Shimon eventually bought her a guitar but, in accordance with his principles, resisted teaching her how to play it. Although I didn’t think so at the time, perhaps he was right because through her own resolution she learned to play the guitar, the recorder and the flute and to read and write music. She discovered that if you want to do something all you have to do is do it. The Finjan years were at the heart of that discovery.
Four
The Healing of Leonard Cohen
When Ronit was eleven, I scraped together enough money to spend several weeks in Ireland. By then I had completed a Masters thesis on the well-known Irish poet and dramatist, W.B. Yeats, and had begun a doctorate. I decided to attend the Yeats Summer School in Sligo and travel in Ireland with research as my excuse. I had been growing increasingly restless. The Finjan was no longer, and I was straining at the bit, yearning for travel. Whereas Shimon thrived on predictability, I withered. He needed home. I needed travel. Without rancour or bitterness we had been steadily growing in different directions.
The trip to Ireland heightened my longing for the road. I returned to Montreal even more restless, unprepared for what awaited me there. Without warning Shimon had left me and was living with someone else. Although I understood his motivations, I was devastated. Trapped, bereft, penniless, I spent the next six months chained to circumstances I was powerless to alter, my travel dreams shattered by unrelenting reality. Then suddenly everything changed. I received a three year Canada Council award, plus travel grant, to complete my doctorate at the university of my choice. My ticket to ride was magically reissued. I packed one bag for myself, one for Ronit and, leaving Shimon with whatever worldly possessions I had, Ronit and I took off for England.
The only material thing I regretted leaving behind was my kitchen with its “wall of fame.” When Ronit was two we had moved into a larger flat where she and I remained until leaving for England. The flat had a remarkable kitchen. It had a special energy, a special ambience, a well-being where things flowed, things happened. It was spacious, yet snug, with a wall of windows overlooking a wild field, a tract of unspoiled land prohibited to builders, a rare event in the bosom of a city. In summer the field was filled with flowers, birds and sunshine, making one feel expansive, extending the kitchen into a macrocosm of possibilities. In winter it was blanketed with snow, long shadows and cold stars, the kitchen withdrawing into an interior landscape, a secret refuge, cosy, warm, intimate. The skies were never still, moving from serene to angry, blue or grey or pink in the day, black with soft moons or streaks of Northern Lights at night. It was a vista conducive to discoveries, revelations, creations. The kitchen table was its heart, generating life, providing a continuous feast. It was around the kitchen table, folded into black velvet skies, drawn by a circle of candle light into compelling universes, that I fell in love with music, with musicians, with poetry, with friends; it was here that I dreamed my dreams of travel; that I prepared long loving dinners; that I did my work, planning choreography, reading and revising for university exams, toiling into the night on overdue term papers. I remember Ronit waking late one night to find me at the kitchen table immersed in books, notes and typewriter, my eyes strained with the effort of completing a paper due next day. “Papers, papers, papers,” she wailed, “I’m never going to university!” But the kitchen gave me energy, stamina, strength to persevere. It was my perfect place.
Late one morning, during The Finjan days, I woke to find a legend boldly inscribed across the kitchen wall. “This is the one and only kitchen in the whole wide world” it proclaimed, signed “Ron Eliran,” the Israeli singer then performing at The Finjan. I was so taken aback I hardly registered the sentiment, so perfectly in tune with mine. How dare he deface my kitchen wall. Immediately I tried to scrub it clean. But scrawled with an indelible marker, it refused to be eradicated. When I confronted Ron, he was unrepentant. “Why did you do that?” I moaned, “I can’t wash it off.”
“I did it because it had to be done.… It must never be washed off. Everyone who stays here should write something for the wall. It will be a wall of fame, a thank you to this wonderful kitchen.”
Shimon agreed and the wall of fame was bom. For me it became a celebration of my kitchen, of The Finjan, of the musicians, of my substitute for travel, of all of us together. After I left Montreal I never saw it again, but wherever I went I took that kitchen and its wall of fame with me.
Although the wall provided happy recollections, it evoked one disturbing memory which continued to haunt me. When the now-famous blues musician, John Lee Hooker, performed at The Finjan, spending wonderful hours in our kitchen, I asked him, as a matter of course, to sign the wall. I was taken aback by his adamant refusal. “Everyone writes something on the wall,” I protested. But he was unyielding. “Please John,” I urged, unable to fathom this stubborn refusal in someone so amenable, “I really want you to sign the wall.… I want to remember you being here.” But, uncharacteristically, he continued to refuse, and, characteristically, I continued to twist his arm. “Why John? Why won’t you sign the wall?” I pleaded.
Finally he offered a lame, “I don’t know what to write.”
“That’s no problem,” I said with a sense of deliverance. At that time he had a hit song in circulation called Boom Boom. “Just write ‘Boom Boom’ … nothing else … just ‘Boom Boom’ … that’ll be great.” Eroded by my insistence, he acquiesced. “Good man,” I said, handing him the felt pen. He clutched it like a child grasping a too-fat crayon, and in slow awkward letters painfully scratched an M … an O … another O and a misshapen N facing backwards. Suddenly it hit me. He was illiterate. He couldn’t write. And I had forced humiliation upon him. Mortified, I watched him press another tortured M … O … O and a wounded N into the wall.
“Boom! Boom!” he smiled broadly, his ordeal over.
“Thanks John, I really appreciate that,” I said, severely chastened. “Now I’ll always think of you when I look at the wall.” And I always did, but with a stinging shame.
At first I intended finishing my university degree in Ireland since I was working on an Irish writer. But after attending the Yeats Summer School and spending some time in Dublin, I realised this was not a good idea. It would be too difficult for a woman on her own with a child to live in Ireland. In a country where divorce was not permitted, where men lived with their mothers until they married in their late thirties or even mid forties, and where sexual repression was rampant, I would be too high profile, up for grabs. Even being in Ireland without Ronit gave rise to a plague of curiosity, making me feel as though my bones were being picked. Although I loved Ireland and the Irish, the poetry, the talk, the music, the hilarity, the madness, I knew I couldn’t live there. It was too introverted, too incestuous, to give me the anonymity I desired.
I had already suffered unwanted attention in Montreal where the English-speaking community was relatively small and where Shimon was relatively well known because of The Finjan years and his subsequent success as a performer. Everyone knew we had parted, that he was living with someone else. Strangers would express sorrow at our separation. The looks of sympathy and commiseration had been difficult to bear, they were like eulogies at my funeral. I decided on London where no one was interested in me, except for Ruth, my only friend there, and Rosy, whom I had met at the Yeats Summer School and recognised as a soul mate.
I had written my Masters thesis on W.B. Yeats’ Plays For Dancers, excited by the discovery that Yeats, like myself, was impelled by