A History of Forgetting (22 page)

‘Oh, Jesus.' He shut up to brood while Alison shampooed.

Donna, Alison found a few minutes later in the back room, alone, gaping at the pictures in her book. ‘He's ready,' Alison told her.

‘Is this yours?' Donna asked.

‘Yes.'

Passing in the doorway, Donna shook her gleaming head. ‘I've had enough already. I had to get a prescription.'

‘What kind of prescription?'

‘Tranqs. If I hear another word about death I'm going to take them all at once. And Thi is still waiting for you. Are you going to leave her there all day?'

Alison, hurrying to the front, wondered what had hap
pened to Donna's resolution to be nice.

‘Finally,' said Thi. ‘I deserve a break, too, you know.'

‘I'm sorry!' Truly mortified, because Thi was so sweet and had never chided her before, Alison watched her put on her child-sized coat and leave without a word. ‘Take your time!' she called, but ten minutes later Thi was back, drawing a newspaper from her bag and laying it on the desk in front of Alison. There was Christian's face and name, his abruptly terminated story in black and white, and a picture of Mr. Vorst. What struck her immediately was how, at a glance, a skinhead seemed a victim. Mr. Vorst's hair was shorn like Christian's, like the prisoners' in the tableaux, and he wore the same expressionless stare as all the prisoners. Mr. Vorst was posing as an innocent. It made him all the more obscene.

She looked at Thi rubbing circles on her temples, then past her, through the window to the sidewalk where Amanda was gambolling in a long dark coat. It was raining and she was holding a purple umbrella and stretching her free hand in the air as she leapt. Not a frisky person even in happier times, Alison couldn't believe her now as Mary Poppins. She pointed, but Thi didn't seem to think it an odd scene. Because she had met Amanda outside, she knew already what it took Alison a moment to figure out: that Amanda was trying to untie the knot halfway up the column. Succeeding, she pulled free the black tail of sodden ribbon, unwinding it from the column, a funereal maypole. Their mourning officially over, now they would have to get on with it—life.

 

Billy asked her, ‘Are you still reading that book?'

‘I renewed it.'

‘You're applying for a job at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre?'

‘What?'

Moving closer, he began a ticklish sniffing at her neck. She shut the book and rolled over to face him; it slid off her
chest and down between them like a wall. For a minute they kissed over the top of it, then Billy took it and dropped it on
the floor.

‘Just today I read in
Physiology and Behavior,
volume forty-five, number two, a study by Albert and Petrovic. They found that female Wistar rats become aggressive when cohabiting with sexually non-performing males. It's definitive.'

Alison rolled onto her back again. ‘I'm not a rat,' she said.

At her request, he had taken down the poster, so now she stared up at what had been under it—a clean white rectangle on the yellowed ceiling. The problem was, it seemed so like a screen now that the images she had been staring at in the book projected out of her stunned retina and shone horribly back down on her.

‘I hate to beg,' said Billy, ‘but—
please, please, please.'

She put her hand over her eyes to block them out: the open pit, the naked bodies jumbled in it, the limbs like sticks. Oh, Christian, she thought.

‘May I at least cop a feel?' asked Billy, trying to be funny.

‘No.' She curled up, hugging her knees.

He rolled over, his aggrieved back against hers, and turned out the light without telling her goodnight. Five weeks ago, when Christian was killed, Billy was as horrified as any of them, but now he was tired of hearing about it. He'd only met Christian once. How could she expect him to feel for a person he barely knew? Yet, as she lay there with her face turned to the wall, she knew it was possible.

 

 

 

4

 

At Billy's insistence she went to see the doctor, who listened
patiently to her story, then sent her to the lab for tests. By
nightfall, a huge purple bruise appeared on her arm where the
needle had gone in, the smeared tattoo of a rose. It worried
her, this stain under her skin, but when she went back to the doctor, all he did was tell her her blood test was normal—no anaemia, no hormonal irregularities. He asked if she wanted an antidepressant.

‘Why—?'

She was asking about the bruise, but with the waiting room crowded with the unwell, he interrupted. Not that he was unkind or negligent. He made time to wax philosophic about the vicissitudes of life and how the body, naturally, felt these too. After what had happened to her friend, of course she felt depressed.

‘Those are legitimate feelings of grief, but aren't they dragging you off to a different place now? You can go there if you want, but it's not necessary.'

Alison wondered if all of them at Vitae had seen the same doctor; one by one they had each brought in their pills. The doctor, reading her mind, said, ‘Look at it this way. Feelings are chemicals, too. They're just chemicals in the brain.'

‘Really?' said Alison.

She dropped the prescription off at Shoppers Drug Mart and went back to work. Mrs. Soloff was in the waiting area when Alison arrived. They greeted each other warmly, as if there had never been any tension between them. Mrs. Soloff was, after all, a great and gracious lady of immense fortitude. Mrs. Soloff had come back from the dead.

Alison led her to the dressing room. ‘How are you doing? Would you like my help?'

‘Yes, dear.'

She stepped inside and slipped Mrs. Soloff's blouse off her bowed shoulders, averting her eyes so as not to see the numbers. Close to her like this, she was again aware of the paradox of the old lady's tremendous frailty and inner strength. She tied the ties, pressed the Velcro, then offered her arm again.

After work, she collected her prescription and took it home.
As soon as Billy got in, he wanted to know what the doctor
had said to her.

‘I'm depressed.'

He laughed. ‘You needed a doctor to tell you that?'

‘I didn't think I needed a doctor,' she reminded him, going over to the window.

‘Did he give you anything?'

She nodded, still staring out. The prescription was lying on the coffee table. Billy put down the papers he had brought home and opened the bag. ‘Great. How long do they take to work?'

What Alison was thinking: that she wasn't going to take
those pills. There wasn't anything the matter with her.

‘Come here,' he said, patting the place next to him on the couch.

She came and sat. Across the coffee table, he had spread a half-dozen travel brochures, glossy, in blinding colours.

‘What's this?' she asked.

‘We talked about a holiday.'

‘Next Christmas.'

‘I thought we could go sooner. You know, get away and
dry off.' It was a lot cheaper in the spring with all the package
deals. They could afford it. ‘Look.' He put a brochure in her
hands and trilled his tongue.
‘
¡Viva la Revolución
!
'

She flipped through the pages, saw bikini-clad women
dancing on the Cuban sand, hibiscus flowers, foot-long cigars.
Such easy pictures to look at.

He made her promise to go through all the brochures; Mexico, Hawaii, Costa Rica, the Caribbean. She agreed. Of
course she would.

‘Do you have a passport?' he asked.

‘No.'

‘We'll have to get you one.'

When they got into bed that night, she wanted him to
look at pictures, too. First she showed him the photograph in the book of the shoes. They were collected together in a very large high-ceilinged room. In the background, someone had propped a ladder up against where the shoes were piled the highest, to the ceiling, but now the ladder, too, was engulfed by shoes. Shoes flattened and stacked like firewood, shoes avalanching into the foreground, shoes and shoes and shoes.

‘I keep telling you,' said Billy. ‘That hall closet? One day the door is gonna give and the whole apartment will look like this.'

Then he asked her if there was a picture of her sweaters. He meant to make her laugh, and did, proving to her something she had been gradually comprehending—the duality of all, even ordinary things. In a picture of a room full of shoes, she saw horror; he saw too many shoes.

In the middle of the night Alison, sleeping fitfully as
usual, got up and went to the kitchen for a drink. She tripped on something, grabbed the counter, dropped the glass. The sound it made shattering in the dark terrified her.

The next morning, she paused before stepping in the shower. She would never be able to take a mindless shower again. Never, she thought. Afterward, she dressed, throwing on anything and a sweater, and said goodbye to Billy. On
the way to catch the bus, she stopped on the railway tracks and looked down the gradually converging rails to the vanishing point, so aptly named. The bench where she sat in the sunshine waiting for the bus had a view north to mountains two-toned with snow. Ten minutes west lay the ocean, that plated sheet. Her own country she had barely discovered; it was beautiful and wild. Safe, peaceful, affluent was how she had heard it described all her life.

Shoes were just some of the plunderings. They took everything—prayer shawls and eyeglasses, jewellery, teeth, everything—and stored it in a warehouse, and when that warehouse had filled, they built another and crammed it, too, with booty.

Warehouses named
Kanada I
and
II.

 

 

 

5

 

At Vitae, Malcolm marvelled to see how they put the tragedy behind them—so soon, when he was still sniffing his wrist and cringing. Of course things were not as before: tempers flared, and here and there a shaved head appeared, but there was a consensus among them, most of them, to recover. They even brought their recovery in and passed it around in the form of pills.

That the girl was in disagreement was soon apparent. Alison had used to welcome any task you asked of her, grateful for the opportunity to do the very things you shirked. But now she had slowed down and there was instead a listlessness about her. She seemed suspended in distraction. Whereas before, if she displayed the ability to read it would be the back of a shampoo bottle or a magazine, now she began to show up with a book.

‘Oversized' read the label on the spine, the damn thing so big it had to be carried in and out each day in a canvas bag
possibly purchased to bear this very burden. Immediately
after putting on the coffee, she would heft it from the bag; she needed both hands to do it. Open in her lap, it seemed to hold her there, preventing her from getting on with the day. She would stare at a page, sometimes not even reading, just looking at a photograph and twisting her dark hair around a finger. Eventually Thi would have to send someone to tell her it was time to get to work.

Their reactions to the book he observed with black amuse
ment. At first everyone recoiled to see it there, juxtaposed with
Chatelaine, Hair Flair
and
Vogue.
Cautiously, they approached—there was barbed wire on the cover. The first
plate, a blurred sepia-toned enlargement of a crowd, Malcolm himself had to look at twice to figure out. It was a crowd of children mostly dressed in stripes, each extending a bare arm. In the centre of the photograph, one child was frozen in the act of pulling up her sleeve. All of them holding out their left arms to show their tattooed numbers to the camera.

Roxanne's reaction was to shut the book quickly; with her every edgy movement, jewellery rattled, or was it her bones? Thi turned a few pages pensively. When Malcolm asked if she had been born in Vietnam, she answered, ‘Yes. We came here when I was a child.' Her doll's face dark­ened; at some point, she had likely been in a camp of sorts herself.

Robert actually studied the book for the length of a coffee break. He'd always seemed to Malcolm the most reflective, brooding and serious, like a missionary trying with his pierced eyebrow to insinuate himself among the natives. Jamie dismissed the book entirely. Amanda stood with her hands on her hips and said, ‘Can't we do something about this clutter?'

The whispering started between Roxanne and Donna. All Malcolm heard was, ‘The book, the book, the book . . .' Then Thi added her discontented voice and it became The Book.

The appointment book was on the desk before Alison, unadorned black leather with a spine that made a cracking
sound every time she opened it. She found the name she was looking for and started to read it out, but her voice cracked. She'd seen a photograph of one of the leather books they had recorded the prisoners' names in at Auschwitz. Covering the page with her hand, she asked the woman there, ‘Are you next?'