rosa, perhaps – that he would never reveal to anyone. ‘Which way does my soul face?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea.’

‘You’ve never seen it?’

‘No, of course not.’

Shelly devoured his breakfast with such urgent purposefulness that I was reminded that he’d lived through Nazi occupation. ‘You’ve never told me how you escaped the ghetto,’ I said.

‘Through a tunnel,’ he replied, and he stood up to fetch the coffee pot and refill our cups.

‘And after that?’

‘I go to Algiers.’

‘How did you get there?’

‘I walk.’

‘The whole way?’ I asked.

‘No, sometimes I take a train. I have French papers. My mom gets them for me.’

‘Nobody bothered you?’

‘Not so much.’

His matter-of-fact tone made that seem a lie. On a hunch, I asked, ‘Did you ever have to kill anyone?’

He started. ‘Why you ask me that?’

‘I don’t know. It just came to me that maybe you had to.’

He looked at me with cold eyes. ‘I kill a Frenchman once.’

‘Who was it?’

He sipped his coffee pensively. I had the feeling he was considering whether to tell me the truth or not. ‘How do you say in English a man who fixes shoes?’ he finally asked.358

‘A cobbler.’

‘A cobbler who tries to stop me from … from continuing my way.’

‘Did you know his name?’

‘No.’

‘How did you kill him?’

‘George, écoute, ça suffit! I do not wish to speak of this.’

‘I’m just glad you survived,’ I said. ‘Which means I’m glad that you killed him. Though that sounds terrible.’

‘No, it doesn’t sound terrible. I’m glad I kill him too – at least, most of the time.’

While he licked the cinnamon sugar off his plate, I asked, ‘Did you go hungry a lot?’

‘George, everyone goes hungry,’ he replied impatiently. ‘One has little to eat in a war.’

‘Want another piece of French toast?’ I questioned.

‘Yes, please.’ He handed me his polished plate.

‘Will you ever tell me about the bad things that happened to you?’ I asked. When he looked at me with a surprised face, I tried to speak to that hidden part of him that he might never show me or anyone else. ‘You can trust me – I won’t tell anyone. And I won’t judge you either.’

‘Maybe some other time,’ he replied. ‘Now I need to talk about other things.’ While I was pouring oil in my skillet, he said, ‘When I first see you at Le Troubadour, a comprehension comes to me that is odd.’

‘It was insolite?’ I asked, pleased with myself.

‘Voila!’ he exclaimed with that sweet-natured grin of his that might have made him a leading man in Hollywood if he’d been born in America.

‘So what did you understand?’ I asked.359

‘That you are hurt. I say to myself, “Quelque chose horrible a blessé ce garcon.” Something horrible hurts this young man.’

I scoffed. ‘It’s normal to see all sorts of things in people’s faces – to read into them what we want to see. Or have to see.’

He shook his fist. ‘Not with such a … force fatale.’

‘What did you think had happened to me?’

‘I think you lose your family – like me.’

‘But no one murdered my mother’s parents. They came to Canada long before the war. And my father’s parents survived all the bad things that happened to the Navajo.’

‘Yes, but you do have a horrible experience – in Germany. And then something else happens that is strange – quand tu m’a pris. That first time.’

‘What happened?’

‘Do you remember that I ask you to stop moving?’

‘Yes, you said that you hadn’t been fucked in months.’

‘Exactly. But I lie. You don’t hurt me. I get scared. Because I can feel the death inside you. I can feel my parents, and lots of other people from Warsaw. And I sense that the Nazi camp is just outside your front door, where the other apartments should be. And I can feel all those dead people coming from you into me – one by one. I become very cold. And my erection, she disappears. And that never happens.’

‘Never?’ I asked, and he shook his head.

When I apologised for scaring him, he said, ‘No, I am glad. I want my relations in me. I want to see what you see. That’s what I wish to tell you for many weeks. That you give them back to me. I want to thank you for that. I feel them in me now, all the time.’

‘Why did you wait to tell me?’

‘It isn’t easy to say you have dead people inside you. But I know now that you are conscious of them too.’360

I waited till his French toast was almost done before speaking again. ‘The problem is,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get all those dead people out of me.’

‘Do you want to make them to leave?’

I thought about that. ‘No, if I’m being honest, I want them to stay with me forever,’ I said.

I sat with him as he ate. At length, he rested his hand on my knee and said, ‘I look in books, you know – at the public library. I discover important things. The Jews who are not killed in the soulèvement of the ghetto in Warsaw, they—’

‘Soulèvement?’

‘When the Jews fight the Nazis.’

‘The Ghetto Uprising.’

‘Yes. The survivors are transferred to Bergen-Belsen. That is how my aunt goes there. If the woman you see is her, I mean.’

Shelly and I spoke no more of his family that morning. After he finished eating, he took off his camphor-soaked tea towel and lit a cigarette. He smoked with an easy serenity, and I could see that the past had released him. Later, on our walk through our neighbourhood, he told me about how much he missed the flowers and bushes at the Botanical Garden. ‘I need the palms most of all – they are so soft and loving,’ he told me.

‘And which way does the soul of a palm tree face?’ I asked, which made him pause in his step and laugh in a burst, but then say in a serious tone, ‘You know, I do not know – Rosa never tells me.’

At the end of our walk, while we were admiring an old apartment house that had been painted pink and yellow, Shelly said that he had to run some errands and would see me that evening. I took his shoulder and told him then that I’d decided to accompany him to Poland.361

He didn’t cry; he kissed my hands as if he were enacting an ancient Hebrew ritual, then embraced me.

 

The next morning, I called my father at work while Shelly was taking a shower and told him I’d be returning to Europe soon.

After a shocked uptake of breath, he said, ‘Why in God’s name are you going back?’

‘To see all the places I missed – Paris, most of all,’ I lied. ‘Shelly is coming with me.’

‘You two won’t go back to Germany, will you?’

‘No, of course, not.’

‘That’s okay, then,’ he said in a relieved voice. ‘Listen, son, do you have enough money to stay in decent hotels? I don’t want you staying in places that aren’t clean.’

‘Shelly’s got savings,’ I said.

‘And you promise to be careful? Some places might still have people that don’t like Jews.’

I assured him I would be. And then I paused, because this would be my last chance to tell him the truth about Shelly before our trip to Europe. ‘Listen, Dad,’ I began, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’ But I couldn’t go on; my heart was racing, and the words wouldn’t form in my mouth.

‘What is it, George?’ he asked. ‘Is everything okay?’

‘It’s about Shelly,’ I said. ‘The thing is, his real name is Hershel, though he never uses it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ my father replied. I could hear in his tone that he’d already taken a step back from me in his mind.

‘Shelly is a young man,’ I said. ‘And he’s really wonderful.’ I spoke as confidently as I could – in a voice that my dad would have to respect – yet I heard it as if I were standing behind a thick glass wall. My legs had begun to shake, so I sat down.362

‘A man?’ my father asked.

‘Yes.’

Silence.

‘Dad?’ I asked. ‘Are you angry at me?’ I tried to keep my voice from quivering but failed.

He didn’t reply. I thought I could hear him breathing hesitantly, but that might have been in my mind. Not knowing what else to do, I made a little jest. ‘Mom won’t have to worry about me marrying a goy,’ I said, ‘Shelly is Jewish.’

The continuing silence made my attempt at humour seem like a kind of slow death. ‘He was born in Poland,’ I went on. ‘He’s really nice and intelligent.’

‘Shelly is a man?’ my dad asked again.

‘Yes. He’s a few years older than me. Listen, I’m sorry I lied to you before. But you’d like him. And he’s helped me … start over.’

No reply.

I started counting. I was thinking that by ten Dad would tell me that my falling in love with a man made no difference to him.

Five, six, seven … Just after eight, I heard a click and the line went dead.

It occurred to me that my father had hung up as discreetly as possible, as if he didn’t want me to know he had left me, and I knew instantly how I would begin telling Shelly what had happened: It was as if he wanted to try to slip away from me without being noticed and make believe that our conversation had never happened.

While holding the receiver in my hand, listening to the dial tone, I continued counting, but slower than before: nine, ten, eleven … I pictured my future self, looking back at this moment, and remembering that it was precisely at the count of twelve that I’d learned that I was separate from everything in the world, but most especially from my father.363

By twenty-one, I was pretty certain that I was no longer in danger of collapsing into tears, but I couldn’t yet hang up the receiver, since there would be no going back after that; I’d never again be able to think of my father the same way.

Thoughts scattered through my head. I took a cigarette from the pack that Shelly always left on my night table. Was I searching for a way out of myself by imitating him? A little while later, he finished his shower. When he came to me, I didn’t mention my phone conversation with my dad. He asked why I looked so pale, and I said that it was because I’d smoked one of his cigarettes.

‘You need more practice,’ he chuckled happily, and I did my best to laugh too.

A little later, I dressed for work; it was my last day at the Fiore d’Italia.

After closing time that night, I grabbed a beer and locked myself in the staff bathroom. A postcard of Saint Cristina of Bolsena being attacked by fanged snakes had been taped to the wall behind the sink. I wondered how she managed such a contented, beatific expression, then studied myself in the mirror until my face no longer seemed the one I knew. You are not the man you’re supposed to be, I thought, and my self-loathing seemed violent and unforgiving.

I might have stayed in the bathroom until morning, but Adalberto, the owner, knocked and told me in his Sicilian-accented English that he was dying to pee.

Lying in bed that night next to Shelly, I tried to convince myself that it was wrong for me to feel so protected with his arms around me, but I was unable to do it. And whenever I pictured us in the palm greenhouse, I grew certain that nature itself – every leaf, flower and spore – understood my love for him. In fact, it seemed as if every test of courage and strength that I’d ever given myself had prepared me for these last few days.364

My mother called the next morning. We were leaving for New York in four days. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said in a hectoring voice.

‘Look Mom, if it’s to tell me you’re upset and disappointed with me,’ I said impatiently, ‘I already know it. You don’t need to say a thing. You can just hang up – like Dad.’

Mom started crying. That hadn’t been my intent, but I wasn’t sorry, which is how I understand that I intended to avenge myself on my father by being cruel to her.

‘I understand how shocked you must be,’ I told her.

‘You don’t seem to understand anything about me,’ she replied sadly. And then, flaring with rage, she added, ‘I don’t care two cents that Shelly is a man!’

I didn’t believe her. ‘Mom, I honestly don’t know what I can do or say. I didn’t plan to be this way. But I’m also not ashamed. In fact, I’m—’

‘George, I won’t let you turn me into an ogre!’ she interrupted in an outraged tone. After a moment, she said more calmly, ‘It’s my fault, I suppose, that you don’t know who I am. How did that happen? My goodness, everything used to be so easy between us.’

‘Mom, the boy I was is gone.’

She sighed. ‘I know. And I know now that I wanted to hold on to him. That was a mistake. I chased you away. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, but I did.’

I realised I’d been waiting for her to admit that for months. What was astonishing was that all my anger at her vanished the moment she apologised. ‘I’m sorry too,’ I said.

‘It’s good for me to know you’ve grown up – and that you’ve met a man you like. I want to meet him. I want to be with you both.’

‘I guess … I guess that when we get back from Europe, we’ll 365come to Toronto,’ I said. ‘We’ll stay in a rooming house if Dad doesn’t permit me to come home.’

‘George, it’s not his decision. This is your house too. And mine. You’ll both stay here.’

‘But what if—’

‘George, listen,’ she cut in. ‘I have a bus ticket to Montreal. I’m coming tomorrow afternoon. I couldn’t live with myself if I let you go back to Europe without seeing you.’

‘What about Dad?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming alone. It’ll … it’ll take him a while to get used to this.’

‘I’m not sure he ever will.’

‘I know your father, George. Give him a few weeks. He’s a good man.’

‘Mom, he hung up on me!’

‘George, you startled him. Once he gets his bearings, he’ll be thrilled you’ve fallen in love. At the moment, he’s battling with some old spirits in that ancestral desert of his, up on top of some mesa somewhere, but I’m quite certain that he’ll find the way forward. He always does.’

‘But this is different.’

‘No, actually, it’s not. He’s proved how good a man he is many times before … how genuine and kind. And he’ll prove it again. You’ll just have to trust me on this.’

 

Mom called me from the Montreal bus station at five-thirty the next day to say she’d arrived and would hop in a taxi. Sitting with Shelly at my tiny dining table, pretending to study the Polish visa in my passport that we’d managed to get that morning, I pictured a family disaster heading straight for us; Mom would 366find Shelly glib and superficial, and he’d find my mother a pretentious snob.

Shelly sensed my tension, of course. ‘George, just keep breathing,’ he told me, grinning like he does when he thinks he’s being charming and devilish.

My mother arrived a half hour later. She’d tied her long brown hair into a tight knot at the back of her head, which made her face seem older and starker than I’d remembered it. She wore a man’s corduroy trousers and a loose-fitting charcoal-grey sweater that she must have knitted recently, because I didn’t remember it. We kissed, and she said I looked healthy and happy.

When she hugged Shelly, she placed her head against his chest for a moment and closed her eyes, and I was certain she was giving him thanks in her own way for helping me start over.

Her turquoise earrings – in the shape of bellflowers – dangled over her cheek.

Mom has a long Roman nose, deep-brown eyes and an olive complexion, and when I was a kid, I loved to see her wear turquoise jewellery, because the perfect blue of those stones made her look elegant and lovely – and, to my adoring young mind, like one of the wise mothers in the Navajo myths my father told me.

Shelly made a nervous face at me while she was embracing him, but I didn’t go to him because I was terrified that he’d kiss me on the lips the moment my mother drew back from him. I couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with my hands, so I joined them behind my back. Mom and Shelly seemed like characters from two different plays that had accidentally met on this little stage that I’d built for myself.

After Mom leaned back from Shelly, she lifted up her hand and cupped his chin. She studied his face as though she were a sculptress.367

‘Good or bad?’ asked Shelly.

‘Good,’ Mom said with a nod. ‘In fact, Monsieur, you have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen! Les plus beaux que j’ai jamais vu!’ she added, which surprised me because I’d never heard her speak French before.

‘Merci, Madame,’ Shelly replied, smiling in his Hollywood way.

‘S’il vous plait, je ne suis pas Madame, je suis Irene,’ Mom said.

‘Comme vous voulez, Irene,’ said Shelly with a gentlemanly tilt to his head.

Mom turned to me. ‘Yes, I can speak French, George. I studied it for seven years back before you were born.’ She clapped her hands together and grinned with joy. ‘Now, I want to get a look at you together.’

‘What … what you mean?’ I stammered.

‘I’m sorry, baby, but you’re standing there like a … cold radiator, and we’ve got to end this impasse here and now or I’m not going to be able to enjoy the rest of our evening together.’

‘What impasse?’ I asked.

Mom rolled her eyes. ‘George, mon amour, I nursed you through every childhood disease you can name, so don’t you think I can tell when you’re feeling uncomfortable?’

‘Well, what would you like me to do?’

‘My goodness, do you really think that you two are the first men I’ve known who’ve slept together? You remember my old friend Frederick?’

‘Of course, I remember him.’ Frederick taught history at a high school in Vancouver.

‘He and I shared the same boyfriend for nearly a year – before I met your dad.’

‘I didn’t know you had any boyfriends before Dad.’

Mom laughed in a gleeful burst and turned to Shelly. In a 368scandalised voice, she said, ‘Do children always think their parents come to life only at the moment of their birth?’

‘Very probably,’ he said, and from eagerness in his eyes, I could tell that he had just discovered that he and Mom were both born performers – and might have a long future of drama and comedy ahead of them.

‘Monsieur, I think you’ll have to make the first move,’ she told him. ‘My son seems convinced I’m someone I’m not.’

Shelly came to me and took my head in his hands, and he leaned in and he kissed me, and he kept his lips on mine until I kissed him back.

‘Wonderful!’ Mom exulted. ‘You make a very handsome couple. Très beaux! And now I’m going to take you boys out for a nice dinner.’

Mom took my hand outside the door and gave it a squeeze, and as we smiled at each other, I thought, Until this very moment, I didn’t understand what ought to have been obvious – that for Mom, love and loyalty are inseparable.

 

I’d made a reservation for my mother at one of the fancy hotels downtown, but she had two glasses of retsina at the Greek restaurant we chose for dinner and got a little groggy, so we ended up getting her a room just down the street at the Pension Honfleur. In the morning, she came over for breakfast and told us – giggling girlishly – that Fedir the Ukrainian boxer was still living there and remembered me fondly. ‘I think maybe he has a crush on you,’ she said with obvious delight, which both stunned and pleased me.

Mom cooked us oatmeal while Shelly wove her shoulder-length, greying hair into French braids, explaining that he used to do this favour for his sister Esther all the time. ‘Braiding a woman’s hair … it always makes me feel useful.’369

‘My God, the beautiful way you speak English …’ Mom told him. ‘I could happily listen to you read the phone book!’

After our lazy breakfast together, the three of us took a taxi to the bus station. Mom’s bus to Toronto left at noon.

‘Take good care of each other,’ she told us as she took our hands for one last squeeze. Just before boarding, she reached into her old plaid suitcase and gave us the presents that she’d nearly forgotten – a big bag of dried mushrooms and her first edition of The Grapes of Wrath.

After I hugged and kissed her goodbye, she caressed my cheek and said, ‘At your difficult moments, remember that what you feel for Shelly is as old as the stones of the Utah desert. And George, nothing you do could ever shame me.’ She turned for Shelly, then reconsidered and reached back for me. ‘Oh, and one other thing, sweetheart – I think you will find that nearly everything people say about the way life works is lies, so just do what you have to do.’

Shelly embraced Mom tenderly and whispered in French to her. Later, he told me that he’d promised her to look after me. After they’d kissed cheeks, he put his arm over my shoulder – to show her that I would be safe with him – and we waved goodbye.

 

We left for New York two days later and stayed in a cheap rooming house just off Houston Street. The next morning, at 11 a.m., we boarded the Queen Mary.

After Shelly and I had put our bags in our cramped stateroom, we rushed back up onto deck – taking the stairs two at a time – feeling as though we were explorers aboard a floating island bound for exotic territories. It wasn’t true, of course, but we must have needed to tell ourselves a happy-go-lucky adventure story to keep us calm.

A little later, we pulled out of our berth and slipped into New 370York Harbor. Barges and tugs and even a few sailing ships were sliding over the dark water, which seemed to hoist us aloft. While most everyone else waved and called out to the Statue of Liberty, I tried and failed to come to terms with the deep sway and glide taking place under my feet.

A certain lightheaded sense of strangeness – of doing the impossible – overcame me as the towering skyline of Manhattan shrank down to the horizon. But when it vanished entirely, disquiet snuck up behind me. Shelly sensed my mood and led me down to our room, and he assured me that I’d feel fine once we had a nap, since we’d slept very little the night before. He was right; I woke up more determined and relaxed. Over coffee at the ship’s cafe, he asked me how my parents had met, and I told him about my mom’s father’s camera shop in Toronto, and how Dad would go there every day to sneak a look at her.

After Shelly retired to our room to read Émile Zola, I returned to the main deck and gazed out to sea, due east, toward the ruined continent awaiting us. After a while, my father appeared in my mind. I saw him seated by a campfire in the desert, chanting to the spirits of the earth and sky – asking them for the wisdom to understand what he hadn’t ever previously considered.

 

We encountered rough seas over most of the journey and took close to eight days to cross the Atlantic. Shelly was seasick and miserable almost all the time, and my main activity became cheering him up. We played rummy and casino on our bed for hours, and I let him win because I’d learned by then that losing at any game put him in a foul mood, and I read to him from The Grapes of Wrath. Had Mom chosen that novel for us because it was about the quiet heroism of the kind of people who rarely appeared in history books?

Shelly asked me every morning if I’d learned anything more 371about Benni – from a dream, or burst of insight – and though I never did, I could feel the boy waiting inside me at the gate to Bergen-Belsen. I executed several small portraits of him in my sketchbook but could never seem to get his eyes just right. Shelly kept saying, ‘Plus grands encore,’ but whenever I made his eyes bigger, he would shake his head and say with frustration, ‘No, they still aren’t Benni’s eyes,’ though he could never tell me what exactly I was doing wrong.

 

When we disembarked at Portsmouth, Shelly kneeled down ceremoniously and kissed the cobblestones of the quay. At a nearby pub, he was able to eat solid food for the first time since leaving New York. Two days later, he was fully recovered, and we boarded a ferry in Folkestone that took us to Boulogne-sur-Mer, and from there we made our way to Warsaw by train.

At the border crossing between Germany and Poland, our train was stopped and our passports were taken from us by two Red Army soldiers, who promptly marched out of our compartment and vanished. Shelly and I were seated in a foul-smelling compartment with cigarette butts on the floor and greasy streaks on the window. When the train started up again an hour and a half later, our documents still hadn’t been returned to us, and a terrifying surge and descent of blood ripped through me. I jumped up, and for a time I couldn’t seem to get enough air.

‘George, what’s wrong?’ Shelly asked.

‘What’s wrong?’ I cried out in a suffocating voice. ‘They’ve got our passports! What if we don’t get them back?’

‘They just want to frighten us,’ he answered. ‘Our papers are in order. Just sit back down.’

He sounded calm, but I could tell by the rigid set of his jaw that he was steeling himself for a major battle, which set my heart 372thumping. I wanted to go looking for the soldiers, but he told me I’d only end up arrested. He opened La Bête Humaine, crossed his legs and started to read, which created in me a poisonous fury that I knew was unjust, but that I was powerless to fight. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine that I was hiking in the wilds of Mont-Tremblant Provincial Park, but instead I saw the fresco of the rabid Cerberus that I’d painted on my wall.

 

Two hours later, after we were already deep into Polish territory, the younger of the two soldiers who’d taken our passports returned. When I stood up, he handed them to me with a small bow. While I confirmed they were ours, he addressed Shelly, and his voice soon became secretive and unsure. It sounded as though he might be speaking Russian, but my friend later told me that it was heavily accented Polish – that the young man was probably a Pole who’d grown up in the Soviet Union. The only words I understood were Montreal and Toronto. Shelly’s replies clearly captivated him, however, and he reacted with pleased, grateful nods. At one point, he even permitted himself a glowing smile.

Shortly before leaving us, the solider checked the corridor to make sure we weren’t being observed and took out a pen and a tiny piece of paper – no bigger than his thumb. He handed them to Shelly, who quickly jotted down a few words.

‘Dziękuję,’ the solider said as he took back the paper. As he folded it in four, his tongue poked out boyishly between his lips. Was he all of eighteen years old? After the paper was the size of a small postage stamp, he tucked it into his shirt pocket.

When he shook Shelly’s hand, hope lit his eyes, and it touched me to see how two strangers might share a meaningful exchange under these difficult circumstances.

Once he was gone, I asked Shelly what the conversation was about. 373

‘He wants to know if we have professional ice hockey teams in Canada. He says he plays really well. He wants to go there, though he doesn’t openly say that. He is too afraid to say what he thinks.’

‘What did you write down?’

‘He asks for my address.’

‘You gave it to him? But what if he shows up expecting to become a hockey star?’

‘Don’t worry. I want to help, but I don’t dare. I invent an address. Poor kid – he is desperate to leave this place. And brave, too – he tells me that talking to me could get him arrested.’

 

We arrived at the ruins of what had been Warsaw’s main station on the afternoon of Monday, August 25th, 1947. Policemen – many of them no older than the soldier who’d returned our passports – patrolled the platforms. Their rigid, impassive faces and their tommy guns, slung over their shoulders, spread shivers through me.

Outside, the rotting stench in the streets compelled me to cover my nose and breathe through my mouth. Although about three years had passed since the Nazi destruction of the city following the Warsaw Uprising – when the Polish Home Army had tried to take back the city from the Germans – sewage still seemed to seep out from somewhere beneath the ground.

To get to Shelly’s childhood home on Ciasna Street, he led me through what had been the Jewish ghetto, but he had trouble getting his bearings because Russian troops – fearing outbreaks of typhus and other diseases – had bulldozed every last remaining structure to the ground. The gouged and muddy streets reminded me of the mining towns in Wyoming I’d visited with my parents as a boy, except that these streets were bordered by hillocks of broken concrete, brick and shredded metal. Spindly, yellow-blossoming weeds and stunning blue cornflowers grew wherever they had a 374chance to express their desperate wish for sunlight. Curiously, nearly all the men and women we passed seemed to be on urgent errands, rushing by with their heads down and shoulders clenched. I suggested to Shelly that they’d learned during the German occupation that keeping to themselves would be key to survival, but he made no reply. In fact, his lips had become a slit of forced silence since we’d arrived in Warsaw. I tried to take his arm at one point, after we passed a high mound of rubble on Dzielna Street that he believed to have been the Eldorado Theatre – where he’d played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – but he gasped as if I’d burned him. ‘I’m sorry, George, I can’t be touched right now,’ he said, and when our eyes met, I realised that violent and tragic emotions were assaulting him.

At one point, he got out his list of the relations of his Jewish friends and made a big blue X with his pen by the names of those who had made their homes in the area that became the ghetto.

Occasionally, Shelly would point toward a terrain of broken concrete and tell me that this was where the apartment house of a family member or old friend had been – or might have been, since it was nearly impossible for him to get his bearings in the sea of rubble around us.

We each carried a small duffel bag. Now and again, Shelly would put his down and gaze around in a slow circle. His face expressed deep confusion and disorientation.

After about a half hour of trudging through that desolate landscape, he kneeled down by a rusty girder. He picked up a piece of brick and tossed it across the street. ‘I’m pretty sure Uncle Henni and Aunt Elisabete have their home over there, with their son, Abe,’ he told me. He pointed up. ‘Second floor, left. They keep begonias in their window boxes. And they have a fat dog with crooked teeth – Knodl. It means matza ball. They also have a 375parrot named Glukl – good luck. They do not place her in a cage. She has her own bedroom. She is very old. And she can speak three languages.’

I laughed, but Shelly stared at me as if I’d insulted him. I wished I could find the right words to bring him back to me, if only for a few minutes.

‘Abe was the chess player?’ I asked.

Shelly lit a cigarette. ‘He would have been Polish champion,’ he said in a monumental exhale of smoke.

‘Maybe we can find him.’

He raised his hands as if he needed to make a momentous pronouncement about his cousin – a declaration about injustice perhaps – but a moment later he simply let his hands drop and shook his head as if it were useless to try.

A hundred paces down the street we came to a giant crater where girders had been twisted into tormented shapes. It seemed like a sculpture meant to symbolise how quickly an entire culture can be reduced to nothing. I followed him down to the crater’s centre. We squatted together by a pile of broken glass. ‘We come here at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,’ he said.

‘Was it a cemetery?’ I asked.

‘No, the Great Synagogue.’ He spread his arms. ‘Beautiful building. You can’t imagine.’

The remains of the ghetto wall were nearby. Past them was a neighbourhood where some of the buildings had suffered only minor damage. Many shops had opened again.

Shelly bought two apples and bottles of beer for us from an old man with the narrow and wary eyes of a hawk. From the wooden sign above his head – bearing the name Nowak – I realised that he might have been the former fabric seller who’d promised to get word to Shelly about any members of his family who returned. At 376the back of the shop, Shelly started a conversation with him, and the old man showed him a nearly toothless smile. They talked for twenty minutes or so.

Shelly returned to me with the apples and handed me one.

‘Is that the Nowak you spoke to a couple of years ago?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, he says my parents not come back. Not Benni or Esther either. He says some Jews return, but they leave again.’

‘Where’d they go?’

‘He is not sure. He says the government takes them to the Czech border, and from there they maybe go to Germany – to the part controlled by the Americans.’

‘What about that other man you spoke to, the baker? Maybe we could find him.’

‘No, Nowak says that Wieczorek vanish about a year ago. Maybe the Soviets take him. Or maybe he moves somewhere.’

‘And Nowak knew your family well before the war? I mean, he’d recognise them.’

Shelly nodded. ‘My mother and aunt shop here all the time – when Nowak sells fabric.’

He bit into his apple, so I started on mine; I wanted to remind him that we were on this journey together.

‘My mom has a dress that is scarlet,’ he said. ‘I forget until now. Nowak, he reminds me.’

‘What was it like?’

‘It has a high collar. And she wears an onyx brooch on it. Scarlet and black – they are my mom’s favourite colours.’

‘She must have been beautiful,’ I said.

Shelly shook his head emphatically. ‘No, not beautiful. She is athletic and slender. Though she is an amazing dancer. She studies ballet when she is a girl, and later, when—’

He choked suddenly, and he reached up to his throat as if he 377couldn’t breathe. Before I could get to him, he staggered back and tumbled over. He scraped his right hand badly, and it started to bleed. After he cursed himself, I helped him sit up and undid his scarf. He took a few desperate breaths. In his eyes, I could see that his fortifications against his homeland had crumbled.

He won’t survive many days of this, I thought, and I accepted at that moment that it would be up to me to force him to return to Canada no matter what we found – or didn’t find.

 

After I put a bandage on his hand, we started off again. Soon, I noticed a staircase in an apartment house climbing up into the sky – leading only to empty space – and it seemed a metaphor for something absurd and deeply flawed in Poland and the rest of Europe that would never now be fixed. And it occurred to me, as well – with the quiet, steadfast certainty of a revelation – that there was no need for an artist to invent symbols, since the world offered them to us ready-made.

Shelly spoke to an aged grandmother wearing a dirty smock who sold newspapers from a stall made of wooden planks, then every other shop clerk and salesgirl on the block. His first question, he told me, was always the same: Have you seen or heard of any Jews who are still living in Warsaw?

While he questioned everyone he could find, I searched a bombed-out building for anything that might be of interest. He returned to me shaking his head. ‘Nobody knows of any Jews who come back and stay,’ he said, adding with an irritated grunt, ‘Though most people close their doors to me.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re afraid of the secret police.’

‘They think you’re from the secret police?’

‘Some do. Though others ask about my French accent and must 378think I’m a spy. Anyway, they’re obviously scared that if they talk to me, they’ll be interrogated. And maybe tortured.’

Hoping to improve his morose mood a tiny bit, I held out a tortoiseshell comb I’d found, but he told me to get rid of it because it might carry lice eggs. Down the block, two young women wearing long elegant coats and lacy stockings were having an animated conversation at a bus stop. Shelly spoke to them, but they looked at him as if he were a bad smell.

‘A problem?’ I asked when he returned to me.

‘They just refuse to talk to me – they tell me to get lost.’

‘They’re dressed much nicer than a lot of women I’ve seen.’

‘Yeah, they must have good jobs. Or rich parents. Either way, they’ve managed to get in good with the authorities.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘The Communists decide where you work now. And how much of your earnings you get to keep.’

When he told me that, I realised what ought to have been obvious to me – that signs and ciphers were concealed beneath the surface of all I would see in Warsaw. As I turned in a circle to remember that lesson, a hunched little man in ragged clothing, carrying a big brown bottle in a filthy hand, limped past me, and I smiled encouragingly, but he glared at me as if I’d insulted him.

Did he assume I was a Jew who’d returned to reclaim my home? Was he a down-on-his-luck Nazi collaborator who’d partied in elegant bars and brothels throughout the war?

At length, we passed a thuggish-looking young man with long, oily hair, wearing a dusty grey suit that was way too small for him, so that his pink wrists and hands stuck out comically. He was carving off big pieces of a dark sausage and popping them in his mouth. He chewed from side to side, rather like a sheep. His eyes – when they met mine – expressed amused curiosity. A little while later, 379I realised that he was following us, so I stepped up to Shelly and whispered, ‘The guy behind us has a knife.’

‘Don’t worry. He’s okay.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘He lets us see him. It’s the men we can’t see who might make trouble.’

‘So we’re being followed?’ I whispered.

‘You do not notice?’

‘No.’

‘A man in a grey suit watches us since the station – probably from the UB.’

‘What’s the UB?’

‘The Polish secret police.’

‘And where is he now?’

‘Behind us, but don’t look! Just forget about him. We have more important things to think about.’

We turned right at the second street corner, and a minute or so later, Shelly stopped in front of a six-storey building with one side missing and no roof. By then, the thuggish-looking sausage-eater was gone. Shelly pointed up. ‘My parents, Esther and I live on the third floor,’ he said.

I patted his shoulder. ‘Let’s go look,’ I said. ‘I want to see where you were a kid. And if Benni or Esther left you a note, it’ll be there.’

‘George, I’m not sure I’m ready to go up.’

‘I’ll stay with you.’

‘Give me a minute to smoke,’ he said.

When Shelly was nearly done with his cigarette, a little scrappy-looking man wearing a red-and-white armband and a rifle slung over his shoulder came clomping and sliding down a high mound of rubble toward us. His eyes were wild, and his thick brown hair was a mess. I feared he’d demand a look at our papers, but instead 380he tossed off a sneering remark to Shelly and raced past us. A minute later, he disappeared around a street corner, and I asked Shelly what he’d said.

‘Something like, “What are you looking at, asshole?”’ he replied.

‘Who was he?’

‘I have no idea. And I don’t want to know.’

Our eyes met, and his seemed to search me for my consent to something I didn’t understand, but which might have had to do with my suspending judgment of him and his homeland.

Our knocks at the door to Shelly’s old home summoned a woman in her thirties to the door, which she opened just a sliver. Her lips were cracked and her eyes were narrowed by fear. Her red headscarf, tied too tightly, made her face look pinched and judgmental.

If I’d spoken Polish, I would have assured her right away that we were neither the police nor French or Canadian spies. Shelly held up his hands and must have said that very thing, since I heard the words policja and kanadyjski clearly. But she must have decided he was lying. She tried to press the door closed, but Shelly thrust out his hand and blocked it, then pushed it in.

The woman stood back from us. She wore men’s slacks and an old white sweater – moth-eaten and stained green at the collar. She was holding a long carving gouge with a wooden handle. We were in a small foyer. The doorway at the back was open, and I smelled turpentine and something else – a fragrant oil of some kind. Remnants of wallpaper – a fleur-de-lis pattern in gold and red – clung here and there to the walls. Black mould grew on the ceiling.

Shelly held his hands up and addressed the woman cautiously. She spoke to him in a jagged, aggressive voice – giving him a warning, I imagined. He answered her, then shrugged as though to excuse 381himself, and she told him something that made him frown and shake his head, then speak in a frustrated tone. A barefoot boy in a blue pyjama top but no bottoms appeared in the doorway, holding a piece of white paper. He looked to be about five years old. Shelly spoke to him gently and smiled. The boy – blonde, with reddened eyes – looked from him to me to his mother. Had she kept him home from school because he was ill? He spoke to her – asking who we were, most likely – but she yelled at him and waved him off. His mouth dropped open, and when she shouted again, he ran away.

Shelly spoke again to the woman, but in a friendly and entreating tone this time, undoubtedly trying to reassure her that we had come in peace. But she shouted resentfully at him and pointed her gouge at his face. I may then have gasped or given away my fear in some other way, because Shelly turned to me and said, ‘Don’t be frightened.’ He flashed a smile at me, as well – later I realised it was to put the woman at ease – then lunged for her and grabbed her threatening arm. With brutal quickness, he seized her throat in his other hand and slammed her back against the wall so violently that she gasped and burst into tears. Her gouge dropped to the ground. She struggled against his grip, but he was too strong.

‘Shelly!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t hurt her!’

He leaned toward the woman and spoke to her in a dark, poisonous whisper. When he released her, she started to cry silently. He snatched up her gouge, then handed it to me. ‘I’m going to look around,’ he told me. ‘You can stay here or join me. But do not trust this woman. And do not give her back her tool!’

I nodded, and I wanted to ask him what she’d told him, but he rushed into the apartment. The woman spat blood on the ground between us. She took off her headscarf and ran a tense hand back through her thick blonde hair. When she looked at me, her face was compressed by rage.382

‘This was my friend’s apartment,’ I told her.

Glaring, she pointed at me and uttered something that seemed a curse.

She turned and stepped through the door at the back into the apartment. I took a couple of steadying breaths and followed her, gripping the gouge in case she came at me. I found her standing by a far window covered by grimy brown curtains. When she made a smoking motion with her hand, I told her I had no cigarettes. As she frowned at me, Shelly called out angrily, ‘George, for God’s sake, stop talking to her!’

I found him in a room centred by a small bed covered with a fraying yellow blanket. Miniature wooden automobiles and planes were scattered around the floor, and a number of carved animals – I spotted a giraffe and a zebra – were jumbled in a wicker basket standing next to a chamber pot. A pink elephant with big yellow ears stood on the night table, and a paper solar system hung from the ceiling. The sun was about the size of a soccer ball. Saturn’s rings had been coloured with crayon or pastel and fastened to the planet with tape.

Had she threatened Shelly to protect her son? But why would she believe that we’d hurt him?

Shelly was standing by a bookshelf, looking at titles. His back was to me. When he turned, I saw that tears were caught in his lashes.

‘Shelly, what’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Dad’s books,’ he replied in a hoarse whisper.

I went to him. ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘We’ll take them with us.’

After he nodded, he turned around to continue reading the titles. At length, I asked, ‘So why did the woman who lives here now get so angry with us?’383

‘She says the Soviets arrest her husband – that they take away thousands of veterans. He was in the Armia Krajowa.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The Polish Home Army. She does not see him in a year. She believes he is dead.’

‘I don’t understand. If he fought in the army to free the country from the Nazis, the Soviets should give him a medal!’

‘George, you think like a Canadian,’ he said critically.

‘Which means what?’

‘Any loyal Soviet citizen knows that a Polish army officer is trouble – he might try to fight for the freedom of his country.’

‘All right, but what in God’s name has all this got to do with us?’

‘Her priest … he tell her that the Jews control Stalin – that the Holocaust survivors … that we go to Russia and tell Stalin to arrest her husband and kill all the army veterans.’

‘And she believed him?’

‘Oui, pourquoi pas?’ Shelly replied with the resigned shrug. ‘Besides, it’s more complicated than you think.’

‘Why is it more complicated?’

‘There’s a Jew named Jakub Berman who runs the Polish secret police,’ he replied. ‘He is a wretched man – une abomination. And a good friend of Comrade Stalin.’

Shelly grabbed a thick volume and examined the cover, which had the title in black Hebrew characters on an olive-green cover. When he opened it, a photograph fluttered out and landed by his right foot. He picked it up and studied it closely. Now and again, he licked his lips. I had a feeling that time had come to a halt inside him.

When I asked to see the picture, he handed it to me, then flipped through the book, though I grew convinced he was studying me.

In the photograph, a man in a high-collared shirt and a woman 384in a ruffled dress were standing behind a boy who looked to be about seven years old. The man – tall, stiff, elegant, in his sixties, perhaps – has his left hand on the boy’s shoulder, to remind him – it seemed to me – not to move while the photographer made ready to take the shot. The woman’s eyes were gazing inside. At sad memories? I sensed she was holding back tears, but the boy’s expression radiated amusement. His thick dark eyelashes made him look as if he were a character in the Arabian Nights. He had a short fringe of dark hair and was wearing a striped, exotic-looking coat – a hand-me-down from a well-travelled relative, perhaps. His right arm was a blur because he had started to bring his hand up to his mouth, presumably to conceal his giggles.

‘You’re the boy?’ I asked.

Shelly nodded. ‘I’m with my grandparents.’

‘What was so funny?’

‘My great-grandmother, Rosa, is next to the photographer. You can’t see her. She is pulling faces. She is old, but she is still a clown.’

‘How old was she then?’

‘At least eighty.’

‘Your grandmother looks upset.’

He took the photo back and studied her. ‘Maybe she is angry with Grandfather. He always has money problems.’ When he turned the picture over, he discovered several lines of highly slanted lettering in what looked to me like Hebrew script. He reached up to his brow with his free hand and moaned. Then he laughed in a burst and turned toward the door. At length, however, his face clouded over and he showed me a confused look.

‘What did you see?’ I asked.

‘J’ai pensé que Rosa …’

Without warning, his eyes rolled back in his head and he 385crumpled. I lunged for him too late. His head hit against the wooden floor with a thud – the sound of billiard balls clacking together, I’d later think. His left arm was pinned behind his back at a painful angle, so I freed it and hauled him up onto the bed. His head wasn’t bleeding, but his breathing seemed dangerously shallow and his hands were frozen. I rushed into the sitting room. The woman was filing a roundel of wood with a rasp. I realised – astonished by how slow my mind seemed to be working – that she must have carved the toy animals for her son.

I made a drinking motion. She brushed a lock of hair from her face and walked into a side room. An aluminium pail brimming with water stood on the floor of the kitchen. Laundry hung down from a cord tied across the room. She handed me a white porcelain bowl and a tarnished ladle.

After rushing back to Shelly, I dripped water onto my hand and dabbed his brow. I called his name.

The little boy appeared again, this time wearing his pyjama bottoms. I didn’t want to scare him, so I didn’t look at his face. I patted Shelly’s cheeks and called his name again, and he awakened.

‘Welcome back,’ I said. ‘You’ll be okay now.’

‘What happens?’

‘You fainted.’

‘No, that’s impossible.’

‘Why?’

‘I do not faint.’

‘You do in Poland,’ I said, trying – and failing – to summon a smile from him.

‘There is a photograph?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, and as you looked at it, you seemed to hear someone come to the doorway.’

His eyes closed. ‘Rosa,’ he said glumly. ‘I hear her calling me. 386She always calls me Teivele – Little Devil. I am sure she is there. But when I look, I see nothing.’

I found the photograph by one of the legs of the bed. I handed it to Shelly and asked what was written on the back.

‘It’s from my mother,’ he replied. ‘She warns me to leave Warsaw because it will never be safe for us. She writes, Make a good life. Do not worry about me or your father or your sister.’

‘So she knew you’d make it back!’

‘No, but it is her hope.’

‘And she knew that a few of her books would—’ I almost said survive, but I looked for another word.

‘You can say it,’ he said.

‘Say what?’

‘Survive. Rosa says books are the human form of angels – the form we can see and touch. She says that is the secret reason why the Nazis burn them.’

‘I get the feeling that Rosa was the poet in your family.’

‘More mystic than poet,’ he corrected.

‘There may be more photographs in the other books.’

‘Yes. I should take the books last time I am here. That is a mistake. But I am not …’ He shook his head and closed his eyes. He was too weak to explain.

‘You were busy trying to find Esther and Benni and your parents,’ I said reassuringly.

He looked past me because the little boy had found the courage to take a few steps toward us. Shelly summoned him over with a friendly wave. He came to us with very erect posture and his hands joined behind his back – an elfin dancer.

‘He’s beautiful,’ I whispered to Shelly.

‘Oui, touts les enfants sont beaux,’ he replied, which seemed the reply of an older brother who had braided his sister’s hair 387throughout her childhood. He showed the boy the photo and spoke about it in a secretive and tantalising voice. And then he asked his name.

‘Bohdan,’ the boy replied.

Shelly pointed to himself and said his name, then gestured toward me. ‘Georg,’ he said with a Polish pronunciation.

Bohdan asked Shelly a question – if he was the boy in the photograph, I later learned.

‘Tak,’ Shelly said with a good-natured shrug.

It was delight that I saw in my friend’s eyes while Bohdan studied the old photograph. And my heart filled with respect for him, for he plainly held no grudge against a Polish child for what had happened to his family.

Shelly asked me for the water and took a couple of sips. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, but he was too dizzy to stand. I asked him for the Polish word for book and returned to the mother. She looked up from her carving with irritated eyes, but when I told her what I wanted, she led me into a bedroom with a Cubist print of a guitar tacked to the wall.

‘Braque?’ I asked.

‘Juan Gris,’ she said. She seemed to want to smile at this small triumph over me, but with a put-upon gesture, she pointed me to her dresser. On it were six books, two of them leatherbound, and with gold stamping on their spines.

I gestured toward them, then toward her. ‘Yours?’ I asked.

She shook her head, so I carried them back to Shelly. After he spoke to the little boy, the child moved his collection of toy animals to the floor and handed me his now-empty wicker basket.

Shelly was able to stand by then, and together we put our books inside. The ones that didn’t fit we squeezed into our duffel bags. He took out ten American dollars from his wallet, kneeled down 388and handed the note to the boy. The child couldn’t possibly have understood its value, but Shelly said something that made him jump up and down. His eyes shone with silvery glee.

After Shelly had had a chance to look around the rest of the apartment, the woman saw us to the door. She said nothing. Shelly made no attempt to shake her hand or speak to her.

On the way down the stairs, he read my mind and said, ‘When I explain why we come, she tells me there are too many Jews before the war.’ He stopped on the first-floor landing and eyed me menacingly. ‘She said, “I am only sorry that Nazis did not kill you and your brother.”’

 

Shelly told me that he next wanted to go to the apartment that had belonged to his Aunt Graça and Uncle Adam – Benni’s parents. After we’d gone a little ways, he took my arm and said in a singsong voice, ‘Once upon a time, my father and mother have a large library. Mom has French novels and all of Shakespeare in an edition with gold lettering – so beautiful! Dad has books in Yiddish and Polish and German.’ He grinned mischievously. ‘And also a few in Russian.’

‘He could read Russian?’

Shelly jiggled his hand. ‘Not so good, but he must have Chekov in the original editions.’

‘Your parents may have sold them to raise money.’

‘Maybe, but I doubt it. They love their books.’ He patted my shoulder and smiled, ‘You know, George, finding that photograph … Wow, that is some big surprise!’

‘You’ve got glukl on your side,’ I told him.

He laughed, and his long-lashed eyes regarded me affectionately. It seemed as if the great tragic winds inside him had vanished. Maybe he had just realised that we were together on this journey. 389Or perhaps grabbing an anti-Semite by the throat was what he’d needed to do for a very long time.

We were both tired and thirsty by then, and Benni’s neighbourhood was still more than a mile away, so we went to a dingy bar to get coffee and a snack. Once we were seated, Shelly put his arm over my shoulder and let his head fall against me, and his breathing against my skin seemed a higher form of trust – so far beyond words that I said nothing. I believed that he was thinking that, as well, but when he raised his head, he said, ‘Are we alive, George?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Are you certain?’

‘Pretty certain.’

‘Good, because I’m no longer sure.’

A half hour later, we discovered that his aunt and uncle’s building had not fared as well as Shelly’s; the side where they’d had their home was gone.

‘Two rooms are still there when I am last here,’ Shelly told me, and the forlorn, teary-eyed, constricted way he gazed around gave me to believe that his throat was being slowly slit by his return to Warsaw.

He and I hunted like rescue dogs for family belongings in the rubble beneath the missing apartment but only turned up a pair of tattered socks and shards of porcelain – off-white with a bright red rim.

‘Tia Graça’s china,’ Shelly said, and he slipped a small piece into his coat pocket.

Over the next hour, I sat with our bags and books while Shelly asked at all the shops on the block if anyone had seen any of his relatives. His irritated headshakes and compulsive smoking made any questions I might have wanted to ask him about his success unnecessary.390

When he finally returned to me, his shoulders were slumped, and his eyes were bloodshot and weary. I said he needed to lie down. ‘No more searching today,’ I told him.

‘Sorry, I must go on,’ he replied.

‘No, it’s out of the question – you’re making yourself ill.’

I won our short quarrel, and we moved on to the hotel that had been assigned to us by the Polish Consulate in Montreal. It was called the Hotel Fabryka, and it was on the far side of the bridge that crossed the Vistula River to the Praga district of the city, which seemed to have fared better under Nazi occupation than the rest of Warsaw. Given its name – fabryka meant factory – we expected it to be a converted industrial plant, but it turned out to be a shabby, three-storey rooming house with wilted red and yellow geraniums in the window boxes. On the bottom floor was a cheap restaurant frequented mostly by prostitutes and reeking of DDT, which struck us – in our exhausted state – as fantastically comical. For supper, we each ate three bowls of borscht with a loaf of bread. The soup was salty and greasy, but it was all there was and it was hot.

A pale, middle-aged man with a beaky face and short, bristly hair, wearing too large a grey suit, studied us throughout supper. Shelly whispered to me that he was the guy who’d been following us since our arrival in Warsaw.

That night, we sat together on Shelly’s bed – we had two small cots – and shook out the books we’d rescued, and seven more photos fluttered out, six with virtually the same message on the back in his mother’s handwriting and one in his father’s tiny script that said, By now, I suspect that you are the man I myself once wished to be. Was I envious of your freedom? Can you forgive me for being harsh with you? I hope so. Whatever you do, do not stay in Poland. Go somewhere civilized, with true human 391beings – if there is such a place. Make love with anyone you like. And accept an embrace from your silly old father, who feels only affection for you.

Shelly is tiny and naked in the photo. His father – laughing joyfully – holds his baby son high over his head. Shelly’s arms are spread before him as if he is about to fly.

After translating the message for me, Shelly said he needed some air and went down to the street. I could see him out our window, his head down, walking in circles, chasing too many memories. Only after he was safely back in our room – a half hour later – did I return to bed.

I awakened long after midnight, and Shelly was standing at the window – his cigarette glowing. I imagined him searching the sky for guidance or solace, but when I asked him what he was looking for, he said, ‘Ghosts.’

‘Did you spot any?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘No, you’re wrong. I wish to see my father or mother.’

I stood up and went to him. ‘What would you tell them if you could talk to them?’ I asked.

‘I do talk to them,’ he said. ‘All the time. And I tell them I am well.’

I took his hand. ‘Did you tell them about me?’

‘Of course. It’s not possible to keep secrets from ghosts.’

‘What do they tell you about us?’

‘Until now, my father says he is ashamed of me. But now, after what I read …’ Shelly’s voice broke, and he finished his sentence only after placing his hand flat against my chest and pressing. ‘Papa thanks you for coming to Warsaw. And I thank you too.’

I kissed him for his thoughtful words and kindness, and 392through him, I also kissed his father for giving the world such an extraordinarily beautiful son.

 

The next morning, we walked to the Saska Kępa district of the city to visit the French Embassy, but the youthful secretary there was unable to find any dispatches from the consulate in Montreal mentioning Shelly’s search for Benni and Esther. Shelly was crushed, and he raged at her for the incompetence and ill will of the French. Terror-stricken tears appeared in her eyes, and she explained in stops and starts – hugging her hands around her chest – that any communiques sent by the consulate in Montreal were probably lost in the confusion of post-war Poland. ‘Or blocked by the Soviets – they censor all our dispatches,’ she told him.

While I was trying to calm Shelly down, the Cultural Attaché came out from his office to demand that Shelly stop berating the secretary. He was a harsh-looking man with the brutish, thrustout chin and balding head of an expressionist caricature. And I saw in his cool, predatory eyes – evidencing secret amusement, it seemed to me – that any apology Shelly tried to make would fail to breach his contempt for us, so I took my drawings of Benni out of my envelope. ‘I’m sorry that my friend and I have caused you trouble,’ I said in English, ‘but all we really need to know is if either of you has seen this young man.’

Shelly translated my request, since the Cultural Attaché told us in French that he spoke no English. He and the secretary studied my portraits but said that they didn’t recognise Benni.

Back on the street, Shelly apologised for creating a scene. He also speculated that no one at the embassy would have wanted to admit that they’d seen Benni because then they’d have also had to confess that they’d failed to register his name and address.

Over that afternoon and the next three days, he questioned 393twenty-four residents of Benni’s old neighbourhood and eleven shop owners in the hopes that one of them could tell him something about his cousin or Esther or any other members of his family. At more than a hundred and fifty other apartments, the inhabitants refused to speak to him.

I know exactly how many people Shelly interviewed because I kept our log.

Seven of the people he questioned admitted that they remembered Benni, and two recalled Esther. But no one had seen them or any members of his family since the end of the war. A diabetic and nearly blind old woman who was confined to bed did claim, however, that she’d heard that Benni had survived. Unfortunately, she did not remember who’d told her that. In the end, she admitted that maybe it was just a wish, because she had always thought he was a lovely child, as she put it.

‘Speaking to her is a disappointment, but it also does me good,’ Shelly confessed to me as we walked back to our hotel, and when I asked him why, he replied, ‘She helps me discover again how beautiful is the Polish language.’ He opened his arms wide. ‘And it is so very big – almost too … grand for me!’

‘What do you mean?’

He tilted his head as if listening for the answer to come to him from out of his past, then said, ‘Polish is a mansion with hundreds of rooms, and in each room is something crazy and wonderful – jewels and flowers and sculptures of the Virgin and ancient manuscripts …’ He shut his eyes tight. ‘And if you go down into the basement, very far down, you find old friends you forget about, and they embrace you, and just for a little while everything is as it should have been.’

 

Over the next two days, we visited all the addresses where relatives of Shelly’s Montreal friends had lived. More than half of the flats 394had been destroyed; Poles had moved in to the rest. Those few who agreed to speak to Shelly told him that the families who’d been living there had never returned. Some of them might have been lying, of course, but we had no way of forcing them to tell us the truth. A telling detail: although Jews had certainly owned many of the flats in the ghetto in which they’d lived, the Poles always referred to them as the previous occupants or simply the Jews who lived here and never as the apartment owners.

 

The next day was Monday, and in the morning we went to the offices of the American Joint Distribution Committee on Chocimska Street, and the director, William Bein, was having a busy day, so he entrusted us to an energetic and quick-smiling assistant named Dan Margolis. I handed him our complete list of Shelly’s family, and the second list of the relatives of his friends in Montreal. Dan was a retired lawyer from Chicago who looked a bit like Buster Keaton. In his no-nonsense, rapid-fire English – chewing gum the whole time – he promised Shelly that he’d start going through the committee’s files that very evening and continue the next day. He patted our backs with grandfatherly optimism and took us for a beer at a nearby restaurant where, he said jokingly, they had grown used to serving him and other American spies.

Dan explained to us that the rifle-bearing man who’d raced past us on our first afternoon in Warsaw – who’d told Shelly that he was an asshole – was from the ORMO, the local equivalent of the Nazi Brownshirts. ‘Complete lunatics,’ he said. ‘You were lucky he didn’t take an interest in you.’

His folksy charm and stories of a childhood spent swimming in Lake Michigan soon took our minds thousands of miles from Poland, and we were grateful. But when we returned the next 395afternoon, he said that he’d been through all his files and hadn’t been able to find anyone.

‘It’s incredible that they are all gone,’ Shelly told him.

‘No, it’s pretty much average,’ Dan told us. ‘More than three million Polish Jews were murdered. If you want, I can tell you what transport to Treblinka some of the people on your lists were on. Do you want those details?’

Shelly said he couldn’t cope with any more bad news, so I spent the next two hours with Dan, jotting down names and dates.

Shelly had waited for me at the pub where we’d had a beer with Dan and was sloshed when I joined him. We trudged back across the city without speaking.

‘We are living in Gehenna for more than a week,’ Shelly told me when we spotted our hotel from down the street. ‘And we have nothing.’ He showed me an angry look. ‘Rien, rien, rien!’ he growled.

‘One or two of them must have survived,’ I told him.

‘If they are alive, they are in America or Palestine,’ he said. ‘We never find them.’

That evening –September 1st – was clouded over and the stench of sewage along the river became unbearable. I discovered that it is possible to think of an entire city – and all its people – as cursed.

After supper, Shelly told me he wanted to return to the Jewish ghetto.

‘But there’s nothing there!’ I protested.

‘I need to walk through the streets and think,’ he said.

‘Think about what?’

‘About anything that appears in my mind,’ he said defiantly.

He believes Benni’s and Esther’s ghosts may show themselves to him there, I thought, so I accompanied him. But the broken-down wall around the ghetto seemed a menacing barrier. When I told 396Shelly that I preferred not to go any further, he glared at me as if I’d become his enemy. ‘So go – I don’t need you!’ he said roughly.

I might have gone with him anyway, but he turned and lumbered away. I stood motionless for a time – regretting I’d admitted my reticence – then started back for the hotel. I thought that Shelly might call out to me, contrite, but he didn’t.

There are places I’ll never be able to accompany him, I told myself, and yet I realised – surprised by my calm – that I had never expected our life together to be easy.

Perhaps ten minutes later, I detoured around a group of raucous Soviet soldiers onto a side street, and I kept walking in what I thought was the right direction, but I soon realised I was hopelessly lost. I asked for directions at a bar where a band was playing an off-key tango, but no one knew enough English or French to help me. I ended up ordering a beer, but the singer – a slender young man in a torn army jacket – screeched on the high notes, and a number of tough-looking men stared at me as if they might want to beat me up, so I took a few quick sips and returned outside.

‘The Vistula?’ I said to a giggly young couple that passed me nearly right away, and they pointed behind them. Ten minutes later, I reached the river. Just ahead, a dingy red sofa was sitting in a weedy embankment. I imagined it as having fallen there from out of the sky just for me. A few minutes after I dropped down on its lumpy cushions, I realised that the string of lights up ahead was the bridge to Praga, so I headed there.

I was passing below a street lamp when the world seemed to spiral away from me and tumble over. I was on the ground and fighting for breath, and cold, insistent hands were going through my coat pockets. I tried to push my assailant off me, but he was too strong. After he ran away, I felt for my bill-fold of American dollars, but it was gone. Luckily, I still had my wallet.397

Had my robber followed me from the bar? It seemed likely, but Shelly would later suggest that the UB man who’d been shadowing us might have decided I was an easy mark.

I could taste blood on my lips and was worried that I was cut badly. Lights were on in the windows of a ground-floor apartment about a hundred paces ahead, so I decided to ask for help. I knocked at the door. A tiny woman with a sheepskin over her shoulders answered. I only realised then that it was a chilly evening. She looked at me resentfully. ‘Sorry,’ I said, and I told her I’d been robbed and was lost.

‘What country you?’ she asked.

‘Canada.’

She took a quick look left then right – presumably to see if we were being watched – then motioned me inside. After she led me through her foyer, I discovered floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in her sitting room. And the stranger discovered that the road ahead was paved with books, I thought, and I decided that this room would be at the centre of a painting I’d do back home about my robbery and rescue.

‘George,’ I said, pointing to myself.

‘Magda,’ she said with a timid smile. Her teeth were tiny and brown. She had a round, moon-like face.

‘Am I bleeding?’ I asked.

‘Bleeding?’ she asked.

‘Blood,’ I said. ‘Sangue … blut.’ I made a scratching motion against my cheek. ‘Do I have any cuts?’

‘Ah, yes,’ she said. She pointed to my ear. ‘And here,’ she said, touching my brow.

She poured vodka on a towel and cleaned my wounds. ‘Przepraszam,’ she said gently whenever I winced. After I thanked her, she told me in a mixture of broken English and hand signals 398that she’d escort me back to my hotel. But I was to let her walk ahead of me and not try to approach her. She pointed to her eyes. ‘Police,’ she said.

‘Rozumiem,’ I said, trying out the word for I understand that Shelly had taught me.

Magda laughed good-naturedly at my attempt to speak Polish. It seemed as if under other circumstances – back in Montreal or Toronto – we could have been friends.

She left the apartment house first. I followed her at a distance of about fifty paces, and I never looked directly at her. After a minute or so, we came to a building with a flag I didn’t recognise in the ground-floor window, but which I would later identify as belonging to Yugoslavia. The flag had blue, white and red horizontal stripes and a gold-bordered red star at its centre. Beside it was a tourist poster of Dubrovnik, a tight jumble of handsome stone houses beside a beach of golden sand. If only Shelly and I were in southern Europe instead of Poland, I thought.

Suspecting that this might be a consulate or trade office, I peered through a crack in the curtains, but the darkness inside defeated my curiosity.

As I started off again, I felt Benni inside me for the first time in days. His eyes were closed, and he was hoping that I would understand the reason that he appeared to me now. And after a few minutes of searching – and some gazing back over my shoulder at the poster of the idyllic beach beside Dubrovnik – I did.

When Magda stopped by the entrance to my hotel, she turned to make sure that I understood that we had reached our destination. I nodded toward her, and I was hoping she’d go inside so that I could thank her and give her some dollars, but she hurried away with hunched shoulders and disappeared around a corner.

I ran up the stairs to our room. Shelly answered my knocks 399right away, but I waved off his apology. ‘It no longer matters,’ I said with rising excitement. ‘I think I know how to find Benni!’

‘How?’

‘I remembered where you always wanted to take him!’

 

Portugal had closed its embassy in Warsaw during the war and had only recently opened a consular office, which turned out to be in a dusty second-floor apartment on the melancholy, weed-infested outskirts of the Saska Kępa district where we’d visited the French Embassy. When we arrived the next morning, the consul was out. A youthful secretary – tiny and quick-moving, like a sparrow – answered our knocks. After ascertaining that Shelly understood Portuguese, she told him she was on the phone and would return to us in a minute. Back at her heavy wooden desk, she resumed her phone conversation.

Her shrill and rapid way of speaking – and the repeated shushing sound of her consonants – made her Portuguese sound like someone scrubbing the floor with a brush. When she was done, she shook our hands eagerly. She had an innocent, eager face. Shelly spoke to her in Ladino.

Later, he told me that he’d informed her that we were from Canada and that his ancestors were from Portugal. She replied with her name – Mónica Lopes – and asked how she could help.

While Shelly explained the reason for our visit, the small Portuguese flag on Mónica’s desk caught my attention, probably because it was red and green, the same colours as my Chinese lanterns at home – which seemed a positive omen. The flag extended out of an amethyst-coloured vase, and next to the vase spread a half-unfolded Japanese fan. Beside the fan was an old leather book, and on top of the book was a white carnation.

Is everything we do determined by a world inside us that we 400know almost nothing about? I wondered, because I sensed that I’d known for many years that I would stand here one day, and that I would cast my hopeful gaze over that green-and-red flag, the Japanese fan, the old book and the white flower, and I would be gripped by what I was now feeling – that these were the simple and beautiful comforts of a civilization that the Nazis wanted to destroy and nearly did.

When Shelly told Mónica Benni’s full name, she gasped and brought her hand over her heart.

‘Sim, lembro-me dele – um rapaz encantador!’ she exclaimed brightly. ‘Chegou cá logo a seguir a abertura do Consulado. Penso que tenho a sua morada. Dê-me só um segundo.’

She dashed into a room at the back, and I asked Shelly what was happening. He clasped his head between his hands. ‘Dear God,’ he whispered, ‘what if she cannot find his address?’

‘But she knows him?’

‘She said she remembers him – that he is a charming young man. She said he came here right after the consulate opened.’

Hope made me lightheaded. I remained very still and silent, and I found myself repeating a Navajo chant to try to remain calm. Mónica darted back into the room waving a piece of paper and laughing with relief, and she handed it to Shelly. Benjamin Rosenfeld Zarco was typed at the top. Underneath his name was an address and the name Ewa Armbruster, as well as a date – Friday, May 9th, 1947.

Mónica explained that Benni had come to the consulate on that afternoon in May, accompanied by an elderly Polish woman named Ewa Armbruster, who told Mónica that she was a piano teacher. She also made it clear to Mónica that she was to give that address to anyone asking after Benni.

Shelly jotted that information down in my log. I also wrote it on my hand, just to be safe.401

He gripped my arm after I handed Mónica back her pen. And then he did something very unexpected – impossible, even – he kissed me on the lips.

I think that Mónica may have gasped. But when I looked at her, her eyes were affectionate. Maybe she thought that Shelly and I were brothers. Or buddies from the Canadian army. More likely, she understood perfectly well and didn’t care; there have always been – everywhere – people who understand.

Just before we left, Mónica fetched us a small bag of Polish ginger cakes to give to Benni, and she sent us on our way with a warning that Shelly translated for me. ‘Be careful,’ she told us. ‘Nobody is safe in Poland.’

 

We tried to book seats on a train that morning at one of the ticket windows, but the woman there told us we’d have to wait. A policeman soon approached us and hustled us into the office of a railroad official who was anxious to know why we wished to go to Łódź. He and Shelly had an animated conversation in Polish that seemed friendly enough at first, but I could tell from my friend’s artificial smiles and nods that careful tactical manoeuvres were taking place on both sides. Our heavyset host had fleshy jowls and droopy eyes. He sat at a big wooden desk eating sticky-looking candy that Shelly told me later were called krowki. He smiled frequently and nodded in an avuncular way, but something he said soon started Shelly blinking away tears. After my friend made what sounded like a final, desperate appeal, our host shook his head and reached casually for a cigarette. As he lit it, Shelly pulled a small wooden case out of his coat pocket and put it on the desk. When he lifted the lid, I saw a ruby ring with a thick gold band.

Shelly left the gift on the desk. The official glanced at it quickly, then leaned forward and closed the lid. He addressed Shelly in 402what sounded like a scolding tone for several minutes, smoking greedily. When he lifted the receiver of his phone to make a call, fear constricted my heart.

A mind retreating from a terrifying situation must share something with the world of our dreams, because the man’s voice now seemed familiar – a menacing part of my childhood, in fact.

After he ended his call, he stood up, so we did, too, and he walked us to the door in a chivalrous manner, smiling benevolently, speaking to Shelly in a way that led me to believe he was offering advice. A pale and pimply young railroad official met us in the hallway. As he led us off, I asked Shelly what was happening.

‘I’m not sure,’ he replied. ‘We have to wait.’

A few minutes later, the official escorted us into a small, dingy room with a wooden desk at its centre, and a photograph of the Polish president, Bolesław Bierut, on the wall. Bierut had a moustache and slicked-back hair, and I joked that he looked like a Quebecois car mechanic, but Shelly wouldn’t reply.

‘You think we’re in trouble?’ I asked him.

‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘But I told him you had nothing to do with the bribe. All my idea.’

A half hour later, a prim little woman in a police uniform shuffled in and handed us our tickets. Shelly studied them with glassy eyes, then held them over his head and whispered a vow: ‘Benni, je viens te chercher.’ – Benni, I’m coming for you.

 

‘I buy the ring at a pawn shop on Clark Street,’ Shelly told me while we waited for our train. ‘I know the owner – Jewish guy from Lithuania. He gives me a great deal when I tell him I go to Poland to find Benni and Esther.’

We spent the afternoon in a cramped train compartment, grinding and lurching through the verdant farmlands and 403soot-covered, sewage-scented, miserably poor towns of post-war Poland. Shelly smoked in the corridor and snuck nervous looks at me while pretending to read his Zola. As we neared Łódź, a middle-aged policeman with deep creases in his forehead and cheeks, and a mud-brown, cancerous-looking patch of skin on his nose checked everyone’s tickets and identity papers. Across from us sat a kind-faced elderly woman carrying a small bag of eggs and two men with the coarse, handsome, powerful hands of farmers.

Shelly spoke to the policeman while he studied our documents, but he seemed uninterested.

The other three passengers turned away from him, but my eyes met the old woman’s for a moment, and she smiled affectionately at me, so I smiled back and made a little wave, and I thought, There it is – humanity. Surviving even in this awful place.

The policeman handed Shelly our documents back without raising any problem. When I asked him how he’d convinced the man to leave us alone, he shrugged and said, ‘I have no idea. I don’t understand how most people here think anymore. I am beginning to believe I have come home to a foreign country.’

 

We arrived in Łódź at close to six o’clock and dashed to the taxi stand. Ewa’s village was about twenty kilometres away, and the second person we stopped there – a young man carrying a sack of coal – was able to tell us where we could find an elderly piano teacher named Ewa Armbruster. He told us that the boy we were looking for was probably her grandson and that his name was Krystian.

The house was less than a mile away. We discovered that it had blue curtains in the windows, and atop the roof was a homemade-looking weathervane of Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god. 404Shelly asked the taxi man to drop us at the entrance to the dusty lane bordered by apple trees that led to the front door.

We knew we’d reached our destination not only because of Thoth, but also because we could hear a sprightly melody – Bach or Scarlatti, I guessed – coming from a piano inside the house. We picked up our bags and started down the lane.

The front door creaked open after we’d gone only twenty paces. A young man stepped outside. He had undoubtedly heard the taxi drop us. His hair was cut short. It looked like a black skullcap. He was holding a small white towel in his hand.

Shelly eased his bag down and didn’t take his eyes from the boy. ‘Benni,’ he whispered.

The boy stepped forward and stopped. And then he came running. Shelly opened his arms wide.

Tears were already sliding down my friend’s cheeks, but he was smiling.

The moment Benni and Shelly met in an embrace, I knew that – no matter what else happened in my life – I had done one good thing. And each of their kisses told me – free of the constraint of words – there would be many times over the next years that my witnessing this reunion would save me from despair and melancholy. And maybe even find me the courage to keep journeying ahead.

The door creaked again, and a woman in a floral dress stepped outside. She thrust her hands over her mouth.

While Benni and Shelly danced and shouted in Yiddish, I sat on the ground and addressed all the dead and dying I’d seen in Bergen-Belsen. I witnessed how the world betrayed you, I told them. And I’m sorry I could do nothing to save you.

Did they forgive me?

A minute or so later, Benni and Shelly came to me and lifted 405me up from where I was weeping, and I realised that I would never know. And yet I laughed when they hugged me, and my relief and joy seemed to contain everything I might one day become, because I knew I’d never again have to be the man I’d been before reaching this blessed moment. In fact, he was already gone.406