Bone and Bread (3 page)

On the day Papa died, the temperature in the bagel shop was a sweltering thirty-eight degrees.

“Hotter than Calcutta,” said one ambulance attendant to the other. They spoke in low tones in French, and they had already given up. They were wheeling Papa's body on the collapsible gurney out through the back kitchen, where the employees watched with grief and awe as the Boss was taken past the stainless steel counters, the ancient metal shelving unit full of flour sacks, and the cords of wood stacked nearly to the ceiling behind the ovens. Somebody gasped as Papa was manipulated with difficulty around the industrial mixer before being levered out the back door and into an ambulance. He was so still that his soft cheeks wobbled above his floury beard. The apron tied around his sweat-soaked shirt was dirty from the fall to the floor as his heart seized. His own grandfather had died the same way, of sudden heart failure, working in the fields in the Punjab.

Mama, who had already rushed down to my father's side, felt a pity for the bagel workers that she did not yet feel for herself, and while she rode to the hospital, an elderly cashier named Lefty came upstairs to watch us. When Mama returned, hours later, she tried her best to explain, but for once, her metaphors failed her. She told us what she had seen (the flour sacks, the soft cheeks), and what she had heard (the murmured French, the frightened gasp), and how Papa was gone before she even got down there to kiss him goodbye.

We were sitting on the sheepskin rugs in the living room, and when Mama finished talking, she rose and went to the mantelpiece, with its purple brocade runner topped with her collection of inspirational objects: a carved dolphin, an orange pillar candle in the shape of a star, a jam jar full of sand from a beach in British Columbia, where she said she had “found her purpose.” There was a horseshoe from Galway, where she was born, and a braided ribbon from San Francisco, where she'd gone next. There were cowry shells and a conch, and stones of all shapes and sizes on a silver tray, some with flecks of mica, others with the fossil shadows of small creatures long dead. There were feathers, too, that she had found, goose and peacock and one from a red cardinal, poking up out of a green Plasticine turtle and fanning in the breeze from the window. And there was a tiny brass cobra, coiled upright at attention as though charmed or about to strike. I could hear Mama breathing as she lit the candle with unsteady hands, and when she turned back to us, she looked girlish rather than serene.

“Stay awake with me?” She phrased it as a question with a measure of hesitance. I could not remember her ever having asked us for something in quite the same way. I held Sadhana's hand and nodded as I squeezed it, waking my sister from her light doze.

We sat up that whole long night with our mother, and the
world grew black as we wept, which was right, and the stars winked on one by one, like cosmic comedians with unbearable mirth, and when the sun had not yet risen, Mama pulled out the mats and bent herself forward and back, stretching in silence from Bhujangasana to Parvatasana, her whole body seeming to collapse and expand in turn as she moved through her yoga postures like a dance with space. Then she began to chant, and I felt goosebumps spread over my skin. The chanting had no words I could recognize or understand, but as the pitch rose and fell in waves of rhythm it reminded me of a dream I had forgotten, in which I stood onstage and sang a song I made up as I went along. I knew they were the same sacred mantras Mama had sung every morning before sunrise since before we were born, but the sounds that came out were as worn and reedy as a tin whistle, as though all the air had gone out of her.

I remember the desperation of my sorrow in the days that followed as a terror of being alone. The phone rang and rang with condolences and I always ran to answer, just to hear a voice, any voice, not transformed by grief into something almost unrecognizable. Mama clutched my sister to her chest, her face flat and tear-glazed as she held out her other arm for me to take my own comfort if I could. Sadhana was too young to understand what was happening, and I was jealous of her ignorance. But her inability to comprehend that Papa was gone for good seemed to give peace to our mother. She held my sister on her lap like a worry doll, stroking her long black hair.

Six weeks later Mama asked Uncle for the name of an Indian astrologer. Though he frowned and narrowed his eyes, he was not a hard enough man to be able to refuse the request of a widow, even if she was a white woman he disapproved of.

“In Indian astrology,” Mama said to us, “they use a different zodiac. Instead of only looking at the Earth and the sun and the planets, they calculate using the fixed stars, too.”

We knew about astrology from the back of the newspaper, where the comics were, and from Mama always pointing out her lucky star, though she claimed not really to believe in it, or maybe just a little less than she believed in most things. I asked her what she would do if the astrologer gave her bad news, and for only the second time in my whole life, I saw her hesitate.

“It's just one way of looking and seeing,” she said with a hint of apology. And then, “Like guessing how many jelly beans in a jar.” She undid the elastic holding up her long red-gold hair and let it unwind and fall to either side of her face before twisting it to put it up again. “Or, if it's anything, it's just a weather forecast, liable to change at any moment.”

I was worried about this explanation because she had taught us that the stars had paths they were bound to, their own places among the others that never changed. And if you couldn't be sure, why even bother to ask?

When she came home, she told Uncle to come and pick up Papa's clothes. Then she took all the silverware out of one drawer and put it into another.

“What did the astrologer say, Mama?” I was anxious to know. “What was the forecast?”

“He said nothing,” said Mama. She looked surprised and a little blank. “Nothing that meant anything.”

From then on, Papa's death triggered in Mama a deep storytelling urge. She had always been ready with theories, if not facts, to frame our experience, scooping them out like salves for all the little wounds and worries of childhood — but all at once she seemed driven by an urgency to form the stuff of our lives, of Papa's life especially, into something strong and beautiful before it cooled. Molten gold, fresh from the forge. The workings of these tales were so intense and profuse that we began to trip over them like guards in a Vatican storehouse. A coronet. A hammered bowl. A candelabrum with twelve arms reaching out towards the ceiling. Although later we sometimes pretended differently and at other times it was hard to tell, most of what we came to remember about Papa came from these stories Mama told us.

When November twenty-fifth arrived, and our first birthdays without Papa, she pulled a chair into the kitchen for me, sat Sadhana on the counter, and talked to us about him while she mixed butter with sugar for a cake. She told us that Papa had never intended to run a Jewish bagel shop. He had never wanted to be a businessman at all. That was where he and Uncle were different, one of a hundred ways they were different. Papa had wanted to be a baker, and he was a baker before everything.

“I fell in love with him,” said Mama, “because he was an artist and a craftsman.” She showed us the mixture in the bowl, and the sugar sparkled like stars in the creamed butter. Mama said, “He was also the only other person I knew who got up at five in the morning.”

Papa was trained as a pastry chef, but when the opportunity came to buy the bagel shop with the money his parents had given him when he went to Canada, he decided to do it. Later, when Uncle came to Canada, too, he gave him a job as the manager.

“Uncle,” said Mama, with great diplomacy, “is not my favourite person.”

Uncle enjoyed everything that Papa had hated, everything that Uncle called the nitty-gritty: the purchasing, the ledger, the profits, the firings. Uncle even enjoyed the customers who were visibly surprised to be buying their Jewish bagels in a Hasidic neighbourhood from a big man in a huge blue turban. This was something he found amusing.

“Your Papa,” said Mama, “liked nothing more than hiding out in the back and training boys in the ways of baking bagels.”

When weeks of incompetence forced him into letting someone go, Papa was easily consoled. Every employee lost just meant another one to train, another boy to initiate into the midnight toil of baking bread.

Mama's baking was never as skilful as Papa's, but when we finished making the cake and sat down to eat it, it seemed to have a little something of him in it. Mama and I each had a second piece while Sadhana licked icing off her fingers.

“Papa always said you could bake love right into something,” said Mama with wonder in her eyes, scraping her fork along the side of the flowered china plate. “He said you could taste the difference.”

Other facts about Papa were harder to pin down. The strength of his hands or the way he used to smell were things Mama tried to describe when she was putting us to bed. “Like flour,” she said, climbing between the sheets with us, “and eucalyptus, and the sweetness of chopped basil.” On either side of her, Sadhana and I each had a cheek on the pillow as she closed her eyes to conjure Papa. “And sometimes he smelled like a raft in the ocean, just a few feet from shore, about to be pulled in by the tide.”

We didn't always understand what she was talking about.

“Mama?” said Sadhana.

“Like seawater,” she said, lashes curling down her freckled cheeks, “and fresh breezes. Like the most lonesome shipwrecked sailor at the first sight of land.”

Sadhana and I nodded, and nuzzled her neck, and threw our arms over her so that she would stay until we all fell asleep. When Mama called Papa's laugh a sneeze full of tulips mixed with a river of swans, it was hard to tell if we were already dreaming.

While we both gathered stories to carry forward, like explorers face to face with a vanishing tribe, Sadhana became focused on what was going to happen next. She did not like me to sit in Papa's chair at the table, and when Mama got dressed one day before breakfast, Sadhana wept and refused to eat. As for the
hukam
, which had stopped altogether in our father's absence, Sadhana insisted that it be reinstated, and Mama agreed.

At the beginning, Sadhana and I fought over who would do it, until Mama settled it by taking over. She read from the Guru Granth Sahib, and then sometimes from other holy books, the Bible or the Koran or the Tao Te Ching. Other times, she pulled the
hukam
from Shakespeare or George Eliot. On the longest and most silent of days, she would just close her eyes and point to a book and read from it, no matter what it was.

The mercy in interpretation, we discovered, was an excess of information. The more we took in, the easier it was to let go of the parts we didn't like. The eerie time we got “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose” from
King Lear
, or the unfathomable “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” from Proverbs. And whatever it was that the astrologer had told Mama. We let it all wash over us and pass away.

But the less we were concerned about specific omens, the more worried we became about all of them in general. A list of superstitions had been scared up from some of the employees at the bagel shop. Mama had been encouraging us to run down for visits, probably so we wouldn't grow to dread the place. We were small enough then that we could slip right by the customers and pass under the counter.

“Mirrors,” said Jean-François, who had a beard like Papa's and rangy blue eyes. “Don't break them.” He had been working there the morning Papa died. Jean-François, like the rest of the employees, was always willing to humour us. “And black cats, ladders,” said Jean-François, his palms and fingers never stopping their rapid work of rolling thin slices of dough and joining them into circles. A loose fluorescent light buzzed above his head.

“What else?” asked Sadhana. She was looking at his face instead of his hands, paying absolute attention for once. I was flapping loose the front of my shirt where it was sticking to my stomach. The white-painted brick walls shimmered in the heat above the deep black openings to the ovens.

“Ask Lefty,” said Jean-François. By then he was throwing the pale dough circles onto one of the long wooden oven paddles.

“Yeah, come here, kids,” Lefty called from the front. Until he started working at the shop, Lefty had shined shoes at the airport. He loved it but quit because everybody started wearing sneakers. He told us to hunt for sweets in the pockets of his coat hanging on the rack while he rang through the customers. Then he leaned his elbows on the counter and started adding to our list. If he had guessed that our paranoid inventory would yield such sober and scrupulous results, he probably would have hesitated.