She had never thought much about God before, attended High Holiday services because her parents bought tickets at a Reform synagogue. After David died, she began to ruminate on the kind of God who had seen fit to take away the best man she knew. God didn’t seem to care who He made suffer, it didn’t matter if one was pure of heart. The universe was a chaotic place without justice or reason.
Though she had watched patients die over the years, she had never felt that profound hopelessness till death touched her personally. It wasn’t a transitory depression; it was a change in her world view. God had died, or He had lost interest in the welfare of the world. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Afterwards she had hit well below her target weight. Though she was average height, her bones were large; her back was wide, her wrists and ankles were not delicate and though the flesh had dissolved on her, she felt the solidity of her frame would see her through. She only wished she could do something about her energy level. The bustle of life here made her feel peripheral, restless.
She turned left at Dundas, mortified that walking three blocks at moderate speed was giving her a stitch in her side. Two streets away the white concrete facade of the Art Gallery of Ontario, spread over an entire city block, sat coolly on its wide steps. She moved amid the supper crowds in Chinatown in the firm knowledge that once she got to Beverley Street all would be quiet. It never ceased to surprise her: in the centre of the triangle comprised loosely of the Art Gallery, Kensington Market, and the University of Toronto, Beverley Street was as quiet as a suburb. It was like the eye of a storm; in the centre of things without all the detractions that the centre of things implied. Traffic was bad along Dundas where Chinatown and the Art Gallery tolerantly merged, and the market was a maze of one-way streets, but the heart of Beverley Street lay warm and beating quietly after a hundred years of affluence. She’d come upon a book that traced the history of old houses in the neighbourhood and had found a surprising number of Victorian styles: Georgian, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne, and Richardsonian Romanesque. Some had been renovated into offices like hers, some into rooming-houses.
Her shins began to hurt as she passed the wrought iron fence of the Italian consulate filling the extensive corner of Dundas and Beverley. She was in pathetic shape. She couldn’t go any faster, no matter how hard she pushed herself.
The consulate occupied a regal tawny structure built a century earlier. What was it called? Chudleigh, whatever that meant; her book had not said. But it represented what Rebecca wanted. She had picked Beverley Street for its other-century, traditional demeanour, its Victorian mansions still sturdy in a new age. She was looking for something solid, something that stood the test of time, something that would still be there when she looked up. Buildings that stood by serenely while the world changed were a good bet. Sure they had been renovated. That was their secret; from the inside out, the old had been made new again. Otherwise they would not have survived. That was the secret, Rebecca thought. Use the old structure for a base and add what is necessary. Change and survive. She had started from the bottom when she bought her formidable leather shoes. Iris was right. She would have to work her way up.
She was nearly home-free, her heart full in her throat, pulsing. How had she deteriorated into this shape? She blew out, then sucked in, refusing to let herself gasp. She stood on the steps of the medical building, catching her breath. Across the street Beverley Mansions caught the warm glow of the early evening sun. She heard sharp distant noises, like drawers opening and cutlery being laid down. People were coming home from work and preparing dinner. Normal people. Would she ever be normal again?
chapter four
Nesha
Friday, March 30, 1979
Nesha made the mistake of examining the photo under a magnifying glass. If it had been the original newsprint he might have been able to see something among the million grey dots. But the photocopy revealed no secrets in its pools of black and white, only bald statements he didn’t know how to interpret. Yet interpret he must. He would keep trying till something spoke to him. He would be methodical as always; it was the only way he knew.
He stepped up to the living-room window that overlooked San Francisco Bay and held the photo up to the light. Starting at the bottom he read the caption, “Fowl Escape from the Market,” then the photo credit: Peter Hanson/Toronto Star. His eyes moved up the page to where a duck waddled along a sidewalk, stores in the background. Finally, as a reward to himself, he let his eyes settle on the man walking in the shadow of the store beyond the duck. A spasm gripped his heart. It felt good to hate again. Like sensation coming back to a long-dead limb: a sign of life. The man in the picture was not young. Nesha looked in the upper margin at the handwritten notation: June 10, 1978. Almost a year ago. A lot could happen in a year. By now he might be dead. Wouldn’t that be rich, Nesha thought, finally getting this new information and stoking up the old fires only to find out the man had died peacefully in his sleep in the meantime. He couldn’t bear that. He stared at the blurred face and tried to get it to speak to him. “Are you still breathing, you bastard? Are you waiting for me?”
Once a year, before Passover, Nesha allowed himself the bittersweet ritual of taking his pistol out of the cabinet and cleaning it. It had been thirty-five years since it came into his possession and each year he brought it out like a relic, the sole concrete evidence of his youth. Only the hard steel convinced him that his past was not a bad dream. He had no mother, no father, no brothers. No photos to bring out of the drawer that could comfort him with familiar faces. After all these years it was the absence of photos he regretted the most.
He tenderly dismantled the gun into its dark steel segments. His legacy consisted of the herringbone-patterned handle, the slide, the barrel, the recoil spring. Set on a piece of cotton flannel on the kitchen table, they absorbed the light from his window. The Bay shone outside, Marin County with its upscale houses set into the hills, their glass walls flaming in the sun. But with the gun before him, sucking in the light, he was in Poland again, in the woods running between villages. Mud sucking at his feet. Branches grasping at him. If he’d only had the gun then. There would have been fear in the peasants’ eyes, not contempt. He knew which ones he would’ve used the gun on. The big stupid one who beat him every day for a month with his hamfists. Nesha escaped one winter’s night, flying through the frozen fields like a ghost, the wind taking hold of him, biting his skin beneath the thin coat. In the next village an old woman wanted him to help her feed her cows. She had a good heart most of the week but on Saturdays she got into the home-made vodka and beat him with her cane. The gun came too late to save him from those floggings. But he had been lucky, too. Not all peasants were the same. Some had pity. He was alive because of them.
A plane hummed over the Bay. He removed the magazine from the handle of the pistol and dismantled it, using a patch of cotton flannel to clean off the dirt, then rubbing it lightly with oil. He applied solvent to the interior of the barrel with a cleaning rod, then ran a fresh patch of flannel through the bore to wipe out the excess. He moved an old toothbrush along the cylinder gear, then over the grip panel of the handle, always in the direction of the herringbone pattern, to remove any dirt that managed to accumulate since the last cleaning. He didn’t understand how a gun could collect dirt hidden away in a box inside a cabinet. But the Earth turned; salt air from the Pacific crept in through crevices and would pock the smooth surface of an uncleaned gun with rust.
Through the two hours that it took him to clean and lubricate the pistol, his mother’s face rose before him. Each time, he pushed her back, unwilling to have his heart broken again. But as he reassembled the gun in the fading light, he blinked too long and her dark hair appeared in the distance, the usually tidy bun unravelling in strands to her shoulders as she lined up with the others. And when she turned — he would never forget — her face white and twisted with terror, all the blood drained as if she were dead already. And her eyes, as familiar to him as his own, pleading with him to run, go back to the forest, run, forget, never come back.
All at once he looked up, startled to find a ragged, bearded man watching him. It took him a full minute to recognize himself in the reflection of the kitchen window, a mirror now