again,” Rebecca said. “I can see it from here.”
“You know, your sister Goldie has one of these dolls in her bedroom.” No reaction from Chana.
“Your sister tells me she comes to visit you. When was the last time she was here?”
Chana stared out the window, her expression unchanged. Rebecca had gotten a basic response from her before. Maybe the woman was capable of more.
“When your sister was here, did she talk about a man? A man who frightened her? Did she say anything about him? What he looked like? This is important, Mrs. Feldberg.”
The woman’s eyes remained fixed but they suddenly shifted from the window to the bed. That was progress, thought Rebecca. Now the woman was avoiding her. Rebecca followed her gaze to the bed. Perhaps Chana was communicating. On the flowered comforter near the pillow, a dozen more misshapen cloth figures in the same prison stripes lay camouflaged amid the vibrant colours of the bedclothes that, Rebecca imagined, Goldie had picked for her sister.
“Could I see one of those?” Rebecca asked softly.
When there was no response, Rebecca stood up and stepped across the floor. She glanced back at Chana hoping for permission. The old eyes were empty. Rebecca bent over slowly, giving Chana time to voice any objections. None were forthcoming and Rebecca picked up a doll.
“Kinder,” a dry voice croaked.
When Rebecca looked up, Chana’s small eyes watched her. Good, thought Rebecca, at least a response. Kinder. Children.
“Kinder,” Rebecca repeated, hoping for more. But Chana seemed all talked out.
Rebecca turned the doll in her hand, marvelling at the primitive simpleness of the thing, very much like a grey sock with arms and legs sewn around. Some brown yarn tacked on for hair, a few stitches for eyes and mouth. Not much uniformity. The object must’ve been to crank out a population of inmates but she hadn’t stuck to a pattern. Each one seemed a new beginning, each an individual. The doll in Rebecca’s hand wore rough trousers, but a number of figures on the bed wore skirts, all of the same striped fabric. Chana must’ve sewn each of them along a bitter journey backwards into some depth of memory. Her sewing table appeared abandoned. Perhaps she’d sewn these in the early stages of her illness. Rebecca knew that the trauma suffered by victims in concentration camps was a wound that never healed. These figures were clearly images from that period. Had the regression halted there, in that time of nightmare?
Rebecca glanced at Chana, whose bony face could have been one of the pitiful multitude staring out from behind barbed wire in the photos she’d seen of camp survivors. Rebecca’s eye was drawn to the doll whose head poked out above Chana’s hand. Something was different about it. Beneath the yarn hair, the head was tightly covered with red gauze, the eyes and mouth stitched over it. Rebecca peeked back at the bed. She focused on each doll till she found two more with redcovered heads.
“Kinder” Chana said.
“Kinder” Rebecca repeated. She wanted a closer look. “May I?” she said, as a formality.
But as soon as she picked up the two red dolls, Chana began to moan. Rebecca glanced at her, surprised.
“Nisht kinder!” she wailed “Nisht kinder!”
“All right,” Rebecca said. “I’m sorry.” She put them down but near the edge of the bed where she could examine them. One doll was a match to the one Chana held, only male to her female, both heads covered with red gauze. The other doll was definitely different. Its trousers were not striped like the other males, but black, worn with a black jacket and cap. This was a uniform. She screwed up her eyes to try to decipher the irregular object sewn onto the end of its arm. A greyish form, probably a gun. What was the significance of these dolls, especially the three with their sanguine, forbidden heads?
Goldie used to describe to Rebecca the elegant clothes Chana sewed for her. It was hard to fathom that the same hand that had created Goldie’s wardrobe had fashioned these crude representations. Yet what was the point of fathoming? Chana was lost somewhere within herself, unable to give Rebecca directions. Whatever Goldie had told Chana was lost with her, the words rattling around somewhere amid forty-year-old memories.
chapter fifteen
Thursday, April 5, 1979
Nesha opened the door of his hotel room and waited, one hand leaning against the frame, the other grasping a can of Coke. The front desk had called to say a courier had arrived with a package for him. Something from his accountant. Could they send the guy up? They sure bloody well could. How long had he been waiting for this?
Down the plush distant hall, someone in a black baseball cap bobbed up and down at a gallop. A young East Indian man stopped at Nesha’s open door, eyeing the scraggly hair, probably writing off any possibility of a tip. He read the name off the front of the package.
“Mr. Malkevich?”
“Yep.”
He gave Nesha a form to sign then handed him the padded envelope.
The man was about to fly but Nesha reached into his pants pocket and brought out an American five dollar bill.
The dark eyes widened beneath the cap, then narrowed into a smile. “Thanks, man.”
In the room, Nesha took his penknife and slit open the top of the padded envelope that he had taped so firmly shut in San Francisco. He pulled out all the extra paper and crumpled junk mail filling out the empty spaces that would have given shape to the object he wanted to render shapeless.
Finally he drew out the Luger, a hard bit of reality poking out of his dream of the past. He held it flat in his palm, entranced by the silky cold of the steel. This was no ordinary gun. With his connections he could have arranged to buy something in Toronto. But this was the gun he wanted. The symbolic value was worth all the effort. He had called in a favour from a former client. The man had Nesha to thank — at least, Nesha’s experience with the intricate workings of the IRS — for the accumulation of capital that helped him expand his business. Evading taxes was a democratic right. It also helped him afford the small plane that flew Nesha’s package over the U.S. border, avoiding customs. A Canadian courier company had taken it from there.
He had taken care of the Luger these long years, cleaning, swabbing, polishing his dark token of hope with only one thought: justice. Justice for his family. And for how many others? He had waited patiently for the right time to bring out the gun. This was the right time.
The immanence of a confrontation left him winded. It had been thirty-eight years since he’d been that little boy. Thirty-eight years since he’d last seen his mother, his little brother. He gripped the textured butt, his heart racing, flying with excitement. He looked up into the mirror, half expecting to find that ten-year-old boy. He hardly recognized the face he saw there. It was like watching himself from the outside. His eyes had grown round and stark. Together with the greying beard, the hair, he looked quite mad. For once this displeased him.
If he was going to succeed, he needed to become part of the scenery, to blend in with whatever background his prey had become accustomed to. He would have to think about that. Turning himself around in front of the mirror, he worked to position the barrel comfortably inside the waistband of his pants in the middle of his
