Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (10 page)

“You must think we’re nuts,” she said, holding on to the piano to regain her balance.

“Oh, no—it’s funny. I don’t know much about classical music. I didn’t even know there was a composer called Berlioz. But those songs you sang, I never heard anything like it in my life.”

Mr. Michaeli examined me through his half-closed eyes. “At school here they teach only the important subjects, what is grown in Manitoba and what fish to catch in Newfoundland. Music, who so much cares?”

“I’m going to start listening to the classical music station on the radio,” I said.

“Oh, Maya!” Rosie came over to me and looked into my eyes, as if apologizing for what she couldn’t give me. “Do you want to get the books from Mr. Lewis now?”

This is not who I am, this person who is worthy of the Michaelis’ hospitality—and what will happen when they discover their mistake? But Rosie bent down and whispered in my ear: “Mummy and Daddy really like you.”

We left the Michaeli mausoleum and walked towards Eden. “I hope Daddy doesn’t forget that Patrick cancelled today,” Rosie fretted.

“Who’s Patrick?”

“One of Daddy’s private students—he’s really funny, like you. Only more … sort of dark.”

“I once had a piano lesson at the house of this friend of my mother, Mrs. Blustein, on Linton. We couldn’t afford a piano, so Mrs. Blustein said I could come over any time to practise on hers. I learned to play ‘The Farmer in the Dell,’ but my teacher quit after one lesson—I guess my mother scared him away.”

“Poor you! Too bad you didn’t come to Daddy. ‘The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi ho the dairy-o, the farmer in the dell,’” she sang. “I love nursery rhymes. I have a whole collection at home, I’ll show you. ‘See-saw Margery Daw, Jenny shall have a new master. She shall have but a penny a day, because she can’t work any faster.’”

“I had a book of Mother Goose rhymes when I was a little kid,” I said. “One of those square books with the gold edges?”

“I have that one. Also a record. ‘Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night, Sailed off in a wooden shoe—Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew,’” she sang, and her voice sailed like the crystal light in the song. “Do you know it?” she asked.

“I don’t have a record player.”

“Oh, you’ll come over and listen to ours, it’s stereo. We found it at a garage sale and Daddy repaired it. He’s good at things like that.”

We passed through a park and there was Eden, across the street. I’d seen the building before, had noticed its ornate, alien letters carved like code into the stone wall. I would never have guessed that one day I’d be going through those doors.

The school was deserted and the halls smelled of old bubble gum and mildew. Our footsteps echoed on the wood floor.

“Mr. Lewis!” Rosie called out.

We set out to find the janitor. The search doubled as a tour of the building. “This is the elementary side,” Rosie said. “It connects through that corridor to the high school. This was my locker.”

Rosie’s locker. I wanted to fall to my knees, wrap my arms around her legs. That’s what love is—the anguish of knowing the person you love has a locker, a handwriting, a favourite scarf. I tried not to look at the green metal door.

We found Mr. Lewis in the library, stacking chairs. He was an odd man—tiny, ancient, sinewy.

“Mr. Lewis, I’m Rosie Michaeli, the music teacher’s daughter—remember?”

He stared at us with blank eyes.

“We need some schoolbooks.”

“For who?” he wheezed.

“For the music teacher.”

We followed him down the hall. He walked with short, uneven steps, like an elf on stilts, but he was strong—I was sure that if I touched him, my fingers would find a surface as firm as rock. He opened the door to the supply closet and watched us suspiciously as we entered the small room. Under a bare light bulb, the crammed shelves and tall stacks of shabby books looked long abandoned; a perfect set, I thought, for an art-house film about the end of civilization. I recognized a few of the titles—
Our Nation Proud and Free. Our Living Language. Math Is Fun!
All of them silenced now by the fall of the empire.

“Here, why don’t you take these?” Rosie handed me three books, their ripped spines curling at the ends. She gathered another three or four for herself. “You’ll also need a special notebook. I think I have one at home.”

“How is it special?”

“It has the alphabet on the back, and thin sort of lines. Thanks, Mr. Lewis. Sorry we bothered you.”

Mr. Lewis locked the door and returned to his janitorial duties.

“Let’s bring these to your place,” she suggested. “Mummy will drive us.”

Carrying our loot, we headed back to Rosie’s. We set the books down on the hood of Mrs. Michaeli’s car, and I watched over them while Rosie went in to fetch her mother and pick up the special notebook.

Mrs. Michaeli’s car smelled of lilac and Elmer’s glue and menthol cigarettes. I’d only been in a car a few times, when parents drove me home from birthday parties, but I settled into the back seat as if I’d been chauffeured all my life. Rosie described our small excursion for her mother, made it sound funny and quaint. She did it even though she knew it wouldn’t help. Rosie’s fatalistic generosity was not very different, in the end, from my acts of evasion.

Using the key my mother gave me, I opened the door to our flat, and Bubby crept towards us like the tide.

“Hello, there,” Rosie said.

It didn’t matter, after all, what Rosie encountered in my house, not only because her home was as odd as mine, or because she wouldn’t hold anything against me. It turned out that I’d been wrong about friends; I’d always assumed that you started off by inviting someone over, and out of that gesture a friendship evolved. But it wasn’t like that. Once you had a friend, that person was part of your life and everything in it.

I bent down to receive Bubby’s whiskery homecoming kiss. “This is Rosie,” I said. “I met her today.”

I led Rosie to my bedroom. Bubby, as always, had tidied up. Her tidying was efficient if unpredictable: today my navy loafers were arranged end to end on the windowsill, with my hairbrush tucked inside one of them.

We sat on the bed and I spread the books out on the blue-and-purple bedspread. “Your eyes remind me of a painting I like,” I said. “I’ll take the book out of the library and show you.”

“You know so much. What a cosy room!” Rosie said. “I can see how much your mother loves you.”

I ran my fingers along the books—my gateway to Eden. The smallest one was a slim blue hardback, almost as thin as the notebook, with thick, shiny pages. I’d never come across such sumptuous paper in a book, paper that made you want to turn the pages just so you could handle it. I stared at the first page: bold, flame-tipped letters seemed to be reaching up to a drawing of lightning and dark clouds.

“That’s Torah,” Rosie explained, “but for grade one. That’s why the print is so big. Torah’s just the first part. Then come the Prophets and the Writings. It’s called
Tanakh
, when it’s all together. Here’s the
Tanakh
we used this year.”

I opened the heavy book she handed me. Here the flame-tipped letters were surrounded by squiggly marks so minute they resembled the imprints of insects.

Rosie read my mind. “The small print is Rashi. You don’t need to know that.”

“I’ll manage,” I said, though I had no idea how. Six years in one summer—it seemed impossible. The script looked impenetrable, more like a cryptogram than a language.

“You read from right to left. The dots are the vowels. Imagine thousands of years ago, when they believed in golden calves and sacrificing children. Here, I’ll show you how it works.”

What I really wanted to do was touch her braids.

Rosie went through the alphabet on the back of the notebook and explained the final forms of some of the letters.

“I’ll practise later,” I said. Tonight, in bed, I would begin. My stomach went skidding at the thought, and though I’d never experienced that sort of sensation, I recognized it as sexual excitement.

There was a small crash as my mother, on cue as always, flung open the front door. Her voice, followed by the scent of Ben Hur perfume, filled the house. She’d fought her way through another day, warded off the Cyclops, dropped by Hades.

—mamaleh mamaleh where are you are you here—

I slammed my bedroom door shut. Rosie was shocked. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Oh, all right.” I opened the door and let my mother in.

—who who is this hello hello yes I know you—

She stopped midway, swayed like a great ship, her face contracted, her bosom expanded. She’d noticed the books.

“Hello, Mrs. Levitsky. These books are from my school, Eden. Maya says she’d like to go there next year—what do you think?”

—what’s that Eden what—

“Sorry, we should have asked you first.”

“Don’t pay any attention to her, Rosie,” I moaned. “She’s always like this. It doesn’t mean anything. Mom, leave us alone, please. This is Hebrew—Hebrew, see?” I opened one of the books and, impersonating Reveen the Impossibilist, I swung it back and forth in front of her eyes. “See … Hebrew … thousands of years old … right to left…”

—I know Hebrew I know Hebrew don’t show me avinu malkenu adon olam ha ha ha—

“You know Hebrew?” I asked. I’d thought that Fanya had by now ransacked every last corner of her remorseless memory. Hebrew, I was fairly certain, had never come up.

—the one the one with the father and the leg they sawed off—

“Don’t!” Placing my hands on my mother’s shoulders, I steered her gently out of the room. I shut the door firmly after her and rolled my eyes. “My mother and her crazy stories.”

“Poor thing. Was she in Auschwitz?”

“Oh, who knows where she was! It’s all tangled up there in what she calls her brain.”

“Never mind, don’t feel bad. I have to go help Mummy make supper, and after that I have a date with this guy, Freddy. But come over tomorrow morning, can you? Maybe you can stay all day, if your mother doesn’t mind. There’s a party in the evening.”

“Party?”

“Yes, Mummy and Daddy spoil me. We have a party every Saturday night, it’s fun. We dance, we play games…”

“What sort of games?”

“You know, charades, stuff like that.”

“I won’t know anyone.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll introduce you to all my friends. You’ll like Sheila—I mean, Dominique, that’s her new name—she’s smart like you. And Dvora, everyone likes her.”

“Is Freddy your boyfriend?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer. And yet I wasn’t exactly jealous. What I already had—Rosie in my life—was a bounty for which I could only be grateful. But there was more to it: Rosie’s availability was a part of who she was, and yielding to it was a way of having her.

“Not really … he wants to be. He wants to be the only person I date. Poor Freddy!”

“He shouldn’t be so possessive, maybe,” I ventured.

“I can tell we’re going to be best friends. Even though you’re ten times smarter than me.”

“I’m not. I’m really not.”

“Next time I’ll tell you more about myself. Will you tell me?” she asked generously.

“I don’t have any secrets,” I replied, downcast.

“You’re a riot.”

“I didn’t mean it as a joke,” I said. “I really do wish I had some secrets, and you were the only one who knew them … I do have something nice I can show you, though. It’s not exactly a secret, but we keep it in a drawer.”

Desperation had given me an idea, and with the idea came a sweet surge of anticipation. My mother had a treasured cashmere
sweater with pearl buttons which she kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. It was pale blue, though the usual terms—cloud blue, pastel blue—fail to capture the quality of its colour; it was the sort of colour that, in combination with the cashmere, the pearl buttons, and the simple cut, made you wonder how a piece of clothing could convey such pure innocence. It was nearly unbearable, that innocence, that purity. The story that went with the sweater was as unbearable: when my mother returned home after the war, she found her old apartment empty, not a curtain left, not even a broom, and as she sat on the steps and wept, the man who lived next door showed up with a parcel, left for her by her mother. Inside was the sweater. More likely that he stole it and repented, my mother added with a snort. And who knew what else the neighbours had in their cupboards! Candlesticks, silverware, lace tablecloths that had taken months to sew, hundreds of books—expensive, leather-bound volumes—and, worst of all, her father’s entire collection of photographs. The sweater looked bereft even without this Aladdin’s story of lost fortune, and I often paid it a visit in the dresser drawer. I’d take it out for an airing, lay it on my mother’s white chenille bedspread, press my cheek against the cashmere, then carefully refold it.

Signalling to Rosie not to make a sound, I led the way to my mother’s bedroom and shut the door behind us. Luckily Mère Levitsky was busy in the kitchen and didn’t see us creeping to her room; it would have ruined everything, had she swept down on us with her account of our solitary family heirloom.

I lifted the sweater from the drawer, held it against my torso, and told Rosie the story of the kind-hearted, or repentant, neighbour.

“They weren’t taken away together?” Rosie asked. “Your mother and her mother?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. My mother was at a friend’s house or something…”

“It’s fabulous,” Rosie said.

“Here, try it on. It’s too small for me, but it would fit you.”

“Oh, no! I don’t think your mother would want that. Anyhow, I really have to go. I have to help Mummy and Daddy … Pretend I died!” And before I had a chance to ask her what she meant, she fell down to the floor and lay there limp and motionless in the nook formed by the two beds.

I bent down and whimpered, “Rosie, Rosie, my only friend, how could you leave me like this?”

She lifted a swan-ballerina’s arm.

“She’s alive!” I cried. “Call the doctor!”

“There are no doctors in this place,” she rasped. Then she laughed and stood up. “You understand things,” she said.