Rue des Rosiers Read online

  Contents

  Publishing Information

  Dedication

  TORONTO

  Lucky Penny – May, 1982

  Laila

  Dirt

  Gift

  History

  Brunswick

  Laila_

  Call

  Hardiness Zones

  History_

  _Laila_

  Dance

  Home

  Work

  Call_

  PARIS

  Paris – July, 1982

  Place des Vosges

  _Laila__

  Métro

  Closerie des Lilas

  __Laila__

  Jeu de Paume

  __Laila__.

  Luxembourg

  .__Laila__.

  _Call_

  French Lessons

  ._Laila_.

  _History_

  _.Laila._

  Dinner

  _.Laila_.

  Lunch

  ._Laila._

  Rien de Rien

  Ni le Mal, Ni le Bien

  Laila 11

  TORONTO _

  Gift – 1984

  Author's Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  © Rhea Tregebov, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  This book's story and characters are fictitious. However, as the Author's Notes indicate, the attack on Rue des Rosiers is based on an historical event.

  Edited by Warren Carriou

  Book designed by Tania Craan

  Typeset by Susan Buck

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Rue des Rosiers / Rhea Tregebov.

  Names: Tregebov, Rhea, 1953- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2018906711X | Canadiana (ebook) 20189067128 | ISBN 9781550506990

  (softcover) | ISBN 9781550508703 (PDF) | ISBN 9781550508765 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781550508772 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8589.R342 R84 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  Available in Canada from:

  2517 Victoria Avenue

  Regina, Saskatchewan

  Canada S4P 0T2

  www.coteaubooks.com

  Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: the Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Saskatchewan through Creative Saskatchewan, the City of Regina. We further acknowledge the [financial] support of the Government of Canada. Nous reconnaissons l'appui [financier] du gouvernement du Canada.

  For Nancy Richler (1957 – 2018),

  a great soul.

  ~

  Toronto

  ~

  lucky penny

  May, 1982

  there’s a certain weight, a light heft, that she likes. Penny in the right front jean pocket, she can slip her hand in any time, turn it with her thumb between index and middle finger, never lose contact. It’s another perfect spring evening, like yesterday’s, like tomorrow’s. When Gail called, Sarah did a quick palm flip, heads or tails. Heads. Yes. So she’s meeting her sister and a pack of buddies down on Queen Street. Leaving her rooming-house room on Palmerston, the tidy single bed, lopsided dresser, books carefully stacked on the floor, to walk south all the way to Queen, absorbing the city, the evening, the day. Taking the smaller streets, back lanes wherever she can find them, the secret side of the city, raccoon-haunted, private. A scramble of graffiti on garage doors, messages only the writers can read. Roses spilling over broken wooden gates, tin garbage cans rusted into lace.

  When she gets down to the wide, raw intersection of Spadina and Queen, it feels too broad. The walk signal to cross to the east side is flashing; she’s not sure there’s time to cross. That heft in her pocket. Another quick palm flip: yes. She hustles across all six lanes, a sedan taking a left heading north leaning on his horn at her. A streetcar shimmies west along Queen, one of the old-fashioned, rusty, red-and-cream models. For a moment she’s distracted by a clunky station wagon trying to parallel park, angling awkwardly into a small spot. The driver, an older guy, looks irritated and frustrated. She figures he doesn’t need an audience and hurries on past. A scraggly American elm sapling is handcuffed to a post as if it’s committed some crime. Poor little elm. The leaves are mostly green, though a few are withered, how often does it get watered? The collar around the trunk is padded to keep it from scarring the bark but the sapling still looks imprisoned, punished –

  She hears something, she’s not sure of the sequence, an engine or tire squeal and then a thud, a crash, or a crash and then a thud, a dull, flat, hideous sound.

  She can’t look back. She wants to keep looking at the sad little tree because she knows if she turns around, whatever she sees will stay in her. A leaf sighs, perhaps in the aftershock of whatever it is that has happened behind her.

  Someone is screaming and screaming. The strength of that scream allows Sarah to turn around, because no one could call that loudly and be badly hurt.

  The big station wagon is straddling the sidewalk. It jumped the curb and someone has been caught between the chrome of the fat rear bumper and the storefront behind her, a shoe store. She can see clothing, a beige cotton sweater entangled somehow with the bumper, and she can see an arm, but somehow she can’t resolve the bits she’s seeing into the story of what’s happened. The driver is leaning forward with his head against the steering wheel. He must have seen what his car did, because his head is resolute against the wheel and she can feel how heavy it is to him.

  The woman screaming is not whoever has been caught between the car and the wall. She’s a young woman dressed in tight black clothing and her face is whiter than Sarah imagines a face could be and then the woman claps her hand across her mouth to stop the sound and it seems quiet on the sidewalk.

  No sound, not a groan, not breath, from the woman caught; Sarah knows now it’s a woman, peripheral vision.

  A young man pushes his way into the store next door and she hears him say, Call 911, call 911! and she sees the clerk reaching for a phone from behind the counter. Sarah can’t move, isn’t helping, though she’s had the sense to step back as others have moved forward. She sees a slim woman about her age in green pyjamas, no, that’s not right, green scrubs, she must be a nurse, or a nurse’s aide, giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, something Sarah never learned, thinking that the emergency would be always someplace else, someone else’s.

  And now there are sirens, not that much time can have passed but she’s been adrift in the moment. It’s a fire engine, but almost at the same moment she sees an ambulance pulling carefully beside the station wagon and the attendants are quick but careful as well and she knows there’s nothing she can do, nothing for her to do. And she’s not a witness, she didn’t see it. She lets this thought move through her head and then she steps back and back and turns on her heel and walks the half block to the Rivoli, where her sister is waiting for her. The sirens seem to accumulate in her head and she feels herself slip, move into a no-space. But she keeps walking, goes past the sidewalk tables out front and into the dimness of the restaurant. She sees Gail and her friends at a table in the back.

  That heft in her pocket. If she’d waited for the next light, if the penny had said no, it could’ve been her. Her emergency.

  Gail’s deep in some kind of intense talk but she must sense Sarah – she look
s up and waves her over. “So what do you think of the Rivoli? I thought we should try something new, we’re always at the Queen Mum… I think you’ve met Caroline, and this is Sharon and Barb.”

  “Have a seat,” one of the women, a stocky redhead, says.

  Sarah can’t sit. She doesn’t know what to do with her body.

  “Sarah,” the woman says, “you okay?”

  She doesn’t have any words.

  “Sarah?” Gail turns to her, gets up from the table, moves towards her. And that’s when Gail pulls her against her thin chest, because something must be wrong for Sarah to look like that. And Sarah feels herself pulled into Gail, feels herself slip back into herself, pulled through that fine surface of glass that separates them into the halves they have to be without one another, and she knows, her forehead against Gail’s cheek, that they’re back into the whole they really are, Rorschach inkblots that mean something, anyone can read what they mean. Her sister has her.

  ~

  The next day the headline in the papers is ‘Freak Accident Kills Pedestrian’ and there’s a picture of the station wagon and police tape but no mention of the woman’s name, just her age, 51, and the age of the driver, 71. The next day Sarah will come back to the sidewalk where it happened because she can’t help herself. Nothing remarkable, the yellow caution tape is gone and the storefront looks unmarred, but there is a man kneeling at the threshold, something reverent in his bearing. He’s fixing the metal doorplate, which must have been injured along with the woman who died.

  Laila

  My small fist slowly warming the coolness of the iron loop. An oval loop, its stem toothed. The taste of iron when I took it in my mouth, the first thing I knew. I would lean my small head against my mother’s chest. My fist holding the key. It opened the door to our house, the old house, the one we lost. My mother’s voice low, hoarse, the lullaby slow: Everyone we love has gone away. When I come to greet the fig tree, no one is there to ask me in. The good nights now are gone. Everyone we love has gone away. But sorrow never lasts forever. My mother’s voice, hoarse and low.

  ~

  dirt

  “you spend your whole day in the dirt.” Gail’s fiddling restlessly with the short tufts of her hair.

  “I like dirt. I like dirt.” Dirt is something Sarah understands. It makes her feel real.

  Gail has set her hands flat and tense on the rough wooden surface of the table. It’s three days since they met at the Rivoli, since Sarah saw but didn’t see the accident, the woman who died. When Gail pulled her against her thin chest, Sarah felt herself slip back into herself. But now Gail’s separate again, and ticked off. With Sarah, as usual.

  “Look, I know how hard you work,” her sister is saying. “But what is going on inside your head? Is it some proto-Marxist manual-labour-is-the-only-real-work shit? Or just plain old Protestant-work-ethic shit? Huh?”

  Sarah blinks in the sunlight. She can’t explain. What she likes about her job is that she can clear away the weeds and garbage, and make a space where something can grow. That’s why she likes her job. It’s simple. And clear.

  She blinks again. There are no curtains, no blinds on the industrial-sized windows in Gail’s apartment. Gail has just moved into this raw loft space south of Queen, a corner one-bedroom, 14 foot ceilings, all open, all light. Complete with a colony of mice, Gail has told Sarah gleefully. There’s no way anyone can keep a place like this really clean, but it doesn’t matter to Gail.

  It matters to Sarah. It’s why she can’t hack roommates. The furnished rooms she stays in are hers only, and they’ve always been clean, or at least cleanable. Though it did take her three solid days to scrub this last one down. She even went in for a new coat of paint; the place looked like some kind of crime scene, indecipherable splotches all over the walls evidence of god knows what. But the linoleum is in one piece and the other roomers are elderly types too dejected to be loud.

  Her sister is drumming her fingers on the table. Gail is perpetually impatient these days, almost as perpetually outraged. At the weather, the patriarchy, the Falklands War, the Middle East, Sarah. Sarah and her preference for the study of dirt over the study of law. No, make that the practice of dirt over the practice of law. Gail’s a real lawyer now.

  “You are bloody wasting your life. You’re twenty-five, for god’s sake. Twenty-five, not eighteen.”

  “I know when my birthday was.”

  “It’s five years since you finished university and you’re still living in one crappy room after another, taking one crappy job after another. Pardon me. You never did finish university. You’re one credit short of graduating and then you go and quit! One lousy course to complete and you’d have had your BA.”

  One lousy course she couldn’t hack. One lousy course that cracked her like an egg. She had to drop it. And anyway, her major was history. What was a BA in history going to do for her?

  “God, Sarah, just open your mouth, will you? Can you just say something for once? You know I hate this silenttreatment shtick. And would you put that goddamn penny away? Just stop it!”

  She didn’t even know she’d taken the penny out of her pocket, was turning and turning it in her fingers. Nervous habit. She sticks it in her pocket, gets up and goes over to the counter, starts attacking the stack of dishes in the sink to calm herself down. She is not getting into a fight with Gail. And she’s not going to start thinking about that damned course again.

  “Will you leave my dishes alone? I know I’m a pig. Just leave them.” But Gail doesn’t get up, instead watches as the stack diminishes beneath Sarah’s hands, swift, deft as they always are with anything physical. “Why are you sticking it out in such a dumb job? What are they paying you, anyway? Minimum?”

  The handsome rent Gail is paying for her bohemian loft is easily covered by the handsome salary from her job at the law firm. Gail, the newly fledged lawyer. Sarah, on the other hand, has never earned anything more than minimum. Gail is right. Crappy. That’s the adjective. It’s been one crappy job after another. Waitressing, tending bar, even a two-week career as a cocktail waitress at the legendary rooftop bar at the Park Plaza. It’s 18 months now, including layoffs, that she’s been at the City Garden Centre, the longest she’s worked at one job since she left university, left Winnipeg for Toronto. It’s the usual Sarah job: crummy hours, seasonal lay-offs, unsafe working conditions. She’s gotten to the point that she likes the smell of the place: the acid tang of pesticides that mixes with the fumes off-gassing from the plastic hoses and cheap watering cans they sell, which in turn mix with the smell of soil and moss and roots, the spice of nasturtium and geranium transplants.

  Gary, her crew manager, calls Sarah ‘Mighty Mouse.’ She can heft a 64-quart bag of soil if she does it right, and she always does, bending at the knees, spine straight. She just grazes 5 feet and 100 pounds, but she’s always been strong and the job has made her stronger.

  She’s studied up about plants and growing conditions and flowering seasons, and now Gary will send customers to her for recommendations. The rest of the crew isn’t interested in looking stuff up, getting to know the plants, but nobody minds getting their hands dirty. Sarah likes that, likes losing herself working with her hands, letting the days melt into her work. She gets to be in her body, that strong little machine that’s always willing to take on more work. That’s why she’s sticking with this particular crappy, minimum wage, dead-end job. At least till the next coin toss. She fingers the penny in her jeans pocket.

  Gail picks at the rough edge of the table, sighs. “When’s your famous boyfriend back?”

  “Michael’s back tomorrow.”

  “So you’re not objecting to me calling him your boyfriend today?”

  Sarah doesn’t answer.

  “Lucky dude gets five days in Paris on an expense account. I’m working for the wrong law firm. Has he been there before?”

  Never. Sarah shakes her head.

  Gail tips her chair back, runs her fingers again throu
gh her hair. “I got a call from Rose last night.”

  Sarah stops doing the dishes, turns around. The room gets smaller. Rose.

  “It must have been only 11:00 in Winnipeg, but when the phone rang at midnight, I nearly jumped out of my skin. She wasn’t too bad. I mean, there’ve been times I couldn’t even understand what she was trying to say, but last night she was mostly coherent. She went on for a while about her job; she sounded really worried they won’t take her back. I get that – she was pretty erratic before David finally convinced her to take sick leave.”

  The last time Sarah saw their big sister Rose, in Winnipeg, she was just beginning to show. Or at least to show to anyone who knew how willowy Rose usually was – the slight bow to her belly evident only to someone who knew how concave it normally was. When they were little, Sarah would cuddle against her, her head fitting neatly in the inverse pillow of her big sister’s stomach, the rise and fall of Rose’s breathing a lullaby.

  “I called Mom this morning. She was making rhubarb preserves. I had to listen to a lot about the preserves before she’d say anything about Rose. When I finally got her to talk, she told me that David really wants Rose to get onto antidepressants. Now. Their GP is on board, says it’s urgent. Even Mom and Dad are pretty much convinced. But Rose is refusing to take anything, she says she doesn’t want to be drugged.”

  Sarah’s finished the dishes and now there’s nothing for her to do. She sits back down at the table.

  “I don’t know, Sarah, she just can’t seem to get over it.” Gail’s frowning, picking at the table again.