were blonder, like Goldie, because they were white underneath.
He only thought about Margie maybe ten times a day now. Not bad considering he hadn’t seen her for three years. Or was it four? If it was only three, she’d worked pretty fast to find herself a new husband. A friend from the office, the only one who kept in touch, had called last week to invite him to a Seder and given him the latest gossip. Okay. So good luck to her. Probably a normal guy this time. She’d make damn sure of that. Could he blame her for eventually gagging on the kind of grief he lived with? The grief that hadn’t allowed him to celebrate a joyous occasion like a Seder for years. After all, how could he take part in a festival that honoured God for His miracle in Egypt? If God could part the Red Sea to rescue the Jews from slavery, where was He when Nesha needed a miracle?
This time of year was always painful for him. It had happened in April, six days before Passover. His mother had been busy cleaning up the house for a week. Everything had to be spotless before the holiday began. All the cupboards had to be cleaned and wiped free of crumbs, the Passover dishes prepared to replace their everyday crockery. God, he could still see her stooped on the floor with her head in a cupboard, wet schmata in her hand. So many times he wanted to crawl back into that picture and stay there forever.
He remembered in younger years singing “Chad Gadya/One Little Goat” after the Seder every Passover. A simple Messianic little folk-song in which a father bought a baby goat for his child. Nesha always pictured a son. But the goat was eaten by a cat that was bitten by a dog that was beaten by a stick that was burned by fire that was quenched by water that was drunk by an ox that was killed by a shoichet, a ritual slaughterer, who was killed by the Angel of Death who, finally, was slain by the Almighty Himself. Blessed be He, said the text. Only the Messiah, whom God had sent, could kill Death, hence the Jewish yearning for his coming. Nesha never sang that song again. The primitive wheel of punishment, in which the executioner himself is executed, no longer held any charm for him. He never understood why God waited all that time to slay the Angel of Death. God always came too late.
Tonight, a million miles from that little boy, he would gather the four memorial glasses filled with wax that he’d brought with him from San Francisco. He would light them in his hotel room at sunset as he had lighted them every Yahrzeit for decades. They would burn for twenty-four hours, then he would begin another year alone.
Sunnydale Terrace was a low-rise institutional kind of building on Bathurst Street in the north part of the city. There had been only seven nursing homes in the Toronto phone book. It didn’t take long to call and find out where she was. Why had he lost touch with his two cousins, the only ones left of his family? He supposed it was the difference in their ages. They had written periodically from Argentina. When Chana moved to Canada there’d been a flurry of letter writing. Months before Josh’s bar mitzvah, Nesha had phoned Chana for the first time and invited her to come. She’d been excited on the phone and he was sure she would make the trip to San Francisco. Then they’d received a modest cheque in the mail with her unexplained apologies. He phoned again to find out how he had been so wrong about her intentions. She sounded diffident this time, almost nervous, whispering into the receiver. Apparently her husband told her they couldn’t afford the trip, and besides, she said, he didn’t like family affairs. Nesha offered to send a plane ticket if she wanted to come by herself; she could stay with them for a week if she liked. He remembered her gasping at the other end. “Oh, I couldn’t do that. Leo wouldn’t let me....”
He’d spoken to Goldie only once on the phone, several days before leaving San Francisco. Was it just last Thursday? It seemed like last year. When asked about Chana, Goldie told him she was in a nursing home. Goldie was still furious with Chana’s husband for depositing her there. “I told him, ach! I look after her half day if he look after the rest. Just half day. Terrible man. He don’t want. Easier sent her away. Now she suffering.”
A wide scraggly lawn separated the front of Sunnydale Terrace from the four lanes of suburban traffic that sped by. On the other side of the road was a series of cemeteries, some Jewish, some Christian, all of them fenced in spiked metal to separate the dead from the living and protect them from each other.
The reception area was not ungenerous, furnished with wine-coloured sofas, their material thin and dirty on closer inspection, and tables and chairs that looked too orderly to be much used.
Nesha waited before the empty reception desk, part of a cubby-hole that backed into an office. “Excuse me?” he addressed the air.
When no one answered, Nesha raised his voice. “Anybody here?”
A very wide middle-aged woman with permed dark blonde hair appeared behind the desk, irritated. “Please keep it down, sir. This is the residents’ quiet time.”
He glanced at his watch: 2:40 p.m. Must’ve been afternoon nap time.
“I’m looking for Chana Feldberg,” he said.
“Are you a relative?” she said, looking over his baseball cap and leather jacket. He could imagine her face if she could see the ponytail inside the cap, or if he still had his beard. At least he’d had the foresight to bring a packet of daffodils as an offering.
“She’s my aunt.”
“You haven’t been here before.” Her head tilted with suspicion.
“I’m visiting from the States,” he said. “I’m staying at the Harbourfront Hilton. You want some I.D.?” He pulled out his driver’s licence and made a show of displaying it.
She blinked with annoyance. “Gloria!” she called behind her. “Take Mr. — “ She turned to him.
“Malkevich.”
“Take Mr. Malkevich up to Mrs. Feldberg’s room.”
A younger woman with mousy brown hair appeared out of the depths of the office. “Come this way, Mr. Malkevich,” she said, heading toward the elevator.
There were only two floors in the building, but Nesha followed. In the elevator, the woman kept her eyes on the floor number overhead. “Mrs. Feldberg doesn’t talk anymore. Only sometimes in Yiddish. It’s terrible what happened to her sister. But she doesn’t understand.”
The woman knocked once on the door of room 201, then opened it without waiting. In a raised voice reserved for children and the mentally impaired, she said, “My dear, you have a visitor.”
Chana half-turned her head, barely glancing at him, satisfied, it seemed, that nothing behind her could be of interest. She returned to stare out the window as if she were watching her favourite TV show. She had a good view of the cemeteries from here. He wondered if it bothered her, contemplating the uneven earth where one day soon she might lie. He took off his cap, letting his ponytail fall onto his neck. The mousy brunette sniffed, satisfied with her opinion of him, then left.
He approached Chana’s chair, surprised at his own shyness. Her mere presence was pulling him back forty years to the house in his small Polish town, his mother, the contented memories of a ten-year-old that were obliterated by what came after. The last time he’d seen Chana she was in her early twenties, closer to his mother’s age but elegant with long smooth brown hair.
This woman in the chair was tiny, on the point of disappearing. What little was left of her hair was white and pressed flat against her head. By his calculation she was not more than sixty-five. She looked closer to eighty. She had survived the camps but couldn’t escape the ravages of the body. Would his mother, if she had lived, have succumbed so early to some unstoppable disease?
“Aunt
