Cricket in a Fist (25 page)

“I've missed my mother since she died,” Tamar told Aga. “But I'm grateful she went so painlessly, after all she went through. That she isn't here to see your mother so ill. Do you remember Oma Esther's funeral? Your mother's speech? It was so lovely, the things she said.”

“Yes. And Mama changed Minnie's first name to Esther. I'd better get home,” Aga said. “Dad's probably making dinner. Thanks for getting Cassandra to cut my hair.” If Esther had been there to see her great-granddaughter's anguish, she would have taken the girl's hands and kissed her wrists, would have reached up to hold the child's beloved face with both hands.

“Aga,” Tamar said. “I argued with my husband the day he died.” Aga looked at Tamar in astonishment. And Tamar was surprised herself. She had scarcely mentioned Robert in years; she had never before mentioned him to Aga. “Yes, and I've always felt terrible about it. That the last thing I said to him was nasty. I always felt that perhaps my words had somehow — well.”

“What were you fighting about?”

Tamar hesitated and smoothed her top, then folded her hands in her lap. “Your grandfather and I used to argue about the newspaper. It irritated him that I didn't read it. That I wasn't interested in ‘world events.' I was forever tidying loose pages; he left them lying around every room. Oh, that house was a mess. Robert read two or three newspapers every day. He was a very clever man, you know. That's where your mother gets it from.” Tamar looked at Aga and added, “You're like your grandfather in that way too, Aga.”
There's a difference
between a confession and a confidence
. Tamar could hear Ginny's voice — was that what Ginny had said?

“When your grandfather died,” she went on, “there was a trial happening in Jerusalem. The trial of Adolf Eichmann. He was in charge of deportations during the war in Europe. The Second World War. My parents,” she added, “were among those deported. Oma Esther — did you know?”

Aga nodded. “I know,” she said. “Mama told me.” She knew, at least, something.

“I was terribly worried that Oma Esther would see these newspapers, the ones with Eichmann's picture, that they would upset her.” Esther had never read the papers, and could barely read English at all, but Tamar was sure a photograph would catch her eye, or she would overhear Robert reading aloud. One day Robert read a quotation from the paper to Tamar: Eichmann had bragged that the millions of lives on his conscience gave him “extraordinary satisfaction.”

Tamar had stepped closer to the television one evening, in order to see Eichmann clearly. “Isn't it true what the reporters say?” said Robert. “That he looks so ordinary?” Tamar hadn't thought Adolf Eichmann looked ordinary at all. Even in photographs, there was something wrong about him. The eyebrows and jaw were always distorted into an asymmetrical grimace; Tamar saw that this man had once possessed attractive features, but that, as he sat in his government office honing his infamous strategies, he had pursed and furrowed and winced until, as the television showed, his face never rested. Even as the eyes remained calm, the mouth and brow twitched with a gruesome, and suddenly world famous, tic.

“So you see,” Tamar told Aga, “I asked Robert to stop leaving those papers lying about. The day he died was Yom H'Shoah. Holocaust Remembrance Day. We argued because he'd been reading those stories about Eichmann and was suddenly an expert about what happened in Europe. He insisted I ought to take my mother to a synagogue. Can you imagine me and Oma Esther? Oh, he just didn't understand us, and I was so angry. I'm not explaining this well.”

“No,” said Aga. “You are.” Tamar was grateful that her granddaughter wasn't the sort to weep or profess some extreme emotional state, that she was unlikely to grasp Tamar suddenly in an embrace.

“Robert told me he'd been reading to Ginny from the coverage of that trial.” Tamar shook her head. “I was so upset. An eleven-year-old girl. I was so upset with him.”

“He did? Really? To Mama?”

“Yes. To your mama.” Tamar hesitated. “I don't know quite what your mother told you about the war, what happened to me and Oma Esther, but sometimes people have the wrong idea about these kinds of things. Sometimes people — they come to believe strange things about each other. You see” — Tamar paused and found the words she needed; after all, she had practised this monologue in her head many times, though she had always imagined addressing it to Ginny — “You see, Aga, your grandfather had come to believe that Oma Esther and I were like those poor people whose stories he read in the papers. They were always printing little stories about Jewish immigrants to Canada as sidepieces to that trial, full of gruesome details. Robert believed that Oma Esther and I had each experienced a kind of world-class drama. What happened to the Jews in Europe during the war — it had become almost stylish to talk of it. It was the first people had heard about it here. I couldn't explain to him that, for me, those years had been terribly undramatic. I stayed with neighbours; they hid me in their house. My life was very strange. I felt as though I were dreaming. I was often alone in the house for many hours of the day, and do you know what I did with my time?” Aga shook her head slowly.

“I dedicated myself to erasing evidence of my day-to-day existence. My clothes were the same size as Femke's and were kept in her drawers and closet. But there were things most people would never think of — signs that could alert a careful inspector to an extra person in the house. After washing my hands, I wiped water droplets from the sink; after eating, I washed all the dishes I'd used, dried them and put them away. I was always on the lookout for long blond hairs, especially in the tub and the bed, because the van Daams were all dark haired. I was careful to have only one object out of
place at any time: a book, for instance, or a deck of cards.” Tamar turned her gaze from the piles of folders on her desk. Aga had removed her glasses — and the way she held her mouth. Tamar inhaled sharply.

“Are you all right, Tam-Tam?”

“My God. How you remind me sometimes of —” Tamar shook her head. She had only spoken to one other person of these things at such length.

“My mother.”

“Yes,” Tamar breathed. Asher. Sitting in Robert's old mustard-coloured chair, limbs stretched out casually, in the old apartment's living room. That room had seemed so dark always, with its walnut-stained mouldings and heavy burgundy rug. And she told Asher about the end of the war. How the city hadn't looked different in any obvious, impressive ways, but that when she tried to live with her mother in their old house, every familiar word crumbled. Everything, even their language, was contaminated at the core, rotten. A child of German sympathizers had been sleeping on her soft mattress all those nights while she had huddled at the edge of Femke's bed or in the crawl space above the ceiling, trying not to breathe.

Tamar had told Asher how Esther came back alone. That there was no joyful reunion, no frantic conversation, Tamar's parents holding each of her hands as they related what had happened, how they'd eluded harm. The Germans were gone, but then so were the van Daams — the only people Tamar had seen or talked to for two years. Her father was missing and her shy young aunt Anke was dead. Tamar had described to Asher how Esther had been shaken long and hard until she collapsed, and then, in the quiet afterward, was permanently greyed by settled dust.

“I was telling you about the day your grandfather died,” Tamar said. Aga reached for her glasses and put them back on, crossed her arms as though she were cold. “I told him that he must stop obsessing. That my mother and I came to Canada to start a new life and forget about those bad years. To leave those terrible times behind. Robert and I fought, and we both said terrible things. He said that if it weren't for Ginny, he would regret ever laying eyes on
me. He claimed that my mother was kind but I was cold hearted. He said he had come to know my mother more than I did. That I wouldn't listen to her. He said such cruel things. And I told him I could barely tolerate his presence. I said I found him repulsive . . .

“And then I watched through the window as he rode away on his bicycle. Your mother was sitting on the handlebars. They were almost at her school when it happened. The ambulance picked them up with schoolchildren watching from the other side of the fence, on the playground.”

“And you felt like it was your fault.”

“I wondered if I'd worn him down, treated him unjustly and driven him to recklessness, though I knew he could never have knowingly put your mother in danger. How he adored that child. I was sure I had tried, that I had tried so much to understand him. I wasn't, I suppose, clever or strong enough. What could I have done?” Tamar was suddenly very tired of speaking. Already the regret that follows any lengthy confession was creeping over her skin. “Oh,” she said, making it worse, “but that was all so long ago.” After a long silence, she stood, to indicate that she had finished speaking, but Aga didn't move. “I don't know how I'm to get this office in order,” Tamar said.

“Thanks, Tam-Tam,” said Aga. She stepped away from the desk. “Dad's probably made dinner.” She was looking away, embarrassed, like a lover who wants to leave but doesn't know how.

“Let me get you that skin cream before you leave,” Tamar said, and led the girl down the hall to the stock room. Tamar kissed Aga goodbye at the top of the stairs. Cassandra was leaving for the day as well, and Tamar asked her, though she didn't expect an answer, why Cassandra hadn't done Aga's makeup. “Just a bit of lipstick,” she said.

“Maybe we'll convince her next time,” Cassandra said, already on the stairs.

Everyone else had already left. Tamar was alone. She knew she ought to go home as well; there was leftover takeout in the fridge. She checked the aesthetics rooms; the girls had turned off all the lights and also the main light in the salon. It was always so strange
to be alone in this room, with the empty chairs and so many mirrors. She stood in the centre and turned slowly, as she'd done fifteen years earlier, amazed that all this was hers, seeing her reflection from every angle. Unmistakably, she was an aging woman. Elegant, yes, but unmistakably middle-aged. At such an age, one ought to be past foolishness.

Tamar went back to the office, sat at her desk and stared at the picture of her own young face. Tamar and her parents standing on a cobblestone road, tramlines under her father's feet. They must have met someone who agreed to take the picture, but she'd always recalled only her parents' company, the three of them walking to catch their tram, alone in the quiet, windy late afternoon, without seeing another soul. Jozef had the folded beach umbrella over one shoulder and the picnic bag over the other. As always, he walked too quickly for Tamar and her mother to keep up. Every minute or so, he'd notice where he was and stop to wait for them. He'd put his free hand on Esther's shoulder or touch Tamar's hair until his mind wandered, and then he'd forget himself again and stride off ahead with the giant, gangling steps that came to him naturally. Tamar loved how he walked with a cigarette between his lips, and how, when he laughed or called out for them to hurry, a cloud of smoke formed in front of his face, making him squint as if surprised by sunlight through a window.

Tamar recalled viscerally the smell of the air at Noord Wijk, the beach outside Amsterdam, and the moment she had turned her head, shading her eyes with a hand, to realize she had unwittingly followed the sea so far that the day's picnickers were mere dots in the distance, separated from her by an expanse of dark, wet sand scattered with rocks and shells. Her parents were among the dots, but she didn't know which they were. She had wandered away to squeeze damp sand between her toes; the water hadn't been warm enough for swimming, and the day was breezy. As the tide receded, she had followed, edging further and further, step by step, daring the icy water, creeping back up, to lick her toes. Once she took a step forward, she wasn't allowed to step back again; that was the rule. “One, two, three, four, five.” She practised her English. “Please pass
the pepper. May I please be excused?” English, that year, had become her favourite subject in school; she must have been nine or ten, perhaps a little younger. “May,” said Tamar, curling her toes into the sand as the water crept to a hair's breadth from her skin. “I please” — she edged another millimetre down the beach — “be excused.”

When she looked back and saw how far the tide had led her, she wanted to run madly, to yell for her parents — the urge possessed her, pushing her bodily forward. She didn't move. Her body wanted to flee itself; she pictured herself flailing, moving so quickly her feet would sink into the sand, trip over each other and send her sprawling. She let it hold her body full in its grasp — the need to escape this wasteland of beached sea life and return to humanity, to find her parents. But still she didn't move. Instead, she let out a small, strange scream. She absorbed the terror of being alone, a tiny girl standing on ground that had so recently been under the sea and soon would be again, and then began a measured walk toward the skyline. Her head was foggy, heavy with salt, sun and the breeze, which seemed to keep changing direction.

When Tamar finally did find her parents, they were unconcerned, her father asleep and her mother reading a novel. She sat down between them without a word, as though she had never doubted they would be there, at that exact spot, waiting for her. Her mother, in a long, white dress made of some diaphanous fabric decorated with a pattern of tiny flowers, turned from her book to touch Tamar's hair with a soft, white hand. She had set up a beach umbrella to protect her skin; she hated it when her complexion darkened and usually wore a hat. Tamar lamented that she was clearly not fated to be as doll-like as her mother, who was surely the most feminine creature imaginable. Esther had fashionably bobbed hair, chunky from the salt air, with a fringe that framed her face. Tamar's father snored quietly, looking as relaxed as a long, angular man in bathing trunks stretched out on a towel could manage, and she touched one of his bony hips. Her parents were peaceful and relaxed, as though nothing had punctured the pleasantness of the day; Tamar was proud of herself.