drug make them quiet, weak. Then ... then,” she put a hand over her eyes, “they throw them out into ocean. Still alive. Alive.”
Rebecca couldn’t speak. Mechanically she rose and took three steps to a small sink in the corner. She pulled a disposable cup from the dispenser and filled it with water. She handed it to Mrs. Kochinsky.
“I’m so sorry,” she said and sat down across from her, suddenly very tired. This was not paranoia; it had the unfortunate ring of truth.
Mrs. Kochinsky drank from the cup mechanically.
“My family gone. Why I should live? I’m only alive because I’m not dead.”
Rebecca leaned forward toward the older woman, seeking eye contact. “Your sister’s still alive. It sounds like she needs you.”
Mrs. Kochinsky lifted her head, bird-like. “What I can do? I’m helpless. She just sit there, won’t talk. Only sometime a word in Yiddish. We don’t speak Yiddish from before war. I bring material so she can sew. She have her little machine there. You should see clothes she make for me. Beautiful dress, blouse....” She inclined her head and tapped her cheek with one hand. “Aye, you won’t believe how she was good with hands. You know, in camp she had job in factory — no one can do like her, with small fast hands. She make part for weapons, little pieces metal must fit together, and if not fit, gun not work. They will shoot her. She told me religious boy come work beside her, can’t do with hands. Young, clumsy. She show him, try help, but he can’t. What you think? She do work for him, so they don’t take him away. She lucky — they change her from factory and then she clean officers’ place. Help her survive. Survive. For what?
“Now she just sit. Do nothing. Her husband happy he get rid of her.” She lowered her voice. “I tell him I look after her, but he send her away. I know why he don’t want me. He have office at home. Many business deals. Crooked deals. He don’t want me find out. Who knows what he do there. I told her for long time leave him. Bad man. Did bad things in war. But was good to Chana, so she marry him. Desperate after war, no one left. And now? He don’t care. I want take care for her.”
“But that would’ve been a huge commitment, taking care of your sister. Maybe it’s better this way.”
“What else I have? Three mornings at bakery? He can afford pay me same like bakery. Much cheaper than nursing home. I wanted look after her.”
Tears formed in her eyes, glistening. She wore her gently waved hair chin length, and with her straight nose and small face, she often reminded Rebecca of what Greta Garbo might have looked like at sixty. Except that, as far as Rebecca knew, Greta Garbo didn’t need psychotherapy to see her through the week.
“She only one I have left.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Man on bus — he upset me. When I get off, he follow. I run and run...”
Rebecca scribbled notes. She’d heard this before. “There’ve been other times when men followed you. Was there something different about this man compared to the others?”
“They all different. They send different man each time. So I won’t know. But I always know. And now they got more opportunity, because I go two buses for here. Before, I walk five minutes to old office. I wish you don’t move. This not safe neighbourhood.”
“I understand how you feel,” said Rebecca. “I know it’s hard to go out of your area, but it will get easier. It’ll just take time.”
Mrs. Kochinsky studied her for a moment. “If you say, I believe. Look — I’ll bring you knishes for Passover. Home-made. Just next week. See? I believe you.”
Rebecca smiled uneasily. The emotional wall she usually kept between herself and her patients had been impossible to summon in Mrs. Kochinsky’s case. The pain she had gone through, the horror, put her in a different category.
Before leaving, Mrs. Kochinsky turned to Rebecca and said, “Oh, I forget something tell you. A visitor coming for me. Cousin from California. So long when I saw him — I didn’t even know he still lives. When he call, like voice from past.”
Then she suddenly smiled goodbye, her mouth partly open in mute apology as if there was something she preferred not to say. It was the same smile each time she left. Apology for what, Rebecca wondered: for living, for being a casualty of war, for surviving with complications?
Iris was deep into files at her workstation when Rebecca passed by at five forty-five. “I’ve got my pager,” Rebecca said. “I’11 just be around the neighbourhood if you need me.”
Iris looked down at Rebecca’s feet. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’m going to do what I tell all my patients: go for a brisk walk around the block.”
Iris examined her from the feet up. “Well, the shoes are good. But you need a swanky track suit, Doc. Something with polyester to show off the slimmer you. That skirt with those running shoes...,” she shook her blonde head. “You want to exercise, you gotta have the right outfit. Come shopping with me this weekend and I’ll find you something spiffy.”
Rebecca put one hand on her hip in protest but realized there was no use arguing. She stepped downstairs past the office of the other doctor. Lila Arons, M.D. They’d met briefly when Rebecca leased the space. A brisk handshake, the usual greetings, and they had both gone on their way.
She stepped outside the medical building, heartened by the way her feet felt in the new leather running shoes. Solid. She was ready to take on Beverley Street. The street looked as empty as the first time she’d seen it, leafy quiet in the shade of another century.
Once on the sidewalk, she dipped her hand inside her jacket pocket to deposit the beeper. What she felt there made her stop.
“Rebecca, Rebecca!” David chided out of an undefinable corner of her past. His trimmed reddish beard pointed at her with irony.
She held the wrapped sugar cube up in her palm, impressed with its survival. She hadn’t seen the gabardine rain jacket since last September when she had pushed it to the back of her closet together with the white cane. She had always carried something for David’s carbohydrate hunger, which came on suddenly when his medication reached its peak. It was a reaction to the insulin. Common enough. Not dramatic enough for a haunting, too physical to ignore. She had gotten rid of his aftershave, his jeans, his tweed sports jackets. She had tried to sweep her life’s surface clear of reminders of him but every now and then there was this self-sabotage she couldn’t explain. She dropped the cube back into her pocket, but uneasily.
She moved up Beverley Street at a pace she knew was unsatisfactory, but it was all she could muster. Speed was a problem for her lately; she could do nothing quickly. Often she felt submerged in water, her body struggling just to move normally. Aunt Sally had insisted at the Shiva that what she remembered most when Uncle died was the fatigue, the dense weariness that grief deposited in the bones. Don’t overdo it, Rebecca directed her solid leather-bound feet. We just want to get in shape, we don’t want to win any races.
She paced herself along Baldwin Street where narrow brick houses watched behind lawns of yellow inchoate grass that would turn green inside of a month. She approached the spectacle of Spadina Avenue. Three lanes of traffic rushed on either side of the streetcar tracks that ran along the centre of the grand avenue, ready to trip the unwary pedestrian. A deathtrap for anyone dependent on a white cane. Apparently a physician named Baldwin who practiced architecture on the side had designed the street in the
