The Imposter Bride (39 page)

I glance at the clock: 4 a.m. I had hoped it would be later. The dog’s barking is building, getting desperate. Soon it will turn to howls. This happens every night: an hour or so of barking, then some howls, then—finally—quiet. Or what passes for quiet. No one complains, and when I mention it to my neighbours they look quizzical, barely suppressing their smiles. I’m an oddity to them—my lack of family, of purpose. They don’t dislike me, but my presence unsettles. They wonder how much longer I’ll stay.

I arrived here last month, intending to stay for a week.

“Purpose of your trip?” asked the border guard.

“I’m delivering a paper,” I said. What I was actually delivering was Lily Azerov’s notebook. I was donating it to the archive at Yad Vashem, Israel’s centre for the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. But I was tired from the long trip over, didn’t feel I had the energy for even a minimal explanation of my long overdue delivery of the girl’s writing into the public domain. I just wanted to get out of the airport into fresh air.

“Where are you speaking?” the guard asked idly, misunderstanding my vague use of the word “delivering.” She was flipping through my passport looking for a clean page to stamp.

“Yad Vashem.”

I expected her to ask for more information, but she didn’t. The mere mention of Yad Vashem seemed to dispel any possible suspicions of my purpose there. She nodded, then her brow furrowed slightly as the stub of my boarding pass flew out from between the pages of my passport. She retrieved it from the floor, slipped it into my passport and returned my passport to me.

“Enjoy your stay,” she said.

It’s never really quiet here. Not even in the middle of the night. There’s a hum, a humming tension. My own, perhaps. I hear it now, now that the other nighttime noises have finally died away: the barking dog, the footsteps above me, the laughing voices and rhythmic slap of cards. I heard it, felt it the moment I stepped outside the airport terminal. A humming like a rising swarm of bees.

“Jerusalem,” I told the first cab driver that approached me. “The Kings Hotel.”

“American?” he asked as we pulled away from the curb.

“Canadian.”

“You speak Hebrew?”

“A little,” I acknowledged. Fluently, actually—I’ve inherited my mother’s facility with language—but I immediately wished I’d pretended otherwise. I wanted to be left alone, in silence.

As the cab pulled away from Ben Gurion Airport, I opened my window. The air was refreshing after the staleness of the airplane cabin. It was a January night, cooler than I had expected, and still dripping from an earlier rain. The driver closed my window and sped onto the highway. I opened it again.

“You have a reservation at the Kings?” he asked.

“You think I need one?”

He laughed. “If I may make a suggestion …”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You know a much better place. Better price, better location.” He met my eyes in the rear-view mirror. “And it just happens to be run by your brother-in-law.”

“My cousin,” he said, revealing a mouthful of silver as he smiled broadly at me in the mirror. “It’s a block from the sea …”

“I’m sure it’s very nice but I need to be in Jerusalem. I’m delivering a paper there.”

“It’s just forty-five minutes from Jerusalem. I can pick you up whenever you need and then take you back. Every day.” He reached back to hand me his business card. It had his name on one side and the prayer for safe travel on the other. “Whatever time you need, you just call and I’m there. At your service. Yuri,” he added, in case I couldn’t read his name on the card.

“Thank you very much,” I said. “But I’m really not interested. Just take me to my hotel, please.”

“It has its own kitchen.”

“I don’t need my own kitchen. I’m only here for a few days.”

“What? You come all the way from Canada to stay only for a few days?”

“I can’t stay longer,” I said.

I was actually at the beginning of a six-month leave of absence from my job. Stress leave, I was calling it, because my workplace didn’t grant leaves of absence for grief. I could stay as long as I wanted, had no return ticket, had told Reuben I would be away for a few weeks. But I had imagined flying out of Tel Aviv for the south of France, maybe Tuscany, where Nina was now living with the girlfriend she had loved for forty years, demonstrating, with that revelation, that she had been a better actor all along than any of her family had imagined.

“It’s just perfect for one person,” Yuri assured me. He glanced at me in the mirror. “You have a husband?”

I considered not answering but sensed that he would just think I hadn’t heard him and would ask the same question, but louder.

“Yes,” I said.

“He doesn’t like Israel?”

Everything was personal here. I’d forgotten that. “He couldn’t get away right now.”

He accepted that answer. “I’ll tell you what … You have a name, Madame Professor?”

“Ruth,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what, Ruthie. I’ll stop along the way so you can have a look—we’re going right by there anyway. Then, if you don’t like it, I’ll take you straight to Jerusalem, no extra charge for the detour.”

“I thought you said we were going right by there anyway.” “You’ll be happy. I promise.”

I HAD NOT SEEN
my mother again after our first meeting. It was as I had sensed during the time we spent together. She was my mother, my beginning, but our lives had diverged, we had separate families and she couldn’t integrate me into her life. I had hoped for more, and maybe she had too, but it had also been enough to meet her, to sit in her presence, to have a sense of who she was and why she had to leave, and to know that she had a sense of who I was, who I loved, how I lived. I felt more comfortable in the world knowing where she was, being able to picture her in the living room of her home in Thunder Bay, sitting by a fire in the evening, or tending her garden or walking in the forests around her home.

As the years passed, though, I did begin to think more about her again. I wondered how her health was, how her life was now that she was getting old. Did the past sit differently within her now that less of life lay ahead? Had her memories of her family resurfaced in her? Would it give her any pleasure or comfort to meet my children, who were now young adults, finding their own ways into the world? I began thinking about writing to her, asking her if it would be all right to visit again, if she would like that; but then my father became ill, Sophie’s marriage fell apart, and Reuben’s mother moved in with us while waiting for a bed to become available at an extended-care facility. All that was more pressing.

My father died in November 2004, on a bleak day of a
bleak month. And then, not more than two weeks later, the phone rang after dinner. Reuben answered.

“Yes?” he said. “Yes. I see. Just a moment.” He handed me the phone. “It’s Anton Eglitis.”

She had asked for me. That was my first thought as I reached for the phone. By the time I said hello I had already imagined my mother on her sickbed, surrounded by the family she loved but feeling that someone was missing, me, the daughter she had not been able to raise as her own. She had told them about me, finally, had begged their forgiveness and understanding for her long-kept secret and asked them to bring me to her side. I would leave the next morning, no question. Sophie, Sam or Joey could move back in to help with Reuben’s mother.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hello,” he said. “This is Anton Eglitis. I know we’ve never met, but we have the same mother.” Did he think I didn’t know that? “I’m calling with some sad news, I’m afraid. I’m calling to—she’s died. Our mother.”

“She has?”

“Yesterday morning. At 10 a.m.”

I’d been at work at 10 a.m. the previous morning, had not felt anything unusual. Nor had I noticed any change in the world, just the continuing, grim reality of my father’s recent death, Reuben’s mother’s decline, Sophie’s sadness about her broken marriage.

“I thought you’d want to know.”

“Of course. Yes.”

I felt Reuben standing behind me, his hands on my shoulders.

She had been sick for a couple of weeks with the flu, Anton told me. She just couldn’t seem to shake it. And then it moved into pneumonia.

“I see,” I said, with what felt like the last bit of air within me.

Anton began to speak then of the funeral. They had buried her within twenty-four hours, in a simple pine box, according to her wishes. “She was Jewish,” he explained to me. Did he think I didn’t know that? I wondered again. I was her daughter, for God’s sake. But then, I hadn’t even known her name for years and years, had I?

“The funeral was today, then?” I asked.

“This afternoon. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

“I appreciate you calling now. How did you know …?”

That I even existed
, is what I meant to ask. I wasn’t sure how to phrase it, didn’t need to.

“She told us. After you came to meet her.”

“She did?” That too felt like a blow. She had kept her distance not out of fear for the stability of her marriage and family, then, her husband’s possible response, but for her own psyche. Because to face me was to face a part of herself and her own experience that she felt compelled to rebury.

But what about Anton, this half-brother of mine? Had he not felt curiosity about me, his only blood relative on his mother’s side?

“Do you live in Thunder Bay?” I asked him.

“Toronto. But we’re all here now, of course.”

In the living room that I could picture. But how many of them were there? Who exactly?

“Your family?”

“My wife and our sons.”

The family and life that my mother had built atop the wreckage of her former lives and identities.

“How many sons do you have?”

He hesitated. Did he think it was a trick question? That I
wanted something from him, was going to lay a claim on the family that wasn’t mine? Had my mother conveyed to him her fear of the place within her in which I resided, the terrible mix of feelings attached to me that I could carry to the surface of her life, blowing it apart as I did?

“Four,” he said.

“Nice,” I said, and on one level I meant it. It was nice that my mother had four grandsons, but as I imagined them all gathered in that living room where I had sat with her, to mourn her death, their mother and grandmother who had been my mother as well, I felt like the defective puppy who’s been pushed out of the warm litter to the lonely coldness of the world. And I felt angry that I should have a half-brother and nephews who were all strangers to me, and that my children had an uncle and cousins who would always be strangers. It seemed a useless, stupid waste of blood relations.

Anton didn’t ask me anything about myself, didn’t make any noises about how nice it would be if we could meet sometime, how if I was ever in Toronto I should call, come over and meet the family. Was he not even curious? I wondered again. Was he an insensate blockhead? Did he not even know that curiosity about our own origins is what defines us as human? That it wasn’t speech, as he might think, or opposing thumbs, but origins, which were inextricably linked to destiny?

“I appreciate you calling,” I said again.

“No problem. I thought you’d want to know.”

After I put the phone down, Reuben got a razor from the bathroom and made the beginning of the tear in my blouse for me. He made it on the left side of my blouse, over my heart. Then I took the fabric and pulled it apart and Reuben took me into his arms while I wept alone for my mother.

YURI’S COUSIN WAS
a woman of indeterminate middle age who had obviously been asleep for the night when Yuri rapped at her door. She greeted us pleasantly, adjusting her housecoat with a tug and giving her hair a quick pat—surprisingly pleasantly, I thought, for someone who had been roused from sleep at eleven o’clock on a rainy winter night to show an apartment to someone who had no interest in renting it.

“I’ll just get the keys,” she said.

As we followed her up the three flights of stairs, I imagined a dim room smelling of mould, but when she pushed open the door I was dazzled by the whiteness, the blue floor that shimmered like the sea in sunlight even in the middle of the night.

“It’s lovely,” I said immediately. The entire apartment was one white room with a blue-tiled floor. It wasn’t large but it felt spacious. The furnishings were minimal—just a desk against the wall with the window, a bureau made of wood, and the bed, pushed against another wall and covered in a white quilt. The blue of the floor repeated in the tiles of the counter in the kitchenette.

“It’s like a ship,” I added, which was perhaps a peculiar thing to say because it was nothing like a ship except in the way it made me feel. I felt I could return to it after I had delivered the notebook that I had once hoped might hold the key to my mother’s life, could trust that room to carry me through whatever might lie ahead and deliver me to a new harbour.

Yuri flashed a hopeful smile at his cousin. “It’s completely remodelled,” he said, though it must have been obvious to him by then that no further salesmanship was required. “It’s one of the original buildings in Tel Aviv. It was built … When was it built, Ayelet?” he asked his cousin.

“Never mind the history lesson,” his cousin answered. “She’s tired from her trip, can’t you see?”

I was exhausted, I realized, as every cramped, uncomfortable moment of the last twenty hours of travel suddenly caught up with me.

“You’ll sleep well here,” she assured me.

I haven’t slept well here, but I don’t care. I’m not here to sleep.

It’s 5 a.m. now. I know without even having to look at the clock. The first flight of the morning just roared overhead, banking steeply in its turn out to sea. Yuri didn’t mention the flight path, would not have thought it worth mentioning. “You’ll get used to it,” Ayelet assures me. She pities me, it’s very obvious. Lost soul, she thinks. Nothing better to occupy her nights than worrying about barking dogs and the noise of airplanes. But she’s wrong.

The apartment faces east, away from the sea, and I like how that fault catches the first light of morning. Soon I’ll see it, that first ray of light. It will sweep the wall by the desk where I’ve pinned the photo of Reuben and the kids emerging, laughing, from the freezing cold lake at Wawa on that road trip across Canada in 1982. Then the desk, where I’ve placed the pink quartz that I’ve always used as a paperweight.