Hutchison Street Read online

  Hutchison Street

  A novel

  Abla Farhoud

  Translation by Judith Weisz Woodsworth

  Copyright © 2011, VLB Éditeur

  Original title, Le sourire de la petite juive

  Translation © 2018 Judith Weisz Woodsworth

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  The following is a work of fiction. Many of the locations are real, although not necessarily as portrayed, but all characters and events are fictional and any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Prepared for the press by Carmelita McGrath.

  Cover photo by Lindsay Crysler

  Cover design by Debbie Geltner

  Book design by WildElement.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Farhoud, Abla, 1945-

  [Sourire de la petite juive. English]

  Hutchison Street / Abla Farhoud ; translated by Judith

  Weisz Woodsworth.

  Translation of: Le sourire de la petite juive.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988130-74-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988130-75-0

  (HTML).--ISBN 978-1-988130-76-7 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-988130-77-4

  (PDF)

  I. Woodsworth, Judith, translator II. Title. III. Title: Sourire

  de la petite juive. English

  PS8561.A687S6813 2018 C843’.54 C2017-906569-6

  C2017-906570-X

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and Livres Canada Books, and of the Government of Quebec through the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC).

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

  Linda Leith Publishing

  Montreal

  www.lindaleith.com

  This is a work of fiction. I apologize in advance if any residents of Hutchison Street were to recognize themselves and feel offended. I would be delighted, on the other hand, if some people did recognize themselves and felt flattered by the way in which they have been portrayed. The names of all the characters have of course been changed. I am pleased to acknowledge my debt to the women and men of Hutchison Street.

  A.F.

  Stories turn their back on the truth. The truth of a story lies in its capacity to create meaning. It thus stands as our supreme connection with the world because it is the freest, the least censored among them.

  Thierry Hentsch

  Truth or Death

  Isaiah asked him, “What hast thou to do with the secrets of the All-merciful?”

  Berakhot 10a (Talmud)

  Prologue

  Last night, I dreamed that I had as many children as books. Or rather, that my books were my flesh-and-blood children. I looked at them, all lined up together on one row of my bookshelf. They were on their best behaviour, standing in order from the eldest to the littlest one. My bed was set up in my office, I don’t know why. An immense bed in an immense room as big as my entire apartment. The room was empty except for shelves crammed with books, which lined three of the walls. The fourth wall was punctuated by four giant windows extending from the floor to the ceiling.

  A magnificent light poured into the room from the street, even though I knew it was night time. I was lying in my enormous bed and I was calling out, “Children, I am thirsty, I would like a glass of water. I’m thirsty, kids, I want some water.” No one came. “Paper prog-e-ny,” I uttered with indescribable emotion. Fate, sorrow, choices, destiny, winning and losing, with death lurking at the end of the road. All of these thoughts were tangled up in my mind.

  I woke up, very thirsty, reciting those two words aloud so I would not forget them. I took out my notebook and quickly jotted down the words “paper progeny,” wondering whether I was sorry that I had not had children, that I had put everything into my writing. Everything. Body and soul, my entire life. Everything. My friends, my lovers, the children I could have had – all of them had come SECOND to my irrepressible desire to write, write, write and then write some more. In my heart, in my mind, there was only room for my paper progeny.

  Can a single thing – such as a profession, a career, a love affair, a passion, a place, or a God – be worth devoting an entire life to?

  I think about myself and the Hasidic community. The Hebrew word, transcribed as Hasid (Hassid, Chasid, Chassid) in the singular and Hasidim in the plural, signifies “pious.” Hasidim spend their whole life dedicated to God. Every feature of their life is guided by the presence of God. Everything is bound up with this God without a name, referred to simply as Hashem or “the name.”

  Since the age of twenty-five, my own Hashem has been writing. I’ve just substituted writing for the concept of Hashem.

  They say that the Jews, and Hasidim in particular, have a portable homeland, the Torah. Mine is just as portable; it regulates my life, my every action, and all of my thoughts.

  A common expression comes to mind: don’t put all your eyes in one basket … In writing this down, I have made a slip of the tongue. I’ve written eyes instead of eggs. It’s true, my eyes have always been focused on the same basket. It’s a bottomless, boundless basket into which I dig deep, in search of an image or a word to use in building a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter and a book.

  My thirst for saying, telling, seeking, understanding and finding has never been fully quenched. I feel like I’m always missing the point. And so I begin another book, hoping to find the answer, but without knowing whether I’ll recognize it when I see it, and, if I do, how I will put it into words.

  Perhaps all is not lost. In my dream, there were four large windows and lots of light. The windows faced Hutchison Street. The sounds of the street and the light shining in from outside are coming back to me now. Such a beautiful light.

  The Mile End Side

  The Diary of Hinda Rochel

  Dear Diary,

  It has been a long time since I last wrote because I am never home alone. My younger brothers are playing in the backyard, the baby is asleep, and my older brother and my father have not come home yet. I think I will cry if I don’t talk to anyone. Luckily I have my diary. My mother has gone out to buy a big pot to cook meat in. It was my fault that she had to throw out everything in the pot and the pot itself because I had contaminated it by using butter instead of margarine. It was a stupid mistake, my God, how awful. But it was just because I wasn’t paying attention, may God forgive me. When I realized what I had done, I acted as if nothing had happened. I continued to stir the beef stew just as Mama had asked me to. I opened all the windows and the kitchen door and prayed that no one would notice anything. Because we don’t have a lot of money. What a waste to throw away a nice pot like that, with a thick bottom, along with all the good meat that was in it, and good vegetables, and the stainless steel spoon I was using to stir it with. But in spite of my prayers, the smell of butter mixed with meat reached Mama’s nostrils. She was in my brothers’ bedroom at the front of the house looking after the baby who was crying. She could smell the forbidden mixture. Other people would have liked that smell. Me too, if I had been brought up by the Goys. But that’s the problem. We are not used to it. Sometimes, especially in the summer when the windows are
open, I catch the smell of this very mixture coming from the houses of the neighbours. And I don’t like it. But I was still praying that no one would notice. My mother came running with my baby brother in her arms and she yelled at me, “Oy vey! Oy vey! What are you doing, you bad girl? May Hashem forgive you, you have contaminated my pot, my best pot, and the only one big enough to feed all of you.” Oy vey! Oy vey! I don’t like those words. I would have liked to tell her that God would understand and that He would overlook the sacrilege just this once because He knows that I’m still a child and I didn’t do it on purpose. Sometimes children are pardoned for things that grown-ups are not. But with my mother, you don’t fool around with the rules. You are not allowed to mix milk and meat, period! Never. If she had to choose between eating contaminated food or dying, I’m sure my mother would choose to die. I was surprised, because my mother is not often mad at me. “Oy vey! Oy vey!” she said, as she usually does when she is angry, but she didn’t punish me. She just said, “Look after your little brother. I’m going out to buy a pot. When he’s asleep peel the vegetables that are left.” Moishy fell asleep quickly, so I was happy. I began to write, right away. And when I start to write, I forget about everything.

  Françoise Camirand

  She came from an average family, neither rich nor poor. There was nothing dramatic or remarkable about her family, which was like hundreds of others in Duvernay, where she was born. Everything was predictable, conventional and stable. Everything conspired, in fact, to make the life of an intelligent, curious and lively little girl turn out just a tad monotonous. You could even say boring. Her father had been working at the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary for ages. Her mother stayed home, looked after the children and kept the house clean and tidy. It was a house without knickknacks, where colouring was off limits because it made things dirty. It was so spic-and-span that you could eat off the floor, as people used to say in those days, except that you were only allowed to eat sitting up straight, at the table, with a napkin tied around your neck or placed neatly in your lap. No one ever told stories, and jokes were few and far between, although the occasional nervous twitter could be heard. It was so dull you could die. The two boys slept in one bedroom, the two girls in another, with their parents in the master bedroom. Out front there was an unbelievably green lawn. There was a small backyard, which was just as uncluttered as the house was inside, with no toys lying around and no swings. Françoise was the third child, followed by a sister who was less than a year younger, who was always getting in her hair.

  The year she was born, there was a big change in the Camirand household. A television set arrived – a large, gleaming piece of furniture that took pride of place right in the middle of the living room – and it transformed the life of every member of the family. This became their only form of “entertainment” because, apart from the one-week vacation they took every year in Old Orchard, they had none.

  Françoise adored the television. Seated in her highchair, even before she learned to talk, she already recognized the characters in the programs. She stared at the TV blankly, occasionally burbling in appreciation, watching everything the family watched. Along with her brothers and her sister, she was mesmerized by everyone in the kids’ program called the surprise box, La boîte à surprise. But her favourite character was the living doll Fanfreluche, who was so talented she could pop out of a big book, slip back in again, and then set off in search of adventure. As Françoise grew older, she became more and more entranced by television because she was beginning to understand the stories and could even predict how they would unfold. It was fun to try to guess how the TV series would turn out, and when she was dead on, she was very proud of herself.

  It was television that triggered her interest in captivating stories, in which her beloved characters sprang to life, but her taste for writing came from reading. It happened at school. At home, there were very few books. Her parents had never read to her and had not even told her bedtime stories. She was the one who told stories to her sister to get her to stop babbling. Her father would read biographies of famous men, but her mother claimed that she didn’t have time for “that sort of thing.” The only time of day when Madame Camirand allowed her backside to sink into the sofa was when she was watching television. She was never idle, though. To keep from biting her nails or from smoking – the only two little bad habits you could fault the queen bee with – she kept her hands occupied by crocheting or knitting.

  School was a real liberation for Françoise. She learned to read at an astonishing pace, so fast and so well that her teacher, who was clever and wholeheartedly dedicated to her pupils, slipped her books while the other girls mumbled their way through easy reading exercises. She would have gone to school on Saturday and Sunday if she could. She was still in grade one when she discovered the pleasure of reading – in her case it would be more accurate to say her love of books. In the difficult years that followed, it was always reading that kept her afloat. The pleasure of writing came a little later, in grade six to be precise, when the children had to write about what they had done on their summer holidays. With unimagined joy, Françoise began to invent the vacation of her dreams, extraordinary holidays, but plausible ones, which all the girls, and not just her, would have loved to have had. This made her friends believe that everything she wrote was true, that it had actually happened that way. She didn’t dare to contradict them. That day, she experienced something new: she discovered how much she enjoyed making other people believe in something, how much she liked telling a story and sharing good times that she had dreamed up all by herself, in her own head. The pleasure she derived from writing endured, but it also turned into a need and a desire that was renewed with each new book, although after completing each of her novels she would also be overcome by periods of extreme fatigue.

  Françoise Camirand was sixteen years old when she left home, escaping from her parents and the suburb she so despised. Before leaving, she wrote a letter addressed to Monsieur and Madame Léopold Camirand, leaving out her mother’s first name out of deference to her personal choice. On the rare occasion when she had seen her mother write her name on a letter, or one of her report cards, she would sign it as Madame Léopold Camirand, as if she had forgotten her given name. In fact, even her husband called her maman. In her letter, Françoise told them not to worry. She said everything would be okay, and, in particular, asked them not to go looking for her because she NEVER wanted to live in Duvernay anymore. To be polite, she did not add “or with you.” When she arrived in Montreal, she slipped the letter into a shiny red Canada Post mailbox and ran off to join the gang of friends at the Hutchison Street apartment they had all rented together.

  She has been living here, alone, ever since she published her first successful book. Her roommates have been replaced by cats and magnificent plants, a desk and bookshelves. Every Wednesday afternoon, she invites the grade-two class from Lambert-Closse School to come over. After the kind of childhood she had, it has felt like sweet revenge to be surrounded by the children she likes to call her “best friends,” who come to have a snack and draw while she reads to them from the world’s most beautiful children’s books. She reads stories from all over, stories like The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry, which they ask for over and over again. With the children seated around her on the floor – eating, colouring and laughing – she is happy. They take delight in everything and are thrilled when she reads them something scary. After they leave, and before she cleans up, she thinks about her mother, who would have a fit if she saw what shape her place was in.

  Her first year in Montreal was exciting, a time of overindulgence, friends, alcohol, and parties stretching into the wee hours of the morning. She drank life in like a prisoner who had just broken out of jail. She went from party to party. All that mattered was having a good time and making enough money to keep on having a good time. But, gradually, she grew tired of partying, which left a bitter taste in her mouth. Her waitressin
g job, which she had liked at first, was becoming routine and pointless, except for the money she earned. She began to feel empty, and angry too. Surely she hadn’t given up everything she hated about her life just to end up like this? Had she merely jumped from the frying pan into the fire? When she was little, she had had dreams. One, at least, that she had cherished since she was in sixth grade.

  The more she tried to suppress her anxiety, the more it grew. She tried to steady her nerves with alcohol, but that only made her drink more and more. Deep down, she knew what she had to do, she knew she was talented. She still had a burning desire to write, but she wasn’t ready to take the plunge. A hundred miles from school, where any old composition would have made a good impression, she was now in the playground of grown-ups, who could eat you alive, tear your work apart and destroy you without giving it a second thought. Her insides churned with fear just thinking about it.

  For years, she had rushed headlong into self-destruction, leading an ever more dissipated life. And then, all at once, she felt as though a thick veil had lifted. For the first time, she was able stare fear in the face. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die,” she could hear herself say. “I don’t want to die before I start writing.” That day, it so happened that her roommates were not at home. She was alone in the eight-room apartment. She walked up and down, and around in circles, pacing back and forth and repeating, “I don’t want to die.” All of a sudden, without thinking, she rushed into her bedroom and picked up a pad of paper she had bought some time before. And without waiting a second longer, she sat down at the kitchen table and began to write like a madwoman.

  Her first novel had been buried deep inside her since the age of fifteen, and she wrote it in seven months. Her fears came and went. She didn’t have time to be afraid anymore. She didn’t have time to feel sorry for herself or to try to conquer her fears by drinking. Françoise was operating in crisis mode. It was either write or die. Little by little, the pleasure of writing crept back. The joy of imagining and inventing worlds, of bringing herself into the world, triumphed and replaced her fear of dying.