Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [51]
Wakened with a sneezing fit at 2 a.m. Reached for my thermometer and discovered I had a temperature of 99.2. My pulse was fast. Joints ached. I knew I shouldn’t have gone out in the rain.
Paris. Oct. 9, 1951. A letter from my father has been lying on my table for ten days, and this morning I finally risk opening the depressingly thick envelope.
I can visualize my father writing this letter in his cramped handwriting, seated at his oak roll-top desk in the rear of the bookshop. He would be smoking an Export A, a toothpick piercing the butt to keep it going until it threatened to scorch his lips. The desk’s surface would include a spike thick with unpaid bills, and a cigar box for the collection of paper-clips, elastics, and postage stamps from foreign countries for the French-Canadian postman he is proselytizing. There would also be the remnants of his lunch. The remains of his dry hard-boiled egg, which he never finishes, or a leaky sardine sandwich. An apple core. Sucking his yellow teeth, he writes with an old-fashioned cork-handled pen, even as he still shaves with a straight razor and shines his cracked wingtip shoes every morning.
His letter, as usual, begins with a litany of political bile. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have naturally been found guilty and sentenced to death. The H-Bomb has been tested in the Pacific, a provocation to the Soviet Union and other People’s Democracies. Twenty-one Communist leaders have been arrested in the U.S., charged with conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government. Then he gets down to the nitty-gritty. Mother is no better. She cannot be left alone at home, so he wheels her to the bookshop every morning, and soon there will be ice and snow, and how will he manage, his arthritis is so bad? She snoozes or reads in the rear of the bookshop until he is ready to lower the shutters and wheel her home. Home, where he will bathe her, soothing her with rubbing alcohol, and then heat her a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup followed by diced carrots and corn niblets, everything out of cans. Or fry her a couple of eggs in stale bacon grease, the edges burnt lacy brown. He will read to her at night in his smoker’s voice, overcome by coughing fits, bringing up phlegm into a filthy handkerchief: Howard Fast, Gorky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Aragon, Brecht. In the absence of a crucifix, a framed copy of Mao’s tribute to Comrade Norman Bethune hangs over their bed, which now requires a rubber undersheet for her sake. Some nights he will brush out her knotted grey hair, even as he sings her to sleep:
Join the Union fellow workers
Men and women side by side
We will crush the greedy shirkers
Like a sweeping surging tide
For united we are standing
But divided we will fall
Let this be our understanding
All for One and One for All.
My father writes that he now finds it all but impossible to cope. If I come home, he will forgive me my sins of omission and commission. I could have the back bedroom, with the radiator that sizzles and knocks through the night. With the window that offers the inspiring view of other people’s Penman’s long underwear flapping on the backyard clotheslines, and sheets frozen rock-hard in winter. I could write in the mornings, looking in on Mother from time to time, emptying the slop basin of her wheelchair, a spur to my appetite for lunch. Then I could relieve him in the afternoons, tending to the bookshop, peddling Marxist nostrums to comrades. Dealing with the occasional innocent who wanders in to inquire, “Would you have a copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking?” Or, perhaps, Gayelord Hauser’s Look Younger, Live Longer? He would pay me twenty-five dollars a week.
“I am not getting any younger, and neither is your devoted mother, and we require your help, as our lives draw to a close.”
And what about my life, I wonder? Why should I sacrifice it for their sake? I would rather slit my wrists, as poor Clara22 did (Clara, whose prodigious talent I was one of the first to recognize), than return