it jingled, my nerves jingled right along with it. I’ve become good at identifying people I’ve never met, based on a few photos of their relatives or a letter about how they loved to play marbles as children. I watched the older Eastern European men come in, the Ashkenazi Jews with their thin grey hair and their pocket watches. None of them were you.
I thought: He probably won’t come. Why should he want to talk to an old lady anyhow?
But I had put on lipstick before leaving the house. I placed my Star of David on a silver chain around my neck—the only piece of jewellery I have from my mother. I combed my own thin hair and looked at myself for a long time in the mirror.
My eyes are watery, a problem that has increased with age. I blink and blink but they will not clear.
I must seem perpetually on the verge of tears.
You and I had spoken on the phone.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
Silence.
I made myself speak. “You had . . .” I faltered. “A sibling,” I said. Careful to say this in the past tense. I waited for your response, for the shock or, at the very least, surprise.
“I know,” you said.
“You know?”
“I have a photograph,” you said. “My father has a baby in his arms.”
I was quiet then, puzzling. I had a hundred questions but I wanted to ask them in person. We made plans to meet at 8 p.m. at Schwartz’s, a popular Jewish deli on Saint-Laurent. It was a bit of whimsy on my part, but you didn’t argue. Our phone conversation, the few words you spoke in that muddled accent of yours, kept playing over and over in my mind afterwards, like the opening phrase of Dvořák’s haunting Prague Cello Concerto—I couldn’t sleep that night for the music it was making.
The morning of our meeting I forced myself to sit at my desk, pretending to transcribe an interview with a woman in Montana who had just discovered the “Jewish branch” of her family. In all honesty though, I was unable to work, as full of excitement as a teenager heading off on a first date. I’d been waiting for this for more than—Well, I’d been waiting forever.
I should have known better than to get my hopes up. The one thing you most want will always elude you. That’s the rule. And I don’t care if you call me a pessimist; I come by it honestly. I am also fretful and fussy, even with the people I study. Especially with the people I study. Truth be told, I think of myself as a kind of a mother hen to them. Which is ironic, given our respective ages.
“Would you like a menu?” The waitress looked fifteen years old max. Her halter top showed the delicate dot of her belly button. An outie.
“No, thank you.”
She took a step back. “If you don’t want to eat . . .” She gestured around at the busy tables. Two old men in sweater-vests were arguing in Yiddish.
“I’m waiting for someone,” I snapped. Which felt like a lie even though it was the truth.
I sat in my booth peeling at the plastic on the menu the teenager had left. Latkes, I saw, and Russian borscht. I told myself I would order as soon as you arrived. I was trying to be hopeful.
There are reasons for optimism. Reasons to have faith in humanity. There were righteous Gentiles whose behaviour during the war exemplified the best of the human spirit. But most people, of course, were not up to the task. And some even made it their purpose to turn Jews over to the authorities. The cases that are the hardest for me to imagine are the ones where the betrayer was known to the family. What could make a person turn against those whose daily lives they understood intimately?
Maybe those betrayers did not understand the full implications of their actions. Maybe they came from a background of betrayal themselves. This is one of the things the social sciences teach, one of the few things about which psychology is abundantly clear: we will re-inflict our own wounds on those in our care. And yet these factors don’t quite add up. There remain instances that give pause, that force us to consider the darker side of human nature: what the Jews call, I believe, the yetzer hara.
Speaking of which, I sat and waited for you for more than an hour.