Templeton

"Dublin's theatregoers are mourning the loss of playwright and native son Hugh Leonard who died Thursday, February 12, 2009 at the age of 82 at his home in Dalkey, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County, Ireland. Leonard preferred old movies to new ones, and old values to new manners. But his conservatism was tinged with a true poet's longing for the past and a true critic's appreciation of what was too good to lose."
-- the Guardian, Friday, February 13, 2009

Karen Tennenhouse introduced me to Yafa in early May of 1973. The two of them were in graduate school at McGill and were taking the third term off. They had returned to Winnipeg for a few weeks to visit their families. Karen brought Yafa to our study carrel in the basement of the physics building to introduce her to Jim Rae and Martin Yaffe. I happened to be in the room at the time, so I was included in the introductions. For as long as I could remember the social scene had given me a wide berth. That spring and summer Yafa gave me her society. She was the first young woman in my life ever to do so.

She invited me to her parents' home in Winnipeg's old north end: "Would you like to see where I used to live?" She asked me if Sunday afternoon was OK. I would have agreed to anything. I caught the Salter-Templeton bus at the corner of Ellice and Balmoral and arrived at 1:30. I can still picture their house: 414 Lansdowne, on the south side of the street, the third house west of Powers. I counted them. I wore corduroy bell-bottoms in a hilarious shade of violet, and fastidiously laced black oxfords with a regimental shine. It was my first ever attempt at peacocking, and I hadn't quite grasped the rudiments of it. She had the charity -- or good grace -- not to laugh.

Some Chopin piano music was playing quietly in the background... whether on a record player or on the radio I couldn't tell. Her parents' names were Aaron and Elka. They were Holocaust survivors from Poland. After the war they had gone first to Italy, then to Israel where Yafa was born and brought up. Aaron had come to Winnipeg in 1963 and established himself as a cattle buyer. The rest of the family had joined him in 1965. Today he evidently wasn't home. Elka was home but did her best to avoid being in the same room with me. She spoke only to Yafa, and only in Polish. Yafa answered her only in Hebrew and looked faintly uncomfortable about the situation. We moved outside to a sofa on the veranda, though it was a northern exposure and still just May.

We wandered together around her old neighbourhood, Yafa telling me about life in her community, and pointing out where so-and-so lives, and how she knows them, and what they're doing now. A neighbour on Bannerman, noticing us admiring the flowering shrubs next to his front steps, came out and introduced himself, and peppered us with questions about our studies. His son had gone to the University of Pittsburgh to study philosophy and mathematical logic. That's where I'm going, I told him, to study the same thing, and I said I looked forward to meeting his son. He seemed chuffed at the news. Later in Pittsburgh I learned the son had been there several years before me, and had gone on to a teaching position at the University of Toronto, and had committed suicide.

Of her neighbours we discovered that we both knew Abe Brass. Abe and his wife ran a small grocery store down the street from where I lived. Yafa told me they were close friends of her parents, and would take turns getting together in each others' homes to play bridge. I had known Abe and his wife since I was six, when I was entrusted with grocery money and sent shopping by myself. I would ask Mr Brass for imposingly named cuts of meat, and relay special requests from my parents about how they should be trimmed or tied, and he would listen to my instructions and discuss the cuts as he prepared them, not as if talking to a six-year-old but like an adult customer. Years afterwards I learned that one of my uncles, a walleyed Irish fistfighter named John Patterson who had a face like Charles Laughton's Quasimodo and no front teeth, and who was himself a cattle buyer, had known both Aaron and Abe. He had in fact worked with both of them, and thought well of them. But by then it was too late to tell Yafa.

Back on the veranda we drank tea with lemon to warm us up. Yafa explained the Polish words herbata and cytryna, and delighted in showing me how the lemon "clears it up", her rendering of her mother's "wyjasnia". She was nearing completion of a masters degree in English literature. Her thesis was on D.H. Lawrence. Her spoken English was accomplished and self-assured and she conversed in it easily, if at a measured pace. At times Polish and Hebrew terroirs vied to influence the structure and flavour of her speech. Lemon "clearing up" tea was a Polish flavour note. Another was her jeans that had lost "their line": swoja linia. The idioms made perfect sense in English but their spiritual home was the Polish of her parents. Hebrew influences were more structural. One of them was her correcting me for saying "gotten" because in her mind it didn't fit an imagined gizrah or binyan. I said the OED recognizes both variants. No, she said simply, "get" doesn't work that way, and smiled a kindergarten teacher's gentle, indulgent smile: if the big hand is on the 12 the little hand can't be "between".

She explained her given name: Yafa means pretty. Was she? I thought so; but then I would. She was more objective and saw lots of minuses, but seemed at ease talking to me about them. And her family name: Rudnik. The vowel sounds differed from Hebrew to Yiddish, she said, and in some pronunciations it had three syllables. And where girls' given names often ended in hei in Hebrew, in Yiddish they were more likely to end in ayin or alef. It was the only time she ever mentioned Yiddish. She didn't say if she or her parents spoke it. She told me about Haifa where she had been born and brought up and gone to school. She talked to me like no one my age had talked to me before, certainly no young woman: caringly, engagingly, genuinely; without threat or hint of losing interest, or having better things to do, or better people to be with. Talking to still the shivering of a small animal traumatized by big beasts. Traumereien. Reveries.

I remember the wisps of down at the corners of her mouth, that she liked to call her "grandmother's mustache", another Polish flavour note. And her medley of smiles: the Winnipeg ones that made a V-shaped wrinkle under her nose and transformed her into a ten-year-old; and the Montreal ones that were more knowing. And her hauntingly ancient voice, a fragile cameo at her throat, with its ashkenazi resh and distant suggestion of mizrahi pharyngeals, and its timbre like shortbread, and its childlike forthrightness. An exotic confection of harmonics from every register -- alto, mezzo, tiny descant -- and an occasional acciaccatura, barely audible, ornamenting the happy vowels. I was besotted by those sounds. They made the back of my throat ache with a kind of inchoate longing.

After tea she disappeared upstairs to fetch me a candle from her bedroom: "This is for you." Candles played a variety of liturgical roles in Judaism, she said, and besides she just liked them. This one was squat and square and multi-coloured, with a mix of translucent and opaque waxes swirled together. She wanted me to have it; she thought I'd like it. Two months later, in Montreal, she took me to l'Atelier de Prague, a subterranean cubbyhole on the north side of rue St-Paul near Bonsecours, to show me where it had been made, and to buy me another.

When I asked her how much longer she planned to be back home before returning to Montreal she patiently corrected me, as if instructing a child: "This isn't my home; Montreal is my home." Later that afternoon she had a girlfriend drive me home. The girlfriend was going that way anyway, and Yafa had some business downtown, which was on the way, so all three of us set off together. I forget the girlfriend's name. She was studying child psychology and was going to be a social worker. She talked about arrested emotional development, and various social interaction disorders, and what she called "pathological" self-consciousness. After dropping Yafa off we spent the rest of the ride in silence. She'd been talking about me, not to me.

Although it never came up explicitly, by piecing things together I gathered Yafa must have been about a year older than me, born sometime in 1949 and I in 1950. Possibly I had more degrees. She had more languages, and had earned her degrees in a foreign one. And in a field of study that requires a closer engagement with language than most native speakers attain. In other ways she and her friends were vastly older than me, far older than that single year between us could explain, their world almost inaccessibly more grown up than mine. She was an instinctive teacher, and I was a biddable pupil, hungry for any companionship on offer. I remember her teaching me to write shalom in cursive script, from right to left. She made me practise it until my knuckles were inky, and I loved it. And explaining to me how abjads have no written vowels (though shalom's vav does duty for one). Every detail of those lessons is seared into my memory. In a photo that shows me trying to teach her something -- cursive cyrillic on a chalkboard -- she looks slightly pained, as if impatient to restore the natural order of things.

I remember meeting her early one morning at the University of Winnipeg, her alma mater, where she had graduated in 1971. That morning sparkled. Intense, almost horizontal sunshine was picking out every bead of moisture. We went shopping nearby for arts and crafts supplies: balsa wood sticks and brightly coloured yarn for making what she called a god's eye, a teaching device for Hebrew school. We made one together at her parents' house the day I visited (and later in Montreal another one, but that's a sadder story). After shopping I waited with her for her bus, and watched her through the window as she took her seat.

It was at that bus stop at Ellice and Balmoral that Yafa planted her first kiss on me. She used kisses not extravagantly but a lot: for hellos, good-byes and thank-yous... breezy, spur-of-the-moment, without any pretext or subtext. I've no idea if she intended a subtext to this one, or if she even noticed herself doing it. Probably not, though I can't say for sure. I noticed because it was the first time since I was a toddler that anyone had kissed me, or even stood that close to me.

We arranged to meet for a picnic at the University of Manitoba, on a secluded slope of riverbank near Freedman Crescent on the edge of campus. These days it's no longer secluded since they plunked the Drake Centre nearby, and then the Crop Technology Centre even closer. But back then it was idyllic. There was an apiary some 150 metres away but nothing much else. We sat on the grass under a canopy of immense elms and were undisturbed for two hours. Yafa made sandwiches at her parents' house and brought them in a Steinberg's plastic shopping bag. It was fire engine red, with white handles and a white letter S on it in Steinberg's trademark fat Gebrocheneschriften. She'd brought it with her from Montreal. I took dozens of pictures of her sitting on the grass. In every picture she's smiling or laughing, happy to be spending time just with me.

We went to my office in the Fletcher Argue building. It was against the university's sumptuary laws for a graduate student to have a whole office to himself. Nerdishly I hoped to impress her with it. I had no other thought or design. At most she may have been touched by my naivete; more likely amused. We practised my shalom on the blackboard. I tried showing her what Russian handwriting looks like, but she was the better teacher, and I preferred the sound of her voice to mine, so we went back to shalom. Later we went back to my study carrel in the physics building, and she invited me to Montreal.

. . .

456 Pine West had three main staircases: left front, right front and centre back. I hauled my suitcase up and down both front ones before a friendly tenant watched it while I explored the third staircase without it, which of course by that point was silly. (And I was supposed to be a logician.) Suite 28 was an L-shaped 7½ room apartment wrapped around the building's right rear (southwest) corner on the third floor. Its rooms were laid out single file, opening off a long communicating passage that ran alongside them like compartments in a passenger train. South-facing rooms, on your left upon entering, overlooked rooftops of buildings farther down the hill; the incline was quite steep. Around the corner, west-facing rooms overlooked a Bell-Quebec employee parking lot behind a chain link gate on Aylmer -- hardly an edifying view but to my mind memorable and oddly poignant. North and east walls of the L, where the corridor ran, backed onto a next-door apartment that enjoyed a view of the building's central courtyard.

Karen, Solange, Therese, the bathroom, and Sima's room were along the south side. Karen's room was the first door on your left as you entered the apartment. The telephone was opposite her door. Solange and Therese were sisters, though you'd never guess it to look at them, Solange dark, compact and effervescent, Therese pale, clunky and reserved. They time-shared one room between them. Strictly speaking it was Therese's, but Solange was its more frequent occupant during my stay. The bathroom had an imposing array of built-in cupboards, a bit like an old-fashioned apothecary. There was a mop and an ironing board in one of them. I was told to use the mop on the bathroom floor every few days.

Sima's room came last on that side. Sima Mojtahedy was her full name; a student from Iran. She avoided using the ironing board, preferring to do her ironing sitting cross-legged on her mattress -- a daredevil stunt, I thought, but winsome in a sans culotte kind of way. From her window you could see treetops in the back yard of a building where Lorne Crescent came to a cul-de-sac. And if you stood just right you could sight down a distant alley of back yards all the way to Milton Avenue where a celadon eave of the Sang Tom chinese laundry peeked through the leaves. Most of the woodwork on Milton was painted a more staid coach green, an exact copy of the green on the doors of 17th- and 18th-century stone houses in Quebec City.

Turning right the corridor led past doors to a living room, a hall closet, and Yafa's bedroom, then spilled headlong into the kitchen, spoiling the passenger carriage effect. The living room and kitchen were both long rooms, maybe half again longer than in my parents' house: the living room commanded two sets of west-facing windows; the kitchen ran crosswise, a small window over its sink at one end. A pantry and cramped dining room opened off the far side of the kitchen through separate doorways, sharing an oblong space that I was told had once been a maid's room. The building dated from 1906 when the neighbourhood was posh, bordering the golden square mile, and could be expected to have such things. Lady Marie Steele, wife of the pukka Sir Sam Steele, had made suite 28 her official residence for thirteen years, from 1937 to 1950, and had employed a maid. Unusually for a maid's room it had a big window. This gave access onto a metal fire escape outside.

It was Karen who told me about the golden square mile, and showed me around inside the McGill faculty club, which had been part of it. Karen, too, who explained that points of the compass in Montreal were off by more than sixty degrees, but if you tried being pedantic about them you'd make a hash of communicating with people, so better to go with the flow. Yafa told me that boulevard Saint-Laurent bisected the city into a french east and an anglo west. In reality, said Karen, that street pointed almost straight at Winnipeg. To its "east" lay Greenland; to its "west", Florida. As if someone had given the island a quarter turn counter-clockwise, like undoing the lid from a jar. Karen was a physicist and liked to get to the bottom of things. Yafa was more politically attuned and knew when to favour popular usage, and why. I seem to recall someone telling me that the lease and utilities were in Yafa's name, and that the other inmates of the apartment sublet from her. If true it would explain why she seemed to behave more like their landlord than their co-tenant. But maybe I'm misremembering.

Pine Avenue was being resurfaced in the midst of traffic, one fussy lane at a time, en passant as Solange put it, like chess. A construction site east of Hutchison added to the din. Loud construction machinery rattled Yafa. She couldn't "deal with it" she'd say, and hurry past. An adult voice raised in anger had the same effect, she said, even if it wasn't directed at her but merely at someone in her vicinity. She once confided to me, after ducking a dispute with a merchant on Saint-Laurent, that she had no chutzpah. Or maybe confide is the wrong word. It seemed to me she said it purposefully, chin first, as if half hoping to disprove a stereotype. Yet there was wistfulness in her voice too, and maybe just a hint of impatience with herself.

Steinberg's was in the basement of the Hudson's Bay building. It shared a street entrance with the McGill metro station: escalator to the left, stairs to the right. There was a taxi rank on the north side of de Maisonneuve just east of Union. After shopping Yafa would always haggle with the taxi drivers, trying to persuade them to drive us the derisory 900 metres to the corner of Pine and Durocher. None of them ever took the fare. Some even got verbally abusive. It never discouraged her.

She dealt formidably for over twelve hours with a busload of harrowing young grade-schoolers on a field trip to the Ottawa science museum. She invited me along on the school's tab, nominally to keep her company, and because she didn't like to leave me alone for the whole day. Also, I suspect, so that I could watch and admire her at work. I wanted to earn my keep so I tried lending her a hand with sundry class management tasks: herding and corralling, blocking and tackling. But I was ineffectual; my efforts -- my whole presence among them -- seemed to be of no consequence whatever. The little darlings screamed at each other straight through me, as if I wasn't there, as if I was just air molecules. By coincidence the most difficult child on the bus was also called Robert, and he certainly wasn't inconsequential or ineffectual. I had never seen disdain in eyes so young. Yafa kept them in line with apparent ease. Clearly she needed no help from me or anyone else. That was the only time in my life I've ever been on a school bus.

She told me she fancied Khalil Gibran and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. She sympathized with the notion of an all-forgiving afterlife, and appeared actually to believe it. She had a dog-eared notebook she'd been keeping ever since she began learning English. In it she recorded every English language title she had ever read. She showed me her entries for The Prophet and The Little Prince. Then added, "the English versions". I couldn't bring myself to believe in an afterlife of any kind, I told her, and the idea of universal forgiveness struck me as a bit too summary, not to say dispiriting. We agreed to disagree. She took me to the corner of Mansfield and Dorchester, in front of the Queen Elizabeth hotel, to show me John and Yoko's 17th-floor windows, made famous in 1969. At a museum of mostly Inuit native canadiana on Sherbrooke she observed that this culture was alien to her, totally foreign, that she couldn't "relate to it in any way." At another museum on the same street, of dolls, puppets and marionettes, she had no trouble relating. She had a recording of Chopin's waltzes in her living room. She played it for me twice during my stay. It appeared to be her only record, and much played. Cultural affinities, deeply rooted.

She kept very few photographs, eight or nine at most, all of them portraits, most of them thumbtacked to the wall in and among the homemade bookshelves alongside her bed: her parents; an older couple who may have been her grandparents; herself and Karen Tennenhouse standing side by side, smiling to the camera, Karen the taller by a couple of inches, Yafa's chin just clearing the bottom edge of the print. Though she wasn't very much under average height, her build made her look petite, almost tiny. I gave her a nickname to match, what Poles call a zdrobnienie, combining the functions of a diminutive and an endearment. Ort, I called her. It was juvenile and I overused it, but she didn't seem to mind.

Near the head of the bed, perched slightly askew in a glassed frame and bigger than the other pictures was a portrait of her fiance Lenny in medical school in Chicago. She had neglected to tell me she had a fiance until that moment we were sitting there together on her bed, looking at her photos. She told me a mutual acquaintance of their parents' had proposed the match and arranged their meeting. She and Lenny instantly knew what was expected of them, and they went by the book. This was what they had been prepared for. Now they were trying to find out if there was any egregious reason why they shouldn't get along. I answered the phone one evening when Yafa was occupied. It was Lenny calling from Chicago. He was civil and businesslike and mirthless and very mature. As he spoke it dawned on me he would never use a zdrobnienie and I felt ashamed.

After the phone call she took me to dinner at a restaurant called A La Crepe Bretonne, on rue Sainte-Catherine, east of Saint-Hubert. It was a different neighbourhood then. There was no UQAM. Rue Bernadette and rue Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes ran all the way through to Ste-Catherine. De Maisonneuve Est used to be called de Montigny, and the metro station was called Berri-de-Montigny. The restaurant was on the south side of the street, and strangely I even remember which way we sat -- I faced east; Yafa faced west. Dishes and utensils and cooking surfaces were plainly miles from kosher. There was no telling if the flour was yashan or hadash. She even sampled some ham and cheese galette from my fork. And yet kashrut was important to her. Whenever she flew between Montreal and Chicago, she told me, she would always try to take Air France, because it was the only airline offering kosher meal service on that connection. Evidently she wanted the evening to be a Montreal experience for me. I was more awed by her jet-setting lifestyle, and envious that she had flown on 747s.

One of the pictures I took of her was a portrait. It's taken from very close up. She is looking straight into the camera, her face tilted up a fraction as if in anticipation, cheekbones and jawline by Klimt. Her eyes are wide open, neither smiling nor unsmiling. Her lips are slightly parted, not all the way to the corners of her mouth, just in the middle, caught in the slow-motion act of unzipping. By chance the effect is evocative, though I didn't intend it so. I wouldn't have known how to intend such an outcome. Proximity, perspective and expression give you the feeling you're seducing her, and nearing your goal. The eyes suggest she is mildly surprised, or maybe puzzled, at finding herself in this situation. I made an eight-by-ten print of it, showing her face almost exactly lifesize. She didn't like the eight-by-ten, and was happy to have me tear it up. She didn't say why. I took other photos of her that to my mind are just as suggestive of sexuality, only they portray the initiative as hers, not the viewer's. In those pictures she's smiling an arch Montreal smile, and there is no mistaking her apparent designs. She liked those photos... or at least, she didn't object to them.

She showed me the place on the street not far from her apartment where "some boys" had "jumped" her on her way home. She didn't say how many boys, or how old they were, or what she meant by jumped. She said it in a clinical voice, with no emotion, and didn't elaborate. I suppose it was possible -- just -- that she was speaking of rambunctious five-year-olds, or rendering a Hebrew verb too literally into an English idiom. But not likely. I took her to mean, at a minimum, that she had been physically set upon by rather older boys, bodily restrained, possibly manhandled. Maybe they'd robbed her, or tried to (although she didn't use the word "mugged"). A grimmer possibility was that they had sexually assaulted or molested her, or maybe even raped her. Of course I should have asked. But I'd never had a personal conversation with a young woman about anything, much less about jumping, and I didn't know how to ask without seeming prurient. She must have thought me appallingly uncaring.

She pointed out some graffiti on an apartment block near Hutchison. There was a lot of political graffiti going around in the McGill ghetto, much of it adolescent and deliberately incendiary. This was particularly highly charged: Black September, it said. Munich was scarcely ten months behind us at that moment, and Montreal next in line. What's more this was just nine weeks before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war, and there was a general sense that hostilities were brewing, and that the next conflict when it came would be longer than the six-day war and bloodier. I remember all she said was "Look". Just that one word. There was indignation in the way she said it, and pain. Earlier she'd mentioned that her neighbourhood was home to "a mix of elements" (in the Polish sense: niepewne elementy) and I got the feeling she was referring to the students. Now the graffiti crystallized it. She seemed to be waiting for me to respond, wanting me to say something...anything. But again I didn't. I was afraid I could unwittingly say something she might find politically gauche or, worse, offensive.

Once, changing to go out to the botanical gardens, she put on a stiffening device on her lower back: three straight flat surfaces, like a triptych behind an altar, secured with a broad ceinture around the abdomen, to help relieve stress on her spine. Over it she wore a snug-fitting body shirt that zipped in front from below the waist and fastened at the crotch with snap fasteners. She didn't always need to wear the stiffener, she said, but we would be doing a lot of walking today, and she'd got her period last night, and her back was hurting. I photographed her that day in the gardens in front of a low stone wall, its height somewhere between a desk and a counter top, I'm guessing maybe thirty-two inches. She is barefoot. Rising on the balls of her feet, she tucks the wall under her buttocks and gingerly lets it plump them up, while the stiffener cinched to her lower back digs into the dimples at the base of her spine and limns the proud orbs to eye popping effect. She showed me where her spine was crooked, and said she was considering an operation to fix it. It crossed my mind that operations on the spine to relieve lower back pain are not always successful and can sometimes make matters worse. I considered asking her if she was aware of this. But surely she must have researched it, and discussed it with her fiance and other medical authorities, and knew better than I did. Not wanting to insult her intelligence, I thought it better not to ask.

She related the story of her hair catching fire from candles on her birthday cake, and how it billowed so sickeningly, and the strange feathery feeling where it touched her skin, and the lightning reflexes of her friend Roque sprinting for a tea towel to smother the flames, and the awfulness of the lingering smell. And Karen explaining to her that it was the smell of a particular protein burning: keratin. It smells like that when it burns because it contains sulphur. Actually quite a breath catching story, even if it left the more lurid details to the listener's imagination. There were any number of questions I should have asked, and anyone else would have. But at that moment all I could see were my mother's fingers scrabbling frenetically to peel the still molten polyester off my baby brother, a vision that has always sickened me. I couldn't bring myself to contemplate the unspoken possibilities behind Yafa's story, let alone ask her to elaborate them. Her rich showcase of personal dramas could almost have been tailor made to engage people in conversation. I had nothing to offer in response to any of them. I must have been the only complete washout she ever told them to.

Her hair was coarse and voluminous, elbow length and lazily wavy, the odd tousled loop more suggestive of a brainstorm than a bedroom. I always thought of it as simply black, and her skin as that palest shade of olive, near porcelain white, that seems inevitably to go with jet black hair and eyebrows. Photographs record a more nuanced reality: faint undertones of very dark brown, like artist's bistre; occasionally a jarring spark of auburn (though not in every picture); a handful of freckles strewn like petals over milk; a few of the olives still green, like lamp oil in the Temple. She wore her hair down, parting it to one side Norman Rockwell style, starting at the corner not the crown, and fixing the heavier side back off her forehead with a pair of bobby pins, like a swag of drapery. Sometimes she'd try gathering it behind her shoulders, but it wouldn't stay there. Once or twice I saw her wear it up. She showed me a funky sixties barrette: floppy, made of reddish-brown beads on elastic cord, in the shape of a three-spoked wheel about three inches in diameter. Across the middle was a wooden stick pin, about four inches long. If she wore it "like this", she showed me, attaching it higher, it was a tiny kippah.

It was at the bus stop at avenue du Parc and Pine West, just as we were getting off the Cote-Ste-Catherine bus (or possibly the Cote-des-Neiges; I forget which), that we got drenched in a violent cloudburst. We were both dressed for a sweltering afternoon, which is to say thinly, and we both ended up looking outrageously see-through, and our hair matted to our faces. She laughed with pure delight, a gleeful hiccuppy laugh, and clapped for joy like a very small child introduced to a beach for the first time. I had heard that laugh once before. It was on our picnic, back in May, at the University of Manitoba. I had tried to photograph it, but of course I only got the pictures, not the sound.

She took me to a student gathering in a house somewhere near Prince-Arthur and de Bullion, it seems to me, though maybe it was a bit farther than that -- my recollection is hazy. I remember we walked more or less east to get there. It had an exterior wrought iron staircase in front to reach the second floor. All the neighbouring houses were of similar design, and most appeared to be rented by students. I have a vague recollection that Karen was with us too, at least on the walk there and back, though she plays no role in my memory of events inside the house. People were milling about from room to room. There was food and drink in the kitchen, self-serve style.

We lounged on the floor, as students do, and half listened to bits of conversations. As we listened I ran my fingers through her hair. We got up and wandered around, and talked to a few people in the hallway and the kitchen. Yafa didn't seem to know very many of them. We came back to the living room and sat on the floor again, this time a little way off from the rest of the group, beside a doorway, where we could talk more easily to each other. Yafa sat with her back against the door-post and her knees pulled up under her chin so passersby wouldn't trip. While we talked I traced her eyebrows and the hairline around her forehead. We rejoined the group in the middle of the floor. Yafa lay on her stomach, propped up on her elbows with her chin in her hands, and her hip against mine. At intervals she'd give me a good-natured bump with her hip, and a sidelong smile over her shoulder. I played with the nape of her neck, and then with her hair again. I was too timid to move my hand lower down her body. The warmth of her bumps through our denims was such a grand prize in itself that I couldn't risk scaring it off. Almost half the time we were there we spent engaged in this amiable pursuit of small, gentle contact. To this day I remember the precise temperature of each part of her, and the faint smell of her shampoo.

I remember the hopeless pass I made at her, and how she brushed it off with easy unconcern. It was on the living room sofa, Yafa's bed during my stay, as she had billeted me in hers, with Lenny to keep a baleful eye on me. Everyone else was asleep. Yafa was in her night dress but still sitting up, with just her toes tucked under the top covers. The bottom sheet was flannelette and lay in a confused mess underneath her. Her nightgown was in a similar tangle, twisted around, with its hem part way up her back. She didn't try to correct it... comfortable with it that way, perhaps, or just too tired. We spoke in half whispers -- I forget what about -- trying not to wake anyone. The air was close. The heat of her body coaxed faint smells of swaddling and warm milk from the flannelette. Somehow I managed to overcome my timidity. She allowed me three or four minutes of doing what I was doing before she dispatched me to my own bed with a dry kiss and a quiet word about needing her sleep because she had to get up early tomorrow. If nothing else I got over the novelty of being kissed.

I remember her taking me to a Sunday matinee play at the Saidye Bronfman Centre theatre: The Patrick Pearse Motel, by Hugh Leonard. The heroine Grainne is young and petite. Her friendliness and beauty attract men; her poise and faintly goddess-like air tend to keep them at their distance. In her husband's absence she invites an outsider to her home. "If there is any jumping to be done," she says, "I'll do it." I photographed Yafa changing to go out to the theatre. She's looking down at the camera with imperious poise and a faintly goddess-like hauteur.

We went several times to see movies at Cine-Outremont: Harold and Maude, Women in Love, The Music Lovers. Tickets cost 99¢ -- you slid a dollar bill under the guichet and helped yourself to a penny from the saucer outside. Montreal being Montreal, The Music Lovers was billed as Symphonie Pathetique. She liked Ken Russell, and told me he was planning a series of movies about composers of the romantic period. We went just the two of us to Symphonie Pathetique, but we saw Women in Love with some friends of hers, I think from the McGill English department. Yafa had written about the novel in her thesis. I volunteered a layman's observation that the characters seemed inside out, their viscera on display. Walking back along Bloomfield, Yafa immersed herself in conversation with her friends while I brought up the rear and kept my own company. I don't recall that I was doing it petulantly (though it wouldn't have been beneath me); I think I was being ignored. We saw Harold and Maude twice, bookending the two Ken Russell movies. The second time was with Charlie Burton from Pittsburgh, who was a Cat Stevens fan.

She took me three times to l'Atelier de Prague. The place exerted a strange pull on her. She told me one of the owners had a tortured history, to do with the Holocaust. Karen accompanied us the first time. Yafa was keen to show me the candles and buy me one; Karen to give me a general introduction to Montreal's old town. The second visit Sima and her boyfriend came along to look at pottery and scarves, and I got a rustic mug the colour of pozzolanic mortar, with a half slip glaze in indigo and cobalt. The third time, we went alone. I bought two candles I thought looked interesting and offered one to Yafa. She suggested "why don't you keep them" and it seemed to me it wasn't a question. I imagined, on no evidence, that she thought my choices uneducated, tasteless. I nursed an inarticulate sulk on the walk back, unable to formulate even in my own mind what was the matter... on the threshold of my twenty-fourth year unaware that in essential respects I hadn't yet reached ten. On a steep bit of St-Pierre that tails off into de Bleury I turned and gave my purchases an ill-tempered fling up the street behind us, still wrapped in their tissue paper. Yafa went momentarily stony-faced and tight-lipped, but recovered her poise within seconds. An hour later I was on top of the world again, pottering around in the kitchen with her.

She took me to visit some friends of hers in Outremont -- a young couple living in an apartment around boulevard Edouard-Montpetit and (I think) either Stirling or Woodbury. Universite de Montreal was much smaller then. There was no CEPSUM, and no Snowdon / Saint-Michel metro line. Many of the streets have since been renamed, rerouted or eliminated. We took the bus along chemin de la Cote-Ste-Catherine, then walked two blocks up hill in the direction of the campus. It was a quiet, leafy neighbourhood full of tidy four-storey red brick apartment blocks dating by the look of them from the early 1930s. The visit featured the preparation of a magnificent cheese and mushroom pie, with much sampling of raw ingredients as they were being sliced. The man was doing most of the slicing, and handed out samples on the knife blade. In the midst of proceedings he said, "You don't look Jewish." I didn't ask him why he thought I should. I thanked him for letting Yafa hear him say so. She had lectured me on how there wasn't any such thing as looking Jewish. It was churlish of me, this petty prickliness over unfairnesses and slights, and I immediately hated myself for it. But it was too late to undo the damage.

Yafa didn't say anything... or at least not within my earshot. When any of her friends were present she never spoke about Jewishness in front of me. When we were alone together, which was a considerable amount of the time, she spoke of it often. She talked about her mother's diffidence toward me and where it came from. She gave me little snippets of judaica lessons all the time, and would illuminate each one by relating a family anecdote, or some apt allegory. Shabat and kashrut were frequent themes, and pilpulistic situations where one rule overrides another. No listening to music, but Chopin was OK because it held unhappy associations for her. Clothes musn't be freshly washed, but panties have to be. No laughing if you can help it, but she couldn't help it. I remember a gruesome story about someone eating the flesh of a dead companion to avoid starvation. We were halfway up the mountain just then, and she was pointing out the dome of the Hotel-Dieu hospital. Verdigris had given it a matte patina so astringent-looking you could almost taste it (though better not, because most of the copper salts in it were poisonous). The farther east you went, she said, the more you saw tin, which could get chalky with age but still shone in the sun like brand new metal.

She would sometimes recite rules while following them, like catechisms. I was never sure if she was saying them for my benefit or absent-mindedly to herself. I recognized many of them from home: quotidien rules of thumb I shouldn't have thought were at all central to halakha. Rummaging one day through the freezer she found something she thought looked suspiciously elderly. "When in doubt throw it out," she recited with a stage magician's smile, while escorting it across the room to the garbage can. Two days later the kitchen garbage sprouted maggots. It had been unrelentingly hot in the apartment that whole month.

I think Jewishness might have been Yafa's soul. No one had ever talked to me about their soul. I had no idea her sharing it with me verged on intimacy closer than that with a lover. If I'd known...I wonder? But lovers' intimacies were beyond me. During one of her shabat lessons I ventured that, as an atheist, I had difficulty taking the havdalah prayer literally, or any prayer literally for that matter, and that because I believed (passionately, though I kept quiet about the adverb) that caste systems were morally wrong, I was uneasy about the third separation in that eloquent parallel construction of four separations: hamavdil...bein yisrael l'amim. I said I felt it was corrosive, and that it could usefully be dropped from the canon on grounds of tikkun olam, or world repair, and that surely this alone would bring lasting light to the goyim.

Yafa's eyes flashed. She spoke in a rush, like a child careering through a verse it knows by heart: I should thank my lucky stars I wasn't born a Jew; it was an awful responsibility, a heavy burden, a lonely path; it had entailed thousands of years of sorrowful travails; and "thank you very much for that kind of chosenness". I watched horror-struck as amino acids sprang unbidden from primordial soup: out of nowhere and without animus we had recapitulated God's own invidious rift, powerless to stop the outcome we both saw taking shape. Something inside me wanted to protest that I hadn't been talking about chosenness, only separateness -- Bill Buckley's "separate but equal" -- but it got trapped in an echo chamber inside my head; outside, I took the rap, the way you stop answering an anaesthetist. Then slowing down she added, "We don't proselytize," and I fancied I heard the gates of "We" softly closing.

. . .

Details crowd back, clamoring not to be left out. The solid steel chessboard, weighing a ton, that I had stupidly sent by a trucking company to save courier charges; Yafa had to retrieve it by taxi from the company's yard in Pointe-Claire, paying twice what parcel post would have cost. The orthogonal latin squares I painted for Karen, thinking she'd like them because we were in Nathan Mendelsohn's course together, and getting wet paint on everything because I'd only just finished them before boarding the plane. The well-thumbed copy of Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" that Karen gave me in return. Happening by chance on a steel drum band from Trinidad giving a free noon hour performance in Dorchester Square, the band leader bantering with the audience in fluent French and English and rallying his troops in some third language that may have been a Tamil patois. The shimmer of a foreign city. The band's calypso rendition of Mozart's eine kleine Nachtmusik.

Karen spelling Yafa once or twice in the role of companion and guide, so I wouldn't be left alone, as if I might hurt myself. Showing me around the still warm remains of the 1967 world's fair on Ile Sainte-Helene, already betraying signs of incipient dereliction. Showing me the City Hall balcony where, in the midst of the celebrations, Charles de Gaulle had shouted, "Vive le Quebec libre!" Pointing out graffiti left over from the FLQ crisis of October through December 1970, a shameful sequence of events that de Gaulle's words had done much to precipitate, and that still reverberated six months later in the summer of 1971 when she and Yafa had moved to Montreal. Deploring the Autoroute Ville-Marie that had been constructed during their first year at McGill, obliterating two-thirds of a once vast and vibrant Chinatown and leaving an open wound in its place. Drawing my attention to people she overheard speaking Hebrew -- nearly a quarter of the people we passed on the street, to hear her tell it. I thought Yiddish more likely, given Montreal's history, but I had to admit I was no expert, and Karen probably was. She was also a fervent, if sometimes slightly unrealistic, booster for intercultural awareness.

Me and Sima taking turns posing shoulder to shoulder with Yafa in Place d'Armes and beside the old stone steps of Notre-Dame Basilica. In the pictures Sima is an inch shorter than Yafa, but has heavier hips and thighs and fails to convey the same impression of petiteness. She is wearing henna on the backs of her fingers, in an unspoken link with the murals of Catalhoyuk three thousand years before the god of Abraham created heaven and earth. The steps of the basilica have since been rebuilt, adding a sloping apron of smooth stone to the side adjoining the Saint-Sulpice Seminary, air brushing from history the small nook where we took each other's pictures, filling it with inert mass like scar tissue, like an immune reaction. I looked Sima up four years later. I found her living alone two buildings east of 456. She had lost weight. She was uncommunicative, mute. Her apartment looked like it had been tossed. She made me tea and sent me on my way.

Yafa padding around the city barefoot -- downtown, on buses and in the metro -- like some primitive in an asphalt jungle. Barefoot to the botanical gardens at the corner of Sherbrooke and Pie-IX, and around the neighbouring expanse of land that in three years' time, she said, would be an Olympic stadium. Barefoot across the hot tar of a freshly paved Pine Avenue and up the mountain's cinder switchback. Barefoot to Steinberg's. Hardly an ashkenazi custom. Nor, for all its liberated mores, a Montreal one. People stole furtive glances. Some forsook etiquette and stared. Though maybe as much at the brevity of her body shirt as the bareness of her feet; the eye was drawn irresistibly from one to the other along the sweet slip of her skin. It was theatre of course. Girlish theatre, of that age-old kind which comes instinctively from about age eight or nine on, and has always made the world go 'round. But this seemed inspired: informed by a theatrical gene.

Buying her an ice cream cone at the botanical gardens. My treat to Yafa for once. And her accepting it. A rare triumph for me. I was unpractised at small gallantries, and painfully awkward at fitting this one into the syncopated rhythm of her faits accomplis. Spicy sausage on a bun, slathered in caramelized onions and cooking oil, from Corvin's hungarian delicatessen on the east side of boulevard St-Laurent, south of rue Guilbault. Yafa nonchalantly buying one for each of us without even asking. The perpetually wet concrete floor of Waldman's, a cavernous fish market on Roy near St-Dominique, fashioned on les Halles, with rickety trestle tables and everybody poking at the fish. Produce from Warshaw's fruit and vegetable market farther north on St-Laurent, past St-Cuthbert. The cluster of kosher meat shops nearby: Central Kosher Meat Market, Dave Herscovitch's Butcher Shop, La Boucherie Le-Shalom. Yafa informing me that two of them were, in her words, "filthy", and sending me to the third one, just by Warshaw's, for kosher calf's liver, exquisitely thinly sliced, each slice on its own reverent sheet of waxed paper, for $1.29 a pound... in those days a princely tariff, more than four times the price of boneless chuck. Explaining to me why kosher liver was so expensive. "And don't forget to tell them to slice it."

A spindly Motobecane AV2 parked on the sidewalk out front of Green's Superette on the southeast corner of Milton and Durocher, of an indeterminate iron pipe colour, long ago possibly black, fitted with an enormous home-built carrier basket for delivering customers' groceries. I had never seen anything like it in Winnipeg. Where successive Quebec governments squandered eye-watering sums trying and serially failing to make Montreal look like Paris this workaday grocer's mo-ped with its heroic basket did the trick for a song: like something straight out of an Henri-Georges Clouzot movie, it was a Gitane sans filtre dangling from the lower lip of Mont Royal. I warmed to it even more when I learned that 1949 was the only year AV2s were ever made. Green's Superette was the same size as Abe Brass's grocery, but Yafa and I never shopped there.

Quartering chickens beside the sink. Neither of us knew exactly how, but I did my best, and Yafa thought it was pretty good. Shredding carrots with a potato peeler, then dressing the shreds with lemon juice and sugar for a Polish surowka (though she didn't call it that.) Tearing fresh mint leaves over applesauce. Poaching fish in the oven in a bath of 7-Up... a discovery she took huge pride in showing me. Baking banana bread from overripe bananas ("un gateau de bananes", when Solange asked what we were doing). A one-pot concoction of rice and bits of stewing meat, gooier than a pilaf, seasoned with brown sugar, vinegar, soy sauce, nutmeg and cinnamon and suggesting a kind of shortcut oshi sabo without the fruit, but more plausibly of Polish origins, the sweet-sour-soy-spice combination standing in for Poland's favourite "sos kabul" and Maggi. Every student's reliable tuna noodle casserole of course. And her fruit-flavoured Yoplaits, and her Jackson's teas in square tins. Reconstituting endless quarts of frozen lemonade and making candles in the empty cans. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker.

Every Friday afternoon making a special trip to the St. Lawrence Bakery across the street from Warshaw's to buy two freshly baked challot, one for 'erev shabas and one for Saturday. In those days there weren't as yet any language laws restricting commercial signage -- Bill 22 wasn't passed until 1974 -- and the bakery's name was unabashedly English, even down to the ceramic floor tiles in the entranceway. Whether to call it a patisserie or a boulangerie wasn't an issue: challah could pass for either. Up three crabbed concrete steps from the street, barely wide enough to accommodate one person at a time, and no hand rail, hoping nobody crashed into you coming the other way. The cash register immediately to your right on entering. Invariably a scrum to order and pay. Unbraiding one of the hot loaves the moment we'd get it home, ripping it apart at the seams with our bare fingers, and slathering it with immodest quantities of sweet butter, leaving a ragged stump for evening. Teaching me to pronounce its lamed the right way, as if with my mouth full (and sometimes not just "as if"), so that I might make myself understood if I ever went alone to buy one... which I did once.

Trying to remember not to use dishwashing liquid, or God forbid scouring pads, on Karen's lovingly seasoned cast iron pans. Making microscopically fiddly adjustments to Sima's crocheted halter top before going out, trying to keep her nipples from poking through the holes... a pleasingly sisyphean contest. Helping Yafa prize the built-in bookshelves off her bedroom wall with a claw hammer, causing horrendous damage to the plaster, which she said the management deserved. Marvelling at her moral certainties -- hard won spoils of centuries of laboured debate with no one remotely like me.

The daily pageant of visitors to the apartment. Sima's boyfriend with his own scouring pad of red-orange curls, looking like a cross between Art Garfunkel and Ronald McDonald. Twice he smuggled us into the basement of his apartment block to use its laundry facilities instead of the neighbourhood lavomat. We were caught and thrown out the second time. Solange's boyfriend being very kindly and jolly and gentle, in his avuncular way, and three times her size. They always held hands when they walked down the street, from a distance suggesting father and daughter. He could always tell, she said, what she was thinking or how she was feeling; he could sense her slightest mood change intuitively. I said that must be nice. Karen's boyfriend from the US, with his Mark Twain homilies and languorous hillbilly twang. He cherished a romantic but impractical notion of being a homesteader in the eastern townships, and was always dragging Karen off to the Atwater bus terminus. Alone with Yafa one day I did a voice impersonation of him and Yafa laughed and said "that's him".

An affable and fearsomely witty young man (all the visitors were men) with a narrow face, mischievous smile and unruly black curls, hinting that I should "Suivez les indications, eh?", which is what I thought I'd been doing, but apparently I hadn't been. Roque returning for some more cake, this time to celebrate his own birthday, and to be kissed by all the young women in the apartment, standing in a line. And a friend of Yafa's who had emigrated from Hungary maintaining that '56-ers were all a bunch of posturers and poseurs, and that it hadn't been as bad as they claimed. She seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain who he meant. Maybe her first inclination was to associate 1956 with Suez and mivtza' kadesh‎. Or more likely she was just trying to call to mind any posturers and poseurs other than him. She smiled and showed him out without further comment.

All her posters throughout the apartment, on every spare bit of wall: in the living room, the kitchen, the hallway. Monkey-tree Miros, candyfloss Klees, klezmer Chagalls. El Greco's View of Toledo, that she'd bought specially for my visit, because I'd mentioned in a letter that I liked it. Conversation had always been a dark art I'd struggled in vain to defend against, so over the years I'd learned to hide behind letters and notes. I wrote Yafa a 16-page letter from Winnipeg, and she bought me a View of Toledo. I can still visualize many of her posters in my mind's eye: Klee's Senecio and Sinbad the Sailor; Miro's Head of a Smoker, Dog Barking at the Moon, and an untitled green pintura with bug eyes and bottle brush mustache looking distantly related to Aloysius Engel; Chagall's Me and my Village, Blue Violinist, Flying Horse, and one of his many Maries or Mariees. I remember us sitting on the living room floor talking about them. I commented on a recurring figure in all the Chagalls: an elongated cleft with wavy flesh-like folds and a singular detail at one end to concentrate the senses. What a thing to say! It must have been my hormones: left sitting on the shelf for so many years they were starting to go off. In a withering voice she said, "Don't be ridiculous," and gave a disgusted 'tsk. I was mortified. I never talked about art after that.

She kept an old theatre poster from the Saidye on the outside of her bedroom door, announcing Marion Andre's production of "The House of Blue Leaves" by John Guare, Oct 18 - Nov 14, 1971, matinees Wed & Sun, no Friday performances... then covered up the performance dates and venue with a smaller picture, leaving only the artwork and title of the play showing, like a shingle outside an inn. At times I felt stuck in the role of Bananas in that room. The smaller picture, in the style of a mosaic, depicted something vaguely resembling two scorpions locked in copulative embrace, the female readying to sting the male at climax.

Marion Andre was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and from 1946 to 1949 had been attached to Polish consular legations in western Europe helping refugees. Recently I've learned that, before his death, he wrote a quasi-autobiographical play in which he meets and becomes infatuated with a woman whose mother is a war survivor from Poland. In the play Andre is professor Edgar Brout, arguably a portmanteau allusion to his own years teaching at McGill University, where he coached drama, and to Edgar Bronfman, his boss at the Saidye, and to his (Andre's) "rout" from the Saidye in the summer of 1972. For camouflage he resets the story many years later and changes McGill to the University of Toronto; but the real Andre never taught at the University of Toronto. Transposing back to the Montreal of 1971-72, the young woman would be in her early twenties. In the play he'd had a brief but memorable encounter with her mother in Europe, and comes to believe she is his daughter.

The courtyard of her building, lined with ivy to the fourth floor. Box-fans in all the sash windows, labouring nightly to no avail. Huge sash windows, their sills barely fifteen inches off the floor, not even knee high; I sat on those sills to photograph her in the dining room and her bedroom, daylight behind me filtering around corners and bouncing off floors. A Winnipeger's thrill at going without screens -- you could lean out the window, just like in Israel, or Italy, or for that matter Poland. The building's superintendent objecting to the miniature pepper plant I'd brought with me as a gift for my hosts; house plants were frowned on, I was told, though no one seemed to know why. The shortcut through the building's sub-basement, coming out farther down the hill on Durocher and saving a few steps on trips downtown. At the front of the building, on Pine Avenue, basement suites were below ground; but owing to the incline, by the building's southeast corner their floors were two metres above the sidewalk. An earthy-smelling passageway beneath them could be accessed through a low door on Durocher. Follow it in a clockwise direction and you came to the bottommost flight of the main stairs to suite 28. Follow it farther, around another corner, and you came to a seedy service stair up a gap in the walls between Yafa's bedroom and the kitchen... convenient for taking out the garbage. It used to be a light well, but at some point in the distant past the skylight had been tarred over.

Each of us by turns sponge-mopping the bathroom floor: unglazed clay hexagons about an inch across, of an institutional shade of white that mopping did nothing to brighten. The smell of White Lifebuoy in the shower, Yafa's favourite. I tried to get some in Pittsburgh to remind me of her, but could only find the original red Lifebuoy, smelling powerfully of carbolic and not at all of Yafa. Hers, I found out, had been withdrawn from the North American market everywhere except Quebec and (curiously) Bermuda. The Place Victoria tower nearly straight ahead of us down the hill, dominating the daytime view out the bathroom window. Off to the left, Hydro-Quebec's coral pink neon Q taking over from it after dark. Solange told me Place Victoria was sometimes called Tour de la Bourse. Yafa said it was called Place Bonaventure but must have misunderstood which building I was asking about. There were remarkably few high-rise office towers for a major North American city -- an eastern city a scant half-day's drive from Boston and New York, with so many corporate head offices. In 1973 there were really just three: Place Victoria, Place Ville-Marie and at a stretch the CIBC building (the stretch being its aspirational radio mast.) Sometimes CIL House was mentioned, but that was setting the bar mendaciously low.

The phone bill on the fridge next to the shopping list, with people's initials owning up to long-distance calls, and Sima's calls to Iran testily outlined in fluorescent highlighter. Though Sima was the newest roomer she had already run up the highest charges and had managed to make Yafa cranky about it. The carnes, lactes and traifes labels Yafa had written on all the kitchen drawers and cupboards, in French, presumably for the benefit of Solange and Therese, though privately conceding to me that it was Karen who made the most mistakes. Yafa omitted to tell me that traifes could be redeemed through careful washing; Karen assured me this was so, even if neither of them could be bothered, finding it easier simply to keep buying new carnes and lactes while the traifes mounted inexorably. And the Passover seder dishes in a corrugated cardboard carton in the pantry behind the fridge. They weren't to come into contact with chametz or kitniyot. I was asked not to touch them.

Several dozen 6-oz Coca-Cola glasses with their signature corseted shape, purchased by the case lot and still sitting in their original packing case. I broke one while washing up. Don't apologize, Yafa said, that's what they're for. Karen's stainless steel cream and sugar set, a gift from a friend from Sweden, proudly adorning the dining room table and almost never used. Jo Coudert's "The I Never Cooked Before Cookbook"; The All New Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook; "The Hamburger Cookbook" by Myra Waldo [Collier Books, 1962] -- one of a surprising number of identical titles on that unlikely subject, an earlier one for instance having been penned by Esther K. Schwartz and Ruth Kooperman [Abelard Press, 1950]. Yafa said Karen devoured them like novels, cover to cover, and had shelves of them in her room, and knew every recipe by heart. The loose back on one of the kitchen chairs (a pair of rivets broken at the top), lashed in place by what at first glance looked like sash cord but on closer examination was a bit of skipping rope.

Not the solo kind of skipping rope, but the stout white cotton braid rope that groups of three or more children use for double dutch: the kind standardly issued to kindergartens and primary schools in fact. I occasioned Yafa a teacherly moment from that chair. She gathered my face into her breasts, and kissed the top of my head over and over again, and kept whispering shush, shush, shush, it's ok, it's ok. She "couldn't ever", she said.

I saw then that I was the more childish of the two Roberts. My behaviour must have been trying Yafa's patience dearly, and now it was starting to pall even on me. Worse, I'd overstayed my welcome. She'd invited me for two weeks but I got turned back at Dorval for lack of an I-20 form and waited another 16 days for a student visa, so I ended up staying a month, in the process blundering unawares through the last eight days to tish'a b'av. By this time she was preparing to move to a new apartment, and readying to defend her dissertation, and turning her attention to a CEGEP course leading to a teacher's certificate, and stepping up her hours at the Hebrew school where she taught. So gradually she withdrew her society.

I tried clinging on. Like a bad penny I came back from Pittsburgh about a week later and stayed an execrable three more days... even bringing another person with me, hoping it might somehow help. I remember, near the end, sitting with Yafa on a park bench at the foot of the mountain as the sun was going down and trying to regain a bit of what I'd lost. I think most of all I must have wanted to recapture our picnic by the riverbank, because I'd unconsciously steered us to a secluded grassy slope near Redpath Crescent on a well-treed edge of the McGill campus. But the summer had passed, and she had no more time for me, and it was growing dark. Tomorrow morning she was flying to Chicago. She had to get home and pack. She got up and walked back to the apartment without me. The next morning I wanted to drive her to the airport. No thanks, she said, she preferred to spend the $2 for the airport limo. It was the last we ever saw of each other. That afternoon Charlie and I drove back to New Paltz.

I remember the day I first arrived in Montreal: July the 9th. It was a Monday. There was a calendar on the wall by the telephone near the front door. Names were penciled in here and there: Thursday the 12th Karen off on another quick trip to Winnipeg; three days later Solange and Therese returning from their European trip; Roque's birthday; Karen's beau arriving from the US; two days after him his father. Nothing for Monday the 9th. An empty square. When no one was home I found a pencil and added my name, in a hand halfway between Yafa's and Karen's, calculating neither of them would remember when she first noticed it there, and each would assume the other had written it. And then, incongruously, wishing someone would see through the ruse and ask me why.

Yafa had no trouble meeting people; she got to know people easily. That one offhand introduction in the basement of the physics building had netted all three of us: Jim Rae and Martin Yaffe had visited her in Montreal a few weeks before I had. It seemed to come effortlessly to her, carelessly, even thoughtlessly. For me there was only physics, mathematics, logic. No people. Try as I might, people were beyond my grasp, out of reach. The contrast between us was searing, yet I was told to thank my lucky stars I wasn't lonely like her. I am ashamed to say I grew resentful. Back in Pittsburgh I struggled for a long time to shake an unworthy brood of small thoughts, the microscopically fiddly furniture of little heads, of rashim katanim. What had been the sense in it for her? Where was she going with me? Had it all just been target practice? I imagined, again on no evidence, that by now she had paved over all memory of me. It was too smooth a finish; I needed to chip the stone. I parcelled up a god's eye we'd made together in Montreal and mailed it back to her with a note: "I don't ever want to hear of you or from you again." A note.

I expect the pharyngeals are gone now, assimilated without a trace into America's melting pot. They were, after all, never her parents' -- just distant echoes of a Haifa playground that in 1951 rang with the voices of children from nearby ma'abarot, or transit camps. I'm sure she was never aware of them; I like to think no one heard them but me. The forthrightness is probably still there, still evoking the earnest tootle of a child. And the shortbread too: the timbre of a voice doesn't change much. Hope haunts me that the resh survives; my better judgment tells me I shouldn't try to find out. It's only the ancient one of memory I would want to hear, too fragile now for words, a private shibboleth for telling the real self from the impostor.

Something you cling to because it was once so achingly comforting, so long ago, when it shone in the sun like brand new. Like morning dew on spider silk.

Standing on tiptoe. A plaintive catenary filament, hanging on for dear life. Winking out of sight.

"It is with great sadness and empty hearts that we announce the passing of Elka Baba Rudnik on October 17, 2007 at the age of 85 years. Born in Poland in 1922, she miraculously survived the Holocaust that claimed her entire family. She rebuilt her life with husband Aaron (who predeceased her by 20 years), first in Italy and then in Israel before finally in Canada. Baba Elka was a devoted mother to Jack Rudnik (wife Linda) and Yafa Levitt (husband Lenny). Beloved Baba to Daniel Rudnik and David Levitt; and great-grandchildren Aaron Joseph named after her husband Aaron and brother Joseph and Sarah Leah named after her younger sister. Baba was devoted and caring. She was well known as a fantastic cook who loved to entertain family and friends. Funeral services were held October 19 at the Chesed Shel Emes officiated by Rabbi Weiztman. Both grandsons spoke eloquently of her courage to live, her stubborn determination and her self-sufficiency and hope of life being better for the next generation."
-- the Winnipeg Free Press, Saturday, November 10, 2007