The Imposter Bride (34 page)

“Import–export,” Lily said.

Bella waited to see if Lily might say any more, and when she didn’t: “I bought you a
yahrzeit
candle.” A memorial candle—it was customary to light it on the eve of Yom Kippur.

“Thank you,” Lily said.

They finished their tea. The heat on the balcony seemed to intensify as the sun dropped lower in the sky.

“We should go in,” Bella said. Nathan would be home any minute.

“Yes,” Lily agreed, but neither of them made a move to go back inside.

“Someone came to see you today,” Bella said.

“To see me?” Who in this city of strangers even knew of her existence?

“A woman by the name of Krakauer.”

She had come that morning, just after Bella returned from her errands. Bella had recognized the woman’s face from the wedding, had assumed as soon as Ida stated her name that she had come about her daughter who was throwing herself at Sol, the daughter that Bella had had the mixed pleasure of meeting just the previous week. But Ida hadn’t come to talk about Elka and Sol.

“Is Lily home?” she asked.

“Lily?”

An irritated frown creased Ida’s forehead at the thought of the wasted trip across town in a hot streetcar. “Does she not live here? I thought …”

“No, no, she lives here,” Bella assured her. “But she’s not home now.”

“Ah,” Ida said, as if she had not considered that possibility.

In that way the mother and daughter were alike, Bella thought. She remembered the dismay on Elka’s face when she discovered that Sol wasn’t home, the ill-concealed irritation that made it seem as if Sol’s absence was in some way Bella’s fault, something Bella had planned for the sole purpose of inconveniencing the young woman who had showed up unannounced on her doorstep. Bella offered the same invitation to the mother now that she had offered to the daughter a week earlier. “You’re welcome to come in and wait.”

Bella ushered her into the living room rather than the kitchen where she had hosted the daughter. She offered her a cold drink, which Ida declined, but she drank thirstily when Bella brought it anyway. Bella made a return trip to the kitchen to refill Ida’s glass, then joined her on the sofa. She wanted to know what this woman’s business was with Lily.

“You play the piano,” Ida said. It was a statement, not a question. She approved of the piano’s presence in that cramped, dark apartment. It spoke to her of aspirations, of sacrifices made for the sake of culture. She saw the cot behind the piano, a makeshift bedroom that only increased her appreciation of the values and priorities represented by the piano.

“My daughter plays.”

“I didn’t realize you had a daughter.” Ida couldn’t very well mention that she hadn’t noticed a daughter at the wedding that she hadn’t been invited to but had attended nonetheless.

“Yes,” Bella said.

There was something wrong with the daughter; that much was obvious from the mother’s terse response. Not so wrong that she couldn’t play the piano, but wrong enough that she wasn’t at the wedding and that her mother would prefer no further questions be asked. Though in the photo on the bookshelf the daughter was entirely normal to look at, quite pretty, in fact, if a bit too done up, too glamorous for a girl who would have been … what, sixteen, at the time the photo was taken? Which was possibly where the problem lay, Ida thought.

“She lives with you, your daughter?”

The shake of the mother’s head confirmed Ida’s hunch. The daughter was not living at home, but neither was she living with a husband—such information would have been freely and happily offered. The problem was of a moral sort.

“The daughters aren’t easy,” Ida remarked in a half-sigh that surprised Bella, the openness of it, the admission she heard in it that Ida’s own daughter was also problematic. It was an openness that Bella would not have expected from this overly proud woman who had come to see her daughter-in-law.

“And it’s much more difficult without a man,” Bella admitted in turn. She, like her guest, was normally not the sort to pour out her life story, not to anyone, but the admission she had heard in Ida’s sigh had encouraged her own. “Nina was only eleven when her father died, and her brothers were not much older, still boys.”

“Elka also grew up without a father,” Ida heard herself saying, surprising herself now with her own outpouring, because that’s what it felt like, those seven words—an outpouring. For when had she ever put into words for another person the shame of her circumstances? “He left before Elka was even born.”

Bella was well aware of the shame and sorrow behind that straightforward delivery of fact. It was an offering that demanded reciprocation, a response that would place her neither above nor beneath her guest, but beside her. It was the sort of demand Bella hadn’t had to meet in years—she had made no real friends here, she realized.

“I’ve met your daughter,” Bella said. Ida nodded, making clear that she knew of Elka’s visit the previous week. “She’s willful, yes, I could see that …”

Ida nodded again, half afraid of what was coming, but hungry for it too. She had been too alone in raising her girl. There had been no one who cared enough to venture an opinion.

“But there can be strength as well as mere stubbornness in will …” Bella looked at Ida. “The sort of strength that comes from knowing one’s own worth.”

Which you and you alone imparted to her
, Ida heard just beneath Bella’s words.
Which you managed to impart to her without benefit of a husband or social standing
.

“She has her moments,” Ida responded. It was the closest she could come to thanking Bella for her compliment, for Bella’s tactful way of letting Ida know that she had not failed with Elka as completely as she had feared. “When I think what I was like at her age …”

“What were you like?” Bella asked.

Their eyes met. They had embarrassed themselves now, both of them, two mature women feeling like schoolgirls, thrilling to their reflections in the eyes of the other. It was a feeling that lifted them into a type of conversation neither of them had ever expected to have again, and it was that feeling that had sent Bella out onto the fire escape later that afternoon, that long-forgotten thrill of her life being of interest to another. Not her physical life, which of course her children cared about, even Nina, but her inner life, “her soul,” she would have called it once. The long-forgotten pleasure of feeling herself come alive under the attentive gaze of another, and seeing that other unfold and reveal herself in turn. It was a pleasure she wanted to savour for a little bit longer before turning herself over to the brisket that needed roasting for the pre-fast meal.

“Did she say what she wanted?” Lily asked. Was it possible Ida had already unmasked her to Bella, had aired to her mother-in-law the accusations implicit in the way she had looked at Lily that day in her store, in her refusal to have anything to do with the diamond Lily had brought her?

“She didn’t,” Bella said. She wondered how the two women knew each other, was half afraid to ask, but then did ask.

“I brought a stone to her a few weeks ago.”

“A stone?” Bella asked.

“A diamond.”

She remembered her sense of purpose as she made her way across the city to see Ida that day, a city where she had no purpose but this, she remembered feeling: to return to the living what was left to return, to return what she had been entrusted to return.

Would her madness never stop?

“She accused me of stealing it.”

“And did you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“The girl was dead. Can you steal from the dead?”

Bella didn’t answer. She was thinking about the pair of boots she had taken off the feet of a corpse years earlier, during the civil war that had followed the revolution. It was an act of acquisition that would have been unthinkable, criminal, had the woman been alive to feel the loss. But was it theft to have taken them off of someone who would never take another step, would never feel the ice forming around the soles of her feet? Was it a crime to take from the dead what was needed to sustain the living?

“The girl it belonged to was a relative of Ida’s,” Lily said.

“You knew one of her relatives?”

There was a calmness to Bella’s voice, a matter-of-factness that was soothing.

“Her cousin. I didn’t know her. I was charged with bringing her to a place where she’d be safer, but when I arrived at the place I was to meet her … something had gone wrong.”

Was there truth in Ida’s assumption that Lily was just a
common thief? Lily wondered. That it was profit that had motivated her? Acquisition? Had Ida seen in Lily what she herself only feared? An irregularity of conduct that in the light of peacetime revealed itself as sin? A flaw that was not merely circumstantial in nature, but essential to who she was, inseparable from her very character? Did the extraordinary vision Ida was rumoured to have with regard to the quality of a stone’s worth extend to the human heart?

She was “charged with bringing her”? Bella wondered. What did that mean? “You … helped people?”

“I moved people. I knew the landscape,” she explained. “I knew people who would help. From before, my father’s work. Whether it was helpful in the end to those I moved …” Lily shrugged.

“Your father’s work …?” Bella asked.

“He was a smuggler. Though that’s not what he started out to be.”

Did anyone ever become what they started out to be? Bella wondered.

“He was a ferryman. Like my grandfather, like my great-grandfather. That’s what we were, my family. The men. Ferrymen. The river was the source of my family’s livelihood for generations. But then the revolution in Russia, the war … After the war, the Polish–Soviet war, our river became the new border. Do you know it, the Slutsk?”

“Only by name.”

It was no secret, the smuggling along the new state’s borders. Even before Bella and Joseph had left Berdichev, smuggling had been identified as one of the major problems facing the new regime.
Contraband derails the decree on the nationalization of foreign trade, turning it into a fiction
, she
remembered reading in a newspaper just months before they left; and at a meeting she had attended in Montreal years later a guest lecturer had told them that the volume of contraband and numbers of people involved in the smuggling during the twenties and early thirties were higher than in any other era in Russian—and perhaps world—history.

“All of a sudden no one was allowed to cross it any more,” Lily said. “So, crossing it became lucrative. You can’t imagine what they lacked there, between the disruptions caused by the war and then, just a few years later, the redirecting of the most basic goods away from domestic, everyday use …”

Towards the collective effort to build a better, fairer future, Bella thought.

“… kerosene, matches, shoes … They banned artisan production of shoes in 1932 in favour of state production, then underestimated by tens of thousands how many to produce, so half the people in the western regions were barefoot …”

Poor children had always gone barefoot, Bella thought. At least now there was no stigma attached to the condition.

“… leather goods of any kind, religious articles, of course, thread, needles, kettles, cooking pots, any household goods that were made of metal—they redirected all metal for industrial use in the 1930s, it suddenly became illegal to own a pot—” She shook her head at the memory of it. “It provided a living my grandfather and great-grandfather could not even have dreamed of … two homes, one of which we used only in summer, education for all of us, fine furnishings, clothing …”

“A real entrepreneur,” Bella said, immediately regretting the sarcasm, fearing it would shut the small chink that had finally opened in her daughter-in-law’s outer shell, but Lily only smiled.
There was relief for her in Bella’s sarcasm, a familiar tone, not unlike that of her aunts when they would discuss her father’s sudden rise in the world.

“He would take me with him. Against objections from my mother, who didn’t want a daughter of hers mixed up in … well, you can imagine.” She glanced at Bella. “It was my mother who was right, in fact. My father’s work was dangerous, difficult. He should not have taken me with him. He should have preferred that I stay safely at home in the soft bed that he could afford to buy for me, benefiting from the education and polishing that his own parents could not provide for him. But at the end of the day it was his bad judgment that saved me. Had my mother prevailed, as she did with my younger sisters, had he not taken me with him, had I not learned from him what he knew … Not just the practicalities that he taught me—his knowledge of the land and how to traverse it, the people he knew who would help us—but the withstanding of fear, of bodily discomfort of every sort …”

Bella nodded again. “And the girl? Mrs. Krakauer’s cousin?”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“She wasn’t there?”

“Oh, she was. She was exactly where she was supposed to be—I was to pick her up in a village I knew. But she was dead.”

The word itself
—toit
in Yiddish—forced an ending, Lily thought. That final
t
. There was no hanging vowel or soft consonant that could be rolled or extended, no bridge of any sort to whatever would follow, just that word and the full stop of the mouth that it forced.

“I don’t know how she died,” Lily said, though Bella hadn’t
asked. “She had been robbed …” She glanced at Bella again. “The payment was gone.”

“What payment?”

“For her passage.”

Did the shock show on her face? Bella would wonder later. Her shock that payment would have been required to save the life of a girl whose life had barely had a chance to begin? It must have, because Lily’s next words were justification.

“We needed it for food, medicine,” Lily said. “Not just for the two of us. There were others. An encampment …”

Bella nodded.

“I think she’d been ill. From something she ate, perhaps.” The cat. The cat that Andre had told her was squirrel and that could well have been dead, septic, when he found it.