Cover

Late at night, in the small hours of the morning, when a cottony hush fell over Tzvi’s, Adele’s mind would dart from its hole and scurry around inside her skull like some nocturnal predator sniffing the spoor that promised nourishment. Memories, elusive as timid deer, were the objects of her hunt. Memories were already phantoms, growing fainter and more evanescent with each passing month. Without mental exercise, lying in wait to pounce, they would slip away irretrievably.

Movie stars whose first names were William. The handsome one, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, it was on the tip of her tongue. H-something or D-something. Never mind now. The craggy faced one with the shifty eyes, a minor actor in D movies, but still, she had a soft spot in her heart for him, he reminded her of Uncle Berl who always sent the kids twenty-five dollars in Chanukah gelt, money for the holiday. Ben-something. Wait, like a washing machine. Yes, Bendix, William Bendix, the evil first mate of a sailing ship, the black-hatted, black-hearted western villain. She devoured her kill with a smacking of chops.

And success bred success, perhaps the smell of figurative blood attracted her original prey. William the handsome, Holden of course. Oh, what a satisfaction and pleasure to own names! She let them sift through her cerebral fingertips like a miser toying with his gold. Holden and Bendix, Bendix and Holden, they would never escape her, she wrapped them tight in the moneybags of her brain and hefted their weight. They were her life savings, she was not bankrupt yet.

The third William, however, remained beyond her reach. And he had been her favorite. Not because of his looks or talent, no. It was the first time she’d set eyes on that demi-god among men, Yasheh Heisswasser, known by some (mainly his brother) as Ike, the English diminutive of Isaiah, and by others as Rothschild for his lordly ways. Her girlfriend, Doris Kaplan, had him in tow when Adele stepped out of the movie house, the old Arden on Citadel Street corner of Richelieu. There, a memory like a steel trap. She hugged the new names to her, Arden, Citadel, Richelieu, a holy trinity because they were the venue of that first meeting.

The first blush of sunset was coloring the sky when Adele emerged from the cinematic gloom. The early summer air was balmy with the promise of July and the evening breeze carried the delicate odor of lilac. She blinked in the roseate light as the other girl hailed her by name. Yashe turned a sullen face elsewhere as they chatted for a moment. Was he hostile? She got the feeling that he disapproved of her. Why that should be she had no idea. No doubt her own shyness was delivering a false message.

“Oh, ‘The Thin Man’,” Doris gushed. “I just love Myrna Loy.” And William something, something with a P or an L. She curled her toes in frustration.

“Me too,” Adele agreed. “And Saturday matinees are half price.” Plus her father worried himself sick when she went out at night, especially by herself. Poor Pa!

Doris and Yashe were going dancing. The YMHA was organizing an impromptu ballroom for young couples in its basement gym. No orchestra but loudspeakers and many records. Yashe had free admittance on condition that he got up on the platform and sang for at least half an hour. Would Adele like to tag along?

She blushed. “Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Really, it’ll be fun. Why not? Yashe won’t mind.”

“Of course not,” he said, still not looking at her.

“My Pa will worry,” she said, coloring with embarrassment. She was over eighteen and still housebound, like a little girl. But the old widower had nobody but her.

“Oh, pooh!” Doris said. “Just for half an hour.”

Doris was assistant forelady at Tartan Garments where Adele stitched buttonholes. Her generosity and temper were legendary. People thought twice before refusing any request or offer she might make. In the end, Adele gave in.

“But only for a few minutes,” she insisted. As it turned out, however, two hours passed before she escaped.

Pa was asleep, snoring softly in his living room Murphy bed when she got home. Saturday was his busiest time of the week, peddling union suits to families in the little French Canadian towns of the Laurentian shield. She let her gaze settle fondly on his worn features. Poor old man. Not that he was really old. But life had been such a struggle since the death of his wife.

Adele could barely remember her mother. The framed sepia photo on a middle shelf of the old mahogany bookcase showed a girl barely older than herself. Sonia Valdman nee Hirsch, a slight frown or perhaps squint incising two lines, like inverted commas, above the bridge of a nondescript nose. A victim of cancer in her twenty-seventh year.

“What time is it?” Yaacov Valdman murmured in Yiddish. His speech was slurred because the dentures which enabled him to enunciate clearly lay at the bottom of the water-filled glass on a bedside table.

Adele bent down tenderly and kissed the weathered cheek, smoothed the thinning grizzled hair. She was his wife now, or as close to one as she could make herself. Of course she had little idea of what wifehood constituted, but what did it matter? They had no one but each other.

“Still early, Pa,” she said. “Have you eaten?”

“A sandwich and tea at Yvonne Bolduc’s.” He meant the widow where he kept the old Ford pickup parked, in the outskirts of St. Jerome, the center of his territory. His relations with the Joual-speaking villagers had become very friendly.

“I meant something kosher,” Adele said with a smile. It was their never-failing private joke. Yaacov acknowledged it with a mechanical grimace, thankful that he did not have to specify the other non-kosher nourishment the widow Bolduc afforded him.

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” he said. “Would you like to take the streetcar to the top of the mountain?”

Their routine varied. Some Sundays they rode east to the botanical gardens, other times to the zoo in Lafontaine park. In the full bloom of spring, however, their customary destination was the summit of the round-backed hill at the center of the city. Among the sugar-maples they hunted for mushrooms and lay in the tall fragrant grass. Later, she would throw bits of bread to the ducks and Canada geese which paddled placidly in the scum-topped waters of Beaver Lake.

Now she hesitated and blushed. “Do you mind very much staying home tomorrow?” she stammered, “Or going by yourself?”

Instantly he was alarmed. “Why, aren’t you feeling well?” His young wife had begun her descent in just this way.

“No, no,” she assured him, “Nothing like that.”

“Then what?”

“Oh….” She shrugged, embarrassed. “Some friends invited me to go walking with them. Around the bandstand and the monument. Do you mind very much?”

He laughed with relief and clasped her hand. “Silly little woman. I’m glad.”

“Because if you’d rather,” she blurted on, “I can easily cancel. Your plans come first.”

“My plans,” he assured her, “Are to sleep as late as possible tomorrow morning, have a bite to eat, and then go back to sleep.”

Would he be as cheery, she wondered, hearing that the invitation had not come from friends but a strange man she’d just met? During a waltz she could barely stumble through, Yashe Heisswasser had broached the idea.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” she mumbled. “What would Doris think?”

“Why should she think anything?”

“Well, she’s your girl friend.”

He snorted with derision. The hot breath from his nostrils scorched her neck and she shrank from him a little.

“I don’t have a steady girl friend. We’re just acquaintances.”

If he hadn’t had the voice of an angel, she would have refused the offer. But he sang like a younger Jack Leonard, at least to her untutored ear. The master of ceremonies called him up to the stage, and he sang “All the Things You Are”. He sang “Falling in Love with Love”. He sang “I’ll be seeing you” and winked at her. Or was it really a wink? She couldn’t be sure. But his voice was so mellow, it didn’t matter. She felt his eyes on her. He was seeing her…

In all the old, familiar places;
That this heart of mine embraces;
All day through.

I’ll find you in the morning sun;
And when the night is new;
I’ll be looking at the moon;
But Ill be seeing you.

He was a terrible smoker. The heavy smell of cheap tobacco enveloped him like the air in a curing shed. But she didn’t care, liked it in fact. It was a masculine scent, a pheromone.

“You should sing professionally,” she told him shyly when he bought the girls ice cream cones on the way out.

“Oh, but I do,” he said with a self-satisfied smile, and lit another cigarette, blowing twin jets of smoke through his nostrils. He had a way of striking kitchen matches off one thumbnail as if he were a being of flint and steel. To show off in front of girls, he sometimes added the flourish of sweeping the match-holding fist across his teeth and producing flame with a snap of igniting sulfur like some fire-breathing dragon. Adele pretended not to notice.

“Yes, he makes a lot of money in kol nidrei on the high holidays,” Doris confirmed. “He was a child prodigy.”

“’Was’ is right,” Yashe laughed. “Yeshayaleh, God’s treble clarinet.”

“But you’ll ruin your voice with smoking,” Adele cried.

He laughed again, a rumbling in the lower registers. “My hormones took care of that. No more sweet soprano for the swooning graybeard masses. Now I mostly conduct and do the chorus. Pretty soon, I’ll have to start working for a living.” From his conversational tones, you would never guess the celestial pipes that lodged in his throat.

Sunday afternoon, he took her to the roller skating rink on Frontenac east, way east, so far into habitant territory it scared her. A susurrus of Norman French accosted her ears like the rising voice of rapids foaming in the middle distance downstream. Though she knew her father associated with these people in the farm lands north of the city and was kindly regarded by them, indeed earned his livelihood from their good will, she couldn’t repress a shiver of fright. The academic French she had studied in high school had nothing in common with the impenetrable patois that issued from their lips. They chattered among themselves with animalistic abandon, their nasal hootings wild and uninhibited, their gesticulations instinct with violence.

“Why’re you trembling?” Yashe asked, one arm boldly encircling her waist, his other hand clutching her elbow.

“I’m not,” she said, “It’s just that I can’t keep my balance.”

“Didn’t you tell me that skating was an enjoyable passtime?”

“I meant in the abstract. It looked like fun.”

He shook his head in exasperation. There, she had made an enemy of him. Or at the very least induced second thoughts. But he held her firmly and steered her round the rink until, with a start, she realized that it was fun, gliding smoothly up and down the hardwood floor, the whirring of metal wheels across the solid, polished, fibrous surface like the jolly hum of a carpentry shop. None of the other skaters bothered to give them a second glance. After a while, she began to feel safe in his didactic embrace.

Afterwards they walked slowly back to the Main. He seemed pensive, preoccupied, and barely said a word. Striding beside her with hands in pockets, he maintained a sullen silence, and again she feared having offended him. But what a moody person he was! Perhaps it was best to have discovered this immediately.

He left her a block from home with a mumbled goodbye and little in the way of assurance that they would meet again, not even the minimum that elemental courtesy required. She watched him slouch away, then cross the road against the lights and disappear into the parade of Sunday afternoon strollers.

Well, that was that. She shrugged. The man was no bargain. Handsome? Yes, there was no denying his masculine pulchritude. And vocal chords dipped in honey. But she was looking for something more than a male charmer, a Valentino sheikh with a love call of golden harp strings. But for Adele intellect was paramount and Yashe Heisswasser seemed to have the mind of an overgrown bar mitzvah boy. And what about character, gentlemanliness, culture? The fellow got a failing grade in each subject. He would have to repeat the year, perhaps many times, before she advanced him to the next class.

It was still early. She walked past the Arden and saw that the bill had changed. A double feature was playing, “It happened One Night” with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert and “Bringing up Baby” with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. She had time for one movie and luckily it was the start of the Gable-Colbert picture that she walked into.

The interior was sparsely occupied and she settled into a mid-house seat with a sigh of satisfaction. Gable’s smart-guy manliness captivated her instantly, and she fell into the story, sinking without a trace. They were in a bus station. The impudent, merry-eyed stranger chased passed her in pursuit of a fleeing thief.

“That was your valise he stole,” she heard him tell her. Adele pretended nonchalance. Oh well, win some, lose some. She joined him on the bus, unencumbered by baggage. A smirking little trickster tried to get fresh. Gable intervened. Oh, my hero. There was a seat vacant next to his and it didn’t take much arguing to have her join him. She fell asleep, her head lolling on his shoulder.

Well, she was an heiress, of all things, her father a millionaire banker (oh, Pa, forgive me). Off to elope with a secret lover. Gable turned out to be an unemployed reporter with a keen nose for a story and few scruples in intruding on her privacy. The beast, the beautiful beast, with his cocky little mustache and invincible arrogance. The bus broke down. They had to spend the night at a cheap motel, sharing a room. Wryly chivalrous, Gable hung a blanket between the beds. Love bloomed in the dark, on each side of the draped barrier.

“So did you enjoy your day?” Pa asked, nose buried in his Forwards.

“So so,” she said, blinking in the prosaic light of the overhead bulb.

The next day, as she was about to knock off for lunch, who should climb the stairs to the Tartan Garments third-storey loft but Yashe Heisswasser? He was ostensibly looking for Doris but, absent-mindedly as it were, sauntered over to Adele’s sewing machine.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked, a little unnerved at her own coolness.

“I would have telephoned,” he said, conspicuously expressionless, “If I had a telephone.”

“It wouldn’t have helped,” she said. “I don’t have a telephone either.”

The ghost of a smile indented faint parentheses at the corners of his mouth. He was really very handsome, almost as much as Gable, though lacking the brilliantined hair. Instead, Yahshe’s hair was wavy. After she got to know him better, Adele learned that he encouraged the waviness by pressing the back of a comb into the troughs.

“There’s a telephone over there,” he said, pointing to the wall unit in the entrance vestibule. Tugging at her sleeve, he added, “Come on, I think somebody’s ringing you up.”

“I don’t hear anything,” she protested, but did not resist his pull.

“Never mind,” he overrode her, “You’ll soon hear.”

She followed him reluctantly to the telephone, uneasy about making a spectacle of herself but determined to forestall him from making a scene. He parked her against the paint-peeling, plaster-cracked wall and off-hooked the earpiece.

“Hello,” he said, expertly twisting the voice pickup until it was an inch from his mouth. “Is Adele Valdman there?”

She felt the earpiece pressed into her hand. He readjusted the speaking tube to her height.

“This is she,” Adele said and could have kicked herself for the tremor in her voice. Why did she always lose control when it counted most.

Yashe, however, seemed not to notice. Reclaiming the earpiece, he said, “Would you like to have lunch with me at noon?”

The black plastic was shiny with the sweat of her perspiring palm. She held it delicately between her thumb and the next two fingers.

“I brought sandwiches from home,” she said.

“That’s okay, you only have to give me half of one. I’m a very light eater.”

She felt like laughing at the insouciant effrontery, but instead answered gravely, “I’m on my last set of buttonholes of the morning. You’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.”

“I’m used to waiting,” he assured her, and hung up.

“That was a short conversation,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t a long distance call.”

He lit a cigarette and jammed it into the side of his mouth, which gave him a dashing appearance. She noticed that it was self-rolled. Probably he had very little money. Perhaps that was why he had left her in the lurch the previous afternoon, embarrassed at his lack of wherewithal for any further treats.

She sat back down at her machine and pulled her chair close, pedaling the treadle and squinting at her work.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Strangely enough, the question was in Yiddish. Much later it became plain to her that Yiddish was his language of serious matters. Whenever they quarreled, and some of their early exchanges were particularly bitter, the recriminations invariably burst out in Yiddish.

“I’m stitching the buttonhole,” she said, preoccupied.

“I thought a buttonhole you had to cut.”

She laughed, a bit patronizingly. “It’s more complicated than that. See, like an exact science. You have to position the shaper just so. It’s called the ‘buttonhole foot slider’. A window, like, the top edge just touching the pencil mark.”

“Ah,” he said sagely.

“Then you lock the slider. That guides the needle down one edge of the buttonhole.”

She executed a neat zigzag stitch along one side of the pencil mark.

“That’s very professional,” he complimented her. She flushed with pleasure, but said nothing.

“Now the other side,” she said, and demonstrated. Two thready lips enclosed a narrow slot of cloth. Yashe raised his eyebrows in admiration and wonder.

“I see the borders, but where’s the hole?”

“That’s the easiest part,” she told him. “Even you can do it.”

He pretended to stagger from sheer disbelief. “Even I?” he gasped, “Even I?”

“Sure.” She handed him a seam ripper and stretched the fabric along its grain to a state of wrinkle-free tension. “See it has two prongs at the end of the blade, one rounded and one pointy?”

He examined the instrument uncertainly. “Yeah.”

“The round tip goes outside the stitch, the pointy tip on the bottom of the pencil mark inside the stitch. That’s good.”

“And now?”

“Now you just ride the stitch upward like a streetcar track. Don’t worry, there’s a pin at the upper end that’ll stop its travel.”

Still he hesitated, fearing disaster. “I’ll ruin it for you.”

She clucked her tongue impatiently. “Do like I tell you. Pretend you’re slicing meat with an underhand stroke.” But he was paralyzed with indecision, until she had the inspiration to repeat the order in Yiddish. Only then did the material part smoothly under the steel.

He blinked in amazement. “Why, a perfect buttonhole!”

For the lunch break, he took her to a little hole-in-the-wall bowling alley nearby.

“I sometimes set pins here at night, and the boss lets me hang out during the off hours. C’mon, I’ll teach you how to roll duckpins.”

They ate their sandwiches in companionable silence. He gobbled his half so fast, she took pity and gave him its mate. He sent her a muted look of gratitude. Poor boy, he seemed to be on permanent starvation rations.

Inside the brown paper bag was the library book she was currently reading. Usually it was the only sharer of her idle half hour. Intrigued by the rectilinear bulk, Yashe fished it out of the wrapper. Closing one eye contemplatively, he read the title aloud.

“Goodbye Mister Chips. Funny name for a book. What is it, ways of dieting? Chips are fattening, right?”

She repressed a smile and said gently, “It’s the story of an old schoolteacher.”

“I hate schoolteachers,” he burst out fiercely, “And I hate schools. The happiest moment of my life was when I turned sixteen and didn’t have to go anymore.”

He lit a cigarette fiercely, almost seeming to chew off the match head. It flared into life with a raucous hiss, the flame large and hot enough to melt lead.

“Be careful with that trick,” she warned. “Sooner or later you’ll set your mustache on fire.” Feathery little mustache, as soft and delicate as down, almost blond where his locks were dark brown. It wouldn’t take much to burn that tender foliage away.

Did he have a mustache then, Adele wondered in the dark at Tzvi’s, or did it grow in later. A debonnaire mustache like the one sported by the actor who played The Thin Man, William P or L something. Paul? Pearl? Pale?

“So tell me more about your Mister Chips,” he said, somewhat mollified by her concern.

“I’ll lend you the book,” she offered instead.

“I don’t read books,” he said loftily. “Only the funny papers sometimes. Gasoline Alley, ever try that? The Katzenjammer Kids.”

She brightened. “My English teacher said that the comic pages are popular culture. Once she even suggested we write book reports on our favorites.”

“And did you?”

“I tried to, on Apple Mary. But I couldn’t finish, because the story goes on and on and never ends.”

“I would have written on Mandrake the Magician,” he said, dreamily watching the wispy smoke curl up from the glowing end of the diminishing butt. “I wish they would make a movie about him. Or a stage play.”

“What a wonderful idea!” she cried, inspired by his vision. “You certainly have imagination. Miss Grendling used to say that imagination is half the battle in life.”

“You look confused, Adele.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Miss Grendling.” The teacher often came up with these gnomic aphorisms. The poetic temperament, no doubt, though the rigid coiffure of her iron-gray hair and the severe navy business suit that encased her spare form were far from outward signs of the wild, bardic Celt within.

Miss Grendling turned toward the blackboard and in a rat-tat-tat of chalk swiftly indited, “IMAGINATION, THE KEY TO SUCCESS!”

“How can you dream of making something of yourself in the future without imagination?” she asked the class, lean cheeks slightly flushed with the power of her insight. “Yes, hard work is essential, but without imagination you’ll always be stuck in the present, the same dreary old you.”

“I guess it took a lot of imagination to make a high school teacher,” Yashe said dryly.

“You wouldn’t be so doubtful if you read Mr. Chips,” Adele said.

“Why don’t you read it to me,” he suggested. “My ear is much sharper than my eye.”

“That’s the singer in you,” she reflected admiringly, and opened the book to the first page. Taking a deep breath, she was about to begin the story when the door flew open and in swept a scrawny, narrow-headed, almost chinless youth, unkempt, disreputable, with a hank of hair flopping over one eye.

“Ikey, you there?”

A bright beady stare scanned the foreground of the place and then the middle distance until it settled on the heads and shoulders of the pair rising above the backrest of the wooden bench fronting one of the alleys.

“What’s up, Toby?” Yashe asked in a calm, well modulated voice.

“Better cheese it fast, brother. The old man’s on the warpath and he’s plenty farbrent.”

He used the Yiddish word for burning with rage. It was the family joke, though not usually funny.

“What is it this time?”

“There’s a fiver missing from his change purse. Somehow he got the idea you took it.”

“And how did such a thing enter his mind?”

“Fuck, it was yours in the first place, wasn’t it? He stole it from you so he figures you stole it back.”

“Whereas it was you all the time, wasn’t it? My light-fingered little brother. Adele, meet Tuvia Heisswasser, the pride of our family.”

The two exchanged glances but no gesture of acknowledgement. A wide, apologetic grin split Toby’s face.

“I told him it wasn’t you, Ike. He wouldn’t listen.”

“But you never took the blame yourself, did you?”

“Listen, I’m always on your side. Never forget that.”

“Which is the reason why he knows I hang out at Westmain Alleys.”

The younger man shook his head emphatically. “I never told him. It was Shaiva.”

Yashe grimaced with distaste. Neither brother could stand their eldest sister, Bathsheba. In the fullness of time, Adele would join their non-admiration society.

“He’s on his way here?”

“Foaming at the mouth.

“Then I’d better make myself scarce.”

“And stay away from home a couple of days. Until he cools down, at least.”

“Wonderful. Maybe you’ll lend me my five bucks for a flophouse.”

Anger made his sarcasm a blunt instrument. His voice trembled with indignation and fear dried it to a hoarse croak.

Toby had the grace to be embarrassed. He hung his head like a small boy caught in some shameful act.

“Lost it at pool,” he mumbled.

Yashe shook his head helplessly. “Thanks for the warning, anyway,” he sighed, unable to keep the bitterness from his tone.

Adele felt an upwelling of pity and maternal concern.

“Pick me up at the factory at five,” she said. “We’ll think of something together.”

She already had an inkling of what could be done. Mondays and Tuesdays her father spent at a small hotel in St. Jerome for an early start on the back roads of his territory in the Laurentian foothills. The Murphy bed would be vacant for the next forty-eight hours.

“Your reputation will be mud,” Yashe protested when she told him as they left Tartan Garments at quitting time. “What, you’re willing to have a strange man spend the night in your room? The neighbors will love that.”

“You’re not so strange,” she said with a shy smile. “Anyway, I’ll say you’re my cousin, if anyone asks. The son of my father’s brother.”

His answering smile was tentative. “Your father has brothers?”

“Five, all of them unmarried.”

That night after supper they exchanged family histories. Yashe hailed from a village near Kiev. He grew up during the Bolshevik revolution and had fond memories of the Cheka, the precursor of the NKVD. His mentors, the subcommissars and their minions who ruled the district, indoctrinated him into the mysteries of the Soviet state and the rites of Leninolatry. Almost without exception, they were Jews, apostates from the faith of their fathers.

“Just like I am,” he told her proudly.

“Are you still a communist?” she asked with bated breath. These were people for whom the newspapers, even the Yiddish ones her father read, had little time or patience. Of course, she would try to keep an open mind. Miss Grendling always insisted on an open mind.

“Don’t be afraid, it isn’t a dirty word,” he said with a slightly mocking smile. Perceiving her distress, however, he took pity and reassured her. “You don’t have to worry, I’m not plotting against the state. In fact, I plan to be a millionaire before the age of thirty.”

She was thrilled that he would confide in her like this. Such heroic ambitions!

“With a voice like yours, I’m sure you’ll go far,” she encouraged him, a little abashed at her own presumption.

“Nah, the voice is nothing special,” he scoffed. “I’ve got acting talent, though. Mitzi Posner says I could be a star of the Yiddish stage if I put myself in her hands. Already done some bit parts in plays she directed and boy, did I impress her.”

“Who’s Mitzi Posner?” she asked innocently.

He scowled at her ignorance. “Just the biggest personality to come out of Poland in the last decade. One of the real artistes from classical Europe.”

Classical Europe, it was a phrase he savored, having picked it up from his patroness. He had caught her eye – or, rather, ear – with a bit of business he used in the Slichot portion of the High Holiday services, the little sob he coaxed from his hard-pressed voice a la Yosseleh Rosenblatt in the most piquant of the beast-beating laments.

“If she wasn’t touring the Eastern Townships, I could be crashing in her pad right now instead of your little room,” he boasted.

Crashing? Pad? These had a sinister sound, though their exact meaning was beyond her ken. Their flavor of unhallowed intimacy did not escape her, however.
“I’m sorry you’re disappointed I’m not Mitzi Posner,” she said stiffly.

He chuckled at her discomfiture. “Never mind. Any port in a storm. Anyway, my old man knows where she lives, but he never heard of you. That’s your big advantage.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad you find me useful,” she sniffed, unmollified.

“Sure, we’re cousins, ain’t we?” He lit a cigarette and grinned at her. “I forget now, is that on your mother’s or father’s side?”

On his own father’s side, he had no cousins but two half brothers, ten and fifteen years his senior, almost total strangers. His mother was the old man’s second wife, a child bride she had been. Jeroboam Heisswasser had been induced to take her off the shelf by a legacy of land that turned out to be subaqueous real estate after the local Pooretz diverted a small tributary of the Don to irrigate his fields. Nevertheless, he had fathered three children on her, of whom Yashe had the honor to be the second.

She noticed that he gritted his teeth unconsciously whenever the conversation veered in the direction of the shadowy patriarch.

The old man had an eye for business. Ritual slaughter, the trade to which he had been apprenticed, held no attraction for him. It was too smelly a vocation and insufficiently lucrative. Hazzanut, sacred cantillation, was something quite otherwise. Prestige and money beckoned, if he could only get a foot in some synagogue door. His own talent, unfortunately, was small. Ah, but the boy! The boy was a nightingale. The boy was a gift from heaven, even more precious than the rich black loam that turned into river bed. The boy was a find. Jeroboam blessed all the angels in heaven when the elders of Kehillat Yeshurun on Slope Hill Road gave ear to the pure soprano and nodded with approval and delight.

“Enough about me,” he said at last. By now, the room was foggy and acrid with cigarette smoke and Adele was coughing softly in counterpoint with his recitation. She raised the window sash to its maximum height. “Your turn,” he prompted her.

“Oh, gosh, I haven’t had any life at all,” she demurred. “Nothing to compare with yours anyway.” She fussed in the tiny kitchen to divert his attention from her insignificance.

“Everybody has a life,” he corrected her. “Maybe we’re not all from classical Europe, but that doesn’t mean we don’t amount to anything. Start from the beginning.”

In the beginning was Bessarabia. She remembered little of that, except Pa’s enormous handlebar mustache, a glossy roan in color, and Ma’s evanescent presence. The convent school she attended until the age of nine.

In nomilei fiului, eyoo tatelui, eyoo shvintoloy dookh, ameen.

That huge, sad-eyed effigee, spread-eagled on a golden cross. Crossing herself with the first two fingers of her right hand.

“They sent you to the nuns?” he asked, almost in disbelief.

“There was no other school in our town,” she explained. “It was a very good education. I learned French and German.”

“Say something in German,” he challenged.

She laughed uncomfortably. “It’s very like Yiddish. I’ve forgotten most of it.”

“Still,” he insisted.

She complied with a little frown and reddening cheeks. “Das ist var.”

“Meaning?”

“That’s the truth.”

“Doos is der emess,” he translated in Yiddish.

“Du host recht,” she continued.

“That’s the same thing,” he said, exulting in his own perspicacity.

Of the old country, she remembered little beyond the church, the gorgeous vestments of the priests and deacons, the cloying smell of incense, and Gypsies.

“I remember, the first thing I asked my Pa when we stepped off the ship was ‘where are the Gypsies?’.

“Maybe I’m a Gypsy,” Yashe mused, blowing smoke from his nostrils. He would emit smoke from his eyes, ears and pupik if he could.

“You don’t look like a Gypsy,” she said, eying him with a sidelong glance. “Though maybe the Gypsies kidnapped you as a baby and sold you as a foundling.”

He showed some excitement at this conjecture. “You know, I’ve often thought that myself. I really belong to a rich family, a family of nobles. Thieves in the night stole me from my cradle and left me with a pack of lousy Jews.”

She couldn’t hide her shock at this bitter hypothesis. “What a way to talk! You should be happy to be of our people. Anyway, you look very Jewish.”

This judgment made him very irritable. “No, I don’t. Mitzi Posner says I look just like a Polish count she once knew. Look at this nose. Have you ever seen such a short nose? Look at this skin. As light as old ivory.”

“Is that what Mitzi Posner says?” she asked with a mischievous smile.

He gave her a sullen look. “Stick to what you know.”

She didn’t know much. It was an admission very easy to make. She knew how to comfort her Pa. She knew how to please her teachers and make good grades in high school. She knew how to prepare simple dishes like the salad and scrambled eggs Yashe had wolfed down for supper. Best of all, she knew how to make buttonholes.

“The years have gone by very quickly,” she told him. “Now I’m all grown up, almost an old maid.” She tittered at her own boldness.

“A very young old maid,” he amended. “An old maideleh.”

That’s what he would call their daughter when she reached thirty, affection leavened by impatience. The girl loved it on certain occasions, though it drove her almost mad on others.

“Well, I’ve told you everything,” she said. “Would you like me to read to you?”

“About old Mr. Chips?” he snorted. “No thanks!”

“Well, it’s too early to go to bed. We can play the radio. There’s ‘Treasure Trail’ on CJAD.”

“I’m not in the mood.” He seemed very restless, pacing up and down the confined space, picking up objects at random and putting them back down. She watched him beneath lowered lids, a little afraid of angering him.

“So what do you suggest?” she murmured at last.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said, almost with a groan of frustration.

“Yes, a breath of fresh air will do us both good,” she said.

They tiptoed down the stairs, afraid of attracting the attention of neighbors. The street lamps went on, casting a pearly radiance, as they emerged. A quarter moon shone mistily over the mountain whose summit and glowing cross were visible just over the low rooftops of her street. They trod on the heels of their shadows, ghostly elongated shapes that wheeled around them as they proceeded down the sidewalk. The smell of lilac hung heavy on the air. She felt a vague longing for the feel of his palm against hers, but she knew better than to suggest it or wordlessly take the initiative. After all, he belonged to Mitzi Posner.

Without consciously intending to, they headed toward the park, crossing at the lights from the built-up section to the green flat land. Scores of promenaders crisscrossed the gently sloping lawn. In the softball diamonds, pickup teams moved cautiously among the bases, taunting each other with low, hoarse cries.

A crowd had gathered around a shallow depression near the sidewalk just across the street from the Jewish old people’s home, Maimonides. A scarecrow figure in an outfit of tan with a red brassard around one arm was haranguing them, pumping the air with one fist while the other hand hooked a thumb through his belt.

“It’s a Nazi demonstration,” Adele whispered tremulously, frightened. “Let’s not go there.”

“Don’t be silly,” he admonished her. “We don’t run away from such things.”

She was starting to tremble. “They’re violent people. Things can happen. It’s dangerous.”

He laughed with contempt. “Yeah, for the speaker. He’s a poor dumb fish swimming in a Jewish sea around here. I want to see what happens.”

Reluctantly she followed as he edged closer to the outer fringes of the onlookers. They could hear the ranting voice of the Nazi now as it rose and fell in waves of staccato oratory. Using a pair of folding metal chairs opened edge to edge as a makeshift platform, the man was speaking in broken English, interspersed with foreign phrases. Adele recognized the accent. He was a French Canadian of the lowest class, those people who broke store windows after disappointing hockey games. She shuddered with fear.

“…Dem Juifs, dey got to be taught un lecon, hodderwise dey drain hus dry….”

A murmur of anger ran through the crowd, but against whom it was hard to tell. In any event, it seemed to encourage the speaker, who warmed to his theme.

“Bientot it is time for deir Passover. Den dey cut de t’roats, les gorges, of good enfants chretiens for deir blood, cook deir Passover bread with deir blood.”

“That’s what makes it taste so good,” Yashe yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth. People turned around and gave him dubious looks but were careful to keep silent.

“Yes, our blood, de blood of our saviour, le sangue sacre, taste good in Jewish mouths. Les vampires is de Jewish race, eaters of blood.”

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Yashe called back. He was shaking with demonic laughter. Adele pulled desperately at his arm.

“Don’t, don’t, please stop.”

“Can’t. Having too much fun.” He shook her off.

“You like blood?” the Nazi jeered. “I give you bloody nose.” He made as if to descend from his perch on the chairs, then thought better of it.

“You dumb Pepsi!” Yashe shouted, struggling to shoulder his way through the press, “You give Hitler a bad name.”

A large man with thick, hairy forearms and an overpowering effluvium of stale sweat stood directly in his path and tried to calm him down.

“Take it easy, boychik,” he rumbled, the wide barrel of his chest impeding the younger man’s progress, “What if he’s carrying a knife or an ice pick? There’ll be enough blood to swim in then, all of it yours.”

“I don’t care,” Yashe raved, “I’ll choke the shit out of him.”

The stranger stepped aside and favored Adele with a mordant smile. “He’s hot stuff, ain’t he? Okay, ya wanna get it outta your system, go ahead. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Given free rein, Yashe hesitated. In the mean time, the Nazi folded his chairs and beat a hasty retreat.

“Thank God!” Adele whispered fervently, noting the sudden departure. It was a nightmare that had unraveled just in time.

Yashe slumped beside her, as if deflated. “Lucky for him, he knew when to take a powder,” he growled with a show of ferocity. “They’re all fucking cowards when it comes to a fight.”

“Thank your lucky stars and bench goymel,” the big man said with a scornful laugh, referring to the Hebrew blessing for escape from death. “The next time you play the fire-eater, you may get burned.”

“Fuck you, asshole!” Yashe rasped, flexing his deltoids to swell his torso to intimidating proportions. “Maybe you’d like to teach me manners.”

The fellow gave him a light-hearted shove with one meaty hand. Yashe staggered back a few feet and almost lost his balance. Several bystanders snickered at the dumbshow.

“I don’t give private lessons,” his interlocutor said with a snaggle-toothed grin. “If you can gather up a minyan of likeminded boys, come see me again. Ten is my minimum class in your weight division. Just ask for Albert the butcher. Everybody around here knows me.”

Hands in pockets, he lumbered off downhill toward the Black Watch armory where a kilted color guard was lowering the flag. Yashe watched him go with a wrathful gaze.

“Nazi-lover!” he shouted after him from a safe distance, “Hitlerite!”

Albert the butcher turned but did not retrace his steps. “Ya wanna fight Hitler?” he yelled back and pointed toward the parade ground of the armory where the bare-kneed troops stood saluting, “There’s the gang you should join. Let me know when you sign up and I’ll buy you a beer.”

“Bigshot!” Yashe muttered and lit a cigarette, his response to every crisis. He shook his head and searched the sky, as if for inspiration, then turned to Adele. “It’s times like this I regret leaving Russia,” he said. “The Soviets don’t take shit from anyone.”

The Chekists he’d befriended as a boy had taught him to shoot the old Enfields with which British largesse had endowed the Czarist forces prior to Brest-Litovsk. The organs of the state could have used a strongly motivated, stalwart young fellow like himself. How smart he would have looked in uniform, with a pistol strapped to his hip. No Albert the butcher would have dared to raise his eyes, much less his voice, to such a figure of authority. Then stinking old Jeroboam had followed the spoor of money to the new world and dragged his wife and children along with him.

Adele encircled his arm with her own and tried to ease him away from this accursed circle of confrontation, but he resisted her pull. He had a score to settle with someone, somewhere. There was a sour taste in his throat. He lit another cigarette.

“I think there’s a bonfire near the soccer field,” she said. “The Zionists are probably organizing a koomzitz. Let’s go have a look. I love it when they dance the hora.”

It was strictly against municipal law to light fires on public grounds, but the YMHA had pull with the city council so that the authorities winked at breaches of these ordinances when a responsible agency guaranteed them as harmless. Muttering under his breath, Yashe permitted himself to be herded in the direction of the flickering flames.

A band of young people in white shirts and the blue, brimless headgear of the Jewish pioneers in Palestine, known as “dunce caps” and as distinctive of devotion to the Hebrew renaissance in the land of redemption as the Phrygian cap was of the Jacobin cause, were feeding a healthy young blaze with dry brush. The crackle of burning wood added an insectile stridulation to the human sounds of merriment and a shower of orange sparks swooped upward like the hot breath of a volcano. Yashe and Adele had to shield their eyes from the incandescent glare and shrank a little from the infernal heat of the fire.

A young woman somewhat older than the adolescents frolicking around the flames approached them with a smile. In one hand, she bore a pair of kovaei tembel, the kibbutznik dunce caps that everyone in attendance was wearing as a badge of allegiance to the Jewish homeland.

“Welcome, chaverim,” she said, offering them to the newcomers.

“We’re not Zionists,” Yashe told her pugnaciously. “I’m not even sure I’m Jewish.”

The woman was not put off by his tone, but quirked her lips mischievously. “There’s one sure way of finding out,” she said.

Yashe glowered at her. “The royal family of England has their kids circumcised. Maybe I’m a prince in disguise.”

“In that case, let me crown you.” Without a by-your leave, she set the dunce caps on their heads. Yashe recoiled from her, but too late. The hat sat rakishly over one eye. “Very becoming,” the woman said, “Pity you’re not a Zionist.”

“Fuckin’ bitch!” he cursed her. He opened his mouth wider to permit the emergence of more creative imprecations, but only a combination of the first two epithets followed. He looked wild enough to strike her, but with an effort restrained himself. Instead, he snatched the hat off his head and flung it, like a sacrifice to Moloch, into the flames.

A charged silence fell over the group. A burly, redheaded bruiser in shorts and sandals materialized beside the woman, radiating hostility and a certain aptitude for violence.

“Now why did you have to go and do that?” he asked softly. His raw-knuckled hands curled, not exactly into fists but more than halfway there. He spoke with a strong accent that Adele could not place but recognized, many years later, as Israeli.

“I hate your fuckin’ Zionism,” Yashe hissed. “My homeland is Biro Bidjan.” He referred to the autonomous region in the Caucuses assigned by Stalin to the Jews.

“Those hats cost a dollar ninety-nine apiece,” the woman said sadly.

“I don’t carry money on Mondays,” Yashe snarled.

“Then I’ll just have to take it out of your Biro Bidjan,” the redhead said, almost with a good-natured smile, and advanced threateningly.

“No, wait,” Adele cried. She dug desperately in her purse. “Here’s a dollar fifty. That’s all I have. Plus two streetcar fares. That makes almost a dollar sixty-five.”

She offered the money with trepidation. The redhead held out a fleshy palm, and she dropped the small change and tickets into it. He also relieved her of the dunce hat on her own head.

“Oofoo mee kahn,” he rasped.

“That’s Hebrew for make yourselves scarce,” the woman translated. By this time, half a dozen members of their group had edged up to back the duo. Yashe had no choice but to comply.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said, stamping across the greensward.

“It’s not important,” she said.

“Yes it is. I live just two blocks away.”

She trailed him reluctantly, of two minds about turning around and going home by herself. Indecisiveness had always been her weakness and inertia kept her at his heels, though she dreaded the toxic mood that had possessed him and what awaited at his home.

They cut across the park to the walled playground fronting Brebeuf Street and on the other side marched south along the unevenly laid flagstones of the ancient sidewalk. Here peddlers on horse-drawn wagons still plied their trade and the cobbled lanes were filled with steaming piles of ordure.

Yashe’s family occupied a coldwater flat at the top of a triplex walkup. The staircase at the front of the building was gaptoothed with the lack of three risers in succession, so that Yashe brought Adele around the back way through a circuitous alley with standing suds-frothed pools of water attesting the nonexistence of drains for laundry and ablutions. He led the way up a spiral metal ladder in a close, foul-smelling, four-walled wooden shaft and onto a tiny gallery hung so thickly with washing that it felt like a poop deck on a sailing ship with all its canvas set.

They entered the flat through a shed-like rear antechamber where a squat coal stove lifted a pair of cylindrical elbowed arms to penetrate the low ceiling and void its production of smoke into the outer air. The door to the rest of the flat was locked from the outside. Yashe jiggled the handle, to no avail, then pounded with rage on the thin plywood panel.

“C’mon in there, I know there’s somebody home. What ‘s the idea?”

“Maybe they’re worried about thieves,” Adele suggested timidly.

“Yeah,” came the sardonic answer, “As if there’s something to steal.”

At last, the mechanism responded to a hand on the other side of the door. A key was turned, the latch was lifted, hinges creaked and a crack of light appeared in the doorway. The board swung open, revealing the ripe figure of a woman in her late twenties. In contrast with her well-rounded form, the woman’s face was thin and angular with a yellow tinge as if from incipient hepatitis. Her mouth was a smear of carmine lipstick and her eyebrows were plucked to pencil thinness. The eyes were what struck Adele with particular force. They stared out of her face with unwinking enmity at whatever happened to be in their line of sight. At first it was Yashe, and she could not repress a sneer at the sight of him. Then her gaze moved to Adele. One eyebrow, an almost hairless punctuation mark with which to parse her facial expression, rose with unfriendly amusement.

“Are you inviting people over for a party, little brother?” she asked, not moving from the doorway and blocking their entrance. “I think you forgot to order fiddlers and refreshments.”

“Let me through, Shaiva,” Yashe ordered, and roughly shouldered his way past her. The woman gave way with lithe nimbleness, though not without suggesting by sly body language that she had avoided by very little being pushed aside by his brutal advance. A sour smile twisted her painted mouth.

“As courtly as ever, brother dear. I hope your little friend is used to your gentle ways.”

Adele held her hand out with a show of courage and introduced herself, hoping to mollify this dragon at the gate.

“Adele, huh. That’s not the name I remember from the last time. Well, never mind. I’m Bathsheba, as you probably remember. We got along pretty well, so there shouldn’t be any trouble.”

“I think you’re mistaken,” Adele faltered, “I’ve never been here before.

“I guess it must have been your twin sister,” Bathsheba conceded with a heavy-lidded smile of contempt. “Sisters, I should say.”

“Enough of that, Shaiveh,” Yashe growled. “Don’t pay any attention to her, Adele,” Yashe growled. “She’s full of the poison brewed by the fear that Toby and I will marry before her and she’ll wind up a sour old maid.”

“The ma and the pa will never allow your weddings before mine,” his sister hissed with gorgon venom. “You can have all the chippies you want, but the chupah never before I stand under it!”

The years proved Shaiveh no prophetess, but how could they know that then? Standing before them, full of oracular certainty, she struck Adele as almost unchallengeable. Yashe seemed to feel this as well, for he dropped his eyes and groped for a reply.

“Where’s the pa?” he asked at last.

“Where do you think? Sleeping it off, as usual.”

Old Jeroboam was accustomed to knocking off half a tumbler of 140-proof slivovitz for dessert. He wasn’t a drunk, by any means, as Shaiveh’s comment implied, but the spirits did make him drowsy and bad-tempered. An hour’s shut-eye was enough to restore him. Yashe had been counting on the tipple to do its work when he slipped into the flat.

He tiptoed into the dining alcove. Sure enough, the old man was slumped in his horsehair throne at the end of the scarred mahogany table. A pair of lit tapers in a two-branched candelabrum threw flickering shadows that seemed to cause the lax features above his sparse gray beard to twitch demonically.

The stooped dumpy form of a woman closer in appearance to old age than her middle years was removing dishes from the table. An air of desperate caution seemed to envelope her and her movements embodied the quietness and control of a servant fearful of awakening an irascible master.

Catching sight of Yashe in the doorway, she stiffened with alarm, though her face lit up with pleasure as well.

“Mein kind, what are you doing here?” she asked in Yiddish. As Yashe opened his mouth to answer, she placed a cautionary forefinger to her lips and signaled him to return to the kitchen where she followed. They embraced awkwardly before Adele. The old woman sent a questioning glance her way.

“A friend of mine, ma,” Yashe explained, but performed no introductions and, beyond a nod of greeting, the two did not acknowledge one another’s presence.

“Der alter is very angry at you, Yashinka,” she said, lowering the dishes carefully into the sink so that they did not clatter. Shaiveh sat at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table and dealt herself a hand of solitaire, pointedly ignoring everyone else in the vicinity.

“He’s always angry,” Yashe said with a shrug. “Since my voice changed, I can’t get a decent word from him. No more child prodigy, no more shmolarehs rolling in, what’s the point of good relations?”

“He says five shmolarehs is missing from his change purse,” Shaiveh muttered in an undertone.

“Toby took that,” Yashe countered, “And it was mine to begin with. The old guy laid his hand on it without even asking.”

“He’s your father, he’s got a right,” Shaiveh declared, though Yashe was well aware that she said so only to be contrary, for she too hated the old bastard, perhaps more than any of them.

“So, Ma,” Yashe said helplessly, letting his arms hang by his sides and turning his hands palms outward. His grin was feeble and he shrugged.

“You need money,” his mother guessed. Her instincts were infallible.

“Can you spare two shmolarehs?” he asked.

“No!” his sister hissed, slamming down the deck of cards with such force that the table jumped. “He wants to take his floozy to the movies, while we barely have enough to eat.”

“You shut your fuckin’ mouth!” Yashe roared, taking a menacing step toward her.

If a hole had opened up at Adele’s feet she would have leaped in without hesitation.

Shaiveh sent her brother a venomous glare. “Big man,” she taunted, “Knows how to curse a defenseless woman, but to earn a steady wage?”

She shook her head, as if to discourage a persistent fly, and went back to her game.

“Nu, my poor Yashkeleh,” Mrs. Heisswasser said, “A few pennies for a beloved son any mother would give. Wait here.”

“It isn’t necessary,” Adele faltered. “Let’s just leave.”

“The first sensible word I’ve heard in the last ten minutes,” Shaiveh rasped.

Yashe raised his fist.

“Hit me, go ahead and hit me!” she shrieked.

A croaking voice spoke in Russified Yiddish from the passageway between the kitchenette and the dining alcove. “What is this infernal racket?”

Quaking with rage, the lord of his domain confronted the four. A black yarmulke rose like a miniature plateau, a truncated fez, from the top of his head, proclaiming, in the manner of a crown, incontestable rulership over all subjects within hearing of his voice.

With ladylike disdain, Shaiveh produced a hanky and blew her nose. The mother froze in her tracks, not daring to make a sound. Adele closed her eyes and willed herself into oblivion. Yashe, to demonstrate insouciance, lit a cigarette.

“What are you doing here?” his father asked, turning a bloodshot eye at the young man. “Why’re you disturbing the household and my innocent sleep.”

“He’s come to return your money,” Shaiveh said with a malicious grin.
Yashe maintained a sullen silence. Tobacco smoke jetted from his nostrils with an almost audible snort.

“In that case he’s welcome,” Jeroboam said. “The bsilla too.”

Adele was not familiar with the Yiddish-Hebrew word for “virgin”, but knew the remark had been sarcastic or insulting or both by the blood that rushed to Yashe’s neck and cheeks.

“Keep your foul tongue off her,” he muttered.

The bearded patriarch nodded his head, as if to confirm the judgment of some inner voice.

“So this is how a shaigetz from the gutter talks to the man who raised him and gave him a Jewish education. Well, I will not return curse for curse.”

He almost smiled at his own forbearance, showing a perfect set of dentures that lent him a look of paradoxical benevolence. Stepping closer to his son, he patted him on the cheek.

“Ach, what a voice he had! I could forgive him anything for that voice.”

Again he patted his son’s cheek, even more gently and affectionately. It was as close to a caress as he ever gave any of his children.

“The voice of an angel,” he whispered, and delivered a slinging slap to both cheeks. “And the soul of a devil. I wish the mohel had cut your throat instead of your shlong.”

To Adele’s astonishment, Yashe burst into tears. She crammed one fist into her mouth to keep from screaming, but a keening wail escaped her throat anyway.

Pavel, the red-haired night attendant at Zvi’s, poked his head through her doorway.

“Everything okay, Delchik?”

In the dim blue light of her nightlamp, the sharp planes of his gaunt, Slavic face stood out in stark relief.

“A bad dream,” she gasped, her voice an unsteady tremolo, the falsetto of an ancient crone, though inside she was still the eighteen-year Adele whom Yashe had courted. Even three quarters of a century later, that brutal smack, resounding pitilessly in the tiny kitchen, had not lost the power to wound her.

“A cup of tea, maybe? To help you sleep.”

For all that, there was still kindness in the world. The young Russian, cadaverous as a walking skeleton and troll-ugly, embodied more than his fair share of human benevolence, and she was grateful.

“You’re a good man, Pavel,” she murmured. “Just a little too skinny.”

“That’s why you love me,” he laughed, and gently closed the door, though leaving it ajar.

Though her children and grandchildren were infrequent visitors, she could always count on Pavel. Poor malnourished man! Poor thin boy!

The tiny phone of memory inside her brain rang, and she lifted the receiver.

“Pavel, the thin man,” a disembodied voice, not her own, perhaps Yashe’s, sounded in her inner ear.

“William Powell,” she cried silently. The thin man.

Exultant at the ultimate success of her hunt, she closed her eyes and hugged her prey close. William Powell and Myrna Loy. At the other end of the line, Yashe celebrated her joy.

Ill be seeing you
In every lovely, summers day,
And everything that’s bright and gay,
Ill always think of you that way;
Ill find you in the morning sun,
And when the night is new,
Ill be looking at the moon,
But Ill be seeing you.


Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 25.06.2010

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