Cormorant Books

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Distantly Related to Freud (Preview)

The Beginning of My Real Life

I was at the window, waiting for the refugees to arrive. My plan was to catch sight of them before they entered our house. Observing people when they didn't know they were being watched was a favourite pastime of mine. But what started as a game soon turned into a strategy for approaching the unknown — see them before they see you.

The technique wasn't as simple as it might seem. A great deal of patience and ingenuity were required. On this morning, I had been nearly stymied when I awoke to find the windows of my room covered with intricate frost patterns. The weather had turned cold overnight — unusually cold, even for Montreal — leaving only a narrow strip of transparent glass at the very top of the pane. It was beyond my reach, but a tall, three-legged stool in the hall offered a solution. The stool wobbled when I climbed onto it, but I found that if I rested one hand on the window frame for balance and twisted my body sideways to gain a better angle, I was able to keep an eye on anyone nearing our front door.

I had been so busy watching the street, I didn't hear my mother come into my room. "I want you off that stool right now, Ellen," she said, sounding annoyed. "I've told you before, it's not meant to be used as a stepladder. Now get down here before you break your neck."

I complied at once, but she wasn't reassured. "The next time I come up here, I expect to find your feet on the ground. Is that understood?"

What I understood was that I better be more careful if I didn't want to get caught again. When my mother's footsteps receded, I returned to my observation post. She had work to do downstairs, and I knew she wouldn't be back for a while. Still, I kept my ears open, just in case.

There was no sign of the refugees, nor of other activity that might have offered distraction, but I was used to amusing myself. To pass the time on this wintry morning, when no one seemed to be in a mood to venture outdoors, I thought about the refugees' failure to appear, and about the designs that had blossomed on my windows during the night. In my mind, the two events had to be connected, but how?

What if the decorations were a coded message from the strangers? A message hidden in an alphabet of white swirls, just waiting to be deciphered. Before I had a chance to make any headway, the sun's rays emerged from behind a layer of clouds and began to erase the mysterious tracings. This too was not a matter of mere chance.

I was in the habit back then of stringing together random occurrences and aligning them to form a satisfying sequence. My goal was to make life resemble the stories I had read in books, where one event inevitably led to another, and each page flowed effortlessly into the next.

It was 1952. I was eight years old, an only child given to dreaminess and invention, reluctant to see things for what they were. I did understand, however, that the arrival of strangers in our midst was bound to change our lives — my mother's and mine — in ways I could scarcely imagine.

There had been only the two of us until now, moving from place to place whenever my mother decided we needed a fresh start. Our nomadic existence was a sign of superiority, my mother said. Unlike the people who never ventured beyond the safety of the familiar, we were explorers, boldly advancing into foreign territory.

Our migrations had begun a long way from Montreal, on a different continent and across a vast ocean. I was an infant then and not a good traveller, according to my mother. But I soon improved to the point where I no longer had trouble following the rules: don't get too attached to the people and places that will soon be left behind, and avoid looking back whenever possible.

The frequency of our moves helped. To feel homesick, you needed to have a home. Ours was always waiting just ahead of us. When I did have the occasional doubt about the way we lived, it was quickly dispelled by my mother's confidence in our future. The best is yet to come, she promised, and I believed her. But there were limits to my mother's adventurous spirit, as I soon discovered. All her daring and assurance shrivelled when it came to the well-being of her only child. Where I was concerned, caution and wariness prevailed.

Her overprotectiveness did not prevent me, however, from doing pretty much as I pleased. The way my mother saw it, danger did not come from unsupervised reading, skipped meals, lax manners, an indifference to tidiness and order, or even the occasional absence from school. Her concern awakened only during those times when I was out there, alone, and beyond the reach of her protection.

My mother worked at home as a bookkeeper, which meant she could keep an eye on me when I was not in school and still provide for our needs. Clients were scarce at first, but once word spread that she charged according to each person's means, she soon had more work than she could handle.

Her unusual billing system traced back to her days in the Polish Young Communist League, when she and her fellow classmates used to march at the head of the annual May Day parade. That early indoctrination, disavowed long ago, continued to cast a shadow over her attempts to better our circumstances.

"You see, Ellen, more for one person means less for others," she would say, trying to explain her quandary. But her scruples were easily set aside where I was concerned. She appeared to have no qualms about providing me with piano and ballet lessons, private tutoring to make up for our frequent moves, the kind of clothes that would not differentiate me unfavourably from my wealthier classmates — and any other bourgeois advantage she considered essential to my welfare.

"You're spoiling her," my mother's friends protested whenever I was paraded before them in the latest outfit she'd purchased for me. "It's time you thought of yourself, for a change."

"Ellen's all I've got left," my mother would reply, fending off their criticism in a tone indicating the subject was not open for discussion. "She deserves the best I can give her." Her desire to surround me with the best of everything had taken us to a house set high on the northern flank of Mount Royal, far grander and more spacious than anything we'd known since our arrival in the city.

I had my own reasons for loving our new home. Looking through its back windows, I could see the top of the mountain, and rising above it, a hundred-foot cross. Illuminated at night, the cross loomed over the skyline like a menacing scarecrow. The front rooms of the house offered a bird's-eye view of the city. In the evenings, I would watch the lights come on in the streets below us, their twisting forms splayed like dead worms at the foot of the mountain.

The wooded area behind the house, a dense, dark wilderness, made it easy to forget we were living close to the heart of the city. Sometimes, playing in the backyard, I would see a group of raccoons emerge from these woods — two adults, three babies — who would stroll past me, in single file, as casually as if I were invisible.

While I happily explored my new domain, my mother was making discoveries of her own, less pleasant in nature. Several months into the move, it became apparent that, for all her careful calculations, the monthly rent for our grand new quarters was proving difficult. This was where the refugees came in. By taking in lodgers, she could just make ends meet. She presented her scheme as the latest instalment in our ongoing adventures.

"We're going to try something new this time. From now on, we will have company every day. This house is much too big for just the two of us, and it will be so much livelier with other people around. It will be fun, you'll see."

My mother had never before mentioned the need for company. Apart from a small circle of trusted friends who continued to visit wherever we moved, we had always kept pretty much to ourselves. I didn't really see the "fun" in her scheme, but I was intrigued to hear that our future guests, as my mother called them, were from the same part of the world where she grew up and where I was born.

The little I knew of that distant place came from my mother's brief accounts of our family history — tantalizing glimpses of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins — all inhabiting a superior civilization that had mysteriously vanished without a trace. Equally intriguing were the odd artifacts that cropped up in these stories — a brass knocker in the shape of a hand; a chandelier, casting a kaleidoscope of colours on the ceiling; a portrait of Sigmund Freud hanging over a mantelpiece. I had no idea what these objects represented. They seemed to have as little to do with me as the ancient shards of pottery and bone I'd seen displayed behind glass on a school excursion to the Redpath Museum of Natural History.

Except for the portrait.

According to my mother, we were distantly related to Freud on my maternal grandmother's side — a familial connection that my mother made a point of mentioning frequently. Each time she spoke of our illustrious relative — the founder of psychoanalysis — I heard a note of regret in her voice, as if the mere mention of his name evoked places and times she preferred not to remember.

"Don't talk about him," I protested. "I don't want you to be sad."

The reasons for the demise of this superior civilization and its puzzling artifacts were never mentioned. Nevertheless, I understood that the cataclysm, which had swept away the chandelier, the brass knocker, the portrait, and our relatives, would have carried us off as well, had it not been for my mother's bravery and ingenuity. Guiding us first across treacherous border-crossings and a vast ocean, and later from flat to flat, she had brought us to the safety of this mountain fortress. Now I learned there were others like us, people with a similar history of lucky escapes, who would soon be joining us. I was particularly interested to hear that our new guests would include men as well as women. We had never had a man in the house before.

My father had died when I was an infant. My mother rarely spoke of him except to say I looked a lot like him. In the face of such discretion, the occasional remark took on special significance. Speaking to one of our landladies — a nosy woman with too much time on her hands, according to my mother — I heard her say, "My husband was in the wrong place at the wrong time." We soon moved to another flat, but the words stayed with me, causing me to wonder if I had inherited my father's bad luck, along with his curly hair and hazel eyes. I knew better than to raise these doubts with my mother. They had no place in our pursuit of a new life. This was made clear to me one night when we were having dinner at our favourite Chinese restaurant. The tables at that restaurant were covered with numerous layers of thin, opaque plastic; as soon as the top one became soiled, it was removed and a clean one appeared.

"What a clever arrangement," my mother exclaimed, watching the waiter prepare our table. "Maybe we ought to try this at home."

I understood her admiration extended to our predicament as well. When you're starting life over — a new country, a new language, new customs — you have to learn to jettison the past as casually as if it were a soiled tablecloth. My mother's silence left me free to invent what I didn't know. When classmates asked about my father, I would describe how he and my mother had fallen in love the first time they danced together at a party. In the background, someone was singing "You Belong To Me."

The song was a favourite in my mother's new repertoire of popular lyrics, which she had memorized in an effort to update her European-learned English. I was encouraged to join her in singing along with the recording:

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle
Just remember darling, all the while
You belong to me.

I liked singing with my mother. She had a lovely voice, and I was intrigued by the way her foreign accent disappeared when she sang. But in my version of their meeting, she sat silent, smiling, while my father sang the words to her. There hadn't been much time for songs lately. My mother was far too busy preparing the rooms our guests would occupy, filling them with bits of furniture borrowed from friends or purchased in second-hand shops. I had never seen her fuss this way before, polishing furniture, shifting it around to find the best angle, arranging pots of African violets on windowsills — as if the strangers who would use these rooms were indeed guests she was eager to please.

I stayed close by, watching this unusual activity with interest. It meant that I would soon be banished from the spaces I had considered part of my playground, but I did not regret the loss. Being the solitary princess in the mountaintop castle, bewitched by the giant with a thousand light-bulb eyes, was not as much fun as it had once been. I was tired of the old games and more than ready for some unusual event to come along and stir up my imagination. This is where the refugees came in; the presence of new people in the house had to be good for some diversion.