Читать книгу Fields of Exile - Nora Gold - Страница 7

— 1 —

She is sitting on the edge of her father’s bed, holding his hand. She thinks he’s dead, but she isn’t sure. He seems strangely still and lifeless; he can’t be dead, though, because he’s her father.

His hand is still warm and dry, as it always was. Like when he took her hand at the age of three, to lead her for the first time safely across the street. And when he touched her on the cheek, in a kind of wordless blessing, the day she left home for Israel.

Her father was not happy about her going to live there. Neither he nor her mother could understand why she would give up a safe and comfortable home to go “halfway across the world, and to a war zone, yet.” But they didn’t stand in her way. Now, though, ten years later, her father brought this up again. Just yesterday he said, “I know you want to return to Israel, Judith. And that’s fine, if that’s where you’ve chosen to make your life. But first you have to go back to school. You need a Master’s degree so you can stand on your own two feet.”

“Never mind, Daddy,” she said. “I’m fine.” Which is what she always said whenever he raised this topic.

But this time he didn’t accept her answer with his usual resigned silence. She was older now, he said: thirty-two, not twenty-two like when she first went to Israel, and here she was, still alone — gantz aleyn, he added in his native Yiddish. By which he meant she was unmarried, and with no prospect of marrying any time soon. She did have a boyfriend, and even one her father liked, but this wasn’t somebody she could imagine ever having as a husband. Firstly, because she planned to return to Israel, and as soon as possible, and he would never follow her there. And secondly, because he was conservative and right-wing, a tax lawyer who had little in common with her socialist ideals or her passionate temperament. But they had known each other since high school — they went out in grade eleven, and then again during her final year in university, for those last few months before she left for Israel. When nine months ago she came back to Toronto, Bobby seemed to always be around. They started going to movies together, and dinners, and in no time at all they fell back in step with each other and became a couple again. She was lost, disoriented, and depressed being back here, and he was comforting and dependable with his weekly Saturday night dates and daily phone calls and invitations. He also felt familiar, and maybe even familial, because he saw her much as her father did. As a wonderful, talented person who had wasted herself and her Bachelor of Social Work by moving to Israel for ten years, living hand-to-mouth in Jerusalem for the last nine of these, and before that working on a kibbutz where she did various odd jobs. Some of them very odd, like simultaneously sucking turkey sperm up one side of a two-pronged straw and turkey ovum up the other, to try and artificially unite them for fertilization. An unpleasant job because sometimes she sucked too hard and the foamy foul mixture came up into her mouth. They were right, Bobby and her father, that since her two social work jobs in Jerusalem were both only short-term contract positions, she hadn’t developed her career very far while in Israel. But still she doesn’t consider those years to be wasted time. She’d really lived while she was there. She’d had friends, lovers, and a community, and she felt truly alive. On kibbutz she rose every day before dawn and worked in the dark, cold fields picking artichokes while the sun rose slowly before her. In Jerusalem she cooked meals with her friends and ate with them and celebrated and demonstrated and laughed and mourned and belonged.

But now she’s here in Toronto, supposedly back “home” — though home for her is still there — because her father, aged seventy-two, got sick. Her mother had been dead for nine years and there was no one else to take care of him. So, loving him, Judith has been doing this as well as she can for the past nine months. (Nine months — long enough to have a baby.) Nine months of watching her father gradually weaken, and get thinner, yellower, and bonier, the life leaking out of him till there was nothing left. Fortunately, he has had relatively little pain, and this is easily brought under control by morphine. His could be called A Very Easy Death, she thinks now, recalling the bitterly titled book by Simone de Beauvoir about the months leading up to the death of her mother. At least Judith’s father has remained lucid all the way through, and this has been a great blessing. Even as recently as yesterday he spoke to her and made perfect sense. Half-sitting up in bed, propped against pillows, he took her hand in his, and said, “Judith, dear, you must go back to school. You said last month that in Israel it takes forever to do a Master’s, but that here it’s just a one-year program. So stay here, Judith, for a year, and do it. I’m not a rich man — I can’t leave you provided for the way I would have liked to. You’re going to have to stand on your own two feet.” He didn’t say “when I’m gone,” but it hung in the air between them. And now he looked at her expectantly. She realized he was asking her a direct question — he wasn’t, as she’d thought, just making a suggestion. She looked back into his eyes. Dying eyes, she thought. But no, those eyes couldn’t be dying. His body maybe, but those eyes of his, so full of intelligence and warmth, would never die.

“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll do my Master’s.”

There was an obstruction halfway down her throat when she said that. She’d held out a long time against this. She didn’t want to leave Israel, even for twelve months, and she didn’t want to do the same thing as everyone else, following the usual well-worn path. She wanted to be different. But yesterday, though that lump in her throat was still there when she spoke — a physical hurdle in her voice box that she had to leap over, like a horse over a fence in an obstacle course — it wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it would be. Maybe because of the relief, joy, and hopefulness that immediately suffused her father’s face. It filled her with astonishment — it had been so easy to make him happy. Then he turned his face away and instantly fell asleep. This conversation had cost him a great effort.

Now, just one day later, she is again sitting on this bed and holding his hand. This hand is warm. Though she knows it won’t be for long. In a couple of hours — or maybe even less than that — her father’s hand will turn cold and rigid. But this is not important. All that matters, all that’s real to her, is that for now it’s warm. It is still Daddy’s hand, the same as always. Tears stream down her face, but she doesn’t feel sad. Why should she? Daddy’s not dead. He can’t be dead; he’s her father. It is late afternoon, and she sits for a long time staring out the window at the slowly falling night, holding — as if this moment will last forever — her father’s unmoving, gradually stiffening hand.

Four days later she tells one of the women at the shiva, an old friend of her father’s, that she’s planning, at her father’s request, to go back to school here in Toronto. She asks this woman what she should study now — should she stay with social work, or try something new?

Flora laughs her big horsey laugh.

“You should study, of course, what you already know, my dear. It makes things so much easier.”

Two days later, on a hot June day, Flora returns to the shiva house, carrying a tub of pistachio ice cream and an application package for the only Master of Social Work program within driving distance that has not yet closed its admissions.

Judith frowns at the name on the envelope. “Wasn’t Dunhill in the papers a few months ago because of a student riot?”

“Yes,” says Flora. “A rally there got out of hand. But never mind about that. You don’t have to have anything to do with the Students’ Union. You just go to your classes and do your homework, and everything will be fine. Anyway, at this point you don’t have any choice. This is the only school still accepting applications — it’s the only game in town.”

The only game in town. Her father always said that. She thanks Flora and puts the big brown envelope on the kitchen shelf. A few days after the end of shiva, Flora phones and comes by again. From the shelf where she saw Judith place it, she takes down the unopened application package, and with Judith sitting dully next to her, dazed and paralyzed with grief, she painstakingly fills it out. Three weeks afterwards, Judith receives a letter saying she has been accepted into the M.S.W. program at Dunhill University.

— 2 —

A glorious sunny day in September, and after a one-hour drive, Judith arrives at the gates to the university in Dunhill, Ontario. She doesn’t want to be here, in exile; she wants to be home in Israel where she belongs. She resents being stuck here for the year because of the stupid promise she made to her father. She stomps around the campus for a half-hour looking for the School of Social Work. She’s here for Orientation, but she feels totally disoriented. The social work school is housed in a silo-like building, the Franklin Ardmore Rutherford Tower, which, for obvious reasons, the campus map does not refer to by its acronym, FART, but simply as FRANK. She climbs the front steps. Once inside, she waits for the elevator with two chatting women. One is a very plain redhead, the other pretty, dark-haired, and flamboyant. The three of them ride up to the eleventh floor. Room 1104 is a big square corner room with large picture windows on two sides, and through these windows Judith sees a big grey-stoned quadrangle eleven floors below her with students crossing it back and forth. The room itself is bright and cheerful, thanks to the large windows flooding it with sunlight, some of this refracted through orange woven curtains, giving everything a warm, fiery glow. It is full of talking, laughing people, mostly women, and Judith, not knowing anyone, mills around, nodding and smiling at whoever she passes, trying to look unobtrusive, un-lonely, and un-lost. She keeps walking as if she’s preoccupied with looking for a friend or has a destination — perhaps someone she knows on the other side of the room. After ten minutes of walking in circles and picking at the handouts and cookies on the long table at the back, she hears a loud thumping. A burly grey-haired man in a green cardigan is pounding on a table at the front of the room.

“Okay, everybody,” he calls out. “Take your seats so we can start.”

Almost all the gold or orange easy chairs are already taken. Within seconds nearly everyone is seated except Judith. She alone will be left standing, with everybody staring at her, like the loser in a game of musical chairs. Desperately she glances around.

“Here,” says a cheerful voice. A young blonde woman in a lime-green blazer is smiling at her and patting the chair on her left.

“Thanks,” Judith says, gratefully sitting.

“No problem,” says the woman, extending her hand. “I’m Cindy.”

The hand is dry and cool to the touch. “Judith,” says Judith, and is about to say more, but the burly man is rapping the table again and starting to speak.

“Good morning,” he says. “I’m Lawrence Weick, Director of the Dunhill School of Social Work, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you here today. You’ve made an excellent choice in selecting this school for your graduate studies. As you’ll soon see for yourselves, we have an outstanding faculty, as well as a very select group of students. It may interest you to know that this year, for your one-year M.S.W. program, there were eighty-four applicants and only twenty-eight spots. In other words, for every one of you sitting here now, we turned away two others.”

A buzz, surprised and pleased, runs through the room. Judith and Cindy grin at each other. Cindy shrugs.

“So you should all feel very proud of yourselves,” Weick continues, “and we’re delighted to welcome you to the 2002–2003 academic year. As most of you already know, we at Dunhill take a Structural approach to social work. Our mission, as you can see on the orange handout, is the advancement of knowledge in the service of social change. This means, firstly, educating ourselves about the oppressions, injustices, and structural inequalities in Canadian society today, as well as around the globe. Secondly, it means preparing our students to engage in the struggle against inequity and oppression, whether you’re working with individuals, groups, or communities.”

Judith is starting to feel at home here. This mission statement sounds almost verbatim like the one at the university where she completed her B.S.W. ten years ago. The same language, the same concepts. Apparently nothing has changed.

Now Weick introduces Phoebe Browne, the school’s Administrative Coordinator and student advisor. Phoebe is a dumpy-looking woman of about forty, wearing an apricot-coloured polyester pantsuit, and she speaks for about ten minutes, describing in mind-deadening detail all the course requirements for Dunhill’s one-year M.S.W. Judith, being in the Practice, rather than the Policy, stream, will need to take eight half-courses — six required and two electives — over the course of the year; alternatively, she can take only six courses and write a one-hundred-page thesis. Thesis, she writes. She’s forgotten to bring paper with her today, so she is writing in the margins of a fuchsia handout that invites all the first-year students to the Lion’s Den, the student pub on campus, for the first meeting of the school’s GLBT committee. GLBT looks strange to her — she’s used to seeing the term LGBT instead. So for a moment GLBT strikes her as some variation on a BLT — maybe a Greek Lettuce-Bacon-and-Tomato, something for the Greek students? Then she understands. Phoebe, finished now, sits, and Weick pops up again like a jack-in-the-box.

“Thank you, Phoebe,” he says. “Now let’s have a go-round of the faculty, who will each tell you what they’re teaching this year, and also speak a bit about their research.” Judith notices now for the first time the long lineup of professors at the front of the room, sitting in a row on plastic orange chairs to the left of Phoebe. Oh God – a dozen speeches!

“Don’t forget,” says Weick, “some of you will need to find someone next term to act as your thesis advisor. So, as your profs are speaking, listen carefully for common interests you might have.”

A short, friendly-looking woman with close-cropped black hair stands. Judith’s pen is poised, waiting, above the pink page. “My name is Terry Montana, and this term I’ll be teaching the course on women and social work, which focuses on the relationship between the social policies affecting women in this society and the everyday problems faced by our women clients.” This interests Judith. “I’m also co-chairing the GLBT committee this year, and for those of you who don’t know, this stands for gay, lesbian, bi, and trans.”

Judith, smiling, lowers her eyes to the page.

Terry continues, “My research is a study I’m doing with five women colleagues from universities across the province, documenting the kinds of barriers lesbian graduate students face, and the ways heterosexism and homophobia are manifested in the academic environment. If you’re interested in this topic, or anything to do with GLBT, feel free to come chat. My office hours are Thursdays from two to four.”

Terry Montana, writes Judith on the pink invitation to the Lion’s Den. Feminist. Lesbian. GLBT. She means to write down what Terry said, but she’s tired, and with the next guy already starting his spiel, she writes without realizing it, Gay Lesbian Bacon and Tomato. The next guy is named Greg Smolan, then it’s Corinne Marajian, and by the time the following guy stands up, Judith is spacing out. A short round bald man resembling Humpty Dumpty introduces himself as Tom Reggel. Reggel eggel, thinks Judith. In the prophet Ezekiel’s “vision of the chariot,” the reggel eggel was an ambiguous part of the four-headed creature’s body, which has traditionally been translated as a foot, a third and extra foot. But she knows from a night course in Jewish mysticism she took one winter at the Beit Ha’am Institute in Jerusalem, that reggel eggel actually means a penis. Automatically she glances at Tom Reggel’s crotch — no bulge there at all (maybe he doesn’t have one?). Then she catches herself and, blushing, looks away. Professor Reggel is speaking now, but she isn’t listening to him at all. She’s thinking about the penis of Moshe, the married man she was with seven years ago in Israel for about six months. Until her father’s death, she hardly ever thought about Moshe. But he’s been on her mind a lot since the funeral. As she sat there that day in the front row, surrounded by people but feeling all alone, Moshe’s image appeared before her like an apparition, like Hamlet’s father, and ever since then he has come to visit her once, twice, three times a day, even more if she’s bored or lonely. She isn’t so much thinking now about Moshe as feeling him. Feeling his taut, strong body, his thighs, chest, and penis pressing hard against her. Every Monday and Thursday morning he’d wait for her at the train station, at Hartuv Junction near the town where she worked. She’d get off the train from Jerusalem drained by the ecstasy of the ride: forty minutes of meandering through magnificent sun-slashed forests, up and down the backroads of the Jerusalem hills. Unsteadily she’d step off the train onto the almost-deserted outdoor platform, and at the bottom of the hill, Moshe’s white van was always waiting quietly under a tree, with the back door open, like an invitation. She would go running toward it: half-running, half-tripping down the hill, stumbling over the protruding tangled roots from the olive trees and their Y-shaped broken-off branches, nature-made slingshots.

At the bottom she’d hurl herself against Moshe’s body, and he would catch and embrace her, one hand on her buttocks, and pull her tight against him. His body was hard and muscular, the body of a man who worked his own fields. No softness. No slack. But there was softness in his mouth, in his lips and tongue, when he kissed her, and in his eyes when he smiled at her tenderly. Then his kiss would turn hard, and he’d pull her down, and right there on the floor of the forest — on top of pine needles, and pine cones, and dead and living grass — they’d make love. Quickly, and urgently, always quickly and urgently, because there was never much time.

“Never enough time,” Moshe often said, feeling old at forty-two, and having, as she thought then, “intimations of mortality.” But also, objectively speaking, there wasn’t much time. The train from Jerusalem arrived at seven-thirty in the morning, and they both had to be at work for eight. So as soon as they’d finished, they stood and brushed themselves off, with him sometimes picking debris out of her hair (reminding her of Rabbi Akiva, who did the same thing with his bride almost two thousand years earlier). Then he’d drive her up the hill to the lone office building in the town centre, where she was working for eight months on a community development project to help the poor and infirm.

While in the middle of this thing with Moshe, she didn’t think much about it, because she couldn’t understand it. And she couldn’t understand it because she couldn’t find a word for it. I still can’t, she thinks, sitting here at Dunhill, while at the front of the room a cheerful but tough-looking blonde woman named Harloffery does her spiel. Moshe wasn’t a “boyfriend.” Boyfriends were the Jerusalem boys around her own age, innocent and eager, who took her out on Saturday night dates to movies. Moshe never took her anywhere; he just waited for her by the train. He wasn’t a boy either; he was a man, and an older man at that: forty-two to her twenty-four. Forty-two, twenty-four: opposite numbers, but matching opposites.

The other word that didn’t fit her relationship with Moshe was love. They never used this word between them, not once. Though this thing between them was deep, maybe even as deep as love. Because Moshe was a man of the land. He had five dunams of land on a moshav that he farmed himself with his own tractor, growing artichokes, melons, and orange and lemon trees. To her, he smelled of the earth, the fields, the orchards, and the sun. Sometimes, after they’d made love, she would lie face down on top of him — the same way she liked on nature trips to lie face down flat on the Israeli earth and inhale its deep scent — and she would smell him. As if Moshe were the Land, Israel itself. Once, lying on top of him like this, she wished she could just for a while be male, so she could scatter her seed on Israel’s earth, and in this way help to — as Ben-Gurion put it — “make the desert bloom.”

Now at the front of the room a tall, skinny man is making his presentation. The blonde woman is gone: Judith didn’t even notice when they switched. In fact, she’s not even sure there hasn’t been someone else, or even two other people, in between Blondie and this guy. Now she feels anxious: maybe she’s missed something important. So she tries to focus and listen to this man. He is talking about the elusiveness of language, and how, from a postmodern perspective, the meaning of a word is not static, but something that constantly shifts, depending on its context. What he’s saying sounds very interesting and seems to resonate with depth. Yet she keeps feeling that she almost understands what he’s talking about, but never 100 percent. As if he were an ad for his own product: Elusive Language. After ten minutes of increasing frustration, she asks herself what Moshe, if he were here, would say.­­

“Bullshit,” comes his immediate answer. Judith suppresses her laughter and looks down at the arm of her chair. Of course he’d say that: to Moshe, language was a simple matter. He spoke without thinking about the words he used. But she found them fascinating because they were Hebrew. Moshe was a man of Hebrew words. A “real Israeli,” a sabra. This was his language, his and Bialik’s and the Bible’s — this language she had just borrowed, acquired through painful study, “breaking her teeth” on it, as the Hebrew expression goes. And which even now she knew — though unusually well for an immigrant — in only a fractured way. It was still for her a second, “other,” language, like being the “other” woman, someone’s second love. Yet this language, this holy tongue, belonged in Moshe’s mouth. Sometimes when he kissed her, she imagined thousands of Hebrew words, tiny as sperm, being transferred from him to her, along with his saliva and desire. Planting themselves within her, taking root, and then blossoming inside her into a tree, with hundreds of Hebrew words hanging off the branches, instead of pink flowers. Making her a “real Israeli,” too.

She looks at the postmodern guy. No — words for Moshe didn’t shape-shift. They each had a meaning that was constant and clear. She used to ask him for words, and his answer was always unhesitating.

“How do you say this in Hebrew?” she’d ask him, scooping a palmful of soil from the ground.

“Karka.”

She held up a pine cone.

“Itztrueball.”

She pointed to a pink wildflower.

“Hotmeet.” A hot meeting, she thought. Hot meat.

She was like Helen Keller asking Anne Sullivan to tell her the names of things. Moshe always told her. But he couldn’t understand her hunger for words. He’d say to her, tenderly joking, “What do you need all these words for, Judith? What will you do with them once you have them? When are you ever going to have a conversation about pine cones?”

But she kept asking. Earlobe. Spider web. Cum. (T’nuch. Kurei akavish. Shpeech.) Which, written, looked to her almost like Speech. Slurred speech — shpeech — like when you come. When Moshe asked her halfway into their relationship what she wanted for her birthday, she told him “a word.”

“A word! What word?”

“Any word. As long as it’s one I don’t already know.”

“But how am I supposed to know what words you don’t know?”

She just shrugged.

“Crazy girl,” said Moshe.

But the following week, when she turned twenty-five, he gave her two presents. First a plastic, imitation-alligator-skin purse — the kind of thing she’d never be caught dead with. Then he gave her the word ta’ava. Craving, or longing. Because, he said, she seemed so much to want, and to want so much. “Greedy girl,” he chided her gently. “You must learn to be satisfied with less. L’histapek b’m’at.” Which she realizes now was probably his way of reminding her he was married, and she shouldn’t hope for too much from him. He concluded his little birthday speech by quoting from Ethics of the Fathers, disconcerting her since he was so staunchly secular: “Who is rich? He who is content with his portion.”

He … his, she thought. That male language doesn’t include me, so I don’t have to be content. She said this out loud to Moshe, half-knowing he wouldn’t understand. And he didn’t. But that’s okay, she thought. L’histapek b’m’at.

Now at the front of the room, there has been another changing of the guard: a skinny woman with wild hair like a cavewoman is talking. From postmodern to premodern, or even prehistoric, thinks Judith, and listens for a few moments. Blah blah blah. She returns to Moshe. Yes, he was married. He had two young daughters who adored him, and a wife who didn’t like sex. And who he in turn didn’t seem to much like, his lip curling involuntarily whenever he mentioned her. What Zahava did like, though, was lampshades. Apparently she had over a hundred of them, and bought a new one at least once a month. Judith pictured a small house crammed full of lampshades, all tawdry and vulgar, and Zahava as tawdry and vulgar too. But actually it was thanks to Zahava that she met Moshe. It was only because he had to keep up with the cost of Zahava’s wild shopping sprees that he started moonlighting and took the six-month part-time contract in the town where Judith worked. He was hired as a contractor to renovate this small, run-down development town. In the thirty-ninth year after the town’s founding, and in anticipation of the fortieth-year festivities, a group of leading citizens had convinced the municipal council the place needed some sprucing up. So, twice a week, Moshe wandered in and out of decrepit abandoned shacks, houses missing half their roofs, and never-used “community centres” with all their windows broken — donated by well-meaning but naive Jewish communities abroad — as he chewed thoughtfully on a piece of straw, considering what to do. She watched him and thought, This is a man who fixes things. Takes that which is broken, and makes it whole again. Perhaps he could do this for people, too.

She soon discovered, though, that he didn’t work alone. He had a Moroccan guy helping him, a skinny younger man named Koby, who measured everything in sight, listened to Moshe weigh the pros and cons of various repair plans, acted as his sounding-board, and helped him come up with price estimates that were neither too high nor too low. Once Judith came with Moshe to visit one of his sites. Koby looked with surprise at her, then questioningly at Moshe; Moshe just smiled and shrugged. For the next fifteen minutes, she watched the two men work together and saw how heavily Moshe depended on Koby: he couldn’t have managed this project without him. But that didn’t stop Moshe from saying when they were alone again back in the van: “Never trust a Moroccan, Judith. You’re not from here, you don’t know what they’re like. They’re lazy, and primitive, and they’ll rob you blind the second you turn your back.”

She looked sharply at him to see if he was joking, but he wasn’t. She felt nauseated, and couldn’t think of anything to say. Other than, “But Koby —”

“Koby’s okay — he’s a good worker,” Moshe said. “But he’s the exception. Most Moroccans aren’t like him. And even he sometimes says very primitive things.”

Not like you, she thought, but didn’t say it. She stared straight ahead at the road as they drove through the town, and her nausea steadily increased. She couldn’t believe she’d been intimate with this man — she’d let him inside her body — and he was a racist. She was disgusted by his comment, and by him and his body, calmly arrogant in the driver’s seat next to her. Yet she also half-admired, or anyway envied, him. She wished she had his male self-confidence, his unquestioned assumption that it’s his God-given right to say whatever he feels like. She was always worrying about sounding nice or not-nice, saying the right or the wrong thing. But Moshe just talked. He didn’t know about political correctness, and even if he had he wouldn’t have cared. He’d have felt it was his right to express, to expel, whatever words had collected in his mouth. Not just the “nice” ones, but all of them. She can see his mouth now: his sensual mouth, full of words. Full of words like the mouths in the Shabbat morning prayer:

Even if our mouths were as full of poetry as the sea is full of water, and our tongues sang your praises like the roaring waves … we could never thank you, God, for even one thousandth of your countless gifts and miracles.

Moshe’s mouth was like a sea. And his red lips like the banks of the Red Sea. She remembers the first time he kissed her. His kiss was careful, exploratory, tentative, like dipping a toe into the sea. She’d just gotten off the train from Jerusalem, he was at the station picking up a small shipment of building materials that had been delivered there, and even though they didn’t know each other, he offered her a lift up the hill to the centre of town. It was a long, hot, dusty walk, and that day there was a hamsin, a burning, dry desert wind. She looked up the hill doubtfully, and nodded yes. In the car, they drove in silence. But at the top of the hill, Moshe leaned over and his mouth softly covered hers. Then his lips parted like the parting of the sea, and his tongue, just the tip of it, reached down hopefully into her mouth. She waited a moment, wondering what would happen next, but it just stayed there — hanging there like a bat hanging upside down on its perch — waiting. Slowly she reached up the tip of her tongue to meet his. Carefully, though. She’d been told by previous men she was too intense, too passionate. She didn’t want to frighten Moshe. But then she couldn’t help it: she trembled — a huge tremor ran through her body, and made Moshe tremble, too. His face flushed and filled with desire.

“On Thursday I’ll pick you up again,” he said hoarsely, somewhere between a statement and a question. She hesitated, then nodded before getting out of the van. She was sitting high up and she had to be careful stepping down. As she did so, she felt swollen in between her legs, and reaching the pavement, it was hard for her to walk.

Remembering this now, she keeps her eyes lowered to the arm of her chair. She’s not sure how much of her feelings show on her face, and she doesn’t want everyone here at the Dunhill School of Social Work to see written across it all her naked longing and desire. Once on a Jerusalem bus, she was daydreaming and forgot to watch herself — and not only did she miss her stop, she actually moaned out loud at one point, recalling the night before with her lover, and a man sitting two seats away shot her a sharp glance. Now too, she senses someone watching her. She looks up: it’s Weick. Peering at her intently. She blushes and looks down. Oh God. He knows. He can tell. She keeps looking at the orange armrest. When she glances up again, he’s still gazing at her, frowning slightly, as if trying to puzzle her out. Then he looks away and stands. Now alone at the front of the room, he instructs everyone to look at the rose-coloured page, which lists all the teachers and their areas of specialization. Judith studies the list. It looks like they have one of everything here, like a smorgasbord. One lesbian, one gay guy (the interest in HIV/AIDS is always a dead giveaway), one black prof, one Native one, etc. Given these identity politics, she can’t help speculating whether the prof who will be teaching poverty grew up poor, if the guy teaching about housing was ever homeless, and whether Tom Reggel, specializing in child abuse and neglect, was, as a child, neglected and abused.

Someone’s handing out canary-coloured sheets. It’s the schedule for first term: every Monday she will have Weick in the morning, Greg Smolan over the lunch hour, and then in the afternoon someone named Malone for “Social Work Practice with Individuals, Families, and Groups.” Weick loudly clears his throat, looks around the room to get silence, and explains there are four profs on the list who couldn’t be here today: Hetty Caplar, Marie Green, Bruce McIvor, and Suzy Malone. Suzy Malone — that name, spoken aloud, sounds familiar to Judith. But she can’t place it. “Malone, Malone,” she whispers under her breath, as if speaking the name aloud will help. It doesn’t. But hearing it repeated like that makes the name seem different, like an abbreviation for “I’m alone”: ’mAlone. And she does feel alone. Terribly alone. There’s no one here — in this school, town, or even country — who really understands her. Who she could talk to about Israel, who shares her feelings about that place. Bobby loves her, but he doesn’t understand her. She achingly misses her friends in Jerusalem. I’m alone here, she thinks. ’mAlone. Gantz aleyn. In galut. In exile.

“We, the faculty,” Weick is saying — rather grandly, like an American saying “We, the People” — “have just told you something about ourselves. So now we would like to hear from you: who you are, what you’ve been doing, and what you’re interested in.” He stops abruptly and turns sideways to listen to Phoebe, who is hissing something at him. He turns back to the group with a short laugh. “Unfortunately, however, Phoebe reminds me that in only twenty minutes Labour Studies gets this room. So please tell us something about yourself, but try to keep your comments brief. Just a few sentences, starting with your name, of course.”

Judith’s stomach starts convulsing. This type of public speaking always makes her very nervous. But at least, she sees, she won’t have to go first or even anywhere near the beginning: she’s sitting smack in the middle of the room, and Weick has started the go-around on his immediate left, with a startled older woman. As this woman speaks, and is followed by other students, Judith listens for clues about what to say when her turn comes. Anxiously she plans a presentation of herself that will make her look interesting and will also fit in with the “mission” of this school and what others are saying. Among the first seven to speak, there are those who proudly declare themselves gay, poor, “of colour,” physically challenged, learning disabled, and “culturally diverse” (Native, Caribbean, Pakistani, Portuguese). Some are just one of these things; others are two or even three, like Macario, the gay, dyslexic, Portuguese guy. Judith struggles over what to say about herself. There’s nothing particularly oppressed about her — nothing she can think of, anyway. She’s white, middle-class, heterosexual, not disabled intellectually or physically, and neither old nor young. She knows that being female and Jewish, she has been in various ways oppressed by both sexism and antisemitism. But the truth is, she doesn’t feel particularly oppressed, and doesn’t see any reason to put herself across that way. The go-around continues, and as it moves closer and closer to her, she gradually figures out what to say. The person talking is three seats away from her. Then two. Now it’s Cindy’s turn.

“I’m Cindy Hanson. Since getting my B.S.W. five years ago, I’ve been working at Mindy’s Place, a group home for teenage girls with physical and developmental disabilities. Quite a few of them have been sexually abused. So I guess what interests me is why that is, and if it happens to these kinds of girls more often than others because of being disabled. I’d also like to know how they think about these abusive experiences, and also about their bodies in general.” There are nods and murmurs of support. “So this is what I’d like to do my thesis on. Maybe approaching it from a feminist perspective, even though I don’t know very much about that. But I hope to learn.” Cindy looks at Terry Montana, and Terry nods back.

Now everyone looks expectantly at Judith.

“I’m Judith Gallanter,” she begins.

“Louder,” shouts someone from the other side of the room. “We can’t hear you.”

Judith raises her voice. “I’m Judith Gallanter. Is that better?” But somehow the volume has increased with each word, so that by the end she’s shouting. Heads turn sharply toward her and a few people laugh, as if she’s made a joke. Blushing, she continues, somewhere between her normal voice and a shout.

“My area of interest, like Cindy’s, is teens. But what I’ve been involved with were discussion groups between Jewish and Arab adolescents in Israel. I was part of a group called Friends-of-Peace. They have a branch in Toronto. We ran meetings twice a month — with discussions and activities — to foster mutual understanding and tolerance between the two groups. To try to build bridges for the future between these two communities, instead of just conflict and hatred.” She pauses. Everybody’s looking at her and listening attentively.

“So while I’m here, I’d like to focus on cross-cultural dialogue, especially with adolescents, and examine what makes it work when it works — or not work when it doesn’t. In more general terms, I’m interested in how people talk to each other. I’m interested in hate speech, and also” — she smiles, scanning the room — “in love speech. In coexistence speech. In the language we use to communicate with each other.” She pauses for a moment. Then she shrugs. “I guess that’s it.”

Lots of people are smiling back at her or nodding approvingly. With relief and happiness she realizes she’s done well. She’s managed to translate herself, and her life in Israel, into Canadian terms: into something these people can relate to. Several of the professors are regarding her with interest. Cindy touches her arm and whispers, “That sounds very interesting.” “Thanks,” says Judith. Soon the go-around is complete, and Weick stands. But before he can say a word, there is loud, raucous noise coming from the hallway — yelling, laughing, and banging on the door, like an approaching mob.

“That must be the Labour Studies people,” says Weick. “An unru-u-uly bunch.” Someone laughs. “It’s their turn for the room now, so we’re going to have to adjourn. Please make sure you’ve got all the handouts, and we’ll see you in class. Welcome.”

Judith is glad this orientation is over. It felt considerably longer than one-and-a-half hours, and she’s tired. But she feels much better now — less alone — than when she walked in here this morning. She gathers her papers.

“Thanks again,” she says to Cindy.

“No problem. You know, we should talk sometime about working with teens. That’s not an age group many people like.”

Judith laughs. “I know.” She watches Cindy, who is trying to straighten out all her different-coloured handouts, and then, giving up, just stuffs them impatiently into her brown leather satchel. There is something endearing about this, and while Cindy bends over, buckling the straps, Judith says to her back, “How about now? I’m not doing anything.”

Cindy looks sideways at her with china blue eyes, reminding Judith of Loretta, her favourite doll when she was growing up: the one with the real open-and-shut eyes. “Sounds good,” Cindy says, standing and slinging the satchel over her shoulder. “But I have a few errands to do first: I have to drop by the administration office to pay my fees, and I need a library card.”

“I have the same list. So we could do them together.”

“Great!” says Cindy. They move toward the door. “That’ll be more fun than doing it alone.”

“Yes. I hate doing stuff like this. It’s so boring.”

“I know. Plus even though I did my B.S.W. here, they’ve changed the campus since then, and I can’t find my way anywhere.”

“Really?!” Judith is surprised. “You seem so … at home here.”

“Me?” Cindy laughs. “Not at all. I haven’t been in a classroom in five years, and I find all this quite overwhelming. I’m not sure I’m ready for this grad school thing. Plus the faculty for the B.S.W. and M.S.W. are completely different. I don’t know a single person here.”

“Yes, you do,” says Judith. “You know me.”

Now it’s Cindy’s turn to look surprised. They look at each other for a moment, then smile. “You’re right,” says Cindy. Together they leave the room. And on the way out, Judith, feeling triumphant, snatches one last cookie.

— 3 —

Five hours later, driving back to Toronto, she hits bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic. She probably should’ve left Dunhill earlier, right after finishing lunch with Cindy at the Lion’s Den. But she was too excited and happy. She had a great time talking with Cindy about social work and life in general. Cindy knew nothing about Israel except what she read in the papers, but seemed genuinely interested in Judith’s life there. Then she showed Judith some pictures of her baby and husband. And the weather was glorious: it felt like the perfect day to walk around the campus under those magnificent oaks, and find out where the gym, library, administration office, and cafeterias were. To physically orient themselves, it being Orientation Day. A strange word though, orient, it seems to Judith now in her unmoving car, since at this point she is not in the Orient. Dunhill shouldn’t have had an Orientation Day; it should have had an Occidentation Day, since, being in Canada, it is located in the Occident. Which sounds like Accident. Yes, she thinks, it’s an accident I’m here in the Occident. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Daddy getting sick. I didn’t choose to leave Israel — I’m not one of those chickenshits who fled because of the intifada, betraying Israel in her time of need.

She glances at the clock. It says 6:12, like the insect repellent she grew up with, and she frowns at the clock like at some horrible bug, as if it is personally to blame for the time. It’s late. And Bobby hates to be kept waiting. So there’s no time to stop off and change her sweaty, smelly T-shirt before going to his place for supper. The stalled traffic irritates her. She looks around: off the highway there are barns, crops, and some grazing cows, everything in a mix of sun and shade. She breathes deeply, inhaling the pungent smells of animal dung and the sweet hay and clover from the fields. Her father loved the country — he loved barns, of all crazy things — but she pushes this away, she doesn’t want to start thinking about him now. Or about his house, where she is now living all alone — so empty and desolate without him there, the house grimy and filthy, and her dirty dishes piling up precariously high in the sink.

Instead she reflects on the coming year. Tomorrow night is Rosh Hashana, and she hopes it will be the beginning of a good, sweet, and happy year. It can’t be worse than the last one: the year she watched her father die. She’d like the year ahead to be easy, light, and pleasant — even slightly boring, so she can recover from what she’s been through. Bruria, her friend in Jerusalem, thinks a year in Toronto may be the perfect thing. Last week Judith wailed on the phone, “What am I doing here, Bruria? Why am I stuck here for a year? I want to come home!”

Bruria answered calmly, “Try and enjoy it, Judith. It’s not like things here are so great right now. Some people would kill to be in your position — to have a year away from Israel forced on them by circumstances, no guilt attached. So enjoy yourself. Make the most of it. Think of the coming year as an anthropological experiment: a chance to study life in Canada. It could be interesting.”

“Okay,” Judith said, “I’ll try.” Grateful to be “given permission” — as Bruria, a therapist, would say — to enjoy herself. Now she reaches into the glove compartment and pulls out a tape labelled Israel at Forty, and in seconds her car is filled with bright, tinny music, unsophisticated and hopeful. No such hopeful music, though, emerged from Israel’s fiftieth birthday. By 1998 the country was traumatized by Rabin’s assassination, the first intifada, and a series of crises one after another, political, economic, and social. The songs on that tape are sombre and anguished. So she prefers to listen to Israel at Forty instead. She listens to a line or two of “The Honey and the Bee Sting,” and then starts singing along, loudly, whole-heartedly, in Hebrew, in the privacy of her car. She knows every word of this song and of every song on this tape — she has sung them year after year with her friends at Yechiel and Miri’s annual Independence Day sing-song — and when it comes to the chorus of this one,

Please, good Lord,

Preserve all these.

The honey and the bee sting,

The bitter and the sweet,

she feels like she’s singing it together with them, no longer alone in her car in Canada, in galut.

But then the song ends, the car is silent while she flips the tape, and maybe because she is alone, and in galut, the words of this song now strike her as odd. She wonders who would want to preserve the bitter parts of life along with the sweet? Who would pray to God asking for that? And why, if you want a bit of honey in your tea, should you first have to suffer the pain of a bee sting? Is this what we in Israel have come to believe now? That we only deserve to be happy, or to live, if first we count out x number of pain tokens per year, like poker chips, to pay to God? That’s sick. It’s like domestic violence — like letting someone beat you so you can have his “love.”

She does understand, though, all those battered women who stay with their men. Because her love for Israel is something like that. Unconditional. The way many people love their family members. You know all their faults, but still you love them. There are things about Israel she can’t stand. At the top of the list, the occupation, and this government’s treatment of Palestinians. (Another definition of domestic violence: domestic policies that are violent.) But it doesn’t matter: Israel is her love. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.

One of her boyfriends in Israel, Micah, once joked that Israel was the only real love in her life. Recalling this now, she knows it is basically true. She has loved various men, just as she currently loves Bobby. But nothing has ever come close to her passion for Israel. Israel was her first love, and it’s the love of her life. Only there has she ever felt fully alive or at home. She never felt at home in her parents’ house. It wasn’t a “bad” home, or anything like that. There was nothing particularly wrong with her family. Her parents loved her. But they were both busy running their little dry goods store, and for as long as she could remember she’d let herself into a silent, empty house after school. When her parents finally did come home at seven-thirty, they were tired after being on their feet for twelve hours, serving customers. There was a quick supper, and she did homework while her mother did housework and her father paid bills. Her parents always had more to do than there was time for. And her mother was short-tempered and given to moods.

But then Judith found Israel. The summer she was twelve she went to a Zionist summer camp, and after that she never felt that loneliness again. She was part of something larger than herself. Her life had meaning and purpose. But not in just a dutiful way. Rather in the way that life has meaning and purpose when you’re in love. She fell in love with Israel. With its soul, but also — a few years later, on her first visit — with its body. She loved this country’s red earth, its mountain-deserts, streams, forests, birds, fish, and flowers. She loved the star-studded night sky, with its sliver of moon lying horizontally on the bottom like a cradle, instead of standing vertically, like in Canada. She even loved the air in Israel and the water — including the salt-heavy water of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. In Canada she’d always found geography and history boring, scoring low on her high-school leaving exams in both these subjects. But in Israel she was fascinated by every mountain range, by every excavated tell or Biblical battlefield. Because it was hers. It was about her people, and it told the story of what had happened to them, and therefore to her.

One morning, on one of the many nature-and-archaeology trips she took with the Israeli Nature Protection Society, she awakened in her sleeping bag on the cold desert sand near Timna, the location of King Solomon’s mines, and also a modern reconstruction of the Israelites’ tabernacle during their forty-year desert journey. Everyone else in the group was still asleep, their sleeping bags dotting the desert floor like multicoloured rocks, and she watched the mountains gradually turn visible in the early morning light, until the whole valley was bathed in a strange grey-yellow haze. Nothing else seemed awake, or even alive, except her and an ibex, its horn arced backwards, staring at her. She followed it. After ten minutes, she abruptly stopped walking. The sun, a brilliant orange, illuminated the mountain before her, making it radiate in the sun, and the whole world was perfectly silent and still. Suspended, as if waiting for something. Feeling rather foolish, she said, “I promise.” She didn’t know exactly what she was promising, she couldn’t have articulated it if you’d asked her. But she had promised herself to this land.

Of course, she’s never told anyone about this. It would have sounded too corny — ridiculous even. Who wouldn’t laugh at a too-earnest pretty young woman swearing herself to a desert at dawn? No one, she thinks now as she drives. But from that point on, her life — as if with a will of its own — bent in a new direction. That glowing throbbing orange of a vow sat in the centre of her like a hot coal she had swallowed, burning and transforming her all the way down. Nothing mattered to her anymore except taking her place in Jewish history and on Jewish geography. Coincidentally, her cousin wrote her around then that history and geography were now being taught together in Canadian high schools under the heading Social Sciences, which felt exactly right to Judith. All she wanted to do at this point was to help realize the Zionist dream. To come home again after two thousand years of exile — of galut, which she noticed laughingly back then, rhymed with dissolute and pollute. To rebuild the land, and on it to reunite all the Jews scattered and in exile from every corner of the globe. As soon as she knew this was what she wanted, she found herself in a circle of young people like herself — Zionist dreamers, new immigrants from everywhere: the United States, England, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Russia, France, Switzerland, Italy, Finland, Holland, Algeria, Morocco, India, Ethiopia, even China. She learned scraps of a dozen new languages, heard music and tasted foods she’d never encountered in Canada. It’s ironic, she wrote then to her father, newly a widower. I was afraid living in a Jewish state would seem culturally narrow and parochial after Canada. But here I’m for the first time living a truly multicultural life.

She swerves — something dark and furry darted onto the highway — a cat? a groundhog? — and she’s missed running over it by mere inches. Lucky there were no cars near her on the road. She looks around and gets her bearings: she’s only about fifteen minutes away from Bobby’s house. The traffic is thickening again now, but so far so good. That’s Bruria’s expression, “so far so good,” and Judith smiles thinking of her. But quickly the smile fades. Yesterday she got a long email from Bruria, and things in Israel are terrible now. Economically, politically, every way. At least, though, all their mutual friends are okay — “okay” meaning none of them were hurt in the latest suicide bombing three days ago at a café where some of them hang out. Five people were blown to bits and eight more lost arms, legs, parts of their faces. But her friends, who that day chose to meet elsewhere, were mercifully untouched.

Bruria’s email also gave Judith an update on their friends. Yechiel and Miri, she wrote, are doing all right, still demonstrating against the occupation every Friday afternoon in front of the prime minister’s residence, as Judith sometimes used to do with them. Usually they’d get a turnout of about forty people, but last week there were just fifteen because of the nearby bombing that morning. Still, that’s not too bad, wrote Bruria, for a moribund peace movement gasping its final breaths. Rina and Michel were there, too, and so was Yaacov, who’s starting his Ph.D. in archaeology next month, and is excited but nervous. Sammy didn’t come — he had pneumonia but is feeling better now. Then on Saturday Tamar and Benny went with some friends in their broken-down van to visit a Palestinian family whose house had been demolished by the army, to help them rebuild it. Yonina usually goes with them, but this time she declined. She’s fed up with politics, and says she doesn’t believe anymore that these little gestures make any difference. Besides, she’s working very hard — her art show opens in two weeks at the Artists’ House. Miki, Bruria’s brother, has started going out with Miri’s neighbour’s sister-in-law, Hedva. They came for cake and coffee on Saturday — she’s nice, and the two of them seem to get along well. “So far so good.”

Last but not least, Bruria writes, Noah has just finished his first six weeks of army service. Judith remembers the first time she met Noah. He was home from school with a fever, and Bruria, whom she’d met only a few months before, was spoon-feeding him warm milk with honey. He was an angelic-looking seven-year-old with silky blond curls, blue eyes, round flushed cheeks, and a heart-shaped mouth. More recently, for the two years before he went into the army, Noah was head of Youth for Peace Now, Jerusalem branch. About six months ago he had his four seconds of fame on CNN: they filmed him at a peace rally, holding a huge placard saying in English, Hebrew, and Arabic: END THE OCCUPATION — NOW! Now, though, he’s in the Tank Corps in the occupied territories — terrified of being shot at, and only slightly less terrified of shooting at others. Bruria wrote that a few weeks ago, on his first day on patrol, Noah was confronted by a group of what the Canadian media calls Palestinian “children,” but in fact were teenage boys his own age, some just a year or two younger than him — sixteen or seventeen. They were throwing rocks and rusty metal pipes at him and his friend Doron, and they were both terrified, but Doron actually shat his pants. When Noah came home a few days later for Shabbat, he just locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out. The next day he joined them for lunch, but hardly said a word. Now, after a few weeks, he seems to be getting used to it.

But what does that mean,“getting used to it”? wrote Bruria. Getting used to being shot at, and to shooting other people? This is insane. Aside from all the obvious things, which I won’t — can’t — even name, I worry about what this is doing to him inside. To his heart and soul.

Anyway, she concluded her email, we hope for the best. Shana tova, Judith — a good, sweet year. I hope it’s much better than the last one for you, and for all of Israel. Love, Bruria

Music is blaring in the car. Judith forgot the tape was even on — it just drifted into background music. But now she hears “Hallelujah,” the song that made Israel the winner of the Eurovision song competition in 1979. Back then, when the Europeans still liked us.

Again the traffic has stopped moving. This sure is Canada, she thinks: everyone just sitting in their stalled cars in polite silence. If this were Israel, there’d be dozens of horns honking, louder than a hundred Canada geese. She gives a tiny honk, just something symbolic, which doesn’t make any difference to the traffic, but makes her feel better. The traffic begins moving, and soon she arrives at Bobby’s house. He’s standing on the porch, suntanned and handsome in a golf shirt, neatly pressed shorts with two perfect creases, and deck shoes. A bit preppy for her taste, but she can’t help noticing how good-looking he is: she always forgets this when they’re apart.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says, getting out of the car. “The traffic was horrendous.”

“I was getting worried, you took so long.”

“It was rush hour — next time I’ll know to leave earlier. What are you doing out here?”

“I live here.”

“No, seriously.”

“Waiting for you.” Judith, nearing the porch steps now, gives him a skeptical look. “It’s true. I was putting out the garbage and saw your car coming down the street. So I figured I’d just wait and surprise you.”

“That’s nice,” she says, and gives him a quick kiss. Bobby puts his arm around her as they go into the house.

“So how was it?” he asks.

“Great!” She takes the sunglasses off the top of her head and shakes out her hair. She’s flushed and radiant, and Bobby gapes at her.

“Wow!” he says. “I haven’t seen you this happy in ages.” Then, slightly resentfully, as if Dunhill were his rival: “What was so great about it?”

“I don’t know,” she says, her back to him as she lays her sunglasses and purse on the room divider. Turning around to face him, she’s aware of a feeling of reluctance, like she is not quite ready for him yet. He’s so demanding. Always challenging her. “Mostly it’s just good to be part of something again,” she says. “The people seem very nice, too. And some of them are doing interesting things.”

“Like what?”

Bobby is leading the way into the living room, and she glances warily at his back as she follows close behind. They don’t see eye to eye politically, and Bobby views social workers as a bunch of bleeding hearts. She hopes tonight they’re not going to have another one of their arguments. Sitting with him on the black leather couch, she tells him about the profs and students she met today, the unexpectedly splendid tree-lined campus, and the smoky, noisy Lion’s Den, smelling sourly of beer. Bobby sniggers appreciatively at her description of the identity politics at Dunhill, and laughs at “Gay Lesbian Bacon and Tomato.” But when she mentions the school’s “mission,” and its focus on anti-oppression, he looks testy.

Ignoring this, she continues: “They genuinely care about social justice at Dunhill. They may not all be, as you’d say, rocket scientists” — he stares back at her stonily, refusing to smile — “but they strike me as people with ideals.”

“Ideals?” he cries. “Is this what you call that left-wing crap? I can’t believe you’re buying into that anti-oppression bullshit. All it is, is, ‘I’m a victim, you’re a victim,’ and you’re way too smart to fall for that.”

She feels her anger rising. “I’m not falling for anything,” she says. “And stop being simplistic. You know as well as I do, that isn’t all it’s about.”

“Yes, it is.” His handsome hazel eyes flash. “That’s exactly what it’s about: the Moral Superiority of the Victim. Anyone who’s not a victim — who’s at all successful — is an ‘oppressor.’ According to these people I’m supposed to feel guilty and apologetic because I’m a lawyer earning a half-decent salary, but I don’t. I’ve worked for it — nobody handed it to me on a silver platter.”

“Oh, c’mon,” she says impatiently. “No one’s saying poor people are morally better than rich ones. Just that they’ve been socially disadvantaged, ‘oppressed’ if you will, and deserve a fairer share of the pie.”

“Ah, but that’s the question: Do they, Judith? Do they? Why do you lefties assume whenever people are poor, or have miserable fucked-up lives, that it’s always society’s fault? Maybe sometimes it is. But mostly these people have fucked up their own lives, and shouldn’t blame this on anyone else. Let me finish.” He holds up his hand to stop her from interrupting. “People aren’t always at the bottom of the social heap just because of your ‘structural oppressions.’ Some people don’t work hard. Some are dumber at birth. People aren’t all equal at the starting line.”

“That’s exactly the point. But never mind — forget it.” Judith crosses her arms across her chest. She’s getting angry, but is trying to control her temper. “I’m not having this conversation with you again. We’ve been through this a hundred times, and you never understand.”

“I never understand because it doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense because you’re not trying to understand.”

They glare at each other from opposite sides of the couch. Then Bobby sighs.

“Okay, Judith,” he says quietly. “Try once more. Explain what you see in this that I can’t. Because if this is where your head will be for this whole next year, we have to be able to talk about it.”

Doubtfully she looks at him. His voice has lost its combative, prosecuting lawyer’s edge, and he seems to have retracted his claws, but she isn’t sure. The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau. “All right,” she finally says. “I’ll try one last time, but that’s it. Yes, you’re right this anti-oppression stuff can have a silly side. But that’s true of everything. There’s nothing in life that can’t be ridiculed — even your precious tax law. As for your argument that some people ‘at the bottom of the heap’ have fucked up their own lives, yes, some have. But most of them haven’t. A single mother, black and on welfare, has a million barriers working against her. So social workers — we ‘lefties,’ as you’d say — try to eliminate these barriers and redress structural inequities, like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, so people can live lives of dignity. C’mon, Bobby, don’t look at me like that. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.”

“Avanti popolo.”

Bobby spent one childhood summer in a socialist Zionist camp singing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, every morning, and “The Internationale,” the socialist worldwide anthem, every night, and this was the worst summer of his life.

Judith, sitting cross-legged, facing his sullen profile, touches him on the knee. “You must admit at least it’s a good dream.”

“It’s a stupid dream because it’s just a dream, and built on false premises. You and your ‘idealistic’ profs, and your lefty friends in Israel, you all believe deep down no one can be rich and also have a social conscience. Well, you’re wrong. Some of my clients are extremely wealthy, and donate millions of dollars to charity.”

“So what?” she asks, feeling tired. It’s been a long day, and this isn’t what she was hoping for when she came here tonight. “It’s just a tax break. One of the legal loopholes you find for them so they can pay as few taxes as possible.”

“Fuck, Judith. You spend one day at Dunhill, and you come home a left-wing Moonie.”

“That’s ridiculous. I’ve had the same politics, as you know, ever since high school, when I started thinking for myself. Anyway, if I were a Moonie, I’d rather be a left-wing Moonie than a right-wing Moonie like you.”

“I’m not right-wing. I’m normal.”

“Oh, I see. And I’m abnormal?”

“Well, you’re sure different from everyone else I know.”

“Maybe you know the wrong people.”

“Maybe you do.”

She doesn’t answer. Just stares down at the carpet, thinking fiercely that there’s nothing wrong with her or with the people she met today. She likes them. They make sense to her. A lot more sense than Bobby, who in under a half-hour has managed to ruin all the happiness of her day — the first day she’s felt truly happy or hopeful about anything since coming back to this country almost a year ago.

“Judith,” he says.

“What?” she answers without looking up.

“Judith.”

“What?” She whips her head upwards, glaring.

“I hate fighting with you. Why do we keep fighting?”

“Because we don’t see life the same way. We have different values, politics, weltanschauung. Trivial things like that.”

He sighs. “But that’s what’s so aggravating about you. I don’t believe you actually see life so differently than me. You know as well as I do exactly how things are, and underneath all that lefty shit you’re as hard-headed as they come. But you pretend not to know. You blather on with that mealy-mouthed crap when, underneath it all, you understand exactly how the world really works.”

She turns and looks straight into his eyes. “Yes, Bobby. I do know, as you put it, exactly how the world really works. But maybe I want there to be more to life than just being born, accruing as much wealth as possible, and then dying. What’s so awful about that? At least I’m not just giving up on the world.”

He looks at her more gently now. “Fair enough. I agree, as you know, that there’s more to life than making money. But Judith, don’t waste yourself on lost causes. Don’t throw away all that talent and passion fighting windmills. It’s one thing to try and change things where you have some reasonable chance of success. But banging your head against a brick wall isn’t going to help you or anybody else.”

“I’m not banging my head against a brick wall. Anyway, what would you know? You always play the game — you never challenge, or try to change, anything. You weren’t like this when we were in high school. What happened, Bobby? How did you become so conservative? How did you turn into such a right-wing shmuck?”

“A right-wing shmuck?!” says Bobby. “Well, how did you turn into a left-wing shmuckette?”

“Shmuckette?”

“Well, if there’s a shmuck, there must be a shmuckette.”

She tries not to smile, but can’t help it. “You learned that word in French class, I suppose,” she says.

“From Madame Benoît.” Now they’re both smiling, picturing their wizened prude of a grade nine French teacher teaching them the word shmuckette. “She also taught me this,” he says, leaning forward, bringing his face close to hers: “Ma chérie. Je t’aime.”

“Yeah, sure. Madame Benoît taught you to say, ‘Je t’aime.’ Madame Benoît was your ‘chérie.’”

“You are my chérie. My one and only chérie.”

“Oy,” she says, but smiles. Then she grins.

“Ma chér-r-rie,” says Bobby in what she recognizes as his best attempt at a Parisian accent, and he swoops and plants a kiss on her laughing mouth. His lips feel smooth and firm. Younger than Moshe’s. Then he kisses her neck. Her ear. Her eyes. And again her mouth. His lips on hers are somehow both cool and warm at the same time, like sun-drenched marble. His lips move down and kiss her throat, and now they are sucking gently on her left nipple. Then harder. She forgets all about politics. She forgets about everything.

An hour later she wakes up, déshabillée on the living-room carpet, to the sound of pots and pans clanging in the kitchen and the smell of burning meat.

— 4 —

On Monday Judith makes the hour-long drive to Dunhill, again listening to Israel at Forty. When she arrives, there’s an atmosphere of excitement: that special crackle in the air of the first day of school. Her first class today is with Weick, and he starts off with another class go-around. When her turn comes, Judith speaks briefly, offering an abridged version of what she said four days ago. But she adds, since this course is “Knowledge and Values in Social Work,” that knowledge interests her more than values because it seems to her that most social workers’ values are anyway quite similar, and she’s eager to increase her knowledge about the latest social work theories, having been out of school for the past ten years. When she finishes, she sees Cindy off to the right, waving two fingers at her, and she waves back. Then she recognizes, a little past Cindy, some of the other students from Orientation, including the two women she rode in the elevator with that day. They’re sitting together in the row in front of Cindy, and the pretty dark-haired one is wearing a magenta Chinese-style jacket. Judith didn’t pay much attention to their spiels during Orientation, but now when they introduce themselves, she listens closely. The one with the magenta jacket, Aliza, used to be a jazz dancer, and the plain redhead, Pam, was in honours economics and poli sci. They both speak ironically and are obviously bright, and Judith decides she wants to know them better.

After the go-around, Weick begins to teach. He’s a stunningly terrible teacher. Among the worst Judith has ever had — lecturing in a monotone from ragged yellowish notes, and hardly ever raising his eyes to look at the students, even though there are only twenty of them in the class. Furthermore, the material he’s droning on about is stuff she already knows backwards and forwards from her B.S.W. Weick is teaching Systems Theory, a theory that was revolutionary in the late 1960s and 1970s, but now is old and tired. It was already stale even thirteen years ago when she first learned it. This theory is past its expiration date, she thinks. If they put expiration dates on orange juice, why can’t they put them on theories?

Weick keeps droning on, and after twenty-five minutes — when it looks like even he is about to fall asleep from boredom — he, for the first time, asks the class a question: “Can anyone give me an example of a system?”

Nobody answers. The question is too stupid. Every student in the room, having done a B.S.W., has already written three, four, maybe five term papers related in one way or another to Systems Theory. He can’t possibly be asking them what he seems to be. It would be like asking, “Can someone give me an example of a fruit?”

At the front of the room he waits. The silence becomes awkward. Finally he answers his own question. Proudly, like a five-year-old triumphant at knowing the answer. “The solar system!” he cries, drawing on the board a big circle and some smaller surrounding ones. “The sun with the planets revolving around it —”

Judith nearly groans out loud. I can’t stand this, she thinks. I really can’t. I know I promised Daddy I’d do this M.S.W., but there’s no way I can take a year of this. I can’t stand even another half-hour. It’s unbearable. She doesn’t dare glance at Cindy, or even Pam or Aliza, for fear that if they make eye contact, she’ll roll her eyes, giving herself away. So she keeps her eyes lowered to the page, like an ox with its eyes glued to the ground as it circles endlessly with its yoke. But after a minute she picks up her pen, and on the blank page before her, writes: I can’t stand this. I can’t stand this. She continues writing this over and over, like a pupil being punished — which is exactly how she feels — and forced to copy the same phrase a hundred times. She isn’t counting, but she writes this many times, punctuating it now and again with Stupid stupid stupid or Fuck fuck fuck. Once she writes Weick is weak. Weick’s a freak. Then there’s the sound of chairs scraping the floor, and it’s over. Weick has dismissed them early because it’s the first day. She approaches Cindy, who introduces her to Pam and Aliza. They all chat together politely, waiting in line to get out of the classroom. But once in the hallway and safely out of hearing distance, the four of them, huddled together, explode.

“Do you fuckin’ believe it …?”

“Systems Theory?! Fuckin’ Systems Theory!”

“Not one new idea — not one — I didn’t already know.”

“God! So boring! I thought I’d die!”

They go on like this in joyful outrage as they leave the building and then cross the quadrangle toward the cafeteria.

“What if all the other classes are like this?” Aliza asks.

“They’d better not be, or I’ll quit this program,” says Pam. “Can you believe they’re still teaching Systems Theory? It’s shocking. Hasn’t anything new happened in social work in all these years?”

“Apparently not,” says Aliza.

“Anyway,” asks Cindy, “what is Systems Theory doing in a course on knowledge and values?”

“Well, theories are a part of knowledge,” says Aliza. “But it’s probably the only theory he knows — that’s why he’s teaching it.”

“Or maybe he doesn’t have any,” says Judith.

“Any what?”

“Knowledge. Or values.”

“Ooooh …”

They arrive at the cafeteria. Entering the door, they all agree this is a class to be merely survived, nothing more, and the one good thing about it is they’ll probably all get A’s. Soon they’re carrying their coffee and donuts to a small, square table.

For several minutes there’s silence: they just slurp, munch, and swallow. But soon they’re sharing how anxious they were about coming back to school after years spent out in the field, and how relieved they are to have at least one easy course, though they hope their other classes aren’t quite as vacuous as Weick’s. It turns out Pam and Aliza, like Judith, are feminists, and while Cindy listens, they talk about the deadly style of the traditional male lecturer — Weick being the perfect example — and then about men in general. Including their own men, past and present — except for Pam, who gets completely silent for once, making Judith wonder if she’s a lesbian. Then Aliza starts telling funny anecdotes. She’s almost like a comedienne, and for a while they just sit around and laugh as she entertains them. Judith flashbacks to how her father loved to just sit around and “chew the fat,” as he’d call it, listening to people tell funny or fascinating stories and throwing in some of his own. Without warning it’s back: that grief that’s always waiting, crouching and ready to pounce, like a cat hidden in the pit of her stomach. She sits, stunned and staring, for several minutes. Then it passes, and she’s back again. Aliza is now in the middle of telling a dirty joke — Judith missed the beginning, so doesn’t fully get it when Aliza delivers the punchline — but it has something to do with a leaning tower of penis. Pam has a high-pitched screech of a laugh, like a monkey’s, and this, with all the glee and giddiness from the others, makes Judith start laughing, too. Then Cindy says, “Look at the time! It’s five to eleven,” and they hurry back for their second class.

From eleven o’clock to one, it’s “Introduction to Social Justice” with Greg Smolan. Greg is short for Gregory — he’s named after the saint, he tells them with a grin — not that he believes in any of that stuff anymore. If he believes in any religion now, it’s the religion of social justice. This class is fun: a cross between a gossip column about the Canadian elite — the rich-and-famous (or the rich-and-infamous) — and a detective thriller built around a conspiracy. Greg, although he doesn’t use this exact word, sees everything as a conspiracy. For two hours he describes how the white, Christian, male elite of Canada uses its power, influence, and wealth to shape virtually all of Canada’s social and economic policies, which in turn help to maintain, and even extend, this same power, influence, and wealth. “Of course,” he explains, “these policies also maintain and extend the marginalization and oppression of those who are poor, old, female, ethnically diverse, GLBT, and/or disabled, physically, intellectually, or psychiatrically. This is just how things work.”

Sitting in Greg’s class on a wooden chair as hard as a pew, Judith listens to his succession of stories about the connections between government, business, inherited wealth, social celebrity, and the media. He describes as vividly as a scene from the movie Howard’s End how, even in Canada now in 2002 — no different, in fact, from the British upper classes in Victorian times — the rich and powerful intermingle familially, socially, professionally, and financially. At their golf games and formal dinners, fundraising galas, garden parties, and weddings, they interact and intermarry, thus keeping within their little circle all that wealth and power. It’s been ten years now since Judith left Canada and became active on the Israeli left, and in all this time she hasn’t had direct contact with any Canadian leftists. So it’s fascinating for her to now hear what their issues are. The left in Canada and Israel have certain obvious similarities, but here the concerns of the left have nothing to do with war and peace, national survival, security, or land. Their issues all seem relatively theoretical to her, and removed from everyday life. She glances at Cindy to see how she’s reacting to this class, but Cindy’s face is bent low over the page she’s scribbling notes on, and Judith can’t make out her expression.

Greg is getting more passionate by the minute, waving his hands around in the air as he speaks, and his voice is rising in volume, and soon he’s so carried away he completely loses track of the time and continues straight through until one o’clock with his charming amalgam of Marx, Freire, and Foucault. Judith hasn’t studied in depth even one of this trinity of guys (of course they’re all guys), but they don’t seem to fit very well together. She can’t picture them being in the same room and having anything in common. But Greg keeps saying he’s “eclectic,” and in his eclectic electric blender, Marx, Freire, and Foucault mush into a kind of sweet social justice strawberry milkshake that has its own internal logic. Greg’s political views seem to Judith not very different from her own, so she doesn’t feel he’s convincing her of anything new. But listening to him speak in his flowing, persuasive, almost poetic way, she wishes Bobby could hear him. She’s sure Greg could make even Bobby, defender of all things capitalist and corporate, see things differently.

As soon as this class ends, Judith asks Cindy to hold a seat for her in the next one and races to the bathroom. There she pees with immense relief, and then for another minute sits on the toilet, daydreaming. Bobby may see her as a left-wing freak-o, but to the people here she makes sense, and they make sense to her, too. This might turn out to be a good year, after all. It could be interesting, even fun, to spend some time here in Canada. In exile, but just for a while. It sounds like the title of a song, “Exile but Just for a While,” and she starts humming a tune to go along with it. For the first time since promising her father she’d return to school, she doesn’t feel trapped or resentful about it. Maybe her father knew something she didn’t. Maybe he was smarter than she thought.

From 1:30 to 3:30 she has the last of her three courses: “Social Work with Individuals, Families, and Groups,” with Suzy Malone. (Or “’mAlone,” as she now thinks of that name.) Arriving from the bathroom, Judith gets stuck behind a dozen students filing slowly into the classroom, most holding sandwiches and drinks. When there’s no longer anyone ahead of her blocking her view, and for the first time she can see the teacher standing at the front of the room, she does a double-take. She knows her. They’ve met before. But where? It takes several seconds to remember, and then it all comes back. It was at a country club in May, at a boring retirement party for a founder of the law firm where Bobby had just begun. Suzy’s husband worked there, too, but as a senior partner. She and Suzy met in the bathroom — a gorgeous, spacious bathroom full of elegant peach-coloured gladioli — and after they somehow discovered they were both social workers, they chatted for about ten minutes. There was something very intimate about standing together in that bathroom while other women came and went, and the toilets kept flushing over and over. Suzy was very interested in the work Judith had done in Israel at a kindergarten for developmentally challenged children, and she told her about the problems of her eleven-year-old daughter, Natalie, who had autism, and how this was affecting her other two kids. Judith, coincidentally, had just heard from a friend of her father’s about a new summer camp for “special needs” kids, and she passed this information along to Suzy. They had a long, lovely conversation — the kind you have when you never expect to see that person again — and she hasn’t thought about Suzy since.

Now Suzy is smiling brightly at her. As Judith approaches, she is struck by how pretty and petite Suzy is. A short, pretty woman in a fuchsia silk shirt.

“I didn’t know you were coming here to study!” Suzy says.

“Neither did I,” says Judith. “It was sort of last-minute.”

“Well, welcome to Dunhill. How are you finding it so far?”

“Okay.”

“You’ll be fine,” says Suzy. “There’s a lot to absorb at first. But you’re so smart —” Judith looks at her in surprise. “You are. You’ll be great. You’ll see.”

“Thanks.” Then Judith feels self-conscious. Glancing around, she sees some of the other students are listening to their conversation. Awkwardly, she says, “I should probably sit down.”

“Sure,” says Suzy. “We’ll be starting soon anyway.”

Judith sees Cindy waving at her from the middle of the room and goes to the chair Cindy has saved for her.

“How do you know her?” Cindy asks as Judith sits. “I thought you didn’t know anyone here.”

Judith starts to explain, but stops abruptly as Suzy says, “Good afternoon,” and begins teaching. In front of a class Suzy is the same person she was in the bathroom: unpretentious, friendly, and open. She’s a good listener, too, obviously sincerely interested in students’ points of view, allowing lots of time for class discussion, and apparently not minding at all — even liking it — when students interrupt, make jokes, or briefly take over. In response to something funny that one student, Tyler, says, Suzy laughs — a natural, tinkly laugh, and now Judith feels happy and at home. Part of this, she knows, has to do with the content of this course: her B.S.W. and all her field placements were in the area of “individuals, families, and groups,” so here in Suzy’s class she feels on solid ground. But more than this there is something about Suzy that makes Judith feel comfortable and safe. Like who she is and what she knows is good enough. Suzy now says she believes in empowerment and androgogy. Judith wonders if they’re back to GBLT.

“Not androgyny,” says Suzy, startling Judith as if she’s read her mind. “Androgogy, the theory of adult education. Androgogy as opposed to pedagogy. I don’t believe in teaching adults as if they were children.” She goes on to explain that in this course she wants to help them retrieve, organize, and utilize the rich stores of knowledge they’ve all acquired from their years of experience in the field, and from life in general.

What a relief, thinks Judith, and what a contrast to Weick. Suzy’s going to treat me like an adult. An equal. Instead of like I’m in grade four.

Suzy tells them about her own professional background. “You have a right to know where I’m coming from,” she says sweetly. She’s worked in a number of different jobs, but currently has a private practice, specializing in therapy with single women in their late twenties and thirties. That’s me! thinks Judith, feeling embarrassed, and more than that, a bit naked, as if Suzy, like Supergirl, has X-ray vision and can see right through her. The rest of the class passes quickly, with Suzy doing a cursory run-through of all the most important theories and models used in working with individuals, families, and groups. Then she asks the class what other theories they know about and like. Judith puts up her hand: “Cognitive Theory,” she says.

“Sure,” says Suzy approvingly. “This is another very useful approach. Coincidentally, a new book just came out called Cognitive Therapy for Social Work, and yesterday I received a complimentary copy. So if anyone’s interested in borrowing it” — she looks straight at Judith — “I’d be happy to lend it.” Judith vigorously nods. “Just come by my office after class.”

Then Suzy says, “Before we finish today …” and Judith, glancing down at her watch, notes with astonishment there are only five minutes left of this class. Suzy reviews the assignments for her course. There’s a term paper worth 75 percent due the last day of the term, and for the other 25 percent they’re supposed to keep a weekly log. “A running dialogue with yourself,” Suzy explains, “about everything you’re learning. A place to begin integrating theory and practice, including your reactions to the readings and class discussions, your thoughts and feelings, and anything else you want to write about. Your logs will be kept strictly confidential,” she assures them, “so feel free to express yourselves there. I’ll return them each Monday to your box.”

After class is over, Judith waits for fifteen minutes while Suzy attends to a lineup of students with questions. Eventually she and Judith, alone in the classroom, talk. To Judith it feels not so much like a conversation between a teacher and student, but like they are just picking up where they left off, back in the bathroom of the Toronto Country Club. Suzy thanks her for the name of that summer camp for her daughter — it worked out very well, she says, and gave them all a much-needed break from each other. Judith tells Suzy how much she enjoyed her class. Suzy says it was great for her to have someone there she already knew. Then, walking together to Suzy’s office to get the book, they commiserate about the major restructuring at the law firm where Bobby and Dennis both work. It’s called “Bonham Bailey Bomberg” (which makes Judith think of the Barnum & Bailey circus). She says BBB should no longer be called a firm, but a shaky, and Suzy laughs. Judith follows her up two flights of stairs and along a gloomy, serpentine corridor with two bends in it right before the end. Inside Suzy’s office, there are red flowering plants hanging from the windows, bright and cheerful French Impressionist posters on the walls (all Mediterranean sun and sea, with ships in the harbour), two bookcases filled with books and knick-knacks, and a deep cream-coloured carpet on the floor. The carpet looks so inviting she wants to kick off her sandals and wiggle her toes in it. But instead she stands politely in the doorway while Suzy searches for the book. Judith is star-struck by the many thick, professional, knowledge-filled books, and the two framed diplomas on the far wall. Suzy, she guesses, is only a few years older than her — maybe five, eight at the most. More the age difference of a big sister than another generation. But look, she thinks, how far ahead of me she is. I’m a student and she’s a professor.

“Here it is,” says Suzy. “Hot off the press. The publisher just sent me this. But keep it as long as you want — I’m not in any rush for it. Just let me know what you think of it when you’re done.”

“Sure,” says Judith, taking the book. “Thank you.”

Suzy stands there silently, apparently waiting for her to go.

“Bye,” says Judith.

“Bye. See you next week.”

She starts down the long, dark hallway. She feels strangely emotional, almost ecstatic, yet also wanting to cry. Something about the way Suzy stood with her back to her as she searched among the books reminds her of her mother. She had that same lightness, slightness of build. Trim, tidy, and self-contained. She and her mother were never close, but now for some reason she misses her. And this missing her is laced with guilt. She was in Israel when her mother first got sick, and no one at the time realized how serious it was. So she didn’t rush back to see her, and the next thing she knew, her mother was dead.

”How could you have known?” her father said. “None of us knew. Don’t blame yourself.”

But of course she did. She could have known. She should have known. Now she forces herself to keep walking, and to distract herself, she opens Suzy’s book and starts reading. She skims the Table of Contents, then starts on Chapter One: “Cognitive Belief Systems and Their Impact on Emotion.” It’s engagingly written and very interesting, and she gets immersed in it as she walks down the deserted hallway. She’s going at quite a good clip, frowning down at the page as she reads, when, turning a corner, she crashes right into someone coming toward her.

“I’m sorry!” she cries, leaping back.

“Well, well,” says Weick. “A student already engrossed in her schoolwork. How admirable. What are you reading?”

“A book,” says Judith, immediately feeling foolish. But she doesn’t want to share Suzy’s book with him (even its title), as if it were something secret or private, like an intimate gift.

“Yes, but which one?” asks Weick, and before Judith knows what’s happening, he reaches out and snatches away the book. She stands there empty-handed, feeling naked somehow, while he peers at the cover and then leafs through the pages. He’s reading the words she was just reading, and she feels almost like he is leafing through her. “It’s on cognitive therapy,” she says lamely.

“So I see,” he says, still reading. Then he thrusts the book back at her, and contemplates her with open curiosity. She feels herself blush and looks down. He says, “You’re here rather late for the first day of class. I thought everyone buggered off as soon as they possibly could. You must be a keener.”

“I was talking to someone,” she says uncomfortably.

“Were you now?” Weick cranes his head theatrically in all directions, looking around the empty hallway. Judith notices for the first time that it’s very ill-lit. Ill-lit, she thinks, and illicit. Just one letter different (c). “I don’t see anyone here,” Weick says, bringing his face quite close to hers, his breath smelling of liquor. She wants to pull away, but can’t. She’s frozen. But she manages to choke out a sentence: “I was talking to Suzy.”

“I see,” he says, drawing back. As if Suzy’s name were a magic charm that brought instant safety, like a cross held up to the devil. “Is she still in her office?”

“Probably. I just left her a minute ago,” says Judith, comforted by the thought of Suzy still relatively nearby. Maybe just a shout away.

“Oh, good, I have something to ask her.” Now Weick squints at Judith. “You’re in one of my classes, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’m in ‘Knowledge and Values.’”

“That’s right, I thought you looked familiar. What’s your name again?”

“Judith Gallanter.”

“Oh, yes. Teenagers in Conflict, wasn’t that you?”

Judith smiles in spite of herself. She’s surprised he was even listening during the student go-around and flattered he remembered her. But also it’s comical the way he said “Teenagers in Conflict.” Like a headline from one of those sensationalist tabloids: Man Beats Wife To Death With Boiled Cauliflower.

“Yes,” she says, “that’s me.”

Weick’s eyes narrow. “Very interesting. I must hear more about that sometime. Well, nice ‘running into’ you, Judith. See you in class.”

“Sure.” She turns and watches his back as he strides toward Suzy’s office.

In the parking lot, Judith sees Cindy carrying a wobbling armful of books toward a green van. She hurries over and helps her unload them onto the back seat, already cluttered with a carseat, baby toys, and a huge bag of diapers. Cindy’s been in the library since Suzy’s class ended, and she shows Judith all the books she’s signed out, offering to pass them on to her when she’s finished with them. Judith thanks her and shows her Suzy’s book, making the same offer. Then Judith tells Cindy about her little run-in with Weick. Cindy snickers, rolling her eyes.

“Typical,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s just say …” Cindy says hesitantly, “he has a reputation for getting a little too friendly with some of his female students.”

“Really?! How do you know this?”

Cindy shrugs. “You’re from Toronto, but I live here. In a place the size of Dunhill, word gets around. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. He had this very nice wife, apparently. A social worker at the school board, but she left him for someone else — five, maybe six years ago. It all started then. But don’t tell anyone I told you.”

“Of course not. I would never.”

Cindy nods. Then she says, “Be careful, Judith. He’s not just a teacher; he’s also the Director of the school.”

“I know,” Judith says glumly. Then she brightens up a bit. “Well, at least I have just this one course with him. After that I’ll hardly have to see him.”

“I hope you’re right. Anyway, I gotta go. I have to get Mikey by five.”

“Right. Of course. Thanks, Cindy.”

“No problem. See you next week.”

Cindy climbs into her van and drives off, and as soon as she’s out of sight, Judith lifts Suzy’s book to her face and smells it. She loves the smell of new books, and this one is fresh from the publishing house, its binding not yet cracked. Deeply she inhales this book, as if, like a dog sniffing a human, she can determine from this alone whether or not it is good. This book, after sitting for a week on Suzy’s desk, smells like her: slightly perfumed with a musk-type scent and at the same time academic. A musky-musty smell, she thinks, and gives the book a kiss.

— 5 —

The next morning she goes food shopping and makes tuna salad and canned tomato soup for lunch. Then she does laundry and goes to the University of Toronto Library, just a seven-minute drive from her house. To her delight there’s an inter-university agreement allowing her to use it. Still, hunting down the readings she needs for school makes for a long and tedious afternoon. Eventually she finds and photocopies fifteen journal articles and four book chapters, over two hundred pages in all. She gets home gratified to have almost all the readings she needs, but totally exhausted. She has another bowl of soup, lies down for a brief rest, instantly falls asleep, and at eight-thirty gets up to meet Bobby at the restaurant near his office for a bite. Afterwards they stop by a jazz club and catch the second set of a trio from New Orleans.

The next day, Wednesday, she starts reading her stack of photocopied articles. Or anyway, she tries. It’s harder now to concentrate on studying than when she did her B.S.W. She keeps catching herself rereading a sentence for the third or fourth time and still not absorbing what it means. On Thursday, though, it goes much better. Her mind is clearer, and by five-thirty she’s finished the six most important readings — the two required ones for each course — and treats herself to pizza for supper. Bobby’s working late tonight, same as every Thursday, so she spends the evening watching Seinfeld and catching up on email. Tonight she has eight messages waiting from friends in Israel, and she answers them all, cutting and pasting certain general paragraphs — like the one about her first day of school — but for the rest of each email, writing back long, personalized, detailed letters.

Then while she gets ready for bed, she pictures each of these friends reading the letter she just sent. The clock says it’s five after ten now, so back home in Israel it’s about five in the morning, and everyone is still sleeping. But in a couple of hours they’ll all be awake, and soon afterwards they’ll check their email and find her letter. In Israel it will be Friday morning, and her words will be mixed in with their busy preparations for Shabbat, like the sweet raisins in a chalah. She knows the exact take-out place on Bethlehem Road where in a few hours they’ll all buy their hummus, carrot salad, and stuffed vine leaves, and also the hot side dishes for Friday night dinner that they don’t have time to make: spicy roast potatoes, ratatouille, fragrant rice with currants. Afterwards, they’ll go next door to the bald guy’s bakery and buy their chalah, rugelach, and cream cakes. While doing their shopping, her friends will all bump into each other, and briefly chat and laugh and wish one another “Shabbat shalom” before rushing off to the next errand. Later in the day, around one-thirty or two, just before the stores close, husbands, at their wives’ bidding, will run out for some final purchases: flowers, more wine, or extra take-out side dishes and desserts to plump up the meal for last-minute unexpected guests. There will be frantic house-cleaning and cooking and pressing of clothes. It’s in the midst of all this that they will receive and read her emails, and in that way she will be there together with them as they get ready for Shabbat. She goes to sleep, dreaming of Jerusalem.

The next morning it is Friday in Canada, and while studying at the kitchen table, she keeps one eye on her bubbling chicken soup. All day long she cooks and studies. That night, Bobby comes over. They light Shabbat candles, do the blessings over the wine and chalah, and leisurely eat the meal she’s prepared: chicken soup, roast chicken, salad with dressing, and sweet potatoes, and for dessert, a home-made apple cake and tea. They sing zmirot, the special songs for Friday night. Afterwards, feeling full — full of food, music, and happiness — they make love. On Shabbat morning (as always) they sleep in, eat breakfast at noon, and for the next few hours just lie around the house reading newspapers and books, playing cards or Scrabble, and snuggling in bed. It’s lazy and lovely till mid to late afternoon; then, as usual, they both start getting edgy, and quibble over nonsense, like who’s going to do the dishes. Their arguments typically are tinged with politics, such as gender roles and household labour, and sometimes this escalates into a big fight. Today, though, they make up by making love. Sex being their favourite peace-pipe.

Afterwards Judith says, “Too bad Arafat and Sharon can’t solve their problems, as we do, by just getting into bed together and fucking.”

“What a nauseating image,” says Bobby. “Though they do, on a regular basis, fuck each other over. Or up. Or around.”

On Sunday morning (as always) they get up around nine, shower, eat, and go straight to work — Bobby at his office, Judith at her home — just as if they lived in Israel, where Sunday is a regular workday. On Sunday night they each sleep alone at home. Then on Monday the work week starts all over again, with Judith in her car at 8:00 a.m., driving to Dunhill.

This same week repeats itself over and over: it is the routine of her new life as an M.S.W. student, and she enters more quickly and easily than she anticipated into its rhythm. Or as her father would say, “into the shvung.” Shvung conjuring a little girl on a swing being pushed from behind by her father, back and forth, back and forth. There’s something deeply satisfying about this rhythm of her new life — something comforting about having an external schedule, as steady and predictable as a metronome, after the year she’s just been through. A year of broken rhythms, syncopations, and skipped beats. Her father’s heart was skipping beats, the doctors discovered. In addition to his malignant tumour, there was an irregular beating of his heart, and they diagnosed him with arrhythmia. That whole year was arrhythmic.

So it reassures her now, grounds her, to have to be at school every Monday morning at nine o’clock for Weick’s lecture, and to know that, boring as it is, she can count on this happening at the same time, and the same place, week after week after week (Weick after Weick after Weick). It’s gratifying, too, knowing she is expected there, and if she doesn’t show up, there are people who will notice and miss her and wonder where she is. On each of the past two Monday mornings, whenever she walked into Weick’s class, she’s been greeted with smiles and waves and “Hi, Judith”s by Cindy, Pam, and Aliza, her new little gang. They’ve pointed to the chair they saved for her (like all the others at Dunhill, a peculiar chair, with an armrest growing out of it on the right — like a tumour, she thinks every time she sits). Or the one time Cindy, Pam, and Aliza all got to class too late to save her a seat, they were sitting on the bench at the back when she arrived and moved their bums over to make room for her. They’re all in the Practice stream of the M.S.W., and therefore in all the same courses. They sit in class together, take their breaks together, and go out together for lunch. They have also, at Aliza’s initiative — inspired, she said, by her grandfather, a Communist and union leader — formed a collective to save themselves both time and labour. Each of them finds and photocopies just one-quarter of the readings, then makes copies for everyone else.

“Now we’re not just a social support system,” Pam says on the third Monday of the term. They’re sitting in the cafeteria, exchanging for the second time the articles they’ve photocopied for each other. “We’re an economic system, too.”

Judith looks at her admiringly. Pam is smart in areas she isn’t, like economics and politics. Aliza is smart, too, but in a different way. Judith always thinks of the two of them together, “Pamanaliza,” because they’re inseparable, and also because they stand out at this school for having done interesting things with their lives so far — not just coming to the M.S.W. straight from a B.S.W. or a social work job, like most of the other students. Until three years ago, when one of Aliza’s knees went bad and she had to quit, she danced in a jazz troupe. Aliza looks like a dancer: slender and lithe, delicate yet dramatic, with sleek long black hair and skin as white as paper. Pam, on the other hand, is plain: a bushy-haired redhead with thick lips and eyelids who never wears make-up. She came to social work with a first-class honours degree in political science and economics, and also an impressive-sounding part-time job at the CBC.

Now Judith looks to her left at Cindy, seated in profile at the square table, twisting her hair. There’s nothing particularly interesting or impressive about Cindy. She’s a blonde, good-hearted, small-town girl who has lived all her life in Dunhill, and is clearly not as bright or sophisticated as the other three of them: all verbal, intense Torontonians, and Jewish at least to some degree. Aliza, like Judith, has two Jewish parents, but Pam is only one-quarter Jewish — through her mother’s father — and she also went at one point to a Catholic girls’ school, so she isn’t truly Jewish. But still she feels Jewish to Judith. Cindy continues to daydream and twist her hair, and Judith thinks: A heart of gold this person has. Definitely a person of the heart rather than the mind — someone wonderfully kind and caring — and the first one Judith calls whenever she has a question about homework.

There is silence around the table now: Aliza is sipping coffee, and Cindy and Judith are just waiting while Pam, scribbling on a napkin, does the math on what they owe each other. What we owe each other, thinks Judith, staring out the window at the rain. Until they started divvying up the articles a few minutes ago, they’d been having a discussion, prompted by a comment someone made in Greg’s class, about “privilege” and oppression: What constitutes real privilege or oppression, and what are the relative weights of different types of oppression? For example, this person asked, is it “worse” to be black than gay? Is it worse to be poor than disabled? Obviously, as Greg was quick to point out, one can be more than one thing — one can be poor, disabled, and gay — and anyway there shouldn’t be a “hierarchy of oppressions.” But it seems to Judith there probably is a hierarchy of oppressions, and a hierarchy of privilege, too.

Watching the rain lash against the windows now, she feels peaceful and contented. She can hardly believe it’s only been three weeks since school began — three weeks ago she didn’t even know any of these people. Yet now they’ve become, for this year at school at least, this year in galut, her home base, almost a substitute family. It is strange in one way, but in another way marvellous. Miraculous, even. All she did was enroll in the Dunhill School of Social Work, and now, presto! she has a life. An instant life: just add water and stir. People to be with. Things to do. A whole world she’s a part of. Temporarily, of course. This is not her real life; that is in Israel. But still, this is amazing. It’s as if she came home one day and found on her doorstep a big gift-wrapped box with a huge gold bow on the top.

Judith speaks, and her voice, raspy with emotion, breaks the silence. “I don’t know about being ‘privileged,’” she says to her gang. “But I feel very, very lucky.”

Ten minutes later, after swapping bills and coins and putting on their coats, they hurry in two pairs across the street, heads down against the rain, dodging the puddles and the racing river of mud near the curb. Aliza stops to prance in it joyfully in her tall red boots while Cindy and Judith reach the other side of the street, and as they run toward FRANK, Cindy mutters, “I wish we could just go home now.”

“Well, at least it’s Suzy and not Weick,” Judith answers.

Cindy doesn’t say anything. Judith has the impression now, and not for the first time, that Cindy is not as big a fan of Suzy as she is. Maybe she’s even a bit jealous that Judith likes Suzy so much. Together they run up the stairs, duck into the building, and stand there panting, waiting for the others. Aliza and Pam soon follow.

“You’re out of your mind,” Pam’s saying to Aliza, and Aliza is laughing, showing perfect white teeth, her long hair dripping. “You’re nuts, I mean it.”

The elevator comes and they ride to the fourth floor. “Nuts,” says Pam, as they walk into Suzy’s class.

Suzy sees them and smiles. Judith feels instantly happy and at the same time an inner ache. A part of her has been waiting all week for this class. But not, in fact, for this class; for Suzy. She has been wanting to see Suzy again.

Everyone takes a seat, Suzy begins to speak, and Judith feels, as she always does in her class, a fine, almost invisible thread, like a spider’s, stretching between them. Suzy looks at her often when she lectures, more so than at anyone else, and whenever she asks the class a question, she turns first toward her, as if appealing to her silently in some way. It’s as if Judith, on Suzy’s compass, is north, and the needle keeps flying there. Sometimes Judith answers Suzy’s questions (almost always correctly), but lately she’s started looking down or away, not wanting to be seen by her classmates as a suck. Either way, this class feels like a dialogue between her and Suzy, with everyone else mere spectators. She’s asked herself if she was just imagining all this, but apparently it’s noticeable also to others.

“Teacher’s pet,” Cindy said to her on the second Monday of school, during the break in Suzy’s class. They were walking to the cafeteria, with Pam and Aliza not far behind. Suzy had just been teaching them about paralinguistics, a form of nonverbal behaviour that includes, among other things, people’s tone of voice, and can tell you a lot about how a person really feels. So before answering, Judith replayed Cindy’s comment in her head, listening for envy or meanness in her paralinguistics, but there didn’t seem to be any. It sounded like Cindy was just saying what she saw.

“No, I’m not,” said Judith. But she blushed and felt gratified. She wanted Suzy to like her best of all. She got her wish, too: at the end of that class, she lingered behind to ask Suzy a question, and Suzy invited her to once again walk back with her to her office. Then this became something of a tradition between them, every week after class walking together down that dingy serpentine corridor (which each time made Judith think, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”), to the sounds of Suzy’s heels click-click-clicking, and their voices echoing eerily off the dismal walls, and Suzy’s tinkly laugh. That day in Suzy’s office, they were standing under the ferns near her desk, and Judith, who had never seen mistletoe, wondered if this was mistletoe, and if so, isn’t that what people kiss under? They talked for almost an hour about all sorts of things. Judith discovered to her delight that Suzy, like her, was religious. Christian, of course, not Jewish, but that didn’t matter. In many ways, she thought, religious people from two different faiths have more in common than a religious and secular person from the same one. Religious people understand each other: they can talk about faith, holiness, and God — they can use the “G word”! — without apology. Without having to be embarrassed or ashamed of that love. Just as Judith isn’t embarrassed or ashamed of her growing affection for Suzy. They also talked that day about Judith’s work in Israel with Jewish and Arab kids, and about some of the teachers at Dunhill. Suzy was professional enough not to say anything against anyone. But Judith could tell from her body language — her kinesics, as Suzy had taught them — which people Suzy did or didn’t like. All it took was a little shrug of her petite right shoulder, naked that day in a sleeveless yellow blouse, or a roll of her expressive eyes. It was quickly obvious Suzy couldn’t stand Marie Green, the former Director of the school whom Judith had never met. Judith felt privileged to be let into what Suzy truly felt. To be a trusted insider.

Now Suzy says to the class, “Many people, maybe even most people, are afraid of their feelings. But there is no reason to be, because there’s no such thing as a wrong feeling. I mean it. Some of you are looking at me like you don’t believe me. Okay, then — give me an example of a feeling that’s ‘wrong.’”

A few hands fly up. Suzy points at Martin, whose family lives in Ethiopia. “Anger,” he says.

Suzy nods and points again. “Hate,” says Genya.

“Fear,” says someone else.

“Right,” says Suzy. “These are all unpleasant feelings — negative emotions, if you will. But they are also perfectly normal, and they are, after all, just feelings, part of being human. We need to learn how to accept these emotions in ourselves and in our clients. Otherwise, they’ll feel we are judging them and they won’t be able to open up to us. They’ll feel we are not accepting them for who they are. And they’ll be right.”

It’s true, thinks Judith.

Suzy is writing on the blackboard now, in a flowing, feminine script:

UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD

“We’ll discuss this concept more in a little while,” she says, turning back toward the class, still holding the chalk in her right hand as she gestures. “But this is what we have to strive for. To truly accept our clients in spite of the things about them we don’t like, whether these are emotions or behaviours. This is probably the hardest thing you’ll ever have to learn. But it’s also absolutely necessary for working effectively with clients.”

Suzy has brought a guest with her today, an acting student from Dunhill’s Theatre Arts department. Judith gazes at the square-faced woman sitting sullenly at the front table: she reminds her of a picture she once saw of a kapo. That’s one tough broad, she thinks. Suzy is explaining to the class that soon one of them will get to role-play a social worker working with a “resistant” client — a great opportunity to practise all the interviewing skills they’ve learned in this class, including Unconditional Positive Regard. She scans the room and selects Margie, a skinny redhead from Halifax, to take the hot seat. Margie sits nervously across the table from her “client.” Cordelia is a crack addict on welfare who, according to Suzy, has just had her two kids taken away, a three-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy, because a week ago she left them alone in the house for a whole weekend, without any food, so she could go off on a holiday with her crack-pusher boyfriend. During Cordelia’s absence, the two-year-old, Tommy, fell down the basement stairs and is now in hospital with a severe concussion and possibly permanent brain damage. Cordelia hasn’t visited him even once and appears completely unconcerned about him. She also, on her return home from that weekend, hit her three-year-old daughter Angela repeatedly, leaving marks and bruises, for “not taking care of her brother,” and for getting her in trouble with the authorities.

Margie looks anxious. She approaches Cordelia gingerly, trying in a soft timid voice three friendly and empathic openers, such as, “It must be awfully hard having your kids taken away from you,” but each time Cordelia just slaps her down. After her fourth attempt, to which Cordelia responds, “Why don’t you just go fuck yourself?,” Margie looks helpless and pale, her freckles standing out like so many tiny failures, as she tries to come up with what to say next. A long silence is finally broken by the click-click-clicking of Suzy’s heels as she goes and stands beside Margie.

“At this moment,” Suzy asks her, “how do you feel about this client?”

Margie looks confused by the question. She glances at Cordelia as if afraid to answer in front of her. Then she looks away and shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says.

“You don’t much like her right now, do you?”

Margie laughs and shakes her head. “No.”

“Of course you don’t,” says Suzy. “She frightens you. She angers and repulses you, and she makes you feel incompetent. Right now you feel totally alienated from her and I’ll bet you can’t think of one single thing about her you like or respect. Am I right?”

Margie looks sheepish. “Pretty much,” she says. “Am I really that transparent?”

Suzy laughs that charming laugh of hers. “No,” she says. “That’s what most people would feel in this situation.”

But Judith can see Margie is a bit spooked.

“Now I’m going to give this a try,” says Suzy. “Watch what happens when you make use of Unconditional Positive Regard. Thanks, Margie.” Margie stands, looking relieved her turn is over, and Suzy replaces her in the hot seat facing Cordelia, who is now staring at Suzy as blankly and impassively as she stared at Margie. But Suzy doesn’t seem fazed by it: she’s smiling at her kindly, encouragingly.

Judith starts taking notes — “smile encouragingly at client.” But soon the pen is forgotten, and she watches enthralled as Suzy once again works her magic. And magic it seems to be. Cordelia’s face softens. Then she starts pouring out her heart to Suzy about how hard it was being a young mother, only sixteen when the first baby was born, alone all day and all night with that baby, and then there were two of them, two crying babies, and they just cried and cried all the time, no matter what she did. They demanded and demanded, and there was nothing left for her, not five minutes for herself, to watch TV or just sit and have a smoke. If one of them was finally sleeping, the other one was still awake, crying, wanting her, needing her, and she couldn’t stand it anymore, she had to have a break, she had to have something for her for a change, even if it was only a weekend, one weekend away in three and a half years. Cordelia is wiping tears from her face with the palms of her hands. This woman sitting across the table from Suzy is now a fully human person. A pained, mixed-up, maybe even messed-up person, but a real person all the same. Suzy has accomplished this — she has gotten to Cordelia’s “story” — in under ten minutes.

Suzy turns away from Cordelia and faces the class. “This,” she says, “is the power of Unconditional Positive Regard,” and dismisses them, earlier than usual, for their break.

Judith files out slowly with the others. Many of the students around her are talking excitedly about what just happened and a few are laughing. But everyone gives Cordelia a wide berth, even though they know intellectually she is just an actor. Only one student, Lola, goes up to her and starts a conversation. On her way past Suzy, Judith says, “That was amazing.”

“Thanks,” says Suzy. Then she adds, “Judith, can you stay behind after class today? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Sure,” says Judith. But walking to the cafeteria, she feels worried. Has she done something wrong? Was there a problem with the logs she handed in last week? Has she perhaps offended Suzy? Throughout the entire fifteen-minute break, while Cindy, Pam, and Aliza talk, Judith sits silently at the square table, nursing a coffee and fretting. Finally she tells them what Suzy said.

“Maybe it’s something good,” says Cindy.

“Yeah,” says Aliza. “You can see how much she likes you. Why do you assume it’s something negative?”

“You’re right,” says Judith, surprised, and brightens. “It’s probably not.”

But just the same, the second half of the class passes interminably. They are still on the topic of Unconditional Positive Regard — or as Judith has now acronymed it in her mind, UPR, or “upper.” Suzy has embarked on a long lecture about it, telling them among other things that this is “the sine qua non of any good counselling relationship,” and that with a little effort it is always possible to find the place in oneself that is non-judgmental, that accepts each client as a valid and valuable human being, regardless of what they may have done during their lives.

“It’s like, ‘Hate the sin, but love the sinner,’” Suzy says cheerfully. Sinner? thinks Judith. We don’t have sinners in Judaism. Or even sin. The word translated into English as sin — chet, in Hebrew — just means an error. We have people who get off track, people who make mistakes. But in Judaism there is no original sin — or even any unoriginal kind. Still, in her stomach now, there’s a sick, dread-filled feeling about her upcoming meeting with Suzy, as though Judaism is wrong and there is such a thing as sin, and she has committed one. Eventually 3:30 rolls around. She waits impatiently as Suzy deals with a long line of students, and after twenty-five minutes, the two of them are alone at last. Judith compliments Suzy again on her interview with Cordelia.

“Thanks,” Suzy says. “You’ll be able to do that too, one day, with some practice. It’s incredible, the power of Unconditional Positive Regard.” Then she asks Judith if she knows what SWAK is.

“I think so,” says Judith. SWAK is short for Sealed With A Kiss: what she and her friends in high school wrote on the backs of birthday card envelopes after they’d licked them shut, with the letters SWAK inside a picture of two lips. But as Suzy continues to look at her eagerly, she understands it must also mean something else. Then she remembers SWAK with a “C” is the acronym for a committee at the school. The most important one. The Social Work Anti-oppression Committee, which coordinates all the school’s anti-oppression activities, publishes an evaluation every spring of each professor’s handling of anti-oppression issues in their classes, and is always co-chaired by a faculty member and a student.

“What I wanted to talk to you about,” says Suzy, “is being my co-chair for the coming year. The peace work you’ve done in Israel is very impressive, and also very relevant to SWAC — encouraging people to work across difference, etcetera. Plus, I think you’d be terrific. If you’re interested, that is.”

Judith nearly laughs with relief. She feels flattered, too: this is a great honour, especially for a first-year student.

“Of course!” she says. “I’d love to.”

“That’s great,” says Suzy, looking pleased. “It’ll be a lot of fun doing this together. Our first meeting is on October 17. Is that okay for you?”

“It’s fine.”

“Good. What are you doing now? If you’re free, we could go over a few things. I have an orientation package for you in my office.”

“Sure. No problem.” Judith’s cheeks are burning hot, and she feels she can’t control her face.

“Great. Let me just stop by the main office for a second — I have to pick something up. Then we can get started.”

They walk down the hall to the main office. But just outside the door, Suzy gets stopped by a tall, gaunt woman. Suzy excuses herself from Judith, and starts talking with this woman in a low voice. Judith goes partway down the hall and waits near the bulletin board, feeling useless and not sure what to do with herself. There’s no one else in the hallway to talk to, and nothing to read on the bulletin board she hasn’t already read. So, for lack of anything else to do, she watches Suzy and the tall, gaunt woman. They’re too far away for her to hear what they’re saying, so she practises “observing their nonverbals,” as Suzy called it in class last week. She notices how intensely Suzy is talking, leaning forward with her face very close to the other woman’s, and also putting a hand on her arm, on the pale green sleeve of an exquisite silk jacket. Suzy smiles and the woman smiles back. They say things to each other, and both of them laugh. Clearly a warm and friendly relationship, thinks Judith. Suzy was right: “It’s astonishing how much you can learn without hearing a single word.” A moment later they draw slightly apart, and Suzy starts looking around the hallway.

“Judith,” she calls when she spots her, and beckons. Judith trots over, self-conscious under the gaze of the two older women. “I’d like you to meet someone. This is Marie Green, the former Director of the School, who has just returned from research leave in China. Judith,” Suzy says to Marie, “has just agreed to be my co-chair this year on SWAC.”

“Congratulations!” says Marie Green, vigorously shaking Suzy’s hand. “Good for you!”

Judith, startled, is already muttering “Thank you” when she realizes with a jolt that this is Marie Green — the same one Suzy dislikes, who Suzy has rolled her eyes about several times during their after-class chats in her office. But no — I must have misunderstood something. Misread what I saw. Suzy’s not a phony. She and Suzy walk together to Suzy’s office. On the way, Suzy explains that the committee meets every second Thursday night at seven o’clock — sometimes, if need be, slightly more often — and is composed of students, faculty, and community people. They organize one major event per year: Anti-oppression Day, the core of which is usually a lecture by a prominent guest speaker — hopefully a star whose name will draw a good turnout — and constellations of other events surrounding that star. Suzy suggests, if it’s convenient for Judith, that they get together before each meeting at around five or six, perhaps over an early supper, to review the agenda. The thought of supper alone with Suzy every second Thursday causes Judith’s stomach to somersault with excitement, and not trusting herself to speak, she just nods in agreement. They reach Suzy’s office and sit at her desk side by side for a half-hour going over some of the background and basic information about SWAC. Then Suzy takes from one of the bookshelves a fat binder containing all of last year’s minutes, and hands it to Judith to read at home. When they’re standing by the door, Suzy asks brightly, “So we’re all set, then?”

“Yes,” says Judith.

Suzy beams at her. “Great!” she says. Then she reaches out her hand, and shakes Judith’s. Half-mockingly, but also half-seriously — ceremoniously, even. “Welcome to SWAC.”

“Thanks,” says Judith, their hands still clasped. Last week Suzy taught them about contracting with clients in social work, and it feels now like she and Suzy have just formalized an important and solemn contract. Or even more than that: like hands and lips are in a way interchangeable, and this contract is being Sealed With A Kiss.

Driving off the campus and through downtown Dunhill, Judith is grinning from ear to ear. “Me!” she crows to herself. “She picked me out of everyone!”

Turning onto the highway toward Toronto, she can see herself sitting with Suzy in Le Petit Café, the mini-cafeteria at Dunhill — not the main, big cafeteria in FRANK, but the smaller, quieter, less crowded one a few buildings over, where you go if you want to be able to hear the other person and have a real conversation. They’ll sit at one of the small, round aqua-and-pink tables, like knightesses at the Round Table, while they work together, tête-à-tête, their dirty dishes from onion soup, salad, or pizza pushed to one side. After their work is done, and the agenda for that night’s meeting all worked out, there will still be a half-hour or even more till the meeting begins. So they’ll linger over coffee and talk about more personal things. Suzy will confide in her about Natalie, and about the rest of her family, too; maybe Judith will confide in her about her problems with Bobby. It won’t take long, she’s sure, just a few of these dinners, before they’re talking intimately and become real friends.

The traffic moves slowly, but Judith doesn’t mind — she’s happily daydreaming about her dinners with Suzy. Eventually, on her right, the huge Brick warehouse appears, telling her she’s already halfway to Toronto. Suddenly she feels tired and her elation starts to fade. She reflects now more soberly on how much work the SWAC committee will entail. Probably more than the “few hours a week” Suzy mentioned — committees usually do. And what exactly will be expected of her as co-chair? Suzy wasn’t very specific. Though she did say that one reason she picked Judith was that she had a strong sense of social justice. It’s true, she thinks. But it’s funny, because she has no idea where she got this from. Bobby’s asked her about this: “Why do you burn like this over social and political issues? Why does injustice bother you so much?” She’s never had an answer for him. No terrible injustice or “oppression” has ever personally happened to her. But now, driving past farms, silos, white fences, and grazing horses, she remembers her beloved grandparents, Bubba and Zayda, and the stories they told her when she was little about when they first came to Canada from Russia, fleeing the pogroms. And it seems to her that maybe all of that is still in her — in her blood or her heart, in a place so deep she never even knew it was there. The place of stories buried in the blood. She can hear the hoofbeats of the Cossacks as they ride into her grandmother’s shtetl, and sees them sitting high on their horses as they beat, spear, and murder Jews. Then they pillage, loot, and set fire to everything, and through it all they’re laughing their drunken laughs. As they ride off, they’re singing boisterous carefree songs, leaving behind them the lingering stench of smoke, blood, sweat, vodka, dying bodies, destruction, and fear. Mingling with this smell, there are sounds: the wailing of women and children, dogs barking, and the moans of the wounded. Her heart is pounding now. We need a safe place, she thinks. That’s what people need — especially the vulnerable, persecuted, and powerless. She glances around her with a hunted look. That’s what SWAC is for. To be a safe haven. An island of justice. A place to stand up against oppression in every form.

— 6 —

At home, the house is dark and cold. Soon it will be winter, she thinks. She raises the thermostat and walks through the darkness to her computer. This is always her priority and first point of contact when she comes home from school: her emails from Israel. She works on her computer in the dark, liking the shiny square screen surrounded by the night. This evening there are the usual dozen messages from the Israeli listservs she’s on. There are two peace groups — at war with each other, of course — as well as a feminist social action forum, a left-wing chat room, and an organization that promotes civil rights and pluralism in Israel. But tonight she also has three personal letters. It will be a good evening, she thinks — an evening spent connected to people who love her and whom she loves. She will be “virtually” in Jerusalem.

But she doesn’t open her little treasure trove right away. She wants to postpone these moments of love and comfort. Like postponing in sex so you can enjoy not just the act itself, but also the pleasure of anticipating it. She goes into the kitchen and drinks a cup of cocoa. Then she returns to the computer and studies her inbox. Of the three emails from friends, she decides to read Rina’s first. Rina’s letter opens by saying how delighted she is that Judith is enjoying Dunhill, and she doesn’t doubt for a moment that she’ll succeed splendidly in grad school. Judith, reading this, is gratified. Rina has always had this iron confidence in her — it’s one of the bonds of their friendship. Then Rina writes about her new job teaching Shakespeare at the university, about Michel’s job (there are cutbacks at the hospital now, but so far he hasn’t been affected), and about their three teenagers: Gidi, Uri, and Yael. The oldest, their son Gidi, is going into the army in two months, and the twins, a boy and a girl, will go a year and a half later. Then Rina writes:

Apart from “the situation” — if that isn’t an oxymoron, because of course there is nothing that is “apart from the situation” — we are okay. We don’t go out much, though. With suicide bombings now almost weekly in Jerusalem, it’s safer to just stay home, huddled with those you love. Many restaurants now offer home delivery: that’s the only way they keep from going bankrupt. You can order in not just pizza and Chinese food, but everything. The main thing now is not to go out. Downtown is still the worst place, but actually we don’t go anywhere we don’t absolutely have to. My daily routine, my life, is remarkably reduced now. It’s just from home to work, and then back home again, except for essential errands like buying food.

Judith can picture Rina and Michel and their kids — all three teenagers with red hair and freckles — pacing like caged leopards around their claustrophobically small apartment, with Rina’s shrill voice yelling at the kids five times a day for leaving their stuff in a mess all over the house or for playing their music too loud, and Michel withdrawing more and more into his study. Rina writes that last Shabbat, at the end of a tense afternoon, Gidi, Uri, and Yael, in a rare united front, confronted her and Michel.

“You can’t keep telling us not to go out,” they said. “We’re not babies anymore — two months from now Gidi’s going into the army. And all our friends are allowed to go out. There’s a concert downtown tonight — Mashina’s performing and everyone’s going, and we want to go, too. Just because you guys want to stay cooped up at home doesn’t mean we also have to. If you want to bury yourselves alive, go ahead. But we’re young …”

Better buried alive than buried dead, I thought, but I stopped that before it came out of my mouth. Because I wasn’t sure if it was even true. What sort of a life, I asked myself, am I advising my children to live? What am I really teaching them — to live lives so full of fear they just hide in their holes all the time like little mice? That would be a victory for the terrorists, if anything would.

So in the end, with all my doubts and hesitations I’m no better than Hamlet. Like him, I’m weak. I caved. I gave in. I let them go to that club downtown with their friends. I told myself: Life, youth, hope must triumph over fear. Don’t you agree, Judith? I hope — I think — I’m right.

Judith frowns. She isn’t sure. On the one hand, she is full of admiration for Rina. She’s braver than I am, she thinks. But at the same time she’s appalled: How could you have let them go? How would you ever live with yourself if something happened to them? Still frowning, she reads the end of Rina’s letter:

Anyway, letting them go to the concert had a side benefit: it gave me and Michel the house to ourselves for the first time in months. And we had the most wonderful sex — delicious, drawn-out, and … noisy! Something amazing …

Judith laughs. What a crazy country. What a crazy world.

The next email is from Yonina. The exhibit of her paintings at the Artists’ House closed yesterday. It was quite well received, she writes. A few days after the opening there was a good review in the weekend supplement of Yediot. And given “the situation,” she supposes she should be grateful any people at all left their homes to come see her exhibit. Anyway, she writes, this will likely be her last exhibit for some time. The arts grants have all been cut — to free up money for more guns, bombs, and missiles, no doubt — so pretty soon she’ll have to find a job, or jobs (probably some combination of waitressing and teaching art to kids like she did a year ago). So, Yonina concludes her letter, so much for painting for a while.

Reading this, Judith feels a pang. She loves Yonina’s pictures. They are fabulous and vivid, with lots of bright blues and greens, and they’re full of parrots and other birds in jungle scenes. Her paintings seem simple, but in fact are subtle, nuanced, multi-layered, and complex. So much for painting for a while — and Judith pictures a parrot being shot down by a cannon.

With a deep sigh, Judith stands and arches her back. Then she circles the room a few times before returning, like a homing pigeon, to the dining room table and her third email. She’s saved Bruria’s letter for the end. The best for the last. She is in much more frequent contact with Bruria than with any other friend: they write each other twice or three times a week. So Bruria’s letters have a special quality of immediacy and continuity. Judith opens her letters almost like a fan of a soap opera eager for the next installment. What is the latest development in the ever-unfolding saga of Bruria’s life, with all its different subplots: marital, familial, social, professional, and political? But none of Bruria’s previous emails could have prepared her for the one she opens now. Bruria’s son Noah, Noah with the heart-shaped lips and golden curls, is in prison for refusing to continue doing military service in the occupied territories. He’s been there for the past three days, since just after Bruria last wrote. This has all happened very quickly. Today’s letter, astounding for someone as meticulous about language as Bruria, is full of typos, spelling mistakes, and half-finished sentences. It’s hysterical and breathless, and if a letter could be one great long sob, this one is. Or perhaps, rather, it’s a series of broken screams, like shvarim, the broken blasts of the shofar at the end of Yom Kippur. Bruria writes she is proud of Noah — she knows that what he’s doing is morally right. But she is also terrified for him. He’s been in solitary confinement for three days, and she and Pinchas haven’t been allowed to see him. She doesn’t know if he’s been given food or water. She’s mad with worry that he’s losing weight, or that he’s very weak or sick and not being cared for, maybe even being mistreated by the prison staff. She and Pinchas spoke today with the best lawyer in Israel for these sorts of cases, but he is only willing to take on Noah as a client if they agree to a group lawsuit with two other boys in the same situation. Bruria and Pinchas aren’t sure about this, and are trying to figure out what’s best for Noah. They have only twenty-four hours to decide. “Judith, I’m so scared. Solitary confinement! Please pray for our boy. Pray for my baby.”

Judith would like to pray, but right now she can’t. All she can do is curl up on the couch, breathing deeply. This is too much pain for her to bear. It is so naked, coming at her from people she loves. This is how it is whenever she reconnects, even for an hour, with Israel: she feels everything people there feel — they are her people, and whatever they feel, good or bad, she feels too. There is no boundary between her and them. She’s defenceless against this love. So now she lies curled up on the couch, breathing deeply and steadily. Trying to calm down. And after a while, lying on the couch in the darkened living room, she falls asleep.

— 7 —

Four days later, on September 27, it’s the last of the eight days of Sukkot, Judith’s favourite holiday. She’s standing under the leafy roof of a sukkah, the makeshift hut — in this case adjoining a shul — replicating the booths the Israelites lived in during their forty-year journey in the desert. Shellacked gourds, ears of purple-and-white Indian corn, pomegranates, and carobs hang from the latticed ceiling; children’s colourful drawings of men and women from the Bible adorn the rickety wooden walls; and down the middle of the sukkah, a long, thin table is spread with a vegetarian/dairy feast for the worshippers. Services aren’t quite over yet, but she’s come out early to have some time alone in the sukkah before the hordes descend for the meal. She loves its bright, cheerful decorations and dangling fall fruits, the constant rustling of the fresh-cut branches on the roof, the smell of the pine needles on the floor, and the sharp sunlight slicing into the sukkah through the slats in the walls. But she also loves being in a sukkah because it exemplifies what she experiences as the most essential human truth. That life is fleeting and fragile. This makeshift hut, thrown together out of thin planks of wood and a few boughs for a roof, is a structure a wolf could huff and puff and blow right down. Nothing, she thinks, can truly protect you. Other than God, if you believe in Her. Which I probably don’t.

People start wandering in. They’re wearing winter coats — not like in Israel, where people in sukkahs sometimes sport sandals and shorts. Now there’s a flood of people into the sukkah in one huge wave, noisy and exuberant, with many little children running underfoot. Soon Rabbi Elaine in her orange-and-pink tallis recites the blessing over the bread. Then Judith piles her plate high with lasagna, salad, tabouli, babaganouj, marinated vegetables, and a brownie, carefully balancing an orange drink on the edge. She is just stabbing a fork into the lasagna when someone shouts her name and touches her on the arm, nearly toppling the whole plate. She rights it just in time, but not before a slice of marinated yellow pepper and a square of purple onion slide onto her shoe. It’s Flora, her father’s old friend, whom she hasn’t seen since shortly after the shiva. Her kind, horsey face.

“Sorry,” says Flora.

“No problem.” Judith surreptitiously kicks away the pepper and onion.

Flora asks how it’s going at Dunhill. Judith says, “Fine.” Flora asks if it’s hard being back at school.

Judith smiles. “Everything’s relative. It’s easier than trying to bring peace to the Middle East.”

Flora laughs.

Judith adds, “Thanks again for helping with that application form. Without you, I wouldn’t be there now.”

“My pleasure. You know how I felt about your father.”

Judith nods automatically, but then something in Flora’s tone makes her look sharply and more closely at her. No, she thinks, actually I don’t — what do you mean exactly? But Flora is looking down at her food and her face doesn’t give anything away. For a while they eat in silence. Judith is relieved to not have to talk and eat at the same time. She’s never understood the logic of socializing over food, when good manners prohibit talking with your mouth full. Furthermore, the eating now is difficult: her marinated vegetables are as slippery as wriggling snakes. Two small boys dart between her and Flora, laughing and shouting.

“How’s the atmosphere at Dunhill?” Flora asks.

“Good. Friendly.”

“No more rallies or riots, I hope? Last year the worst incident there began as an anti-Israel demonstration. Nothing weird going on there now?”

Judith takes a sip of her orange drink. Now she understands the question about the atmosphere. “No,” she says. “There’s a strong anti-oppression movement at Dunhill, and there’s an anti-oppression committee at my school. But I’ve just been asked to co-chair it, so I don’t see any cause for concern. All that must have just been last year.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” says Flora. “I’ve thought about you numerous times, Judith, and I admit I was worried.” Judith looks at the kind, lined face. She’s touched to discover that, without her even knowing it, someone has been thinking about her, and concerned for her, all this time. “It’s only the beginning of the school year,” Flora adds. “Let’s hope things continue as well as they’ve begun.”

Judith can’t keep back a smile. Flora sounds just the way her father used to. What can you do? It’s that generation. Always anticipating something bad, always fearing the worst for the Jews. It used to drive her crazy when her father said things like this, as if he were deliberately acting gloomy and pessimistic just to put a damper on her natural hopefulness. An undertow trying to drag her down. But now she gazes tolerantly at Flora. There’s something almost quaint about her comment. Flora, like others of her circle, still lives in the past. Not in the extreme way of a teacher Judith once had, an old man who, whenever a balloon or a car tire exploded, would dive under his desk, still traumatized from the war. But something changed in that whole generation of Jews, she thinks. Even her father and Flora, who both spent the war years here in Canada. Judith feels wistful now, reminiscing about her father. And compassionate, too. She has an impulse to put her arm around Flora (Did Daddy ever put his arm around Flora? she wonders because of her strange comment), and to say, “Don’t worry, Flora, the world’s not like that anymore. Antisemitism is a thing of the past. That’s all behind us now.”

But she can’t. Because even though she first met Flora back in high school, she doesn’t actually know her well enough to put her arm around her. It might even seem condescending. Also, Judith isn’t sure it’s true that antisemitism is a thing of the past. Some people are saying it’s back, and even on the rise. But she doesn’t believe it. Sure, there’s a lot of criticism nowadays of Israel. But some of it is justified. The constant expansion of settlements, the excessive use at times of military force — these things deserve to be criticized. But antisemitism, as she pictures it, is something quite different from criticizing Israel. The mainstream Jewish community always equates the two, she thinks, but that’s because they don’t know enough, or care enough, to be critical of Israel, and they always rubber stamp whatever the Israeli government does. No, she decides, antisemitism is not a problem anymore. There’s nothing to worry about now.

But still … When in doubt, kiss — a rule she came up with when she was four and her cousin Paul, who was three and a half, cried all the time — she’d kiss him and like magic he’d stop. So now, moved by a mixture of emotions, she leans forward and lightly kisses Flora on the cheek. Flora looks surprised, and her face softens. Then she kisses Judith back and gives her a hug. They wish each other a happy holiday, and Flora leaves. Judith takes another minute to finish her lunch. She steps out from under the sukkah’s gently whispering roof, feeling well fed and well sheltered. Succoured. And sukkah’ed. Now on her nose she feels something tickle. She looks up and laughs: the first snowflake of winter.

— 8 —

It’s two and a half weeks later now, mid-October, and Judith’s classes have all continued, like streetcars, along the tracks laid down for them on the first day. Weick’s “Knowledge and Values,” for instance, travels along in the same agonizingly slow, tedious, creaking way it began, not having improved one iota since the first day. She hasn’t skipped any of his six classes, though: she’s too afraid of angering or alienating Weick, especially after Cindy’s warning. But mentally she is never there. She walks in, sits, and lets her mind travel where it will. She survives this class week after week only by not being there alone: Moshe comes to keep her company. Today as always he shows up a few minutes into Weick’s lecture, just as her mind is starting to go numb. Moshe doesn’t come to talk, to offer her conversation more stimulating than Weick’s; he comes to make love to her. This is what he is doing now. Though this time he’s doing it in an unusual way for him: slowly and very passionately, the way he did on her birthday, the one time they weren’t in a rush. He refused to hurry that day: “It’s your birthday,” he said. “Let them wait.” He had informed Koby he’d be late that day, and she called her office too, saying she’d missed the early train and would catch the next one. They lay under the tree at the bottom of the hill. Moshe had smoothed the ground for them, clearing away the pine cones, and even brought a blanket. That day she turned twenty-five.

“A special age,” she told Moshe. “Five times five: a perfect square.”

“Old enough,” he said, “to open your eyes and see what’s in front of you.” He suggested she keep her eyes open today when they made love, so they could look at each other all the way through.

It was an effort because she felt shy, even embarrassed, but she did keep them open after he entered her, and they stayed like that for a long time. They gazed at each other until she was so deep inside his eyes she wasn’t aware of anything else — it was like sliding down the hole in Alice in Wonderland, but never hitting the bottom. The love in his eyes was bottomless. Infinite. Then, unexpectedly, he thrust into her. She cried out and writhed, trying to get to the deepest place, but just when she was almost there, he pulled away. Still moaning, she opened her eyes, and he was smiling at her faintly, and his eyes were wet brownness, like rained-on desert sand. Or quicksand, the way they sucked her in. She slid down, getting lost in them again, and there was no him or her; they were just one person. There in his eyes she rested awhile, with no sense of time. Time was gone: they were suspended in an eternal time zone. Then, catching her unawares — how could there be a thought in his mind that wasn’t in hers? — she felt him thrusting into her again. But this time all the way into the middle of her — into the inside of the inside of her, into her very core, a place no one had ever been. She cried out. Then she screamed and screamed her way to the end. Afterwards sobbing in his arms for a long time. Sobbing like a baby. Finally she opened her eyes. There he was, Moshe who was also Israel, looking at her, his eyes full of tenderness and love. Home, she thought. At last I’m home.

Judith looks up. Weick is still at the front of the class. She feels like she’s been gone for over an hour, but according to her watch, it’s only been fifteen minutes. Weick says: “We all play many different roles in our lives.” Right, she thinks. All the world’s a stage. “And when two or more roles,” he says, “conflict with each other, this is called inter-role conflict.”

Like duh. Judith recalls the classic example of this she learned thirteen years ago during her B.S.W.: being both a mother and a student, and having to choose between caring for your child and getting your schoolwork done. Role Theory was interesting when she first learned it back then, but like Systems Theory, it isn’t anymore. Certainly not as interesting as making love to Moshe, or even lying next to him, her body curled around his, in post-coitus contentment, on the grass. So she returns to Moshe. He is still lying where she left him under the tree, but now he has one hand behind his head, and is smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings. He too has been listening to Weick, and doesn’t think much of him — “A weak man, you can tell just by looking at him he can’t get it up” — or of Dunhill. She looks up: Weick is watching her. She lowers her eyes — perhaps he just heard what Moshe said about him. That’s crazy, she knows. Of course he couldn’t have. But maybe he could somehow sense the presence of Moshe, her invisible friend. Her favourite aunt, Hilda, now dead, always saw, and sometimes even talked to, Judith’s imaginary friend Max, whom she pulled around on a string when she was four. From Max to Moshe, thinks Judith, rolling her eyes. Oh, well, whatever gets you through —

Weick, still talking, is staring hard at her now, demanding her full attention. Did he see me roll my eyes? Maybe he thought I was rolling them at him. Just in case, and to deflect his anger, shortly afterwards she raises her hand and respectfully asks a question. Citing the conflicting definitions of inter-role conflict in two different articles, she asks Weick which one he’d recommend. Weick, obviously pleased, says he’s happy at least one student’s doing the readings, and replies at length while Judith arranges a facial expression of polite listening. She even smiles wanly when he makes a stupid joke. Meanwhile she’s thinking this class is a total waste of time. Pam agrees. During their break in the cafeteria half an hour later, Pam sputters that all they’re learning from Weick is how to feign interest and respect; how to endure without looking like you’re enduring; how to survive long, awkward pauses, some of them excruciating; and how to fake-smile encouragingly at an ill-prepared teacher as he flounders for words. “We are learning,” she concludes, “about the power of the guy at the front of the class. Nothing more.”

“Well, maybe that’s the essence of ‘Knowledge and Values in Social Work,’” Aliza says darkly. “The power of power.”

“Oooooh,” says Cindy, and bites into her donut.

Pam laughs, and Cindy chews cheerfully, but Judith doesn’t respond. She’s just decided that from now on, she’s never again going to be the last one out of Weick’s class, or alone with him anywhere. On her way out of the classroom just now, while Cindy, Pam, and Aliza waited impatiently for her in the hallway, she asked Weick a quick question about the topic she’d picked for her midterm paper, and he suggested she drop by his office after class to discuss it further. But she won’t. Because when he made this suggestion, he brought his face, flushed and eager, close to hers, and there was the smell of liquor on his breath.

* * *

Next they go to “Introduction to Social Justice” with Greg, or Saint Greg as some of the students have nicknamed him, and if Weick’s class was a creaky old streetcar, this one is a turbo train. Today, as always, there is a sense of urgency and dynamism here, and a passion that strikes Judith as almost religious. Greg, waving his hands around, is still, after six weeks, on the theme of how the rich and powerful oppress and exploit the weak, and how it is the obligation of each and every one of us to use whatever power we have to fight for a fairer distribution of resources, both in Canada and around the world. Judith listens, her bum aching from the hard chair, and she vacillates between the exciting feeling on one hand that she’s part of a revolution, and on the other that Greg is naive and not very bright. Still, as the term progresses, she finds herself using more and more of what she thinks of as “Greg’s words”: socially constructed, classist, marginalized, disenfranchised, globalization. Or, as Bobby put it several days ago, she has begun to speak, and also think, “in black and white.” Even though, of course, that’s a phrase you can’t use anymore — not unless you’re completely politically incorrect, like Bobby. Which she didn’t hesitate to tell him.

“I’m not ‘politically incorrect’,” said Bobby, looking handsome in a green Ralph Lauren polo sweater with the logo of a horse on it. “I’m free.”

“No, you’re not,” she retorted. “You’re enslaved to political incorrectness, which is no different than being enslaved to political correctness. You’ve just swapped PI for PC. And you’re hopelessly out of touch with the world around you.”

“Blah blah blah,” said Bobby, and gave her a hug.

* * *

Greg’s favourite mantra is “Take a stand.” Over his desk hangs a tattered copy of the famous poem by Pastor Niemöller written during the Holocaust:

First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.

“Don’t be neutral,” Greg tells them at least once every week. “Truth isn’t neutral. Justice isn’t neutral. Take a stand.”

Suzy’s mantra is different: “Know thyself.” In Suzy’s first class, this sounded terribly naive to Judith. Knowing oneself, she thought, is a lifetime’s work. And maybe even an impossible goal, one you can never achieve. “You never fully know a person,” her father used to say mournfully. “Least of all yourself.” So Judith felt a flash of contempt for Suzy — a quick flash, here and gone, like the sun glinting on the edge of a knife. Contempt for her simple, even simplistic, mind, her lack of intellectual sophistication. As Suzy continued talking, though, Judith realized she only meant self-knowledge in a very limited way: a specific application of this concept to becoming a social work professional, something like “Self-Knowledge for Social Work Practice,” or “A Dummy’s Guide to Self-Knowledge When Working with Clients.”

“For instance,” said Suzy, looking cute in a buttercup-yellow silk shirt, “what if you’re uncomfortable with certain emotions, like anger? And what if you had, for example, a very angry, hostile client, like Cordelia? I’m sure you all remember Cordelia! Would that be hard for you?” Yes, thought Judith. “If so, that’s natural. Very few people like anger, or fear, or guilt. Then again, there are people who are also uncomfortable with love, or joy, or tenderness, and will try at all costs to avoid these feelings.

“And it’s not only emotions,” Suzy continued, scanning the class, sweeping everyone into her range of vision. “It’s values, as well. For example, what if you don’t like a certain sort of person? Simply don’t like — never mind racism, homophobia, or anything like that. For instance, what if you don’t like tall people because — I don’t know why — maybe they make you feel small and insignificant? So you have to know this about yourself, because if a tall client walks in through the door, you’ll react to them a certain way. That isn’t fair. That isn’t ethical. This is your emotional baggage to deal with, and you have to clean it out of yourself.”

Interesting, thought Judith, that Suzy picked tallness as an example, since she is so short. Funny, too, all this clean/dirty imagery. The assumption that all of us are somehow dirty, or polluted — “sinful”? — and part of the task of professionalizing us into social workers is to “clean us up.” Cleaning us through a certain kind of brain-washing. Or is it soul-washing? Maybe they should’ve put showers in the student lounge.

But in subsequent days, she gave all this some serious thought. Whether reading articles, hunting down library books, doing laundry, or cutting vegetables for chicken soup, always somewhere at the back of her mind was, What is knowledge? And what is knowing oneself? That Friday — the day of the week, she recalled, that God created Adam and Eve, who stole from the Tree of Knowledge — she sat in just a striped T-shirt and panties at her kitchen table, soup bubbling on the stove, and wrote her weekly log for Suzy. She began with Socrates — the first, she wrote, to coin the phrase “Know thyself” — and some other Greek philosophers. Then she pulled in Nietzsche, Kant, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and psychologists ranging from Freud and Fromm to the cognitivists, including some from Suzy’s blue-and-yellow book. Next she peppered in some Shakespeare (Polonius), some Bible (Ecclesiastes), and several relevant scraps of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry in translation (Halpern, Heifetz Tussman, Rachel, Ravikovitch, and Amichai). She knew most of these references weren’t from social work and hoped this would be okay. Well, even if it isn’t, she thought, paraphrasing her friend Sammy, what can Suzy do — shoot me? This had become Sammy’s favourite expression ever since Rabin’s assassination. Then she wrote in her log:

As the above sources illustrate, there is no one simple thing called “knowledge.” There are different kinds: knowledge of the mind, heart, soul, and body, and maybe others. Traditionally, since Plato, the mind and body were split, and the only knowledge valued, or even acknowledged(!), by men was knowledge of the mind: rational knowledge. Women, however, have appreciated different forms of knowledge (Belenky et al.’s Women’s Ways of Knowing).

Then, since they were told to include some self-disclosure:

I’ve always listened mainly to my mind, so this year I’d like to be more open to other forms of knowledge. Hopefully this will help me better understand my clients, and respond to them more fully, empathically, and effectively in my professional role.

The following Monday she handed in this log. When she got it back, on the last page there was a big 10/10 in red pen with a circle around it, and underneath it Suzy’s comments in flowing, feminine handwriting:

Excellent work, Judith! Fabulous how you draw on such a wide range of sources, some of them unusual, to explore this concept. You do a nice job of integrating your personal feelings and issues with the ideas in the literature, demonstrating your knowledge of both the heart and mind. An exceptional log from an exceptional student! A pleasure having you in this class!

Soon afterwards, Judith’s logs began to change. They became more loosely related to the content covered in Suzy’s course, and more personal, until they felt almost like a diary. The last time she kept a diary she was twelve and never let anyone read it. But this log-diary is different, she thinks now, sitting in Suzy’s class. Not because it isn’t private or deep; it is. But she doesn’t mind Suzy reading it because Suzy is safe. There’s nothing she could write to Suzy, or say to her in person, that would be unacceptable, or make Suzy not like her anymore. So everything inside of her comes flooding out toward Suzy. Not only in her logs; any place, any time, they’re alone together. For instance, walking with Suzy back to her office every Monday after class. Or last Monday sitting with her over coffee at a round pink-and-aqua table in Le Petit Café, just as she imagined it would happen, to plan the first meeting of SWAC, which will be taking place three days from now. Judith likes just about everything about Suzy. Including her petiteness, her tinkly laughter, and her way of dressing: always conservative on the bottom in dark skirts or slacks, but wildly colourful on the top with her blazingly bright silk shirts.

Judith likes, too, how Suzy looks at her. How she is mirrored in Suzy’s eyes. “You have an extraordinary mind,” Suzy said to her last Monday over coffee. “Yet you’re also extremely sensitive and emotionally attuned. This is a very rare combination. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a student quite like you in all my years of teaching.”

Later on she added, as if musing to herself, “You remind me of myself a few years back.” And she touched Judith on the arm. Softly, like a butterfly resting.

— 9 —

Three days later, on Thursday night, Judith attends the first meeting of the Social Work Anti-oppression Committee. There is no supper with Suzy beforehand because Suzy had an emergency faculty meeting, so Judith, disappointed, worked at home all day and drove in just for SWAC. She arrives at ten to seven and is relieved to see someone there she knows: Lola, from Suzy’s class. Lola is a broad-shouldered sensuous blonde with oversized lips and huge blue eyes, and everything about her is theatrical and slightly larger than life. A week ago she told Judith she was born and raised in Montreal as Lola Katz, but now she is Lola Ibn Hassan from Riyadh. As a McGill undergrad she was involved in left-wing politics, and on her twenty-first birthday she married and ran off with another student who took her to his native Saudi Arabia, forced her for three years to wear a burqa, and forbade her to leave the house unless accompanied by him or one of his three brothers. Lola escaped, she said, in the middle of the night, returning to Canada, but she still lives in terror he’ll find her. Judith listened raptly when Lola told her this, but now, recollecting Lola’s melodramatic style when recounting it, isn’t sure how much she believes. Still, they stand chatting together amicably as the other people drift into the room, and then sit beside each other at the rectangular table.

Suzy calls the meeting to order. It’s a fair-sized committee: in addition to Suzy, Lola, and herself, Judith counts six other people. Chris is a second-year student in the Policy stream, and the school’s representative to the Dunhill Students’ Union (DSU). He wears an earring in his left ear and a ratty leather jacket covered in studs. Janice McVitty is a blonde woman whose hairstyle and neat white blouse and sweater are straight out of the 1950s. Janice has a private practice and is working with Suzy on some community project. Carl Lantern graduated from this school twelve years ago, and is now the Executive Director of First Nations Community Services in Toronto, and the alumni representative on SWAC. An abnormally tall woman says she is a faculty member here at the school and will be retiring at the end of this academic year. She looks like some strange big bird with her amorphous black cape, wild grey-black hair, and intense, mournful glare. In a soft, guttural voice with some undefinable European accent, she says, “I am Hetty Caplar,” but Judith, who finds her startling, even scary, hears instead, “I am Hedda Gabler.” Which makes sense: there is something as grotesquely compelling about this woman as Hedda Gabler herself. The last two committee members are Brenda Chow, a Chinese woman who’s a hospital administrator, and James Roberts, a dark-skinned man in a suit who works for the Children’s Aid Society. Suzy explains that most of this committee is continuing from last year, except for Judith, Lola, and Hetty, and she’s looking forward to these new members’ fresh ideas and energy. Suzy tells everyone Judith is this year’s co-chair; Judith blushes as some people smile and nod at her and others study her appraisingly.

Then it’s down to business. Tonight being the first meeting of the 2002–2003 academic year, the agenda focuses on planning the upcoming year’s activities. Judith has been worrying intermittently all day about what would be expected of her tonight as co-chair. She realizes now she needn’t have worried, because Suzy runs the whole thing by herself. But she doesn’t mind — in a way it’s a relief. Suzy is a good chair: task-oriented but relaxed and with a sense of humour, and the committee tonight has a free-wheeling, friendly brainstorming session about this year’s Anti-oppression Day, with everyone bandying about ideas, except for Hetty, who sits heavily silent, like a black hole. Several names are tossed around for the keynote speaker — or, as Suzy termed it, “the star.” One name keeps coming up repeatedly — Michael Brier — and after the fifth or sixth time, Judith writes down his name, a reminder to herself to google him when she gets home. Chris in particular is enthusiastic about Brier, saying he’s heard him speak and he’s absolutely brilliant. Ten minutes later Chris brings him up again, offering to contact him and see if he’d be their keynote.

“Ask what he charges,” James suggests. “We don’t have much of a budget.”

“Good point,” says Chris.

Janice says she has a cousin who knows Brier personally and maybe can get Brier to come at a cheaper rate. She and Chris agree to work together on this and bring some more information to the next meeting.

“Great,” says Suzy.

“The main thing is,” says James, “whoever we pick should be passionately committed to social justice. Someone who can serve as a role model for our students and for the profession as a whole.”

Everyone agrees.

Suzy asks the group what they want to do about food on Anti-oppression Day. There is a general groan and a rolling of eyes. Apparently last year they offered participants two different lunch options, and when people registered, they indicated their preference. There was a three-course meal for ten dollars, and a five-dollar, lighter option — pizza and a donut — for students and the economically disadvantaged. It all became very contentious, with some complaining that even the five dollars for the latter was too expensive. Suzy says she recently attended a family therapy conference where the organizers dealt with the food problem by just writing on the program: Lunch — On Your Own. This is the latest thing, she says, and one easy way to get around all this. But James and Lola object. There is a principle involved.

“I believe eating together on Anti-oppression Day is a crucial part of the experience,” says Lola. “That is part of what being a community is about. It’s symbolic. The other way you’re basically reinforcing a two-tiered system, the same one that rules in society. The profs and the more privileged students will eat one kind of meal, chicken or whatever, while everyone else gets something crummy. That’s not what social work is about.”

“My feeling exactly,” says James.

Oy, thinks Judith. It’s true, of course, that often these “small” decisions are microcosms of larger issues in life. But seriously. Everyone eating the same pizza is not going to equalize society’s inequities. That’s like in H.M.S. Pinafore when they sing, “Love levels all ranks.” Of course it doesn’t. Neither love nor pizza levels anything.