Wednesday, March 28,1979
As soon as Goldie stepped onto the Bathurst Street bus she knew she was in trouble. The strangers around her stared with cold faces. The familiar palpitations began in her neck, her chest, as she determined to find the one she was looking for: it was in the eyes, the way a person held his head. This bus was why she didn’t go downtown, this danger to her survival that the doctor hadn’t counted on. Oh why had the doctor moved so far away! Goldie preferred to walk everywhere she could. The area around Bathurst and Eglinton where she lived proliferated with every kind of store. There was little she could not buy within a three-block radius of her apartment.
Today was her first appointment in the doctor’s new office. If she made it. On the bus now, all her energy polarized to keep her standing in the aisle without bolting out the exit at each stop. In her head she tried to reproduce Dr. Temple’s calm voice telling her that she was in Toronto, she was safe. Most of the seats had filled and more people got on. Gripping the bars, she moved further down the bus when suddenly she saw a young man who reminded her of Enrique. Mama, you’re a big girl, he would’ve said. You gotta try. It’ll be all right. Besides, you look great. She pushed Enrique from her mind.
She looked into each face to make sure she was not being followed. Most of the passengers avoided her eyes; Torontonians were so reserved. But she continued methodically row after row, face after face: immigrant women with their tightly curled hair, students with books, old men and women, their surfaces like maps of forgotten places.
Did Dr. Temple understand how hard it was for her to just go out on the street, her own familiar street, never mind all the way down to the new medical office? Goldie didn’t thank the doctor for saving her when she’d finally mustered the courage to swallow the valium. She did thank her for caring, for understanding her pain. Ah, there was nothing else to be done; she had to go.
Now this new thing, this cousin’s voice from so long ago on the phone suddenly. She didn’t like to think about that time. She had escaped from Poland when she was twenty, left behind everyone she loved. Only her sister Chana survived. Poor Chana, who had ended up in a camp. Thin and frail after typhus, she finally joined Goldie in Argentina after the war. And now this forgotten cousin from Poland who had somehow escaped. The rest of her family had become dust and ashes. She owed them this much, to help the cousin find what he was looking for. They would meet soon, he said, after all these years. Where was he living now? California? They had only exchanged a few letters now and then. Maybe she could find the address he needed. Give him something of importance when they finally met. She had to work up her stamina for that kind of adventure. Maybe she would go next week.
Dr. Temple’s voice, if she had managed to hear it at all, popped like a balloon when the young man Enrique’s age stood up and looked at her directly.
“Please,” he motioned behind himself. “Take my seat.”
Goldie was too shocked to understand what he wanted.
“Sit down. Go ahead.”
She looked into his face to see if this was a trap, but his voice was English, his manner Toronto. Not taking any chances, she nervously moved further down the aisle, leaving the young man to fall back into his seat, embarrassed.
A block below St. Clair, a short, dark-haired woman walked to the exit and stepped down on the stair. She was thick as a sausage in a cheap ski jacket over her home-made paisley dress. A group of teenagers in fashionably ragged jeans had gotten on at St. Clair and still held the driver’s attention. When the woman pulled the cord at her stop, the bus careened past. The students were so noisy that it was possible only Goldie, who was close by, heard the woman shout, “¡Abra la puerta!” The woman began to beat her small fat fist against the glass of the door and again yelled, “¡Abra la puerta!”
In a flash Goldie found herself again in her apartment in Buenos Aires that night when all had been lost.
“¡Abra la puerta! ¡Abra la puerta!”
A cluster of fists hammered at the door of her apartment. The voices in her nightmare cried, “¡Abra la puerta! ¡Abra la puerta!,” and she had woken up from the dream that had once been her life. As soon as she unlocked the door, four men in plain clothes jumped inside with guns and handcuffed her from behind. They twisted her arms with such careless venom that she blinked in bewildered pain. They ran through the apartment searching for others and for this, at least, she felt relief.
“Where is he?” one of them asked her, the others milling about.
“Who?” she said.
The man threw a blanket over her head then pushed her out the door in her pyjamas. They will get you to talk, Jewish whore.
A gun barrel was pushed into her side as they rode down the elevator. The blanket still over her head, they threw her down onto the floor of a car. Their feet perched on her body, the gun barrel stuck in her back as they drove away.
Finally they arrived in the basement of some official building. First she was blindfolded, then, without any preamble, she was put on the machine. She didn’t know it was the machine then; she merely knew her fate was catching up with her. Someone placed her on a cot, attached what she later realized were electrodes to her mouth, and pushed a button. A fire, a howling, started in her mouth. She fell into the noise headlong, forgetting her name, forgetting her face. The plague had carried off her family in Europe thirty years before; it finally remembered to come back for her. She was being punished for surviving.
Later on she found out that all the prisoners were given the machine on their arrival to rattle them into submission. Routine. Then to business. At the beginning the conversations went like this:
“Where is your son?”
“I don’t know.”
A sharp slap across the face.
“How can I help you if you don’t cooperate? We don’t want to hurt him. We just want to speak to him about his subversive activities.”
“He has no subversive activities. He’s a musician. He writes songs.”
“Songs? Propaganda that describes us as animals. Lies that give comfort to the enemy.”
“Students are your enemies?”
“Your son is young. Maybe he fell in with a bad crowd. We understand all that. We don’t want to hurt him. Where is he?”
“Out of your reach, Mr. Interrogator. Nowhere you can find him.”
The fist smashed her mouth. That stubborn mouth. Her interrogator, once interested in her son’s whereabouts, now enjoyed torturing her for her own shortcomings: her uncowed demeanor, her Jewishness, her stubborn mouth that refused obedience. An uncontrollable mouth. Not that she didn’t want to control it, only it was directly attached to her brain and her brain she couldn’t control. With the result that her tongue, no matter how she manoeuvred it, succeeded in inflaming her interrogator to heights of sadistic rage. What was worse for an old woman — sitting in pyjamas on the wet floor of a cell, praying the scorpions wouldn’t find her, or sitting in the interrogator’s chair, her only human contact slamming his fist into the side of her ribs, searching for something she could not give him: herself?
After some weeks, when Goldie lay filthy on the stone floor, her pyjamas soiled from the remnants of bodily functions, her interrogator grew bolder. When fetching her from her cell, he neglected to blindfold her. She now saw he was fat, with short greasy hair. He was ageless, sexless, she would not recognize him on the street. She allowed herself a fleeting moment of hope before coming to a halt in the room. Seeing it for the first time, she was perversely satisfied with its shabbiness — it could have been a converted kitchen. She smiled to herself, surprised that she was able. She was being fried in an old kitchen. The smell was damp, musty, like long ago fried fish.
“This amuses you?”
Goldie