The County of Birches (15 page)

“Just a few days,” Mummy assures me, “and you'll be all better.”

I can't shake the feeling that I've done something wrong. It must have something to do with what the nurse at my infant-school called Mummy in to talk about. The shame of it, having your mother called in, but no one ever accused me of anything. There was some talk about the way it's done here in England. Every child must have his tonsils taken out. But it's so vague and bleary. I don't know what tonsils are. Not like stones that you can see.

I have the sense of being deliberately kept in the dark. Maybe my mother thinks I will make less trouble if I don't know why I must be sent away. Certainly I would be less tractable if I knew that I would be in hospital for two whole weeks.
Two weeks.
What largesse on the part of the British. My mother is not in the habit of explaining things in detail. She assumes my sister and I are quick enough to pick up whatever we need to know. What we don't understand is probably best not clarified until we are ready to learn it for ourselves. She adheres to a method of child rearing that on the one hand treats us like miniature adults, and on the other trains us like a higher form of pet.

We walk slowly down Monahan Avenue. The houses tip me forward, but my heels dig back. My mother uncharacteristically slows down, matching her stride to mine. Usually she's in a hurry. At home, in her kitchen, I stand clear of my own accord. Mummy doesn't take the time to warn me she's about to whisk a hot pan off the stove. She is quick, purposeful and sure in all her movements. When Apu stayed home during my mother's illness, he didn't take chances. Overly careful, he told me to back away when he stood the iron on its end so he could check the oven. I knew very well the iron was hot, but I liked my father's attentiveness.

It was like a holiday being alone with my father. He didn't make me go to infant-school every day or shoo me outside. Apu pushed the iron methodically back and forth, and talked to me softly about the old times on his family's estate. It reminded me of the way he used to talk to Lili back in Hungary when I was still hardly more than a baby. Finally I was old enough to receive the same attention. I liked the scorched smell of hot cotton more than the mustiness of wet wool. I liked the way he included me: what should we have for dinner, the casserole from Auntie or the dish brought by the mother of Lili's school friend? In Hungary my father never did chores since he was home only on weekends, more like a guest. He looked funny wearing Mummy's apron tied high over his middle, and the laundry stacked up beside him in little rolled logs to keep damp. Should we go meet Lili on her way home from school? he asked. All his suggestions were delightfully out of the norm.

As we walked hand-in-hand, Apu told me about that other world like a fairy land, so full of all that was good. His home before the war was called the Rákóczi Tanya. When he said the name it sounded big and important, like London or Budapest. Bigger—the centre of the universe. As a boy he had driven between family estates in carriages and sleighs pulled by matched pairs of horses, and he and his brothers were pampered with wet nurses, governesses, tutors and—this impressed me most vividly—teddy bears made from the winter fur of hares. The phrase “winter fur” suggested all that was splendidly old-fashioned and fine. By the time Lili met up with us he was launched into the description of a holiday feast. Did we know that at Passover sometimes more than thirty guests had gathered around his beloved mother's table?

Back in our dim kitchen, Apu passed the broom over the cold floor in systematic sweeps, still talking about the festive meals he had enjoyed, listing each dish served on silver platters embossed with the family initials. I pictured steaming aromas rising like vapours of love. The dank chill of our kitchen warmed with the melodious flow of his voice. The cold melted like stiff cloth under the kiss of his iron.

“What's happened?” Mummy asked when she returned home from the hospital. She sensed the different atmosphere right away, even as she pulled off her hat and gloves. It made me realize she'd lost nothing of her sternness, removed stones notwithstanding. Apu took her in his arms, but she was impatient to look things over. He managed to hold her just long enough to pass me a conspiratorial wink over her shoulder.

I'm not convinced that I really need an operation. I think instead that I am being sent to the hospital to learn a lesson. My mother had a scar to attest to why she had been away. I pestered her until she showed me the angry red line running up her belly. Like a thermometer, I thought, showing when she might boil over. The new overall feels stiff and scratchy on my legs, so I take comfort in the pink posy that is delicate and fine. I finger it as we go.

*   *   *

A nurse all starchy white takes us up to the ward. Instantly I recognize the two rows of beds facing each other, just like the picture in my
Madeline
storybook. Two rows of beds for children without parents. From each bed a child stares at me as I hold the hand of my mother. They may have no parents, but I do, and mine do not want me. They can see that I'm being rejected.

“We're all full up this week,” says the nurse. “It'll be the crib for you, love. You'll fit yet.”

Crib.
This is sheer humiliation. Mortified, I whisper to my mother, “But I'm four and
a half.
That's just for
babies.
”

“Never mind,” she answers loudly in Hungarian so everyone will hear that we're not like them, “you'll just be a few days. When you come home your throat will be all better.”

I'm so ashamed in that room among strange children to be thrust in a crib, so humiliatingly set apart, that I don't notice what she says about a sore throat or coming home again.

My mother comes to see me every day. In between visits, the time stretches interminably. Painfully shy in my crib, I don't speak to anyone but the nurses. Since I am quiet and well behaved, I'm left mostly alone.

Mummy brings treats and books and reads to me each afternoon after her shift at the factory. One day she pulls from her satchel a beautiful surprise.

“Look what Lili sent you.” Lili doesn't like toys. Her imagination quickens to words on a page. Since she learned to read English, books are her chief amusement. She has sent her best doll. I think no less of the gesture because she rarely plays with it. I'm still honoured to be entrusted with the doll's safekeeping.

“Lili can't come to see you because they don't let children who aren't sick into the hospital.” This is another of the incomprehensible contradictions I have come to expect. I'm here all the time although I'm not sick, but my not-sick sister cannot come to visit even once.

“Lili says you may play with her doll while you're here, as long as you promise to look after it.”

Oh, I will. I stroke the doll's coarse hair as though it were an angel's.

“And Apu sends his love.”

It is my mother who visits me each day; why never Apu? She brings fruit and biscuits and storybooks. There is always a special tidbit from my father.

“Apu is very busy. The garden has to be tidied up after winter, and there isn't much time for that when he gets home from work. Look, he sent you a macaroon.”

I assume that my father stays away on account of the unnamed offence by which I have obviously let him down. I feel responsible for his absence. But mostly I blame my mother for leaving me each day.

“Bad mother.” I greet her with this charge when she comes in the next afternoon. “You're a bad mother. Apu wouldn't leave me here. If he knew I didn't like it, he'd come and get me.”

My mother's eyes narrow. “Oh yes, your precious father who can never do any wrong. You girls think he is so perfect. But your father is afraid. He is a coward, I tell you. Afraid to see his baby in a hospital. Do you think I like having to say good-bye to you day after day? You think this doesn't hurt me too? I do the hard part and he gets all the love!”

My breath is an intake so sharp I cannot use it. I want to leap at my mother and slap her harsh mouth.

“Afraid?” It has taken me a moment to locate the thought, but now it looms large and glaring. “Afraid of what?” Panicking, I demand, “What's going to happen?”

But my mother has decided it's best to put the outburst behind us. She pulls up a chair beside my bed, and opens the storybook. “Calm down,” she says, “or the nurses will think we're fighting. Do you remember what happened to Noddy yesterday? Think. Who picked him up in the scooter? What colour was it? So, we will read a little more. Listen carefully, and I will give you a treat when we have finished.”

I watch the children in the ward roll in and out on special beds. They sleep a lot when they come back. Then the nurse brings them ice cream. You don't get the ice cream until you've rolled away and returned. So I wait. I've figured out that in due course I will get to roll out and have ice cream too.

When I finally go it's like I'm dreaming. Awake, yet dreaming. Strange to be carried and conveyed like a thing. Not unpleasant, not having to propel yourself. Double doors swing out as I sail through. More double doors. Poof—they exhale softly behind me.

“Night-night, love,” says a disembodied voice. Then it's too late to resist the mask that shuts me down.

Darkness grabs me like a pillow against which I struggle to breathe and wake. It must be night. This dawns on me briefly before the searing in my neck closes out further thought. I try to scream but can't. My mouth feels severed from my throat by piercing knives. I grope for the crib bars but they aren't there. My hands open and close on nothing. I find nothing to grab onto. I can't locate my voice. I'd disappear into the black night, a free-floating pain, were it not for these knives in my throat that pin me to the mattress. The ice cream when it comes is cold and numbing. Sometimes it's pink, sometimes it's white. It hardly matters because it has no taste.

*   *   *

As my mother helps me dress, I'm surprised the overall still fits. It feels a long time ago that I wore it, when I was much smaller. I've changed since then. Monahan Avenue too has changed. It's a lot brighter. The street is bathed in sunlight, a bright uncommon English sunshine. The heat makes the uphill harder work. The cloth of my overall clings to my skin. I've taken my suitcase from Mummy and it bumps heavily against my leg. Inside, Lili's doll lies safely swaddled in my underclothes. I drag the bag up the steep hill but won't let my mother take it. It's my burden. It belongs to me.

I am very aware of how different the street seems. Everything looks clearer than before, and sharper. My gladness, too, is so acute it hurts. I'm so relieved to be forgiven and allowed another chance. The blackness came and swallowed me, but I was granted a reprieve. I don't know why I'm so lucky. I got close to the abyss, teetered over the blackness, but it only got a part of me. Unlike that other little girl, my half-sister, Apu's first daughter, who never came back from Auschwitz. I will have to stay sharp from now on so I can see what's coming.

When I get home I plan to strip off these hot, scratchy clothes, throw them away, these wretched, traitorous pants that presume I will return the same as I went. I'm not that same baby. I hate any part of her trusting innocence. I itch to tear the guileless posy off the infantile bib.

Then I forget. As soon as I step into the cool shade of the house and out of the pitiless light, insight evaporates. Apu enfolds me like something inestimably dear, and Lili pulls me into the sitting room that is arranged for a party. For
me?
Life is seductive, erasing what I've learned. I have already lost it, the horrible fact of my father's imperfect protection. I'm pulled excitedly to something set up in the bay window. Overwhelmed, giddy, I don't immediately recognize what it is. Something new, a pyramid of blue and red squares. I gaze a moment, then lift the top block off the pyramid, delighting in its solid, wooden heft. I close my hand around it, feel the smooth, curved edges, hard but not jagged, satisfyingly substantial. The block has weight and bearing.

It doesn't take me long to become an avid builder. I build houses, schools, hospitals. I build enclosed pastures and paddocks that surround fanciful edifices characterized by fairy-tale towers. The blocks are the last thing I let Mummy pack before our trans-Atlantic voyage, although she repeatedly threatens to leave them behind if I don't clear them out of her way.

But it's not until we move into our new suburban Montreal home that the blocks realize the potential I had sensed when I lifted the brick at the top of the pyramid. I start to build bridges. I build them over and over again, using red and blue pylons and a yardstick overtop. I build boats from blocks by taping on white paper sails. “This is the
Empress of Britain,
” I say, “and this is the
Queen Elizabeth.
” I sail fleets on the pale hardwood floorboards I call the Atlantic Ocean, and pass them under the measuring stick held up by red and blue cubes.

Apu sits nearby in the white-walled kitchen, writing letters. Our mail in Canada is exotic. It comes from Argentina and Australia, Hungary and Britain, Haifa, New York and Philadelphia. Apu is constant and loving, a devoted relation to whomever he has left. And, over the years, some relatives he had given up hope for are resurrected, as if from the dead. He corresponds with them all, discovering from someone recently exhumed that another cousin he'd left for dead has resurfaced in Boston or Sydney or Utica. He reads the letters of reunion he composes aloud to my mother before sticking on the stamp. I pile up my blocks again, this time as high as possible without their falling. The yardstick balances precariously on top, thinnest of planks to be thrown across the void.

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