Hutchison Street Read online

  Her suffering could have destroyed her, but she used it as the raw material for her writing. She would mine the suffering, extracting what she needed, turning it into words and transferring it to one of her characters. As long as she came back up to the surface as quickly as possible. In the beginning, she was scared to death that the dark thoughts would pull her under like quicksand.

  Her fifteenth novel has just come out. It is an ambitious and whimsical story of a family, beginning in Gaspésie in 1940 and ending in Montreal in 2001. A voluminous book that took a long time to write, it was a lot of fun but it has drained all her energy. She feels tired, not out of steam yet, but almost. The promotional events are over, too, and the novel is on its own. There are no new projects in the works, nothing in her head or on her worktable. Instead, she’s had a lot of dreams. Dreams have always been important to her, that’s often how novels are born. Yet, at this particular moment, she feels in limbo, as if she were floating in space, weightless, with nothing to hang on to.

  For several nights, she has been dreaming about the people on her street, especially the Hasidic people. They’re dreams, not nightmares, not yet. Why the Hasidim? She has been living in the neighbourhood for thirty-nine years, and she has seen them every day without ever dreaming about them. Yet now, increasingly, they are beginning to haunt her. She dreams that they are parading down Hutchison Street playing raucous music. The neighbours are going out into the street to dance with them. A fight breaks out, with the rabbi just barely managing to rescue the scrolls of the Torah. A bus is filled with women travelling to New York to find husbands, but they turn back because they want to marry Québécois and learn to speak French. Two young men with sidelocks are kissing each other right out in the street, creating a scandal in the community. Last night, she dreamed that the little Hasidic girl came over and rang her doorbell. In her dream, the girl was the spitting image of Françoise. She smiled at Françoise and headed straight for her computer as if she knew her way around the house. With knitted brows, she typed page after page without even looking up. What would Françoise dream of next?

  Strange. She feels strange. Something barely perceptible is shifting inside her … she feels like she is drifting in a new direction … She says, aloud, as if she needs to hear herself say it over and over again, “I will never again write the same way.” She is not repudiating what she has written before. She would defend every word, but she wants nothing more to do with that mode of writing, with

  writing obsessively. After all, she has nothing more to prove to anybody – except a little bit to herself, still. Fifteen novels, several short story collections and some children’s books. Her novels have been translated into several languages, and some have been made into films. If she could only find the time to live differently, to write differently. She is fifty-five years old, a perfect age to change.

  She’s like the inveterate drunk who gets up the morning after a terrible binge and says, “I will never drink again.” After she finished a novel, she would say, “I don’t want to work myself to death anymore. I don’t want to write each book as if it were my last.” But it has just been wishful thinking, a resolution that quickly evaporates. All it would take was for one new project to capture her heart and mind, and she was hooked, carried away by what she was going to discover along the way.

  She goes out onto her balcony with a glass of wine in her hand. It’s nice out. The little Jewish girl she dreamed about last night is sitting on the stoop across the street, reading a book. In her dream, the girl seemed older than she actually is, she looked almost like an adolescent. Her younger brother is playing next to her. An even younger child is peering out the window. He is rapping on the windowpane because he wants to come outside too.

  Françoise takes a sip of wine and looks down over the street. The girl is dragging her brother into the house because her mother has just called them in.

  She can’t remember having spoken to one single member of the Hasidic community, or even having smiled at anyone. Never, not once in thirty-nine years. Actually, she has never even made the effort, as if she has always known that it would do no good. That’s why she’s puzzled by her dreams. Why now?

  The first time she saw a foreigner, she was about ten years old. One afternoon, a new girl came into the classroom. She was called Francesca, the Italian name for Françoise, something she learned much later when she and Francesca became friends. She remembers going home that day and writing about it in her diary, which she kept hidden under her mattress: “My God, how unhappy Francesca must be. All she knows how to say is hello. That’s all. What will she do when she has to go pee? Tomorrow I’m going to teach her how to say, Miss, may I go to the washroom, please?” Françoise smiles as she thinks about what she was like as a little girl, about Francesca who couldn’t answer the teacher’s questions, about the year they spent together on Hutchison Street in an apartment filled with people, about the angst which consumed her for so long, and which still creeps up on her from time to time.

  Hutchison is quiet. A few cars cruise by almost soundlessly, while young Hasidim, their heads bowed and their foreheads glistening with sweat, scurry along the street in their everyday clothes. The first time she laid eyes on them, she was bowled over. Every time she ran into them during the first year, it was as if she were seeing them for the first time. She couldn’t get used to it. Gradually, they became part of the landscape, but not the culture.

  It was not the fact that they were foreign that baffled her. There were plenty of foreigners around and she loved the neighbourhood for that very reason. Foreigners take on the characteristics of their adoptive country and give something back to the country in return. With time, they become different from the way they once were, that’s just how it is. Hasidic Jews have been living here for generations, and they are still the same as ever. They are a homogeneous group, and that’s what she finds surprising, not their strangeness. She can’t conceive of them as individuals. Instead, she sees them as a monolithic group, which has remained cut off from the outside world, and untouched by it. But why is she just starting to dream about them now, after thirty-nine years of living alongside them?

  Her neighbours are outside on their balconies, enjoying the fine weather. Some of them are already wearing shorts, as if they hadn’t a second to lose. The beautiful young woman next door has invited friends over. They are going in and out of her place, a beer in one hand, talking loudly and laughing, already tipsy. They are probably celebrating spring. Any excuse for a party, as she well knows, because not too long ago she was their age.

  She takes another sip of wine and thinks about all the people she has rubbed shoulders with for so many years, without even knowing their names. She thinks about one person she has known since she was a baby. Francoise used to see her when she was a child riding her tricycle, then as a little girl going back and forth to school, then as a young woman kissing a boy, and later on with her arms wrapped around someone else.

  At the corner of Bernard, people are going in and out of the TD Bank, while others are rifling through bins in front of the grocery store.

  The Hasidic girl steps out of her house, the fingers of her right hand lightly brushing the mezuzah as she closes the front door. For a split second her gaze meets Françoise’s. The girl runs toward Bernard clutching some money in her hand. She crosses the street and enters the corner store.

  Françoise mulls over her dream and, once again, it strikes her that she and the little girl look very much alike. At least in her dreams.

  The Diary of Hinda Rochel

  Today, I got a big shock. It was awful.

  I’ve been looking forward to getting a minute to myself so I can write down what I saw on my way home from school.

  Usually, I walk home with my friend Naomi, but she wasn’t at school today, I’m not sure why. I don’t often get a chance to walk alone. When I’m not with Naomi, I’m always with my brothers or, even wors
e, with my parents and the whole family. I love to walk alone, to have the time to look at people. Not just the people in my community, I know those ones by heart, but the others. I was walking slowly. It was nice out, and I saw young girls and boys who were my age. They were out walking, running, chasing each other and holding hands. No, to be honest, they were a little older than me. At least thirteen years old. Even fourteen.

  I followed them, but I kept my distance. They were walking quickly. Except for a boy and a girl who were taking their time. They were holding hands, and then they put their arms around one another.

  I saw the boy stop right in the middle of the sidewalk. He pulled the girl up against his chest, held her tight, and kissed her on the lips. A shiver ran down my spine. I felt paralysed.

  The girl tipped her head back and was kissing the boy as if it was the last thing she wanted to do before she died. I was sure she was going to run out of breath any minute. It was beautiful. No, it was disgusting. I was standing there, not far from them, and I didn’t know which way to turn. I wanted to disappear, to close my eyes, but I kept on staring at them. May God forgive me, I pretended that I was her. I was ashamed to look. It was beautiful and ugly at the same time. I would have died if the boy had kissed me, I know I would. For sure, I’d be dead.

  Then the blood began flowing through my veins again. The wheels in my head started to turn again and I came back to my senses. I quickly stepped down from the sidewalk and onto the road, to avoid the boy and girl. I walked around them, turned down Hutchison and ran home. Luckily, our house is just a few steps away from Bernard, where I had seen them kissing, on the corner, right there on the corner.

  It’s a good thing that I know how to write in French. That way, my family can’t read my diary. Sometimes I pretend to be doing homework, but I’m actually writing in my diary. I can’t help feeling a bit nervous, though. The other day, my big brother got suspicious. What’s wrong? he asked. He thought I looked funny, different than I usually look when I’m doing my homework. I told him that I had a composition to write in French. He said, poor you, good luck with that. He hates French. There aren’t many people in our community who like the French language. I’m different, but it wasn’t on purpose. It’s because of Gabrielle Roy. I really like her a lot. I have read Bonheur d’occasion at least a dozen times.1

  Willa Coleridge

  If you counted up all the lost smiles, if you could deposit them into a bank account, Willa Coleridge would certainly be a millionaire. Just counting the times she smiled at the growing number of Hasidim on Hutchison Street would have been enough to make her a rich person or else a saint. All the other people who lived on the street had given up. They had soon come to the conclusion that it was a lost cause, that their smiles were wasted, everyone except Willa, who was unwilling to admit defeat. But she could not understand why those people, who were her neighbours and whom she had never hurt in any way, did not smile back at her.

  And as long as she didn’t understand why not, she was going to keep on doing what she had always done.

  You might think that she was born that way, always smiling, but that wouldn’t be completely accurate. She was born black, that much is true, but she smiled by choice, as a way of life, as a way of combatting the dreariness and hardships of life, and as of a way of reaching out to others. A smile leaves the door open to a possible relationship. Even when she was little, she knew how to use her smile to cheer herself up, and it had made her life easier. At school, she chose to smile rather than cry when faced with her huge learning disabilities, telling herself that she would get through by working harder. And she succeeded. She was never first in her class, but she passed. With time, this became her way of being, her way of connecting to the world and her way of expressing herself. I smile, therefore I am, with no intention of paraphrasing Descartes whom she had never heard of. The Bible was the only book she had read cover to cover, including the New Testament.

  In her twenty-five years of living on Hutchison Street, she had managed to elicit some smiles from very young children who had not yet been indoctrinated. But Willa was still hopeful that one day a Hasidic man or woman would smile at her or at least smile back. Some people would have dismissed Willa as simple-minded, but that was far from the truth. Willa was a good person and full of hope. Goodness and hope defined her every bit as much as the colour of her skin. Her life would not have been possible without goodness and hope – and her smile. Not only would it have been difficult for her to live life to the fullest, but it would not have been her life. For Willa, hoping did not mean believing that everything would turn out well, but rather that everything meant something.

  Willa Coleridge was twenty-three years old and had three children when she came to the neighbourhood with her parents. Her husband had left her. Actually,

  her husband had never lived with her. Not entirely. She was still living at home when her first child was born. The second and third were born before she was married. Then there was a church wedding, an exchange of vows and rings, a white wedding gown and a reception, although they did not share a home. The plan to live together was always postponed for financial reasons or some other excuse her husband would make up, which the young bride always fell for. Willa was gullible, like every woman in love. The last reason he gave for not living with her – the real reason – was that he was already living with another woman.

  Willa lost her smile for three months, one month for each child. She had lost her lover and her children had lost their father. She had seen, seen with her very own eyes, another woman walking arm-in-arm with her husband. She had seen their children, one of whom he was proudly carrying in his arms, and another one was running up ahead. What she saw tore her guts apart. She held back her tears, she did not run away and she did not drop dead on the spot. Her children saved her. The children waved casually at their father, calling out “Hi Dad,” and they kept on walking beside their mother. Their mother, Big Willa. Her children have always considered her the tallest, the most understanding, the most beautiful and the nicest mother in the world.

  Willa’s children were wise beyond their years. They would say: our father is our father, he is what he is. They never waited at the door clutching a suitcase. His absence didn’t make them suffer or shed tears. Unlike their mother, they had no hope. They weren’t unhappy children, far from it. They were just accepting and realistic. They understood that their father had sired them, end of story. When he came to see them, they were pleased, nothing more. When he left again, they picked up where they had left off, living their life with their mother and grandparents.

  In the end, Willa understood her husband and she forgave him. And she forgot about him. She had a few lovers and men she could go dancing with. She even went out alone to dance at Keur Samba, a club close to where she lived. It was an inexpensive bar on Park Avenue, where a single woman could go and dance as much as she liked without having anyone hit on her. She could dance to African or Caribbean music, without even having to buy a drink, which was just perfect for her, since she didn’t have much money and she liked to dance, not drink.

  Spirituality moved her as much as dancing did. She was a believer. She believed in a divine force, in divine goodness. She attended church regularly. She sometimes changed churches, but never Gods. As far as she was concerned, the God of the Jews was the same as the God of the Christians or the Muslims. She would have liked to go pray one day in a mosque or a synagogue, but she didn’t know how to go about it. Would they throw her out because of the colour of her skin or for some totally other reason?

  Willa did not understand why some people were intolerant of their fellow human beings. She believed that people were meant to learn to love one another. Since she had experienced intolerance, rejection and even racism, on more than one occasion, she was careful not to fall into the same trap. In any case, it was not in her nature. When it came to the Jews who lived on her street, she felt bad for them rather than
intolerant. She would have liked to get to know them. She thought they could give her answers to some of the questions that troubled her. She knew they were as religious as she was and she wanted to learn from them. Their children were clean and well behaved; they didn’t smile, but they were polite. They almost never squabbled. They listened to their parents and the older children looked after the little ones. And it was beautiful to see how kind and respectful they were to their grandparents. Her own children were grown up now, but there would be grandchildren soon and Grandma Willa would be there for them just as her mother had been there for her and her kids. Willa wanted to learn, to know more and more, and she was always prepared to open her eyes and her heart. But she didn’t know how to break through the wall behind which the Hasidim had retreated.

  Her family had left Jamaica more than a hundred years ago. She didn’t know much about her ancestors. She knew that her father’s grandfather had worked for CN on the Halifax-Montreal line. He would toil away for more than eighteen hours a day, sleeping in a bunk on board the train. One day, when the train arrived in Montreal, he got off and never went aboard again. That’s about all she knew about her family background. It wasn’t for lack of interest, but she had had other fish to fry and a lot of mouths to feed. Now that her children were getting along fairly well, now that she had found a job that was not too tiring, cleaning offices downtown, her parents were dead. She didn’t have anyone left to answer her questions.

  When Bob Marley died, she cried, like a lot of other people did, but no more.