Читать книгу To Die in Spring - Sylvia Maultash Warsh - Страница 9

Wednesday, March 28,1979

Rebecca was looking over the morning’s test results. Every now and then she glanced up at the print of Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields and Cypress in the waitingroom to reassure herself that none of David’s paintings had escaped the basement. She wondered whether Iris had realized when she put up the Van Gogh how turbulent it was, the thick heaving clouds filled with energy, the dark trees springing from the ground like flames. Iris chuckled on the phone as she booked an appointment with a patient. Without warning the front door flew open and Mrs. Kochinsky wobbled in. She was wearing a stylish navy blazer over beige trousers but something seemed askew, as if she hadn’t put them on straight. Or maybe it was the sweaty bangs of greying brown hair that stuck to her forehead. But, she still looked a decade younger than her sixty years.

“Mrs. Kochinsky!” Rebecca exclaimed. “How are you?”

“Not good!” she said and hobbled over to the waiting-room instead of approaching the counter. She dropped into one of the chairs and appeared to be trying to catch her breath.

Rebecca stepped toward her, concerned. “Are you all right?”

Mrs. Kochinsky looked up at Rebecca and absently lifted the damp bangs off her forehead with her fingers. “I’m so glad you’re back, Doctor. But bus — bus ride killing me. A man....” She suddenly glanced up at Iris, who had stopped talking on the phone to listen.

“Come into my office, Mrs. Kochinsky,” Rebecca said.

One of Iris’ eyebrows shot up in mock offence.

Once they were seated privately, Rebecca said, “So, it’s been some time since we last met. How’ve you been?”

The dark half-moons under her patient’s eyes hinted at the anxiety, the web of paranoia she’d woven around herself.

Mrs. Kochinsky shook her head. “Not good, not good.” The charming Spanish-Polish inflection. “All winter I have such trouble sleeping. The other doctor — Romanov — he no good. He don’t understand. Only wants me take drug for sleeping. Maybe I don’t want sleep. Because of dream. Yesterday I dream of Enrique. Oh, Doctor! I don’t want sleep. I have nothing left. Why I should always reminder have....” She was still agitated, her chest rising and falling too quickly.

“You don’t usually dream about Enrique,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t you tell me about it.”

Mrs. Kochinsky hesitated a moment. She cleared her throat, then took a breath. “Night very dark in my dream. My husband, dead two years, sits in bedroom on chair. He say, ‘They find him, Goldie. Don’t wait for him. He not come back.’ This scare me because I know what. Then suddenly I’m in plane. Flying. Much noise. Very dark outside. Two men — young men — sit on floor, hands tied behind. Noise from plane terrible. I shout at men: ‘Wake up!’ They don’t move, eyes closed. Suddenly big man opens door to outside. I see clouds beside. I shout, ‘Close door!’ But he take one man, lift and push him out! I look — body fall through clouds, down, down into water. I scream louder. Big man don’t hear me. He take other young man — I see sleeping face and suddenly I know it’s Enrique. I grab his arm but like cloud, I can’t touch. Big man lift like before but I push hard on Enrique’s chest and finally, finally he open his eyes and smile last time. Then ... then man throws him down through door. I try catch my boy, but he falls. Falls. I can’t look. I know he land in ocean....”

Rebecca waited a moment, noting how pale her patient had become. “That must’ve been a very frightening dream.”

Mrs. Kochinsky looked up at her, brown eyes fierce. “Not just dream. Before I leave Argentina I hear talk, secret talk, about how soldiers get rid of people. They don’t want bodies left. So they take prisoners up in plane. Give them drug make them quiet, weak. Then ... then,” she put a hand over her eyes, “they throw them out into ocean. Still alive. Alive.”

Rebecca couldn’t speak. Mechanically she rose and took three steps to a small sink in the corner. She pulled a disposable cup from the dispenser and filled it with water. She handed it to Mrs. Kochinsky.

“I’m so sorry,” she said and sat down across from her, suddenly very tired. This was not paranoia; it had the unfortunate ring of truth.

Mrs. Kochinsky drank from the cup mechanically.

“My family gone. Why I should live? I’m only alive because I’m not dead.”

Rebecca leaned forward toward the older woman, seeking eye contact. “Your sister’s still alive. It sounds like she needs you.”

Mrs. Kochinsky lifted her head, bird-like. “What I can do? I’m helpless. She just sit there, won’t talk. Only sometime a word in Yiddish. We don’t speak Yiddish from before war. I bring material so she can sew. She have her little machine there. You should see clothes she make for me. Beautiful dress, blouse....” She inclined her head and tapped her cheek with one hand. “Aye, you won’t believe how she was good with hands. You know, in camp she had job in factory — no one can do like her, with small fast hands. She make part for weapons, little pieces metal must fit together, and if not fit, gun not work. They will shoot her. She told me religious boy come work beside her, can’t do with hands. Young, clumsy. She show him, try help, but he can’t. What you think? She do work for him, so they don’t take him away. She lucky — they change her from factory and then she clean officers’ place. Help her survive. Survive. For what?

“Now she just sit. Do nothing. Her husband happy he get rid of her.” She lowered her voice. “I tell him I look after her, but he send her away. I know why he don’t want me. He have office at home. Many business deals. Crooked deals. He don’t want me find out. Who knows what he do there. I told her for long time leave him. Bad man. Did bad things in war. But was good to Chana, so she marry him. Desperate after war, no one left. And now? He don’t care. I want take care for her.”

“But that would’ve been a huge commitment, taking care of your sister. Maybe it’s better this way.”

“What else I have? Three mornings at bakery? He can afford pay me same like bakery. Much cheaper than nursing home. I wanted look after her.”

Tears formed in her eyes, glistening. She wore her gently waved hair chin length, and with her straight nose and small face, she often reminded Rebecca of what Greta Garbo might have looked like at sixty. Except that, as far as Rebecca knew, Greta Garbo didn’t need psychotherapy to see her through the week.

“She only one I have left.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Man on bus — he upset me. When I get off, he follow. I run and run...”

Rebecca scribbled notes. She’d heard this before. “There’ve been other times when men followed you. Was there something different about this man compared to the others?”

“They all different. They send different man each time. So I won’t know. But I always know. And now they got more opportunity, because I go two buses for here. Before, I walk five minutes to old office. I wish you don’t move. This not safe neighbourhood.”

“I understand how you feel,” said Rebecca. “I know it’s hard to go out of your area, but it will get easier. It’ll just take time.”

Mrs. Kochinsky studied her for a moment. “If you say, I believe. Look — I’ll bring you knishes for Passover. Home-made. Just next week. See? I believe you.”

Rebecca smiled uneasily. The emotional wall she usually kept between herself and her patients had been impossible to summon in Mrs. Kochinsky’s case. The pain she had gone through, the horror, put her in a different category.

Before leaving, Mrs. Kochinsky turned to Rebecca and said, “Oh, I forget something tell you. A visitor coming for me. Cousin from California. So long when I saw him — I didn’t even know he still lives. When he call, like voice from past.”

Then she suddenly smiled goodbye, her mouth partly open in mute apology as if there was something she preferred not to say. It was the same smile each time she left. Apology for what, Rebecca wondered: for living, for being a casualty of war, for surviving with complications?

Iris was deep into files at her workstation when Rebecca passed by at five forty-five. “I’ve got my pager,” Rebecca said. “I’11 just be around the neighbourhood if you need me.”

Iris looked down at Rebecca’s feet. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’m going to do what I tell all my patients: go for a brisk walk around the block.”

Iris examined her from the feet up. “Well, the shoes are good. But you need a swanky track suit, Doc. Something with polyester to show off the slimmer you. That skirt with those running shoes...,” she shook her blonde head. “You want to exercise, you gotta have the right outfit. Come shopping with me this weekend and I’ll find you something spiffy.”

Rebecca put one hand on her hip in protest but realized there was no use arguing. She stepped downstairs past the office of the other doctor. Lila Arons, M.D. They’d met briefly when Rebecca leased the space. A brisk handshake, the usual greetings, and they had both gone on their way.

She stepped outside the medical building, heartened by the way her feet felt in the new leather running shoes. Solid. She was ready to take on Beverley Street. The street looked as empty as the first time she’d seen it, leafy quiet in the shade of another century.

Once on the sidewalk, she dipped her hand inside her jacket pocket to deposit the beeper. What she felt there made her stop.

“Rebecca, Rebecca!” David chided out of an undefinable corner of her past. His trimmed reddish beard pointed at her with irony.

She held the wrapped sugar cube up in her palm, impressed with its survival. She hadn’t seen the gabardine rain jacket since last September when she had pushed it to the back of her closet together with the white cane. She had always carried something for David’s carbohydrate hunger, which came on suddenly when his medication reached its peak. It was a reaction to the insulin. Common enough. Not dramatic enough for a haunting, too physical to ignore. She had gotten rid of his aftershave, his jeans, his tweed sports jackets. She had tried to sweep her life’s surface clear of reminders of him but every now and then there was this self-sabotage she couldn’t explain. She dropped the cube back into her pocket, but uneasily.

She moved up Beverley Street at a pace she knew was unsatisfactory, but it was all she could muster. Speed was a problem for her lately; she could do nothing quickly. Often she felt submerged in water, her body struggling just to move normally. Aunt Sally had insisted at the Shiva that what she remembered most when Uncle died was the fatigue, the dense weariness that grief deposited in the bones. Don’t overdo it, Rebecca directed her solid leather-bound feet. We just want to get in shape, we don’t want to win any races.

She paced herself along Baldwin Street where narrow brick houses watched behind lawns of yellow inchoate grass that would turn green inside of a month. She approached the spectacle of Spadina Avenue. Three lanes of traffic rushed on either side of the streetcar tracks that ran along the centre of the grand avenue, ready to trip the unwary pedestrian. A deathtrap for anyone dependent on a white cane. Apparently a physician named Baldwin who practiced architecture on the side had designed the street in the early 1800s with the Champs Elysées in mind. By the time Jewish merchants opened their produce stalls along the street near the end of that century, Spadina was no longer glamorous. Now modern wholesalers with their overcrowded dry goods, hardware, and poultry shops made the street garish. But because of its elaborate width, it was difficult, from one side of Spadina, to see what was on the other. A lot, thought Rebecca, like looking across to the opposite bank of a respectable river. Across the expanse she picked out the store where David had bought his art supplies. Chinese restaurants had opened on either side.

When David was alive, she had struggled with her weight — a lifetime ago when she was ten or fifteen pounds more than she liked. But her atrophied appetite satisfied her in a morbid way though she denied she was punishing herself. She hadn’t given David diabetes. She just hadn’t been paying enough attention to realize he was hiding his symptoms. As a physician she knew it was common to deny one’s illness in the hope it will disappear. He had concealed the constant peeing, the thirst, from her. He constantly sucked on breath mints to mask the sweet ketonic breath. He didn’t want to worry her. For awhile he’d fooled his mother, poor Sarah, who had survived the Holocaust but lost her only child.

Near the end, when he was in hospital, Rebecca left him alone with his mother and took the elevator down to the main floor. Sarah had no other relatives — all were lost in the camps. Though she never talked about it, and though her auburn hair and quick smile belied it, her loss defined her to Rebecca, who now found it hard to be with the two of them — one dying and the other a reminder of death. It was August and the evening air wafted so softly against her skin refreshing her, filling her with guilt. She was alive! She stood in the shadows too numb to move while traffic floated by. Voices murmured off to one side. She absently noted two interns in white coats sitting on the cement stairs leading up to the hospital. “Fellow at rounds this morning, only thirty-five. First thing he knew anything was wrong was when he went to check his eyes for blurred vision. Diabetic retinopathy. Blind now. Pyelonephritis. That’s not the way I want to go! Crazy thing is, his wife’s a doctor....”

She had never forgotten that conversation; never come to terms with the guilt. She knew she’d failed in her primary role. Not only had she missed the symptoms that would’ve been obvious if a patient had presented with them. That was bad enough. But the changes in his painting. How could she have ignored the reaching for the light? In a year, the subdued and muted palette that had always defined his work became transformed. His canvases deepened into cadmium reds and phthalo blues that should’ve set off alarm bells in her head. The dimmer his world became, the more radiant his colours. Finally they became brilliant streaks of pigment without shape. Was there anything more ironic than an artist going blind?

Near the end he would try to engage her in discussions about God. Try to get her position, as a woman of science. She mouthed the platitudes for his sake, but in reality reserved judgment. This was her deal with the Almighty: if he let David live, she would embrace Him wholeheartedly. In her prayers she stressed that David was the kindest, most unselfish person she knew and that thirty-five was too young for a good person to die.

She had never thought much about God before, attended High Holiday services because her parents bought tickets at a Reform synagogue. After David died, she began to ruminate on the kind of God who had seen fit to take away the best man she knew. God didn’t seem to care who He made suffer, it didn’t matter if one was pure of heart. The universe was a chaotic place without justice or reason.

Though she had watched patients die over the years, she had never felt that profound hopelessness till death touched her personally. It wasn’t a transitory depression; it was a change in her world view. God had died, or He had lost interest in the welfare of the world. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Afterwards she had hit well below her target weight. Though she was average height, her bones were large; her back was wide, her wrists and ankles were not delicate and though the flesh had dissolved on her, she felt the solidity of her frame would see her through. She only wished she could do something about her energy level. The bustle of life here made her feel peripheral, restless.

She turned left at Dundas, mortified that walking three blocks at moderate speed was giving her a stitch in her side. Two streets away the white concrete facade of the Art Gallery of Ontario, spread over an entire city block, sat coolly on its wide steps. She moved amid the supper crowds in Chinatown in the firm knowledge that once she got to Beverley Street all would be quiet. It never ceased to surprise her: in the centre of the triangle comprised loosely of the Art Gallery, Kensington Market, and the University of Toronto, Beverley Street was as quiet as a suburb. It was like the eye of a storm; in the centre of things without all the detractions that the centre of things implied. Traffic was bad along Dundas where Chinatown and the Art Gallery tolerantly merged, and the market was a maze of one-way streets, but the heart of Beverley Street lay warm and beating quietly after a hundred years of affluence. She’d come upon a book that traced the history of old houses in the neighbourhood and had found a surprising number of Victorian styles: Georgian, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne, and Richardsonian Romanesque. Some had been renovated into offices like hers, some into rooming-houses.

Her shins began to hurt as she passed the wrought iron fence of the Italian consulate filling the extensive corner of Dundas and Beverley. She was in pathetic shape. She couldn’t go any faster, no matter how hard she pushed herself.

The consulate occupied a regal tawny structure built a century earlier. What was it called? Chudleigh, whatever that meant; her book had not said. But it represented what Rebecca wanted. She had picked Beverley Street for its other-century, traditional demeanour, its Victorian mansions still sturdy in a new age. She was looking for something solid, something that stood the test of time, something that would still be there when she looked up. Buildings that stood by serenely while the world changed were a good bet. Sure they had been renovated. That was their secret; from the inside out, the old had been made new again. Otherwise they would not have survived. That was the secret, Rebecca thought. Use the old structure for a base and add what is necessary. Change and survive. She had started from the bottom when she bought her formidable leather shoes. Iris was right. She would have to work her way up.

She was nearly home-free, her heart full in her throat, pulsing. How had she deteriorated into this shape? She blew out, then sucked in, refusing to let herself gasp. She stood on the steps of the medical building, catching her breath. Across the street Beverley Mansions caught the warm glow of the early evening sun. She heard sharp distant noises, like drawers opening and cutlery being laid down. People were coming home from work and preparing dinner. Normal people. Would she ever be normal again?