The Girl Who Stole Everything Read online

  THE GIRL WHO STOLE EVERYTHING

  .ll.

  THE GIRL WHO STOLE EVERYTHING

  a novel

  Norman Ravvin

  .ll.

  Krzysztof Majer, Elise Moser, Linda Leith, Shelley Butler and Nancy Richler helped me think and write about Poland and Vancouver.

  Copyright © 2019, Norman Ravvin

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

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

  Prepared for the press by Elise Moser.

  Cover photograph by Cezary Jurkiewicz, reproduced by permission.

  Excerpt from “Family Home,” in Unseen Hand (2009) by Adam Zagajewski on page 5 is reproduced by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Author photo by Allen McInnis, Montreal Gazette/Postmedia.

  Cover design by Debbie Geltner.

  Book design by Tika eBooks.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The girl who stole everything / Norman Ravvin.

  Names: Ravvin, Norman, 1963- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190066768 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190066776 |

  ISBN 9781773900278 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773900285 (EPUB) |

  ISBN 9781773900292 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781773900308 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8585.A8735 G57 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

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

  .ll.

  Linda Leith Éditions

  Montreal

  www.lindaleith.com

  . . . all the nights since you left

  are snarled like the yarn of an old sweater

  in which wild cats have nested.

  You come here like a stranger,

  but this is your family home.

  — Adam Zagajewski

  PART ONE

  Ania watches the boy run toward her. In his hands he holds a box big enough for a pair of shoes. It is the Czaykowski boy, isn’t it? She grew up with his mother, and their mothers were children together in wartime. But maybe this is another child. They all look the same now, with their buzz cuts, their summer shorts and T-shirts with American slogans. The boy’s reads: Madonna World Tour.

  He stands in front of her, saying something about a hole he dug in the back field.

  “Calmly,” she tells him. “Let me see what you have.”

  They sit at the corner of the square, on the stoop of a house a few doors from Ania’s mother’s. The boy hands her the box. As she looks through its contents, he tells her his story in a high breathless voice.

  The family cat, he says, died on Tuesday. His mother wanted him to take care of it, to get it out of their yard. She always said it was dirty.

  “But the cat never went anywhere but the woods. It’s clean in the woods, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Ania says. “As clean as can be.”

  The cat—the boy says this with the greatest seriousness—was the cleanest animal he knew. It was cleaner than most people. It cleaned itself with care and regularity. Its name should have been Mr. Clean. But it was called Jósek. An unusual name for a country cat, whose counterparts might simply be called kot.

  “For Piłsudski? Like this square?”

  “No.” The boy does not think it was named for the square. Why would they name the cat after this lousy square? He’s heard of Piłsudski but he forgets. Was he president? Or a soccer player?

  Ania smiles. Sometimes a child’s ignorance is a pleasant and freeing thing. She rests the box on her knees, and he rattles on with his story.

  At first, he thought he would take the cat to the far corner of their property, over near the big willow tree. Does she know it? He points, past the rooftops, beyond the church, at the summer sky. In order to make things easy, she nods.

  But then he remembers something he’d heard about the cat.

  “It’s a rumour. My father used to joke that the cat was Jewish.”

  “What can this mean?” Ania asks. “People can be Jewish. The building across the square from the church was Jewish once. Possibly it still is. But how can a cat be Jewish?”

  The boy shakes his head. He never really understood. And he was afraid to ask. They’d been given their cat by the Grabowskis, after theirs had kittens.

  “When Jósek died I wanted to bury him in the Jewish cemetery. But I was always told not to go to that place.”

  This takes Ania by surprise. She knows where the Jewish cemetery was in the village, before the war, because her parents owned land next to it. Old-timers know, because once they watched as the village’s Jews made their way there along the back roads. But each year this contingent of old-timers is fewer in number. And the cemetery grounds are nothing more than an open field where gravestones once stood. Someone has been telling him ghost stories.

  “It’s over there,” the boy says. Again, a finger to the horizon. “Where Shnigorsky keeps his cows.”

  Ania nods. Her mother used to point out the cemetery site when they went to visit their property at the edge of the village. After Ania’s father died, her mother had refused offers to buy the land. Some were miserly, but in one case the money would have been a windfall. It was a few years after the fall of Communism. A speculator came from Warsaw in a BMW the size of a tank. He parked in the square and marched up to their door. In his jacket pocket he carried payment in cash, as if this guaranteed compliance from yokels. Now there were rumours that a Jewish organization in Warsaw wanted to recover the cemetery land for the gemina, the overall Jewish community in the city. But these discussions had stalled, and her mother was glad. She followed developments in the news. Her land alongside the cemetery grounds was a wide sweep of fields to the south of the village. Ania’s mother walked there to pick wildflowers and roots, which she put in teas and homemade medicines. What, she asked Ania, would Warsaw people want with our village land? Who would build, or, even stranger, buy a new house on the outskirts of Radzanów?

  On this topic Ania knew her mother was not as up-to-date as she believed herself to be. Radzanów was an hour by car northwest of Warsaw on a good highway. Contractors were putting up modern villas for professional families who were willing to commute to the city in exchange for some peace in the countryside.

  In addition to the fields on the village outskirts, her mother hangs on to another bit of property. A house on the village square that has been derelict since the war. She’d put up a few zloty for it when abandoned properties came available. Behind it there are stables and a brick farm building. Ania passes the house each time she visits Radzanów, alighting from the Młlawa bus.

  She last visited her mother’s fields during the Potato Festival. Everyone was at church bringing offerings to the altar. She walked by herself to the cemetery’s edge and sat on a big stone on the Jewish ground and breathed in air that she felt was hers alone. As if she were the last person in the village. When she got up to go, she felt something inside, which she couldn’t describe, least of all to a child.

  The boy describes how he visited the cemetery grou
nds at night. He snuck out of his house through the bedroom window. He carried the cat in a satchel he used for school.

  “I was scared,” he tells her. “I’d never gone on the Shnigorsky land, even in the daytime.”

  Old Shnigorsky, some eighty years old, was still tough, Ania knew, his bald head like a cannonball.

  “And there was no moon that night, so it was awfully dark. Like the basement. The countryside at night was as dark as my parents’ basement.”

  “I would be scared too,” she tells him.

  He nods. She understands him. He has brought his story to the right person.

  He brought a shovel and a piece of paper with a prayer written on it. He had asked his mother what people said at burials. He understood a bit of what she told him, which he’d scribbled in pencil and slipped into the satchel with Jósek. Even if it was Christian stuff, he hoped that saying it in the Jewish cemetery made it all right. He set the bag near the old tree where Shnigorsky sometimes tied his favourite cow. The one with the white and black markings. Did she know that tree?

  She thought she did. The crippled one, like an old man.

  “Yes,” the boy says. “That one. I put Jósek there. And I began to dig behind the tree, out of sight. There are a lot of stones in our ground. It was hard work. Did you know that when a shovel hits a stone in the night there is a spark of light?”

  She did not know about stones and sparks.

  This raises the boy’s spirits. He has told her something she did not know.

  “I dug,” he says, “for what seemed like forever. This deep.” He holds his arms wide. “Sparks popped like fireworks.”

  When he thought the hole was deep enough to prevent it being dug up by raccoons, he put Jósek by the edge of the hole, to say the prayer before he lowered him in. It was then that he noticed that his digging had uncovered something. Not just stones.

  “This?” Ania lifts the box from her dark-stockinged knees. They look at it together. It is made of yellow wood and is very light to hold.

  He nods.

  “Did you show this to anyone else?”

  The boy shakes his head.

  Could she keep it for a few days? To look carefully at what was inside.

  He nods, enthusiastic. He is anxious for someone to take his discovery off his hands.

  “When would you like it back?”

  The boy shrugs. Time means nothing to him. Days. Weeks. Whatever. He is going to live forever.

  Ania smiles and wraps her long, manicured fingers around the box and bends forward to kiss the boy, lightly, on his forehead. A kind of christening. He must think of her as a person of impressive authority, not just a thirty-something ex-villager who has remade herself in Warsaw. Because of her link with her mother, who is a person to contend with in the village, Ania must be someone who can solve mysteries.

  The kiss makes him smile and stand up tall. Off he runs, free of his weird find. It is in her hands now. And he’s been kissed by Pani Ania, who went away to another life in Warsaw.

  A Calling Card

  Nadia is heading east. Jess is behind her, his jacket flapping. But as they hurtle around the bridge skirting the port, he flies past and disappears into the dark. This route was once entirely suited to commerce—trucks and trains and workers on the port elevators. But it’s been retooled as part of the cycling lanes from Vancouver’s east side into downtown. Nadia’s heart is in her mouth. She doesn’t own a bike. She prefers to feel the ground under her feet. But somehow Jess coaxed her into a nighttime ride. He has something to show her. This is what he said over the phone. And now she feels she is risking her life trying to keep up with him to find out what it is.

  After a long tunnel under the convention centre—air vents that look like jet engines whir high above their heads—they stop by the water, at one of the city’s remarkable seawall views. This one looks out across Coal Harbour at Stanley Park. As Nadia straddles her borrowed bike, winded, she watches little waves carry the moonlight across to the park. It is oddly quiet at the edge of the country’s busiest port. But it’s late, almost midnight. The lights are out in the bank of sky-high condo towers behind them. The rumour is nobody lives there. They are said to be among the favoured real estate investments for offshore money.

  In the dark, she can just make out the seaport where planes and helicopters land. She sniffs and catches a hint—the idea shocks her—of the past. Not a memory of the past. The thing itself. Those long-ago days reared up before her: when she’d lived nearby, in her aimless twenties, a punk extremist for whom everything was about the here and now, the next twenty-four hours, the next—as her friends used to say—fucking five minutes. It was the moistness in the air, and the calm hovering over everything. There they were, those days, lingering above the water. She tries to explain how she feels to Jess. But it’s pointless. He gives her a peculiar look and giggles. Giggles. It is the most discomfiting response imaginable to her effort to unburden herself there in view of the dark water. But it is exactly what she should have expected from him. What had he been to her? A would-be boyfriend? She is about to throw the bike down. Tell him he can return it. And to never call again. But before she can do this he reaches into his pocket and says, “Here.”

  He holds a business card. She considers not even looking at it. Pocketing it. She’ll throw it away later. But he says, “There’s something at my work you’ll want to see. Connected with you. Nadia.” He looks away as he says her name and breathes in as if to try to make up for laughing at her response to the drowsy port air. She moves into the amber glow of a streetlight to see, first one side and then the other:

  It is obviously old. Its edges are furry with wear. The giveaway is the telephone number cued by a word: “Marine 3647.” Did that take it as far back as the fifties? The name on the card is not hers but very like her own: she is Nadia Baltzan. Something is lurking, but she has no idea what it could be.

  Nadia feels winded. First by the bike ride, its speed and views and the familiar shock of how exhilarating the city is at night. The view of the single remaining boat gas station, throwing its ribbons of Shell yellow onto the water. Then the gloved hand of the past in her gut. What is she supposed to say?

  “Come down and see,” Jess says. He hops on his bike and leaves her there with the rented bike, which he’d rolled up to her at the corner of Robson and Davie, saying, “Get on, Nadia. Let’s go for a ride.”

  She has no desire to ride it another inch. The nearest object she can lean it against is a monument, to the side of the bike path, telling passersby of Canada’s rejection of a ship full of Sikhs a hundred years before. Its photo of rejected people gazes into the dark, quizzing her, a tableau of ghosts in their buttoned suit jackets and white turbans.

  Cordovaland

  Nadia stands on the corner of Abbott and Cordova in her sensible shoes, white joggers with the bounce of a pair of pillows. She does not care if they match her Levis and her logoless white T-shirt. She thinks of a time when she wouldn’t have been caught dead in the same room with someone wearing shoes like the ones she has on. But that was a decade ago, in her aimless twenties. How, she often asked herself back then, getting herself ready to go out, can I express just who I am? Every person who saw her had to get it. Strangers on the bus, classmates, and friends. Why? She cannot remember. But that was her focus: her self. A totally coherent message. This thing I am now and its particular commitments must be understood. How little she cares about such things today, as she takes in the grit and rush of Cordova at the corner where Vancouver breaks into its west and east sides.

  She walks down Abbott and marvels at how much has changed in the last few years. Wall murals. Whoever thought these streets would spawn wall murals? One is of a stenciled girl with blunt-cut yellow hair. She blows fluff from the head of a dandelion. Above it is a banner promoting “all-new concrete homes.” Here come the new neighbours. Once upon a
time the locals were punks like herself, social workers, down-and-outers, and cops. But the surrounding streets were open for business, just a few minutes from the old flophouses. She passes an impromptu sidewalk market offering a jumble of odds and ends, rags, radios, and jars full of nails. She passes too quickly to take it in properly. She is no longer Nadia Baltzan the Here-and-Now Girl. She is a graduate student and a walker in the city. She is just passing through.

  So, why is she here, headed east?

  It is the business card. She feels for it in her chest pocket. The card is the reason she is headed for RR Auctions down by the tracks. It was there that she and Jess had their final argument. He’d insisted she visit, thinking she might be interested in the weird memorabilia and the freaks who came crowding in to bid on it. What else besides “freak” could you call a grown man who pays thousands of dollars for Bonnie Parker’s bloodstained stockings? That had been one of the most sensational lots, along with a jewelled compact found beside her in the death car. These had been uncovered in some long-forgotten police locker in Texarkana, with a shrunken banana and a workman’s lunch thermos full of shattered glass. Jess had led her around. They’d peered into the spot-lit vitrines. Then Nadia had told him, “Never ask me to come back here, okay?” But here she is on her way back to see him there

  She and Jess were seeing each other around the time she’d begun to wonder if a man, any man, including boy-men like Jess, would ever make her feel excited. She’d gone as far as taking a number in a study being done at the Pine Avenue clinic testing a new pill, a kind of female Viagra. The young doctor told her to put one pill on her tongue at the same time each evening and let it dissolve there. In addition, she was to keep a pill diary. Each day, she was supposed to note down any ideas she had about sex, or any experiences and thoughts after sex, even any conversations she might have about sex. If she did not follow up, did nothing further in the way of therapy or talk about her sex issues—this was what the doctor had called her condition—she’d still have the diary as evidence. Of what? she asked. When she took the pills she was seeing Jess, sometimes letting him stay over at her place because they’d stayed out late and he was too exhausted or high to find his way home, but her unwillingness to be intimate did not change. So her pill diary was rather monotonous: “No change.” “No.” “Did not feel like it.” “Well, no.” “Same as usual.” “Oh, this can’t work on me. So why take it at all?” And so on, until she stopped altogether.