After written notification of his death, discussion of Tamar's father stopped abruptly and conclusively, and Esther immediately acquiesced to Tamar's new plan. Tamar sold everything they owned â many of their possessions had been returned by neighbours who'd managed to take them and safeguard them. With the money from her father's furniture, her mother's jewellery, and the art they had bought together, Tamar brought her mother to Canada. They looked in the atlas and were shocked at the size of the country â Tamar had pictured an area approximately the size and location of Alaska. The capital city seemed like a reasonable destination.
Within two months, Tamar was working at a high-end clothing store in downtown Ottawa. She stood in her smart suits and high heels, long hair pulled up and back, hands clasped, in front of rows of Canadian women's clothing. She worried about her mother, home with the doors locked and the radio on, watching the snow-covered sidewalk through a crack in the blinds. Esther organized and reorganized the contents of the fridge, cooked the dishes she knew. Chopped liver and potato kugel, pea soup and chicken croquettes. She'd always harboured a basic contempt for all other races and nationalities, and now she was vehemently convinced of every known stereotype. She disdained her own ethnicity as much as any other; she thought Jews were elitist and superstitious and the Dutch
stingy and lazy. Yet at first she prepared Jewish and Dutch dishes with seeming reverence, a care that could easily be mistaken for nostalgia. She often prepared
pannekoeken
with apples for breakfast and challah on Fridays for the weekend.
The first time Tamar brought home a cookbook from the department store, Esther spent the evening poring over pictures of succulent chickens, hams and pies. The next afternoon, she started on the first page, going through the recipes with her English-Dutch dictionary to write translations in pencil beside each ingredient. On her next grocery day, Tamar asked, “Shall I buy you some of those ingredients?”
Esther looked shocked at the suggestion, then nodded. “
Ja
.”
“Which one?” said Tamar. Esther showed her a minced-beef pie, full of potatoes, corn and peas. Tamar copied down the list of ingredients, and two nights later came home to unfamiliar and delicious smells. Her mother had recreated the pie so it looked exactly like the photograph. “This is wonderful,” Tamar told her. Esther was utterly absorbed in eating. When they finished, Esther carefully wrapped the leftovers and put them in the fridge.
Tamar bought her mother more cookbooks, all of which Esther studied carefully and translated into Dutch. She wanted to try Italian dishes, French dishes, Asian dishes, and her quest for ingredients finally drew her out of the apartment. Equipped with purse, map and cookbook, Esther took the bus to Little Italy and to the Chinese stores on Somerset Street. She showed store proprietors the English recipes and demonstrated uncharacteristic respect for anyone who sold, cooked, prepared or was in any other way associated with food. The only exceptions were kosher butchers, who she claimed were barbarians. Her grandfather had been a kosher butcher, and she remembered him as a sadistic, unaffectionate man. Her unlikely descriptions had him covered in blood, head to foot, even at family gatherings. “Always, it was black under his nails. I knew it was meat rotting under there.” Esther's memories of her childhood had somehow become distorted, warped in strange directions during the two years Tamar had lost her. Tamar knew there was no point in arguing with her mother's beliefs and had long ago given up
trying to convince her of anything, even the details of their own lives.
Some of the recipes in Esther's books were too lavish for Tamar's salary, but they were both surprised by how inexpensive it was to eat well. Spices cost only pennies and transformed the most familiar ingredients into unheard-of delight. Over twenty-five years, Esther's arsenal of dishes had grown to the hundreds, but she still refused to diverge from the recipes in her books. Wouldn't replace white flour with whole wheat or habanero peppers with chili. She required exact measurements and penciled them in beside ingredients that could be included “to taste.” Once, when Ginny was a little girl, she suggested that Oma Esther add red pepper to her zucchini risotto. Esther didn't respond. Ginny said challah with chocolate chips would be a great dessert, and Esther was appalled. She attributed such suggestions, along with all Ginny's other flaws, to her Irish blood.
As Esther took on more cooking, shopping and housekeeping, Tamar began to work longer hours for increased wages, and her English improved quickly. She had taken English classes as a child, and the conversational requirements of sales came to her easily. Her manager forgave any difficulties, and so did her customers, because her impeccable appearance and manner more than made up for them. Esther, meanwhile, learned the English words for food and its preparation. Within a year, she didn't need to use her dictionary as much and recognized the words for most vegetables, meats and spices. She learned cooking verbs, but only in the imperative voice: whisk, knead, separate, crumble.
Asher tried to convince Tamar that Esther's fixation on food was a common symptom of what he called “survivor syndrome.” “Inmates in the camps talked and even dreamed incessantly about food,” he told her. “They would spend nights planning the menus for dinner parties. They fantasized about recipes far more than they thought about sex.” Asher forced these pictures into Tamar's head: Esther, starving, remembering recipes, dreaming of roast chickens and potatoes.
“My father,” Tamar told Asher, “would roll over in his grave, if
he had one, to see the way we eat. When I was a child, we weren't allowed to put more than one item on a piece of bread. Either butter or cheese, but not both. It wasn't because we were poor; it was some kind of moral principle.”
Asher tapped his finger against his chin. “Is it possible,” he said, “that you and your mother feel guilty for accepting your father's death, for leaving him behind â surviving him?”
After washing the length of Ginny's hair, Tamar squeezed more shampoo into her hand. “Once more.” This time, she worked up a thick lather and rubbed her daughter's scalp firmly with the tips of her fingers. “Ow,” said Ginny. “Nails.” She smiled.
“You should see some of the new products they're coming up with,” said Tamar. “I know you young girls like to have that straight-down-the-sides-of-your-face look, but you could still use something for shine. Thin eyebrows are in,” she added. She ran her finger over Ginny's pale left eyebrow, then used her palm to wipe away a puff of soap she'd left. Tamar's own eyebrows were non-existent, plucked from their follicles and replaced with a brown pencil line. “You could use a facial,” she told Ginny. “Betsy can do it. She's wonderful. She'd get rid of all those blackheads, too. The things she does for some of these women. They're like new people.” Tamar paused. “Does Steven know Asher has left?” she asked.
“Sure, they're friends.”
“Steven's such a nice boy. And he liked you so much.”
“Steven still likes me,” said Ginny. “And he's no saint, by the way. He's an oddball. He keeps brains in jars of formaldehyde. Asher calls him Doctor Frankenstein.”
“That's his area of study, isn't it,” said Tamar. “He's a scientist.” She winced a little at the thought of the pickled brains. “Anyway, he would never â”
Ginny splashed water up her arms. “Never what?” She shifted her weight, and her ankle bumped against the corner of the soap
basket. “Ouch.” She regained her balance with an arm on each side of the tub. “This one time, I was at Steven's apartment. There was a dinner party, and I was the last one left.” Tamar paused, gripping a handful of hair like a rope before she continued to knead it between her hands. Ginny reached up and touched the top of her head, then let her arm fall back to her side.
“And?” said Tamar.
“And,” said Ginny, “we were finishing the last of the wine when he walked over to the window. He told me to come over and look. We could see right into the apartment across the street. The bedroom. Do you want to hear this?”
“If you like.”
“Well, there were this man and woman lying side by side, completely naked, holding hands.” Ginny paused again, long enough for Tamar to wonder if this was supposed to be the end of the story. Then she added, “They were masturbating.”
“They were â goodness, Ginny!”
“Steven said they did that every night. Night after night. And he stands there watching them. He insisted I keep watching until they â were finished.” Tamar filled the green bucket and began to rinse the shampoo out of Ginny's hair.
Steven Winter was just a sweet, decent boy. He'd been calling Ginny for months, coming by and taking her to the movies, before Asher got in the way. He'd brought Tamar an assortment of teas in a basket. Terribly tall, he had a ponytail and a thick, bushy beard. But despite the fashion of the day, he had an intelligent face, a gentle face that would someday crinkle around the eyes in a permanent expression of kindness. Tamar was sure that only some strange twist of his sweetness and decency brought him to his window to spy on his neighbours and made him want Ginny to see them, too.
“Well?” said Ginny.
“Well what?”
Tamar pushed Ginny's head forwards to pour a bucketful of water on the back of her hair. She continued to rinse in silence and Ginny sighed, wiped her wet lips with the back of her equally wet
wrist. “There,” said Tamar at last. “Hair's all clean. Squeaky clean.” She squeaked her fingers down one lock to demonstrate.
“Thanks, Mother. I can do the rest.” Ginny splashed water on her face. As her mother settled back onto the toilet, drying her arms on an already damp towel, Ginny said, “Honestly. I'll be fine. Maybe you should check on Oma Esther. Can I call you when I need to get out?”
Tamar stood. “Thank you would have been nice.”
“I
did
say thank you, Mother.” She said it quietly, and Tamar didn't react. Instead, she paused in the doorway and asked, “Where did you get the paper for all those birds?”
“Oh. I buy origami paper at the art supply store. And I cut wrapping paper into squares. You can use anything as long as it's square; sometimes I use old class notes or letters. Junk that comes in the mail. Anything.”
Shutting the door behind her so it was open only a crack, Tamar manoeuvred through Asher's clutter to the bed and lifted one end of the balled-up blanket to shake it straight. Asher and Ginny had slept in this bed together for six months. Tamar couldn't picture it. Sleeping bodies, so vulnerable, waking to see each other's faces slack and open.
When Tamar married Robert, she and Esther had packed up the meagre contents of their apartment. Robert put their pots and pans in his bare cupboards, their books beside his own on the many shelves and their furniture in the guest bedrooms and den. He and Tamar slept in the bedroom in his large, furnished basement. The very bedroom where she'd often lain naked, Robert holding her and imagining a future for them, while Esther thought she was working extra shifts at the store. Esther slept upstairs. Tamar hadn't anticipated waking in the night, disoriented, with the panicked conviction that there was a stranger under the covers with her; she had never intended to share a life with him this way, to fall asleep with him. He lay on his back with his wiry, surprisingly robust limbs spread wide. He snored. Sometimes he would roll over and his arm would settle across Tamar's body, heavy and stubborn as an animal. She'd
shared a bed once before, but she hadn't predicted waking beside her husband with another name on her lips.
“Who's Femke?” asked Robert. Smiling across the pillow, he said, “You moan in your sleep, love. And you keep saying,
Femke
.”
“A girl I knew in Holland.” Femke used to curl up against Tamar's back and breathe against her shoulder. Her hair was brown and smelled like soap or like smoke or garlic. Sometimes, after an evening with her friends, she smelled of liquor, and sometimes she passed wind in her sleep. “Don't mention her in front of my mother,” said Tamar. Robert was curious, and so she told him, “I stayed with her family when my parents were gone.” When she said this, Robert pulled her back against his chest as though to protect her.
One time, Tamar remembered, Femke said, “You better stop making those moaning noises, pervert, or I'll tell them to come and take you away.”
“Doesn't your mother want to know what happened to you while she was gone?” said Robert.
Wriggling out from under his arm, Tamar sat up. “You can't mention it to her. Please, you don't understand.” She'd told him her mother was interned for a time and that Tamar had stayed with neighbours; she had made it sound like a week or two. She had considered telling Robert the whole story, and considered it again as he sat up in bed beside her and shook his head, perplexed; the urge to confess swelled from her stomach into her throat. But to tell him she hadn't breathed fresh air or been allowed near a window for two years of her life â that the years she was seventeen and eighteen, when most people agonize over first love, worry about exams and dream of extravagant futures, she'd been hidden away like a terrible secret.
She imagined telling Robert about the hours, sometimes entire days, she'd spent lying in the crawl space under the roof, keeping her mind still by conjugating English verbs, thinking of the beach or concentrating on the smell of her mother's rosewater perfume until she could feel the memory in her nose. But she had already vowed, privately, never to tell anyone. How could she, without letting those
two years define her? If she described details, admitted to the circumstances of her father's and aunt's deaths and tried to imagine what her mother had witnessed, anything else Tamar said or did or ever achieved would inevitably pale in import beside those twenty-two months' obscenely tragic glow. She would become gruesome in her own eyes and the eyes of others; how could she not?