She was heading for her car when she saw him. Feldberg stood on his steps smoking, three duplexes down from Mrs. Kochinsky’s, as he had said. He saw her, too. Quickly throwing down his cigarette, he stepped up to the sidewalk where she would pass.
“You are the doctor? Goldie’s doctor?”
“Yes.”
“What a shock to find her like that. I was just going to make coffee. Would you like some?”
The statement could wait.
Feldberg’s main floor apartment was laid out exactly like Mrs. Kochinsky’s, but the differences in style were startling. She had filled her living-room with the curved lines of French Provincial sofas and needlepoint chairs set in a circle, creating an impression of gentle clutter. His tastes ran to modern and expensive, a pale blue leather couch beneath the bay window, a steel and leather armchair near the fireplace. Between them stood an ultra-modern coffee table of chrome and glass. On the surface a large art book lay perfectly aligned with the couch. No carpets softened the floor of blond pine planks whose pattern converged in the centre of the oblong space that housed the living- and dining-room. The lines of the floor, and their juncture, drew the eye into the dining-room, which was almost empty except for a small table and two chairs. On a corner table sat a Mayan head carved from stone.
“Make yourself comfortable, Doctor. I will start the coffee.” Feldberg disappeared into the kitchen, the aroma of his cologne receding with him.
Rebecca observed the painting over the fireplace: wispy, nearly translucent figures dancing in the twilight of a romantic grove of cypress. She glanced instinctively at the signature, then smiled. Corot. Who was he trying to fool? What had David told her once? Jean-Baptiste Corot had completed four hundred paintings in his lifetime, and eight hundred of them were in North America.
From the kitchen Feldberg called out, “As you can see I’m a great lover of art. Have you heard the expression: the air we find in the Old Masters paintings is not the air we breathe? I deeply believe this.”
Her eyes followed the pattern on the pine floor where it converged in the dining-room. The burled table top was large enough only for a few tea cups. The austere ladder-backed chairs did not invite the guest to stay long. Rather the room drew the eye to the art on the walls, where she was amused to find paintings signed by Utrillo — a scene of bleached houses pressed together in a village — Pissarro — a busy scene at the docks in some French town — and a lopsided Chagall fiddler flying over a house through a pink sky. They were very good copies. Not just coloured photographs on artboard, but brushstrokes that looked real on canvas. Was this the new technique of reproduction that David had scoffed at? All that money and taste and then Feldberg had spoiled it.
Enough schlock. She turned to the photos on the mantelpiece. Feldberg and Chana in summer clothes stood together on a sidewalk somewhere, not close enough to touch. Rebecca noted a sisterly resemblance to Goldie even in the wary half-smile for the camera. In another, a young Chana and Goldie, arms around each other’s shoulders, beaming in front of a large tree. Goldie’s face, small, heart-shaped, her brown hair swept up into a chic roll. And the eyes! Ironic eyes radiant with humour. How beautiful she was. They both were. No wary smiles here, no buried emotions. Then a photo caught at Rebecca’s heart. Mrs. Kochinsky wistful beside a dark-haired handsome young man, his arm stretched affectionately around her. Enrique.
“A tragic family,” Feldberg said entering the living-room, noting the photo in her hand. He carried in an elaborate silver tray that he placed on the coffee table. “Did she tell you of her past?” He had an admirable head of steel-grey hair for a man in his sixties. His fine bones and trim frame exaggerated the hair.
“I know about her experience in Argentina.”
His back stiffened as if she’d said something personal. What had he to do with it? Perhaps there was something here to find out, but she needed to put him at ease first.
“At least she escaped from Europe before the war,” she said. “Things could’ve been worse.”
“She was luckier than me, in that respect,” he said, showing Rebecca to the sofa. He sat down in the severely modern chair opposite her, crossing his legs the prim way she had seen European men do. His grey jacket was made of expensive wool, the line of the trousers creased just so. He appeared nervous though, understandable after the evening’s events. His grey eyes tended to dart around quickly. Every now and then he rubbed his patrician nose as if irked by a smell.
“You were caught in the war?” she said.
He looked past her to the draped window. “At first we just ran from one town to the other, trying to stay ahead of the Nazis. Then in one of the towns, someone informed on us. Those Poles were devils. They hated Jews. And that was the end of our freedom. They took us to a camp in Poland, me and my brother.”
“How did you survive?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“We were young. I was lucky I was small. My brother was bigger than me and I gave him some of my food. I knew he needed it more than me. But he couldn’t take the hard labour and he wouldn’t listen. I helped others to survive. They valued my advice and they lived. But I couldn’t save my brother.”
The nasal voice stopped and she realized he was observing her. “Did anyone else from your family survive?” she asked.
“Some cousins. They’re in the United States.”
“Did you go there after the war?”
He squinted his eyes, squeezed his face into a grimace. “I didn’t want the States. I wanted adventure. I went to Argentina.”
Rebecca recalled an autobiography by a camp survivor she had once read. It seemed everyone was trying to get into the United States after the war but only those with relatives were allowed in. She began to wonder.
“Cream and sugar?” he asked.
Once he was sipping from his china teacup, she said, “You met your wife in Argentina?”
“Argentina? No, no! We met in a labour camp in Poland. She was so beautiful, you wouldn’t know, looking at her now. How she suffered there! She was never a strong woman. She survived because of me. You know why she lived? Because I got her a good job in the camp. I was there before her and I had friends. Friends were the most important thing — more important even than food. Food you could get with friends. So I pulled some strings and she didn’t have to go to the factory. She went every day to clean the officers’ quarters. Away from the camp, maybe five minutes walk. No danger of the quotas in the factories, or being shot by an SS out for some fun. Just cleaning up their rooms.”
Mrs. Kochinsky had mentioned Chana’s trauma in the camps but failed to cite Feldberg as her saviour. So he hadn’t chosen Argentina for adventure but because Chana could be sponsored by her sister. Water under the bridge.
“You were lucky to leave Argentina before the reign of terror there. You moved to Canada quite a while before your sister-in-law. Did that upset your wife?”
He straightened up in the chair, affronted, his eyes darting faster. “I had no choice. I had to start somewhere new. You probably heard the story about Goldie’s husband, my late brother-in-law. He didn’t like me. He was a hard man, a hard man. We were partners in a printing shop. I worked like a slave and one day he just kicked me out of the business. So unfair. I had to start from scratch in a new country with nothing, supporting a wife...”
He continued talking while Rebecca’s mind jogged back to a memory he had let loose with his story about the printing business. It was the beginning of her relationship with Mrs. Kochinsky, the only time the older woman had mentioned her brother-in-law. Apparently her husband had taken Feldberg into the business for Chana’s