"I'm not sure," I said. "They were separated when my mother was thirteen. But, I was telling Rosie, it probably runs in the genes." I was talking too much, and soon I'd get on their nerves. "But I don't sew at all," I added desperately.

"No, no, in modern times it's different. Ready-made. Ready-made everything."

I was afraid that if Mr. Michaeli overexerted himself, the slender mechanism holding him together would give way and he'd collapse. It seemed amazing to me that he was a teacher, that he stood in front of a cla.s.s and raised his voice to a roomful of children.

"Maya, Maya, Maya," he said. I need not have worried about making a fool of myself. Mr. Michaeli's covert intransigence could have been intimidating, but it was countered by informality-an informality that went hand in hand with his retreat from the tenets of the world the rest of us inhabited. I could trust him. As for Mrs. Michaeli, she was only tenuously connected to her surroundings, though not because of a surfeit of preoccupations, as with my mother, but because she was absent-minded. I sank back into my astronaut seat and waited to be served.

"Would you like juice, milk, or tea?" Rosie asked me.

I was witnessing a tribal ritual. In this anthropological scene, no other options existed: when guests arrived, they were led to the kitchen, ushered to the seat against the wall, given a choice of juice, milk, tea. Something admirable about them or their family was brought to notice; a plate of homemade poppyseed cookies and a bowl of apples and bananas were set at the centre of the table.

"Tea, please-thank you-I'm sorry," I said inanely.

"Do you want your pillow, Daddy?" Rosie picked up a shabby cushion from one of the kitchen chairs. We had the same chairs-st.u.r.dy, framed by curved metal rods, upholstered in some kind of transparent laminate-but theirs were marbled grey and white, while ours were a plasticized marvel of cornflowers and blue leaves.

"No, no, me I am fine. Hunky-dory." Mr. Michaeli chuckled with private despair.

"Please, help yourself," Rosie said, pa.s.sing me the cookies. Her mother put on the kettle for tea. She smiled at me, but her smile was distant and somehow unreliable. "Mummy used to be a nurse," Rosie informed me. The biography-or hagiography-was, like the drinks, a part of the ritualized hospitality they were offering me. "She met Daddy that way, when she was working with the Red Cross, taking care of people who came out of Auschwitz."

Auschwitz, Red Cross-the words were familiar from my mother's mangled monologues. But what exactly happened during the war? The only clear image I had of the war was one I'd invented myself: my mother and I are trapped in an immense windowless museum: sterile, brightly lit, and bare, with endless serpentine corridors. On exhibit, under gla.s.s globes, are worms, happily squirming. We want to ask one of the barrel-bellied guards for directions, but they turn out to be wax figures, and my mother seizes my hand, scurries this way and that, searching for an exit.

Where did these images originate? Possibly from a nightmare I had when I was small, back in the days when my mother ran to me at night, weeping with terror. But the dream, if that's what it was, took hold. For months at a time I forgot about the museum, and then, for no reason at all, a phantom memory of being trapped in the windowless labyrinth would come over me, accompanied by nausea and a piercing headache, and I'd have to stay in bed. My mother would hover over me with mugs of hot milk and honey. As I sipped the milk, she swished a bar of Pears soap in a basin of warm water, dipped a towel in the fragrant solution, and rubbed my back and arms and legs. Eventually the worm museum receded, and in its place I resurrected Monet's br.i.m.m.i.n.g poppy fields. There an ordinary girl trailed alongside her ordinary, umbrella-twirling mother, their heads protected from the sun by ribboned hats that replicated the colour of the clouds.

"I'm not very good at history," I said apologetically, and the Michaelis burst into laughter, all three of them laughing in the exact same way, as if this was the best joke they'd heard in a long while, or maybe ever. They didn't mean to exclude me; their laughter, almost deliberately prolonged and hearty, was affectionate, and for a minute I hoped I'd said something witty. But I knew my comment was ridiculous. I also understood, in a flare of lucidity, that the Michaelis were inseparable, and more impenetrable, as a trio, than any clique I'd encountered at school.

The laughter subsided and Mrs. Michaeli prepared the tea. Rosie's family, like ours, drank their tea in gla.s.s cups with slivers of lemon floating on top. I dropped two cubes of sugar into my cup and stirred. Rosie went on: "Mummy was lucky, she managed to work in a hospital the entire war, and no one found out she was Jewish-but everyone else in her family died. She called Daddy the humming patient because he didn't tell anyone his name at first, he just hummed tunes. She didn't know he was famous. Daddy was a violinist before the war."

There was no avoiding it now: the Michaeli household was as mad as my own. Even the form of madness was the same. Like my mother, Rosie's parents were both holy and unappeasable; in this home, as in mine, the persistent echo of absence and horror made way for fantastic claims on us, the progeny.

Rosie, intuitively grasping my silent verdict, nodded at me and shrugged helplessly. Yes, this was how it was, for better or worse. Yet she held the strands together with her serenity. It was a feat I was in a position to admire.

"My parents met on a ship," I said. "Or rather, they were reunited."

But the Michaelis already knew the story: my mother never missed an opportunity to ply captive audiences with the full range of her misfortunes. It was this trait that led to her dismissal from Solomon's Kosher Butcher; customers complained about the stress of buying a chicken from Fanya Levitsky. She wasn't sorry to leave. Raw livers disgusted her, and she also disliked Solomon, whom she called King Solomon or, when she'd had a particularly hard day, Slaughterman Sol.

"Daddy, do you think Maya could go to Eden next year? She really wants to. What if she studies all summer?"

Mr. Michaeli nodded, smiled, nodded again, considered. Imagine someone always on the verge of recoiling with fear. Not actually afraid but on the verge, at the edge. The second before terror. Imagine someone frozen into that moment forever. "Maybe, maybe ... the main thing would be to learn to read Hebrew. We'll find for you some books, yes?"

"I could get them from Mr. Lewis." Turning to me, Rosie explained, "The janitor. I'll get him to open the cupboard. He's still at school, cleaning up."

"What will we sing for our guest?" Mr. Michaeli asked no one in particular.

I thought he meant a singalong around the table, and I was about to suggest "Michael Row the Boat Ash.o.r.e," but the three of them rose and made their way back to the living room. I had somehow missed seeing or had not paid attention to the upright piano in the corner. Mrs. Michaeli and I sat on the sofa, Mr. Michaeli perched himself on the piano stool, and Rosie stood beside him like an attendant, facing her audience of two. Snacktime was over, storytime was over-now we were ready for the music recital.

The piano was the only thing of beauty in the room-or in the apartment, as far as I could see. In my own home, my mother's personality declared itself in every ceramic shepherd and plastic apple, every snail-shaped soap dish and skirted tissue-box cover. The Michaelis, on the other hand, seemed opposed to the entire idea of ornamentation. There were no paintings or prints on the walls, and even the sofa seemed devoid of colour, as if it had come with the place and through some process of progressive invisibility had faded from notice. The floor lamps, with their stark metal stems and yellowing shades, were merely serviceable, and the only movable object in the music room was an overflowing ashtray on the armrest of the sofa-Mrs. Michaeli was a heavy smoker. The house was a variation on Rosie's navy skirt and white blouse: a form of stalling, a way of keeping something, though I didn't know exactly what, at bay.

But the walls in this room weren't altogether bare: fourteen framed photographs of Rosie had been arranged in sequence above the piano. An annual celebration, starting when she was a year old.

I gazed at the portraits and mourned. I was not there when Rosie wore a sailor dress, I was not there when she'd had a Christopher Robin haircut. Rosie beaming for the camera, six years old, eight, eleven: I'd missed it all. At the same time, I absorbed this iconography with famished grat.i.tude. At least those lost years weren't hidden away, at least they were on display.

"Les Nuits d'ete, by Berlioz," Rosie announced, then added, for my benefit, "Except we call him Berliozo. We have crazy names for all the composers-Mozartino, Lord Ludwig ... This isn't real singing-I'm only faking. Daddy says you can't start training for opera until you're eighteen." She nodded to her father, and he began to play.

Though I hadn't been in many homes, I knew these family traditions were idiosyncratic. Whoever heard of Miss Popularity offering her beleaguered parents to her friends, or singing arias for their entertainment? But beyond that, there was an exigency in the Michaelis' behaviour that clashed with their casual style, as if they were involved in some ongoing ceremony which an onlooker could only partly understand.

Rosie sang, her father accompanied her, the two of them exchanged meaningful glances.

L'ange qui l'emmena Ne voulut me prendre Que mon sort est amer Ah! Sans amour s'en aller sur la mer!

Extraordinary talent takes us by surprise, when it emerges from someone we've met in ordinary circ.u.mstances. Here, let me show you my secret wing Here, let me show you my secret wing. I was hoping when the song ended that no one would speak for at least an hour. But Mr. Michaeli had long since renounced reverence, and deliberately broke through mine. "What say you, Maya, to that G? You do not expect it, and there it arrives. Unfortunately, such things in life don't last. A whole octave and one-half you must go to get back to Earth."

Rosie hugged her father, folded him into her embrace as he sat at the piano, and Mr. Michaeli said, "Yes, yes, love we definitely have." He didn't exactly return Rosie's embrace, and to compensate he mocked himself, mocked his own inadequacy. Rosie didn't mind. She and her father had come to an understanding.

"Would you like to hear another song?" Rosie asked.

"Oh, yes! Yes," I said, and the three of them laughed again, briefly this time.

Mr. Michaeli played a few notes and Rosie's voice, effortlessly bearing its sensuous, incorporeal sadness, slowed down as she invoked the lowering of a coffin into the ground- When I am laid, am laid in earth May my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in thy breast Remember me! Remember me!

But ah! forget my fate.

Rosie asked for her fate to be forgotten for the fourth and last time, and as Mr. Michaeli struck the final funereal notes, his body seemed to droop with sudden fatigue. I was afraid it was my fault and, wanting to help, I quickly asked Rosie: "What other names do you have? I mean, of composers."

"Oh, they're crazy." Rosie smiled. "Moony Mahler ... Bachanova ... We even have a dance called the Bachanova."

"A dance?"

Rosie giggled and Mr. Michaeli nodded. He began playing a piece by Bach in a boppy, syncopated rhythm. I didn't know at the time what he was doing exactly, for I had only the vaguest notion of Bach or his music, but I recognized the frivolity of it. Rosie swung her arms with simian abandon as she tap-danced on the faded carpet. She danced until she was flushed and out of breath.

"You must think we're nuts," she said, holding on to the piano to regain her balance.

"Oh, no-it's funny. I don't know much about cla.s.sical music. I didn't even know there was a composer called Berlioz. But those songs you sang, I never heard anything like it in my life."

Mr. Michaeli examined me through his half-closed eyes. "At school here they teach only the important subjects, what is grown in Manitoba and what fish to catch in Newfoundland. Music, who so much cares?"

"I'm going to start listening to the cla.s.sical music station on the radio," I said.

"Oh, Maya!" Rosie came over to me and looked into my eyes, as if apologizing for what she couldn't give me. "Do you want to get the books from Mr. Lewis now?"

This is not who I am, this person who is worthy of the Michaelis' hospitality-and what will happen when they discover their mistake? But Rosie bent down and whispered in my ear: "Mummy and Daddy really like you."

We left the Michaeli mausoleum and walked towards Eden. "I hope Daddy doesn't forget that Patrick cancelled today," Rosie fretted.

"Who's Patrick?"

"One of Daddy's private students-he's really funny, like you. Only more ... sort of dark."

"I once had a piano lesson at the house of this friend of my mother, Mrs. Bl.u.s.tein, on Linton. We couldn't afford a piano, so Mrs. Bl.u.s.tein said I could come over any time to practise on hers. I learned to play 'The Farmer in the Dell,' but my teacher quit after one lesson-I guess my mother scared him away."

"Poor you! Too bad you didn't come to Daddy. 'The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi ho the dairy-o, the farmer in the dell,'" she sang. "I love nursery rhymes. I have a whole collection at home, I'll show you. 'See-saw Margery Daw, Jenny shall have a new master. She shall have but a penny a day, because she can't work any faster.'"

"I had a book of Mother Goose rhymes when I was a little kid," I said. "One of those square books with the gold edges?"

"I have that one. Also a record. 'Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night, Sailed off in a wooden shoe-Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew,'" she sang, and her voice sailed like the crystal light in the song. "Do you know it?" she asked.

"I don't have a record player."

"Oh, you'll come over and listen to ours, it's stereo. We found it at a garage sale and Daddy repaired it. He's good at things like that."

We pa.s.sed through a park and there was Eden, across the street. I'd seen the building before, had noticed its ornate, alien letters carved like code into the stone wall. I would never have guessed that one day I'd be going through those doors.

The school was deserted and the halls smelled of old bubble gum and mildew. Our footsteps echoed on the wood floor.

"Mr. Lewis!" Rosie called out.

We set out to find the janitor. The search doubled as a tour of the building. "This is the elementary side," Rosie said. "It connects through that corridor to the high school. This was my locker."

Rosie's locker. I wanted to fall to my knees, wrap my arms around her legs. That's what love is-the anguish of knowing the person you love has a locker, a handwriting, a favourite scarf. I tried not to look at the green metal door.

We found Mr. Lewis in the library, stacking chairs. He was an odd man-tiny, ancient, sinewy.

"Mr. Lewis, I'm Rosie Michaeli, the music teacher's daughter-remember?"

He stared at us with blank eyes.

"We need some schoolbooks."

"For who?" he wheezed.

"For the music teacher."

We followed him down the hall. He walked with short, uneven steps, like an elf on stilts, but he was strong-I was sure that if I touched him, my fingers would find a surface as firm as rock. He opened the door to the supply closet and watched us suspiciously as we entered the small room. Under a bare light bulb, the crammed shelves and tall stacks of shabby books looked long abandoned; a perfect set, I thought, for an art-house film about the end of civilization. I recognized a few of the t.i.tles-Our Nation Proud and Free. Our Living Language. Math Is Fun! All of them silenced now by the fall of the empire. All of them silenced now by the fall of the empire.

"Here, why don't you take these?" Rosie handed me three books, their ripped spines curling at the ends. She gathered another three or four for herself. "You'll also need a special notebook. I think I have one at home."

"How is it special?"

"It has the alphabet on the back, and thin sort of lines. Thanks, Mr. Lewis. Sorry we bothered you."

Mr. Lewis locked the door and returned to his janitorial duties.

"Let's bring these to your place," she suggested. "Mummy will drive us."

Carrying our loot, we headed back to Rosie's. We set the books down on the hood of Mrs. Michaeli's car, and I watched over them while Rosie went in to fetch her mother and pick up the special notebook.

Mrs. Michaeli's car smelled of lilac and Elmer's glue and menthol cigarettes. I'd only been in a car a few times, when parents drove me home from birthday parties, but I settled into the back seat as if I'd been chauffeured all my life. Rosie described our small excursion for her mother, made it sound funny and quaint. She did it even though she knew it wouldn't help. Rosie's fatalistic generosity was not very different, in the end, from my acts of evasion.

Using the key my mother gave me, I opened the door to our flat, and Bubby crept towards us like the tide.

"h.e.l.lo, there," Rosie said.

It didn't matter, after all, what Rosie encountered in my house, not only because her home was as odd as mine, or because she wouldn't hold anything against me. It turned out that I'd been wrong about friends; I'd always a.s.sumed that you started off by inviting someone over, and out of that gesture a friendship evolved. But it wasn't like that. Once you had a friend, that person was part of your life and everything in it.

I bent down to receive Bubby's whiskery homecoming kiss. "This is Rosie," I said. "I met her today."

I led Rosie to my bedroom. Bubby, as always, had tidied up. Her tidying was efficient if unpredictable: today my navy loafers were arranged end to end on the windowsill, with my hairbrush tucked inside one of them.

We sat on the bed and I spread the books out on the blue-and-purple bedspread. "Your eyes remind me of a painting I like," I said. "I'll take the book out of the library and show you."

"You know so much. What a cosy room!" Rosie said. "I can see how much your mother loves you."

I ran my fingers along the books-my gateway to Eden. The smallest one was a slim blue hardback, almost as thin as the notebook, with thick, shiny pages. I'd never come across such sumptuous paper in a book, paper that made you want to turn the pages just so you could handle it. I stared at the first page: bold, flame-tipped letters seemed to be reaching up to a drawing of lightning and dark clouds.

"That's Torah," Rosie explained, "but for grade one. That's why the print is so big. Torah's just the first part. Then come the Prophets and the Writings. It's called Tanakh Tanakh, when it's all together. Here's the Tanakh Tanakh we used this year." we used this year."

I opened the heavy book she handed me. Here the flame-tipped letters were surrounded by squiggly marks so minute they resembled the imprints of insects.

Rosie read my mind. "The small print is Rashi. You don't need to know that."

"I'll manage," I said, though I had no idea how. Six years in one summer-it seemed impossible. The script looked impenetrable, more like a cryptogram than a language.

"You read from right to left. The dots are the vowels. Imagine thousands of years ago, when they believed in golden calves and sacrificing children. Here, I'll show you how it works."

What I really wanted to do was touch her braids.

Rosie went through the alphabet on the back of the notebook and explained the final forms of some of the letters.

"I'll practise later," I said. Tonight, in bed, I would begin. My stomach went skidding at the thought, and though I'd never experienced that sort of sensation, I recognized it as s.e.xual excitement.

There was a small crash as my mother, on cue as always, flung open the front door. Her voice, followed by the scent of Ben Hur perfume, filled the house. She'd fought her way through another day, warded off the Cyclops, dropped by Hades.

-mamaleh mamaleh where are you are you here- I slammed my bedroom door shut. Rosie was shocked. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Oh, all right." I opened the door and let my mother in.

-who who is this h.e.l.lo h.e.l.lo yes I know you- She stopped midway, swayed like a great ship, her face contracted, her bosom expanded. She'd noticed the books.

"h.e.l.lo, Mrs. Levitsky. These books are from my school, Eden. Maya says she'd like to go there next year-what do you think?"

-what's that Eden what- "Sorry, we should have asked you first."

"Don't pay any attention to her, Rosie," I moaned. "She's always like this. It doesn't mean anything. Mom, leave us alone, please. This is Hebrew-Hebrew, see?" I opened one of the books and, impersonating Reveen the Impossibilist, I swung it back and forth in front of her eyes. "See ... Hebrew ... thousands of years old ... right to left..."

-I know Hebrew I know Hebrew don't show me avinu malkenu adon olam ha ha ha- "You know Hebrew?" I asked. I'd thought that Fanya had by now ransacked every last corner of her remorseless memory. Hebrew, I was fairly certain, had never come up.

-the one the one with the father and the leg they sawed off- "Don't!" Placing my hands on my mother's shoulders, I steered her gently out of the room. I shut the door firmly after her and rolled my eyes. "My mother and her crazy stories."

"Poor thing. Was she in Auschwitz?"