This hunter, she thought, has left the snow.
Hershel
It was the middle of December and business was in a torpor. City centre traffic had shifted from early-morning back-ups to night-time snarls, as residents and holiday makers thronged to the bars and clubs. At any time of the year, in Hershel’s experience, people hated making big decisions – signing leases, buying buildings – but now they had an excuse (holiday time, downtime, leave) and nobody was making any decisions at all. Apart from his meeting later today – on the phone, the woman had sounded foreign and brisk – there was nothing on the horizon.
He told Hazel that he was going out to walk the neighbourhood, drop into some businesses to see if they’d consider new premises. “Enjoy,” she said sardonically. His plan was to go for a sandwich and then a stroll down Long Street to take in the scene.
He was only a couple of steps onto the street when a woman peeled herself away from the building’s wall, where she’d been standing in the slender shadow granted by the late morning sun.
“Hershel Bloch?”
She awakened an old uneasiness in his mind. A coloured woman of about sixty, thick grey hair, large brown eyes. Stylishly dressed in a striped blue top and white cotton slacks. Earnest and attractive. But she looked sad.
He forced a smile, screwed up his eyes. An ex-corporate client? “I can’t quite place your name.”
“We haven’t met, I’m sorry to say. I’m Marcia Josephs. Do you remember Camille Josephs?” Her hand was cool, long and bony in his big one; a loose grip.
“Camille?”
She smiled. “I can see you do. Not someone you forget, our Camille. I’m her mother. Do you have a few minutes? Could we take a walk, get coffee somewhere? I need to tell you something. It won’t take long but it’s important.”
They walked in silence along the street, this elegantly dressed woman alongside dishevelled Hershel as he probed tender, painful memories, long neglected.
First year varsity. Hershel had scraped through his Accounting courses: fifty-two per cent average, enough to satisfy his mother, more or less. They’d organised a party on Clifton First Beach, next to the rocks. Just him and his friends Gadi and Sam. They’d been together since their days at the Jewish day school, where they’d slipped through the cracks, thoroughly undistinguished in academic or cultural activities, known only – with slight derision – for occasional sporting success in the pool. His old waterpolo buddies waved him over when he arrived.
“Hey Hersh!”
“Fuck you – you passed Accounts! Who’d you bribe?”
“You didn’t forget the booze, did you, Hershie?”
He smiled and held up two plastic bags. “Good man,” said Gadi.
Hershel spread out his towel and sat. Sam took out some polystyrene cups from a cooler bag and passed them around. They always did it like this – the booze in plastic cooldrink bottles, the polystyrene cups – to avoid the cops, though none of them had ever seen a policeman on the beach.
Sam leaned forward: “Open the booze and stop yammering, man. We haven’t got all night.”
But they did have all night – that was the beauty of being twenty. Hershel still lived at home, but he’d told his mother he was staying over at Gadi and Sam’s digs and that she shouldn’t expect him back until the next afternoon. Zelda, relieved that he’d managed to pass the demon Accounting, and made happy by her daughter’s recent engagement, raised no objection. Hershel’s father, a respectable family doctor and well-organised philanderer, was not a factor in any decisions – he’d left Hershel’s mother when his son was three. Shortly afterwards, he’d emigrated to Canada with one of his patients, a young woman who suffered from panic attacks, and ended communications with his family, though Hershel’s mother kept his memory alive and besmirched.
After an hour of languorous drinking – Hershel was never a heavy drinker, but he liked the optimism, fading into mellowness, of whisky – he wandered along the beach, attracted by spots of flame in the darkness. A girl was doing a fire dance near the water’s edge, the orange flames at the end of her sticks rising and falling, while a semi-circle of drummers maintained a hypnotic rhythm. “Yussis,” said Gadi. “Not bad.”
“Not bad? I’d dive in there and never come out,” Sam murmured.
Charlie giggled. “I’d stir a bit of cream into that mocha.”
But Hershel barely registered these remarks from his inexperienced friends, sensed them only with a distant irritation. His eyes were fixed on the slender curly-haired girl, biting her lower lip in concentration. She looked into the distance as she twirled and dipped.
After a minute, Sam waved an arm slowly in front of Hershel’s face. “Herrrshie,” he said spookily. “Is there anyone home in that meaty skull?”
Hershel shook his head, psyching himself up to do something. When the girl had finished, he made his way through the darkness, his heart beating painfully. She’d sat down, cross-legged in the sand, to watch the next fire-dancer. Her curly hair was loose down her back, and her skin looked even darker away from the firelight. Her shoulders were strong, like she canoed or did some kind of sport that worked her upper body. He thought of making a comment along those lines, but then wondered if that could be a stupid thing to say, and if she would take offence. He crouched – it might alarm her to have him address her from above – and said, before he could get scared, “That was the most beautiful thing.”
To his shock, she smiled. “Thank you.”
Now, twenty years later, Camille’s mother was speaking to him in the same elegant, soft voice across the slightly sticky wooden table of a Long Street café.
“When you came out the building, I recognised you, Hershel. I’ve seen what you looked like – Camille had a photo of you. Once, she told me your surname. And yesterday, finally, I looked you up on the internet – you’re easy to find. I hope you don’t mind.”
Hershel realised how different – older, balder, fatter – he must look now. “So how’s Camille?” he asked. He cleared his throat. “What’s she up to now?” He tried to inject a bright tone into his voice, to show that he wished her the best and no longer remembered the intense pain she had caused.
When he’d phoned around, desperate at her sudden disappearance two months after their relationship began, a friend of hers told him that she’d left for India, “to get her bearings”. He remembered that his throat had contracted painfully with the effort of not crying. There’d been no further news of her, no further contact. Ever.
Marcia’s hand, fingernails glossy with varnish, touched his forearm briefly. “Camille isn’t in this world anymore.”
Hershel looked at her, mute. Then he swallowed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Since many years ago. I’m sorry you had to hear it now. At the time of her passing, I wasn’t in a state to try and look up her old friends. And later, when I’d recovered a little, it seemed like finding people from her past would only make more suffering. Maybe I was wrong, but I thought Camille had already caused enough hurt. But now I’ve needed to find you. There’s something