The Birthday Party
It was November 1994, and her birthday. She was thirty-two. My in-laws, Mammy and Papy, and two of her three brothers, had come, they said, “to help celebrate.”
Mammy and Papy had waited two years to visit us, their daughter and their grandchild. Little Hannah was in her mother’s arms.
No Joy-euses Anni-ver-saire! No “Hap-py Birth-day to you!” was sung on her birthday. No candles. So, no candles. were lit. Anyway, had there been, there was nothing to light them with. No need to take a deep breath since there’s nothing to blow out. Instead, Mammy, her mother, started insulting her, humiliating and berating her daughter who she called a Nègre. That kind of browbeating from her mother really hurt. She couldn’t take it. She started sniveling, and I saw she was on the verge of tears.
“Arrêtes, Mamie!” I cried, “Mammy, stop it!”
But Mammy didn’t relent.
“You did some acting and dancing, wanted a career on stage. How do you make a living doing that? You can’t! Only les putes (whores, prostitutes, hookers) do that. And writing, it’s even worse! What are you going to do? Eat the paper?”
“Pute! And you aren’t married and have a little girl. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should’ve gotten married in a shul, in a synagogue, like a good, decent Jewish woman. What you’ve done only whores do that.”
I was in our living-room, but it was as if I wasn’t there.
“That’s enough!” I cried. “It’s time for you to go! I mean, Mammy, if you came here on your daughter’s birthday to badmouth her, to insult her, it’s best you leave, and to leave now.”
I tapped her on the shoulder to suggest she should get up off the couch. And I pointed to the door suggesting she should head in that direction. There was some resistance on Mammy’s part. She gave me a look that asked me, in fact that demanded, “Who are you? Why are you meddling? This is none of your business.”
I felt there was.
Claude, the older of the two brothers, got up off his chair and he raised his fist at me. He was warning me, warning me, in my own home, if I persisted in talking to his mother like that, I’d have to fight him. It would come to blows.
And he was younger, bigger and stronger than me.
I don’t think I was being rude.
Her baby brother was six foot tall and gangly. He reminded me of Disney’s Goofy or a gentle, red setter whose paws were splayed out. He too stood up and towered over me.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Maybe, we can handle this differently. Excuse me.”
I knew I’d left a broom handle and a hammer in the bathroom off our bedroom. Grabbed the hammer. Kept it by my side as I returned to the living-room. Mammy screamed. “He’s got a hammer! He’s got a hammer!” I raised it up in the air just like her boy had raised his fist in my face. Now I raised the hammer and waved it like a tomahawk aimed at their faces.
They were scared, real scared. In a state of shock.
I remember Father telling me about this anti-Semite always taunting him and insulting him and calling him names like “Jew boy,” “Dirty Jew,” “You little kike.” “I was an upholsterer’s apprentice in Budapest,” he said. “It wasn’t the first time he was saying things like that. I wasn’t going to take it anymore, So, I picked up my hammer, and I threw it at the guy. I mean, he wouldn’t stop insulting me. And I hit him. The claws of the hammer dug into his forehead. The guy fell and started rolling around on the floor, holding his head in his hands. He was taken to the hospital. When he returned to work in the shop, he was a vegetable. He never bothered me again. No one else dared to either.”
Anyway, when the older brother saw the hammer in my hand, he knew I meant business. He tapped his baby brother on the chest and tilted his head in the direction of the door, strongly suggesting the two of them better make a run for it, to get the hell out of here.
I chased after them and down the five flights of stairs. They leapt down, taking two to three steps at a time. But I remained hot on their trail, in hot pursuit. They ran into the courtyard of cobblestones and little three-storey houses and from there to the huge wooden door street entrance and then out onto rue Belleville (which in English translation means Beautiful City Street).
When I came back, the mother of my child was in tears. She was whimpering and begging her parents not to leave.
“Please, don’t go!”
But I had had enough. I couldn’t stand the sight of them.
“Leave!” I said, “It’s time to go.”
I said to Mammy. “You shouldn’t pick on your daughter like that Mammy. This has been some birthday party!”
Now I got to thinking about what the Lebanese guy had told me. Also, about what the guy wearing a silver pin earring at La Bicyclette had said, which was more or less the same thing.
He told me about his marriage and his divorce,
“I know what happened in Nazi Germany,” he said. “But I married this German girl and now I have three lovely kids, only I can’t, I’m not allowed to, see them anymore. I had been living with her for years and with no problem to speak of. But once, that one time, while I was still living in Germany, I flipped out and hit her, not my wife but her mother! She went to the police station, and she filed a complaint against me for “Assault and Battery.” Not only that, but her family also insisted we get divorced, and we did. But after that I couldn’t see my kids anymore. My Ex got total custody though I never touched her, never laid a hand, not a finger, on her, not once.
But my wife said to me, ‘I can’t live with a man who hit my mother, even if my mother had been insulting me, and had it coming.”
Her whole family turned against me. What could I do about it? What can I do? Nothing. I can’t go within a 500-metre radius of my own house where my wife continues to live with our three kids!
Then I started being followed. Not just followed, followed by different men holding weapons. They weren’t even members of her family. I never saw them before, had never seen any of them before and certainly not the one holding an axe or a machete. I knew I had no choice. I knew I had to leave town. For that matter, I was strongly advised to leave the country, leave Germany, altogether. I had to accept the fact, be resigned to the fact, I would never be able see my children anymore. That I would never see them again. That’s right.”
“Man,” I told him, “Man, I should leave now. Cut my losses. But I can’t. I can’t. Hannah’s my daughter and she’s only two!”
About her brother who raised a fist at me. After I chased him and his brother out of our apartment, he sent me hate mail. I got a registered letter in a large white envelope. I signed for it and opened it. It was ten pages of hate, full of insults and complaints about how badly I’d been treating his sister. I had only met him once or twice. So, where he’d get that from? I don’t care who he got that from. I said to myself, “I’m not taking this shit from him! I’m not taking this shit from nobody!”
So, I went over to his office. I rang the front doorbell.
He opened the door and said, “Hello” to greet me and went to shake my hand. He invited me in as if he had never written that letter and never spewed that hate and like everything was all rosy and hunky dory. I put my knee in his chest, then I kneed his balls. His head went down. I lifted my knee, up fast and I hit his chin hard. His hand went up to check his jaw, to see if he lost any teeth or any were broken and if he was bleeding from the mouth. I raised his face, I could see he was in real pain. I lifted his face up. I held it in my hands, looked in his eyes, and then with my nails I ripped the skin off his face.
“What do you mean?” this guy I was telling the story asked me.
I mean he acted like he was my buddy, my good friend, when he had written and sent me this hate mail, a 10-page letter of hate. Or he was acting, acting like I was a good client of his and he had done my accounting. Can you imagine someone after writing that shit pretending it was nothing! That really pissed me off!
But I pretended to go along with it. So, I shook his hand. As if to say, “OK, It’s water under the bridge. No use in crying over spilt milk. Let’s be friends.”
Then I kneed him in the groin. He doubled up, buckled over and was holding himself in his hands. I grabbed his face, pulled it back, pushed his head back up and I went at him. I stuck my nails into both of his cheeks just like his sister and the mother of my children would later do to herself when she was going crazy, when she was going nuts. My fingernails became claws and he was bleeding like a pig, like a stuck pig! What a fucking bloody mess that asshole made. All that blood was pouring down his face.
That’s enough, I thought. I stood back. Shit! I got some on my clothes. The bastard. I can’t say how angry and pissed off I was. I had to take my clothes to a pressing, to the cleaners to try to get the blood stains out.
“There’s no guarantee,” the guy at the cleaners said, “I can’t guarantee…I can’t promise you.”
I said to him, “OK. OK. Do the best you can.”
I don’t remember punching him, her brother, in the nose, smashing his nose in, I may have. It would’ve been a nice touch, an added feature. But no, I don’t think I did. Anyway, after that, it was a no-go with her and her family. And they didn’t need nails to crucify me. My daughter wouldn’t even look at me. Never mind her calling me, Dad. Her proudly saying, My Dad.
Each time I tell the story of what happened on her birthday, it changes a little. It might be a memory lapse on my part. You forget things. Or it might be what shrinks and psychoanalysts call “Denial,” having put things at the back of my mind, put things in storage, or erasing them altogether from my memory. I’m not sure.
Come to think of it, Mammy who was from Maghreb, North Africa, had made some of her famous Dafina, using kosher meat, beef, I think, and potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, chickpeas, and eggs. She had brought a big pot of it for the special occasion: her daughter’s birthday. No, not Couscous or Tagine, which I love. There were no raisins, almonds, walnuts, or olives in little bowls on the table. No cinnamon, no cumin, raz el hanout (a mix of spices), no ginger, saffron, paprika, garlic, and preserved lemon. But for dessert, instead of having made a birthday cake and her daughter blowing out all the candles, thirty plus one for good luck, there were sugar-coated Cornes de gazelle (Gazelle Horns), crescent-shaped cookies with a sweet almond-orange blossom filling, topped with pistachios, and covered with icing sugar.
I heard her brother resigned from that accounting firm soon after. That was also supposed to be my fault.
The owner-waiter at La Bicyclette liked my story. He went from a look of “Oh, my God!” to grinning and smiling. He came out from behind the counter and it was about Closing Time and started fixing, tidying up, putting things back into place. He removed the scotch tape and took down a painting off the wall. Later, he removed the plastic coating on the floors and washed the windows in the back room.
Oh! She didn’t get any birthday presents. But Mammy or Papy had slipped her some money, some cash, before they left.
Lifesaver
Val Morin, aside from its Jewish summer cottages, was known primarily for three things to us Jewish foster kids. The first was Val-Va Karting, with a Go-kart like a Scooter-boat or Overdrive bumper car at Belmont Park being used to sideswipe and bump the other kids off the small, around-you-go, in-no-time racetrack.
The second exciting thing was horseback riding. The horses and ponies were in the stables, some of them thoroughbreds, but most of them were ready to die. So, when my Palomino Toots took off, I was scared shitless. I used my left hand to block branches from whipping my eyes and leaving bloody scratches on my face.
Little Al whined and yelled, “It’s my turn to go on Toots!”
We got to go horseback riding because Mrs. P convinced my social worker Miss Brodie it was good for us,
“The kids will really enjoy it,” Mrs. P said.
And she had a great sales pitch, “And I can get the owners, with seven to ten kids, to give me a cut rate, a good discount.”
“What’s the purpose of being up here in the country, anyway,” Mrs. P asked Miss Brodie, “if the kids can’t enjoy themselves? It’ll be a real treat for them, a thrill they’ll always remember.”
The third thing was Val Morin had three thousand and fifty-seven sparkling water lakes surrounded by ragged crests and lakes dipping into flower-filled valleys. Not to mention seven hundred and forty-three rivers, creeks and streams, the islands, bays, and coals: a fisherman and angler’s dream come true.
The summer cottage Mrs. P had rented faced Lac Raymond (Raymond Lake), also called “the Jewish lake” because it was the only lake where Jews could go and not have to worry about being called les maudits juifs! “Fuckin Jews! Damn Jews!” So, for us it was “the best lake,” stretching three hundred and nine meters, and we had it all to ourselves. I was awarded a Bronze Medallion and a Red Cross Lifesaver’s certificate from Camp Wooden Acres at Saint-Adolphe-d’Howard where I’d spent three weeks the previous summer. I could tread water, float and hold my breath, and if need be and the girl was pretty enough, do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I know how to pinch someone’s nose and get them to open their mouth. Then I blow air and life back into them. Otherwise, he or she could die. Out there in the middle of one of those huge lakes, you never know what can happen.
“Help!” I heard her screaming, “Help! Help!”
I couldn’t see her. I looked out across the lake. There she was out there.
I yelled, “I’m coming!”
I jumped into the water.
“I’m coming!”
It was late early summer. There was a cool breeze. The water was still really cold up there in the Laurentian mountains. The further out I got, the colder it got until it was ice-cold. I was freezing. I didn’t have to look at them. My balls were turning blue.
“If it’s Karin who’s out there and in trouble,” I said to myself, “I don’t care. Nothing else mattered than saving her from drowning.”
“I’m coming!” I cried out and accidentally swallowed some water.
I cut the water. I use my arms. My hands. I slice it open. My arms and hands are like swords. They’re like Royal Hungarian Hussar sabers. They’re like tin snips. They’re like garden shears, getting the weeds out, trimming the hedges. My arms and hands, they’re like so many knives and daggers being thrown into the water. Like so many Davie Bowie knives. My left arm goes back, high up and back down knifing the water. Then my right arm does the same thing. I’m a fish. I’m a swordfish. I’m a barracuda. I’m swimming fast, gliding along. I can do anything!
“Karin!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Karin!”
My right arm. My left arm. I’m a steamboat. I’m a speedboat.
My heart was beating fast. I kept my face in the water. I kept kicking. I had powerful, muscular thighs. I did a lot of running. I ran marathons. I did mini marathons too. This was a four hundred yards race. A thousand yards. But I was swimming so fast, it was like doing a sprint.
Things swim into my head.
My aunt, Bözsi Néeni, is caressing my thighs.
“So strong,” she says and sighs.
“You have beautiful legs,” Mother said, “the legs of a woman with three perfect diamonds between them.”
My head comes up. I turn my head to the right. I open my mouth sideways, look up at the sky and into the sun. I suck in some air and crawl back into the water.
I’m a vacuum cleaner. I’m A Hoover. A Black & Decker. No, I’m a fish.
I breathe. I can breathe! The air, a leaf, a few branches brush my back. Caress it. I sweep a few others aside. My face is in the water. I can see everything. My right arm goes up in the air, then the left.
My arms become swords, sabers, knives.
She was there in front of me, splashing wildly, gasping for air.
My hand goes into her chest, pulls out her heart. I’m holding her heart in my hand. I look at it carefully. I see how it’s beating. It’s beating fast. And my heart is beating as fast as hers. I take her heart and put it back inside her chest.
I’ve got her by the waist. My arms wrapped around her.
“One kiss,” I said to her.
She moved her head away. It wasn’t her! It wasn’t Karin! Dammit! It’s not Karin. It’s Gail, her twin sister! I was fuming. I was burning up. Dammit! I was angry as hell. I yelled at the sky, “What the …! I hate Gail! I hate her! She’s always…! And she’s jealous, so jealous of her sister. That stupid…! She tricked me. There’s not going to be any treat. So, I let go of her. I let her go on her own. I turn around. She’s thrashing about, slapping the water hard with the palms of her hands, beating the water with her fists as if that’d do any good and help. Well, it won’t. And I don’t care. I turn my back on her and start swimming the other way.
I’m a dragon, a fire-eating dragon. I’m spitting flames. I’m heading back to shore as fast as I can.
“I’m here!” Gail’s screaming her head off and crying out. “I’m here! No! No! Come back here!”
I turn my head. I see her thrashing and splashing about. She’s doing everything she’s and you’re not supposed to: panicking, screaming, and wasting her breath, swallowing water.
You’re wasting your breath sis! I think it but I don’t say it. Because I don’t care. I don’t give a shit!
“No!” she keeps begging me and yelling at the top of her lungs, “No! Please come back!”
“OK!” I said. “OK!”
I turn around. I swim slowly back. I keep my eye on her. I’m watching her. I’m taking some pleasure in this, in her gasping for air. She’s going crazy. The way she’s hitting and striking the water harder and harder. I reach her. She jumps on my back and clutches my sides. Then she clutches my neck and holds on for dear life. She tugs at it, as if my neck could up and run away, leave the rest of my body. She’s strangling me.
“Gail, let go!” I raised my voice and yelled at her. She could not see how angry and pissed off I was because she was on my back. “Gail let go! My neck! Gail!”
I put my fists together. I make my back small. I move from side to side and manage to get her off my back. I turn around and get my hands under her armpits. I’d like to punch her in the face but I don’t.
She swallows a lot of water. Gulps it down.
“Calm down Gail!” I tried not to yell at her but I did.
I’m a dolphin.
I lift myself up out of the water and give her back a hard slap. She spits out the water. The water spurts out of her mouth like out of a faucet or a drain that’s just been unblocked. She makes a similar kind of noise.
“Now Gail calm down! Just calm down, will ya?”
“OK,” she cries, still all panicky. “OK!”
“OK, Gail, hold on. Hold onto my shoulders. No! Not my neck!”
I help her a bit. I make sure she’s holding on right. But she clings to me like a leech. I hate that! I really hate that!
“Relax! Try to relax! Calm down Gail. Will you calm down!” “OK! OK!”
It’s not OK. I know it’s not politically correct to say this but she was hysterical. She was going nuts, and she was driving me nuts.
“Don’t dig your fingers in. Don’t dig your fingernails into me.”
“OK, I’m sorry,” she said, all apologetic.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
I start to swim back with her hanging onto my back. I do the breast stroke. It might be easier, I think, with her on my back. It’s not. I can’t move my arms, not wide. I can’t kick. She’s all tense.
She’s a stingray.
Remember, what my brother Steve, what Pisti, taught you.
“Kick! Kick! Use your legs! Kick your feet!”
I listen to him though he’s not there. For once, I’m doing what he told me to do.
“Keep your head up. Keep your face in the water but keep your head up on top of the water.”
You’re a ship. You’re a speed boat.
“You have to use your feet. Make like a fish, like a dolphin, like Flipper. Like you got flippers on.
I’m a shark coming in for a kill. No, I’m Flipper. I saved Gail. I should be happy and dancing on my fins, with my head up and my body high out of the water.
I think of Jules Verne, I’m Nemo. I’m Captain of the Nautilus. I’m going Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: A Tour of the Underwater World. Now, I’ve come up.
I’m Lloyd Bridges of Seahunt.
There I am diving with scuba diving tanks on my back. No, because Gail’s on my back.
Now I’m Captain Jacques Cousteau looking for shipwrecks and buried treasure. Maybe, I can explore and discover the secrets of the sea, of all the seas and oceans.
Forget rivers and lakes, streams and creeks.
“Ah!” Gail’s screaming again and snaps me out of it. “Ah!”
“Oh! Oh Gail! What’s wrong Gail? What’s wrong now?”
I look at her. I look behind and see the sky’s a beautiful baby blue, a sky blue. If it weren’t for Gail, I’d look and stare at the sun, a Sunkist ball of fire.
“Ah!” she cries, and complains, “Oh! Ah! I have a cramp!”
“It won’t be long now before we reach shore. Just hold on.”
“Ah! Oh!”
She’s so anxious, she won’t let up.
“Gail, will you please shut up! Please! Gail, shut up! We’re almost there. If you’d just shut up a minute!”
I made it and get us back to shore.
“OK, Gail get offa me. You can get off me now.”
But she doesn’t.
“Gail, get offa me!”
I have to shout at her to get the message across she’s safe and sound, and everything’s OK now.
“Get off, will ya!”
She finally loosens her grip.
I lie there on the stony beach for a while. I think of her sister, of Karin’s, dark hair, her dark eyes. The night.
Gail starts crying again.
I think. Oh, shit! That’s all I need is for someone to hear her crying.
“What are you crying about now? You’re safe and sound. You should be happy. You should be relieved. You could’ve drowned. Gail, let me see you smile. C’mon Gail.”
But she keeps on crying.
“OK!” I say to her, and I get up. “Stay here Gail. Don’t move. I’ll go get our beach towels.” I race towards our country houses. I don’t see Karin or anybody anywhere. I wonder where they all are. Where is everyone?
I don’t go looking for them. I don’t go looking for more trouble than I already have. I come running back with towel for her, and I put the towel over her, a tepee, a tent and rub her down a little.
“Gail, gimme your hands,” I tell her.
I rub her hands. Her teeth are chattering. Her lips are purple. She looks like a frightened pygmy. I can’t do anything about that. Not about her face and how frightened to death she looks and still must feel though she’s safe now. I can’t do anything other than I brought her back alive.
And she’s alive!
Dammit!
Still, I give her a good rub down. She finally shuts up. She’s just trembling and shivering a little bit.
“OK. Now Gail you go ahead and you do it.”
She slowly rubs me down with the towel, dries me off.
I think for a moment. And I tell her and ask her and beg her at the same time, “Gail, promise me you won’t squeal. You won’t rat on me, will ya? Promise.”
She promises not to.
“After all,” I remind her. “I did save your life. You don’t want me to regret my going back to get you and saving your life, do you?”
Of course, she broke her promise and squealed. She went not wasting a minute and ratted on me. She told her mother, and her mother told her father and her parents, the Herzkowiczes, went stomping over to see Mrs. P, and they told her what Gail had told them. They didn’t talk to me or ask me what happened out there on the lake or ask me any questions.
Things became a lake. The rivers and tributaries poured into the water.
Mrs. P yelled at me, “You’re never ever to approach them again. Never ever go near them. Not Gail, not Karin, neither of them, you hear me!”
Everyone in the Jewish cottages in Val Morin heard her.
“Why?”
“Because… and you know why.”
Mrs. P sure was furious, and then catching her breath, she finished her sentence, “Because I say so.”
Then she got her second wind.
“Because what you did was absolutely disgusting!”
That’s not the first time she said that.
“And they don’t want a boy like you capable of doing such a thing near their girls. And I don’t blame them.”
“But I saved Gail’s life!” I cried.
“That’s not the issue nor the point!”
*
It’s Indian summer. The lake’s covered in leaves, maple leaves, but it looks like so many beds of lily pads. The sun’s shining bright. But the water’s still ice-cold. And I’m freezing. I can’t help it. I think of Karin. Then I think of Gail. Damn her! I shouldn’t have gone back to save her. I should’ve let her drown, pretended I didn’t hear her. Then I wouldn’t have to hear her screaming in my ears. I’d be seeing Karin. Nobody would know. Nobody’d be the wiser. And I’d be consoling her over the death by drowning of her sister, her twin.
George Ferenczi’s Paris-based Les Editions Est-Ouest Internationales and its literary review in Montreal, publishing such “Writers from the Other Europe” as Danilo Kiš and Tomaž Šalamun. He also the first to publish Nobel prize-winner Imre Kertész in French translation. He organized four international conferences, For Paul Celan (Paris, Montreal, Bucharest and Chernivtsi). He’s taught courses on ‘Raymond Carver and the North American short story,’ on ‘Literature and Film Adaptation,’ as well as Journalism and Rhetoric at several French “grandes écoles” (French Ivy League schools) and “Art and Science” at Beaux-Arts de Paris. He often writes about struggling with a mother’s mental illness, being a foster kid, child abuse, domestic violence, the Jewish Hungarian immigrant experience and intergenerational trauma. His writing has appeared notably on CBC-radio, in Les Temps Modernes (in French), and Fire Readings, Frank Books, (with Shakespeare & Co. in Paris). His story “My Sweet Mother” will be published by the Budapest Poetry Collective in May. He has been asked to be a contributor and write an essay for the Cambridge Companion to Charles Bukowski.