The Imposter Bride (14 page)

She hugged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them as she continued. She slipped into Yiddish. “In Tel Aviv once—this was a few weeks after I got there—I was sitting at a café and I saw a man looking at me, staring at me. I felt uncomfortable. There was such intensity to his stare—a ferocity, almost. I couldn’t relax with him staring at me like that, was afraid that at any moment he would approach me, grab me … I wasn’t sure what. I quickly paid for my coffee, and left. He followed me. I turned onto the street, walking quickly—I was quite nervous by now. I quickened my pace and he started to run after me. ‘Gabi!’ he called out, and immediately I understood. I stopped, turned to him, and his face fell. It fell so completely, it was as if my face was, in itself, the bearer of his terrible news. Do you understand what I mean?”

Sol nodded, though he wasn’t entirely sure that he did.

“‘I’m sorry,’ he said to me. ‘There was something in the way that you stirred the sugar into your coffee … and then when you lifted the cup to your mouth, the way you held it … Forgive me,’ he said, and then he turned and left. I watched him walk away, a normal-looking man from that viewpoint. There was no hunch to his shoulders, no obvious dejection in his gait. No one would guess that he was a man who chased women out of cafés in his desperation to see in them …” She paused, shrugged. “Who was this Gabi, then? I wondered. A girl he had once had a crush on? A sister of a friend? A cousin?”

Lily remembered her own disappointment at that moment, her wish that her face could have been the one that man sought, could have produced in him, in Sonya Nemetz, in anyone still alive, an expression of joyful recognition.

“Everyone is looking for their dead,” she said. Sifting through the wreckage, she thought, looking for some trace,
some fragment … a familiar gesture, a fleeting resemblance, a name. “Does your friend’s mother think she’s the only one?”

Sol didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry I can’t be the Lily she was hoping to see at my wedding.”

Sol nodded again now. He believed her. He also sensed that there was something not quite right. With Lily? With what she’d just told him? He didn’t know, could not account for the discomfort that he felt.

And now what? Lily wondered. They sat in silence for a while. “It’s getting late,” she said. The light was still on across the alley. “Who lives there?” she asked.

“Where?”

She pointed.

Sol shrugged. “I don’t know.”

She would try to sleep, she decided. She’d know better in the morning what to do. She brushed her hand across her thigh as if to sweep away crumbs that had accumulated there while they had spoken, then she rose to leave, the soft fabric of her dressing gown brushing his cheek as she moved past him.

CHAPTER 8

I
was twelve before I saw an adult cry. I’d seen adult eyes fill with tears before then, the time Elka was wearing a brand-new black dress when Sol came home from work, for example, and he looked at her and said, “What’s that?” But if Elka’s tears spilled over into crying when she fled the kitchen that day (Sol hot on her heels, apologizing) I didn’t see that. Nor did I see anything but moistness in my father’s eyes when Old Yeller died or when the dreaded doctor’s call came for Bella and the news turned out to be good. When the adults in my life cried they did it behind closed doors. Until Mr. C, my sixth grade teacher, who handed out a quiz one November afternoon, then stood by the window with tears running down his cheeks.

I didn’t notice at first. He was utterly silent, and I was concentrating on the quiz, so I wasn’t looking his way. I might not have noticed at all had Carrie not poked me and indicated with a lift of her chin that I should look in his direction. And even then I didn’t know why she was nudging me. I was used
to the sight of Mr. C leaning against the sill of the window, looking out. We all were. That was how he stood even when he spoke to us. “Children,” he would say, his eyes not on us but on the scene outside: our schoolyard with its hopscotch and champ boards chalked on cracked asphalt and enclosed by chain-link fence, the row of brick duplexes across the street. “Take out your Humashim and turn to the third verse of the second chapter of Exodus,” he would say in his Hebrew that was still infected with the Yiddish inflections and pronunciations of Europe, entirely different, that is, from the Hebrew we spoke or aspired to speak, which was the modern—which is to say, Israeli—form of the language. And all the while he’d be looking outside, at the cracked asphalt, the chain-link fence, the duplexes across the street.

What?
I mouthed to Carrie.

She lifted her chin a second time and this time ran her index finger down her cheek so that when I looked again I saw his tears.

We had all been talking and joking around when he walked into the classroom that day and had not stopped even after he called us to attention. “Children,” he said several times, “
Banim, banot!
” each time a little louder until at last he was no longer calling us children in English or in Hebrew, but yelling at us in Yiddish, a language only half of us understood, his face red with anger, the vein in his forehead engorged and hammering in a visible and disturbing way. At which point, on that particular day, we did stop talking, returned to our seats and prepared to begin our class, though there had been many times during that school year when even his explosions had no effect on us, not on our behaviour, in any case, and it was not until our principal, Rabbi Loffer, was called in—usually by a
neighbouring teacher—that order was restored and class could begin. It was not that we went out of our way to be rude to him. We didn’t. We were simply doing what comes naturally to children: making life a torment for any teacher who cannot control them. But there was something about Mr. C that wasn’t quite natural.

He was a small man, no bigger than some of the boys in our class, and lost inside the crumpled grey suit that he wore every day, a crumpled grey suit that was several sizes too big and that fell in folds around his shoes, which were also too big, more like planters than shoes, as if his feet had gone ahead and reached their full potential before fate and history stunted the rest of him. He was small, but he wasn’t weak, as those of us who had felt his grip on our wrists or the backs of our necks could attest. There was a strength to him, a hard, dry strength. He was dry and hard and as spare in manner as in build, petrified, it seemed—like the wood we had just learned about, wood that used to be a living tree—except for those moments when anger rushed through him, a flash flood of anger that filled out the cavern that was his face, flushing its greyness with oxygenating blood.

Mr. C had come from Europe after the war. That in itself wasn’t unusual. A lot of our friends’ parents had come after 1945. (The school that Carrie and I now attended was a half-hour east by bus across the city, close to where my father, Sol and Nina had grown up and where newer immigrants still lived.) And a lot of these friends’ parents exhibited certain peculiarities of behaviour related to the war, problems with nerves, temper and mood. Mira’s father, for example, would come into her room late at night just to sit at the foot of her bed and watch her sleep, which was why she never felt comfortable
having her friends spend the night. She would feel his presence, sometimes for hours, his gaze so intense that it would pull her from sleep. And Helen’s mother hid and hoarded food. And Lena’s father had a temper with the force and staccato rhythm of a machine gun. With the parents of our friends, though, those peculiarities stood out from the rest of their personalities like the lines of quartz that stood out from the black granite face of one of the rocks my mother had sent me. With Mr. C, peculiarity was the rock face itself, shot through with fragments of humour, kindness and other scattered bits of who he used to be.

“He’s a damaged person,” Carrie’s mother said one afternoon after we told her about one of his explosions, and it was her use of that word—“damaged”—the tone of it, that made me start to wonder about my mother in a way that was different from my earlier curiosity—because my mother too had been damaged, I knew. “Shattered” was the word Elka sometimes used, but until then the word had always brought to mind the teacup that sat on the highest shelf of Elka and Sol’s dining room high board, a white porcelain cup with a delicate pattern of blue flowers that had shattered once from a fall through Sol’s fingers, had been carefully repaired, but was too fragile now for the rigours of holding tea and being transported from saucer to mouth and then back to saucer again. My mother was like that teacup, I had come to think. She could not withstand the rigours of the life she was trying to live, a normal life of love, marriage and family. My birth had re-shattered her, and it was a sad story, to be sure, but it was also a story with a certain prettiness to it. Pretty things shattered, did they not? Glass, crystal, fine china. Mr. C, though, was not in any way pretty.

I saw his tears that day and Carrie’s mother’s words came back to me, because only a damaged person would stand by a window in a classroom full of children with silent tears rolling down his cheeks. And then for a second I saw my mother standing by a window. She was less glamorous than I’d envisaged her until then, but not because she wasn’t nicely dressed. She was very nicely dressed in a skirt and blouse not unlike the brown wool skirt and silk blouse I had seen on my friend Helen’s mother, and her hair was pulled back into a French twist held in place with a tortoiseshell clip. It was more how she felt to me than how she looked that was different. It was the same feeling I picked up from other immigrants that I knew from her part of Europe, people with thick accents who were either too severe or held your gaze for too long or simply felt too dense to me, too concentrated, somehow, as if the very cells in their bodies were heavier and more compressed than ours. I couldn’t see her face—she was staring out like Mr. C, out onto the city that was now her home—but I could see the tears streaming down the side of her face.

Mr. C’s tears were caused by his damage; I knew that. But had we not also played a role? That’s what I began to wonder as I watched him. He had called us to attention and we had ignored him. We had made him aware in countless other ways how little we respected him, how unpopular he was as a teacher, referring to him by initial only when we were talking amongst ourselves, as if he didn’t even have a name. I imagined him in his grey suit entering an apartment at the end of his workday, hanging his hat—a grey homburg—on a peg by the door, then shuffling down a dingy brown hall to a dingy beige kitchen where he would make himself tea that he would drink out of a glass like everyone from Europe drank it, with
lemon and sugar, and hard cookies on the side, and I resolved at that moment to show him kindness and respect, a resolution that I committed to paper and passed in a note to Carrie, who rolled her eyes and wrote back asking for the answer to one of the questions on the quiz, which I gave her, and which Mr. C didn’t notice because he was still staring out the window, though the tears had stopped by then.

“This is a classroom, not a mental ward,” Carrie told me at recess. That was a direct quote from her mother, I knew, because her mother had said the same thing to Elka when she had called her a few weeks earlier to enlist her support in having Mr. C removed from our classroom and shifted to a job that was less sensitive than classroom teaching. No one was suggesting he be fired, Carrie’s mother had assured Elka.

“I still think we should be nicer to him,” I said to Carrie, more because I had conflated him with my mother in my mind, I think, than because I was an inherently nicer person than Carrie. But before I had a chance to enact my good intentions—that very afternoon, in fact—Mr. C unleashed his fury at me for giving a wrong answer in class, as if I had deliberately misunderstood the text for the sole purpose of enraging him. I didn’t understand the exact content of his tirade—he had switched into Yiddish—but I understood his fury, his outrage that it was me and my ignorant and boorish ilk that he was forced to teach instead of the vastly superior boys and girls who had perished fifteen years earlier in Europe—no one ever
died
in Europe, they
perished
—and even though I knew he was damaged, and that that was the real cause of his tirade, I still felt the heat of deep shame rising in my face, which is what prompted Carrie to send me the note that called him a murderer.

In Carrie’s defence, she was referring to a passage in the Talmud that we had learned earlier that year, that Mr. C himself had taught us, which said specifically: “He who publicly shames his neighbour is as though he shed blood.” The shedding of blood in the passage refers to the internal flow of blood in the shamed person’s face as it changes colour—though the reference is to a whitening of the face, rather than the reddening I exhibited that day—and that is all that Carrie meant. It was her attempt to comfort me in my shame, a shame that Mr. C had caused but which was not really his fault, so it felt at that moment like my fault entirely. It was an exaggeration, it’s true, to leap from the shedding of blood to outright murder, but it was in Carrie’s nature to overstate whatever point she was making, and no harm would have been done had Mr. C continued looking out the window as he had been when she first set the note into motion. His tirade at me finished, he had taken up his position by the window and seemed to have forgotten about the class for the moment. Carrie dropped the note on the corner of Freddy’s desk—he sat between us—and then Freddy dropped it on the corner of my desk as he had so many times before, but unfortunately he did so at the precise moment that Mr. C turned back to face us. I saw the note land on my desk and glanced up to see that Mr. C had noticed as well. For a moment, though, he said nothing and I did nothing, and the note sat, untouched and unopened, where it had landed.

“Nu?”
he finally said. His voice was quiet, as it always was after one of his rages. “Aren’t you going to read your mail?”