Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (27 page)

“Daniel, it’s all over the place. You were late and I was cutting tomatoes and the knife slipped…” Sarah’s voice rose with each complaint.

“You’ve cut yourself?”

“My finger. I’m bleeding. There’s so much…”

“Sarah, try to calm down. It’s only your finger. The blood can’t be spurting?” Daniel was, after all, a doctor.

“No, but there’s a lot of it.”

“Yes, there’s a lot of it, but if you had cut muscle or down to the bone, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

“It’s bleeding…”

“Put the phone down and get a dishcloth. Wrap it around your finger, wrap it good and tight. Then come back. Okay. Can you do that for me?”

“I’ll try.”

There was a moment’s silence on the line as Sarah followed her husband’s instructions.

“All right. Is that under control?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see it now, it’s all wrapped up.” Her tone was now sulky.

“Okay, well, keep it that way until I get home. I was just calling to say I was running late—Mrs. Katz showed up at six, just begging for an appointment. Her baby is still colicky. She’s beside herself. Anyway, I’m leaving now. I’ll be with you in twenty minutes. Just sit tight. We’ll get a bandage on it as soon as I get there.”

“Twenty minutes. Can’t you take a cab? I’m still bleeding, it’s coming through the towel now. Daniel…”

“Try to be calm. I will be there as quick as I can.”

Daniel usually left his 1958 Ford in the garage, reserving it for weekend errands and visits, and took the subway the three short stops up and down Yonge Street from home to office. Tonight, worriedly dismissing the extra expense as necessary under the circumstances, he did flag a cab outside the door of the medical building and was back at the house ten minutes later. He hurried into the kitchen to find Sarah still sitting by the phone, cradling her hand, wrapped in the stained dishtowel, on her lap. He got the first-aid kit from the bathroom, bandaged up her finger—it was a fairly small cut and had, by then, stopped bleeding—washed some blood from around her mouth, and settled her in the living room with a cup of tea, while he heated up some leftover soup for their dinner and finished slicing the tomatoes himself.

“Daniel…” Sarah called from the living room. “Just put a little salt on the tomatoes, won’t you? They taste better with just a little salt, not too much, just a sprinkle. The shaker’s on the windowsill.”

Daniel sighed, reached for the salt shaker, and followed his wife’s instructions.

That night in bed, once Sarah had finally dozed off, her injured hand now resting on a pillow he had fetched for her because she complained that her finger still throbbed, Daniel reflected, as he did increasingly, that it had not been a good day.

Good days were ones where nothing happened to upset Sarah. She had not cut her finger, or stubbed her toe, or caught a cold, or merely worried that she might be catching a cold. She had found all the ingredients she needed at the
supermarket. It had not been a day when a new postman, one whom she didn’t recognize, had come to deliver a parcel, prompting her to call Daniel at the office to check whether or not she should open the door to him. She was in the middle of her cycle, so neither her period’s worrying delay nor its disappointing arrival nor yet the cramps that sometimes accompanied it would disturb her on this day. Nor had she read an article in the paper suggesting the economy was due for a downturn, nor one that insisted there were far too many doctors in the province of Ontario for all of them to get work. She was not, today, worried about the possibility of nuclear war. Those were good days.

It was Daniel himself who had given Sarah the luxury of fear.

At thirty-three, she could barely believe now that she had once been a young woman capable of buying passage to Europe, boarding a ship without any companion, sailing to France, and spending weeks alone ferreting out information as to the fate of her parents. Outside the house, she was usually a woman of great exterior composure—indeed, her slight air of aloofness from events around her often led others to consider her something of a snob—but once she met Daniel, interior courage was no longer required. That was his department. Calmly self-confident, Daniel had been raised to help others, he believed it a duty and a joy, and in the postwar years, as immigration officials slowly began to accept the European refugees they had once kept at bay, there seemed no more appropriate person to help, no more delicately pretty girl to love, than the quiet and resolute young Sarah Simon. Her fractured history seemed to him hugely attractive and he longed to make it better just as surely as he would cure his patients of strep throats and broken bones.

The next morning, the day after Sarah cut her finger, Daniel set off from the house early, took the subway down to King Street, and joined a short queue in front of the information desk at the German Consulate. The line was moving well, an officer dispensing visa forms and tourist pamphlets with quick precision, until the young woman ahead of Daniel moved up to the counter. She was about to leave for Germany on a student visa, Daniel gathered that much from the English half of the conversation, but since she seemed intent on proving to the boyish-looking officer that she spoke German, moving haltingly through her requests in that language despite the officer’s replies in impeccable English, the transaction took rather longer than it should have. She finally secured the information she needed about what inoculations and vaccinations were required—the words for typhoid and diphtheria proved elusive—and moved on, thanking the officer for his kindness and assuring him how much she looked forward to her trip, in English, before essaying a cheery
auf wiedersehen
as she left. Daniel advanced to the counter.

“I wanted information…”

His voice sounded too loud in the consulate’s echoing front hall. He hesitated, cleared his throat, and tried again in softer but unhesitating tones.

“I was looking for information about indemnification, for war claims.”

“Yes, sir. I will get you the forms. Just a minute, please.”

The officer turned to a cabinet behind him, opened a drawer, and started leafing through files. He seemed unable to find what he was looking for, turned to Daniel and indicated with a gesture he would be another moment, and walked back towards a closed door, knocked, and entered.
The woman behind Daniel in the queue shuffled her feet impatiently. Someone coughed. After a minute or two, the officer emerged with an older colleague, a middle-aged woman dressed in severe grey. She advanced to the counter, and bent her head to speak to Daniel.

“The person who is applying, that is…” Her voice, already quiet to the point of inaudibility, trailed away.

“My wife.” Daniel prompted.

“Yes, your wife. Is she… was she? She lost property? She was interned?”

“Her parents died in the camps.”

“Yes, but was she interned, herself, yes?”

“No, she escaped, here, to Canada.”

“Yes, she is the child of a victim.” The woman turned to the same cabinet her colleague had searched, pulled out a file, and showed it to him. “These forms here.”

She came back to the counter and spoke delicately to Daniel.

“There is a form you can fill out, but I must warn you, yes, that the German government is paying indemnification to the heirs of victims in not many, um, very limited number of cases. Most money is going to survivors. You read the form, yes? And then if you want more information, you can telephone us, the number is stamped on the form here. Or, also, um, you can get advice from the Canadian Jewish Congress too. They also have these forms, yes?”

Daniel nodded, although he already knew that. The congress’s offices were located uptown, well west of his house, and he would have had to drive over there. The consulate was more convenient. With a hint of defiance, he had decided there was no reason why he should avoid it.

The woman continued.

“Also, sir, you should know that the German government has announced a final deadline for all applications, next year.” She seemed to want to apologize for something with her polite, slightly hesitant smile. “The program has been running more than ten years now.”

“Yes, I heard about the deadline.”

Indeed, that was why Daniel was here. A story in the
Canadian Jewish Chronicle
had caught his eye only the week before, a story reporting that the German government was holding firm to a final deadline of December 31, 1965, for all applications to its indemnification fund. If Sarah was to apply, it had to be now or never. Daniel couldn’t remember how long he had known about the reparations—he must have heard about the German fund around the time of his marriage—and soon after they were married, he had urged Sarah to apply. She had quietly refused.

“I don’t need German charity,” she had said, and closed the subject with a look of cold pride that occasionally passed across her face, if she felt she was being patronized or snubbed, and that Daniel had come to hate. There was unfinished business here, but it was only in the past year that he had started to broach the issue again, convincing her that he would start investigating what had happened to her parents’ property in France. It wasn’t straightforward: Sarah had no birth certificate, let alone bank or insurance records, and did not know if her parents had owned or rented their Paris apartment. She had acquiesced passively—“If you think it’s worth it, dear”—to his French project, but he had not had the courage to open again the subject of German reparations. He was on his own here, judging that if he found out that it was worth her while to apply, if he could name a sum to her, it might change her mind. He took the form, thanked both the
German officers, and left the consulate, heading uptown to his office in time for his 9:45 patient.

Sarah, meanwhile, was trying to park the car in front of a meter on Bloor Street but had misjudged the angle and now found her rear right wheel was hitting the curb. Frustrated, she pulled back out, tried to remember what Daniel had said about watching something appearing or disappearing in her side mirror but failed to grasp the trick of it, and hit the curb once again. Flustered now, she gave up, drove on, and found a space two blocks further on with no car in front so that she could simply drive straight into it. She got out of the car, tried to decipher the instructions on the meter as to the required fee, settled on a dime, fished it out of her purse, and slipped it into the meter. She started to walk the three blocks back to her destination, still punctual for her ten o’clock hair appointment.

As she walked, she smoothed her skirt with her left hand and absent-mindedly noticed the way the slight roughness of its wool rubbed against the coating of the bandage that Daniel had wrapped around her finger the night before. It was one of these fancy new waterproof ones made of plastic rather than cloth. Everything was plastic nowadays. She breathed slowly and let the frustration of parking fall away from her so that she would enter the hair salon with the right degree of composure—it was so easy to feel oneself snubbed by a hairdresser and arriving all hot and bothered would not strike the right note. She allowed her mind to float above the street a little, and it was then she noticed that the light was back. The clear light. Yes, there was a small chill in the air. The mugginess that had hung over Toronto all summer long was gone and this new clarity seemed to invade Sarah’s soul, inflating it with soft hopes, piercing it with a small, sharp pain, leading her
backwards and forwards simultaneously, removing her from the present and depositing her in a place that was somehow both future and past. Sarah stopped for a moment, closed her eyes, opened them again, and mentally brushing the feeling away, took the last three steps towards the hairdresser’s and pushed open the door.

These small episodes were commonplace in her life. If Sarah knew rationally that she lived in Toronto and would live here until she died, she could not really bring herself to believe that she would not some day return, if not to the place of her childhood, then to its time. She found it hard to believe that the past was actually over and this was, most of all for her, a sensory experience. When she had first come to Canada, she noticed that light and temperature were in opposite relation to each other than they were in France, where sunlight produced heat and clouds cold. In a Toronto winter, when the sun shines and the sky is a cloudless blue, locals know to wear a hat and secure a scarf tightly around the neck of their coats, for the thermometer has dropped to zero Fahrenheit. But the overcast days are warmer, as the clouds insulate the city from the arctic air that hangs high above it. In spring the air is briefly clear, but by June, as the real heat arrives, a veil descends, the atmosphere becomes muggy and unfocused, and remains that way for the rest of a sweltering summer.

Gradually, Sarah had come to recognize and even love peculiarly Canadian effects of light and temperature. She knew well those early-summer days when the sky is huge, the puffy clouds immobile, and the green of the lawns and verges so intense they look unreal. Or, sitting inside around noon on a sunny February day, she was familiar with the very particular smell and look of heat, slightly dusty in
odour yet shimmering with a lucidity forcefully distinct from the atmosphere around it as it rises out of the air vents to warm the house.

But if stepping out on a barely warm May morning she were to catch sight of the shadow of a tree, sharply delineated in the new sun of spring; if walking under a spreading chestnut in October, her shoe banged against a shiny conker rolling on the ground; if she were to enter the subway to be greeted with a blast of warm air; or if she were to sense, as she did this day, a certain foreign quality to the light at the first hint of fall, then the agony of remembrance would pierce her heart and she would stop walking and stand for a moment with her eyes clenched shut until she felt strong enough to move on. Spring on the boulevards, autumn in the Bois; the sunlight of late summer, the sweet, sooty scent of the Métro—these were the sights and smells of the world she had lost.

In her Toronto present, a life of Daniel, and the house and the shopping, a few friends, visits with Clara and Lionel and Daniel’s brothers and their wives, trips to the library, the hairdresser, the synagogue some Saturdays, in this life, November had become Sarah’s favourite month—for perverse reasons. It was the month when the pain passed, the light could no longer injure her with its brightness, its vague familiarity, its unpleasant newness; the air could no longer fill her with nostalgia or longing. After the promise of May and the disappointment of September, it was a neutral season where Sarah no longer felt haunted by comparisons, where she could shelter indoors in a state of sensory amnesia and live unconsciously for a while.