A Louse, a Coal Bin, and Eddie Fisher

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

Memories, like patches in a quilt, don’t necessarily appear to match but when seen from a distance, patterns do emerge.

Following an afternoon with my friend Madeleine, my mother noticed I kept scratching my head. She wasted no time in launching an investigation, carefully parting my hair to closely scrutinize my scalp.  After some time, she found what she was looking for—a louse! Only one, but that’s all it took. First, she squashed it between thumbnail and forefinger and then, she laid down the law. I was strictly forbidden from ever again going down to the basement to play with Madeleine.

“But why, Mameh?” I whined. At four, I was terrified at the prospect of losing my one and only friend, perhaps because it also meant losing access to Madeleine’s magic box that every afternoon displayed a wonderful puppet show, albeit in French.

“But why?”

“Ich ken nicht keine loyz aushalten. No lice. Not after what I went through in the war,” she said, talking more to herself than to me. She did that a lot since my brother was born.

That one louse changed my life. Until its appearance, I was permitted to climb down the two flights of stairs from our second-floor apartment on Lajoie Avenue in Montreal to the basement to play with Madeleine Portuguese, the janitor’s daughter.  I spoke only Yiddish, and she spoke only French, but as we were both four years old, language failed to be a barrier, especially because there was so much to explore in the basement. 

One of our favourite pastimes was sneaking into the coal bin. Nothing surpassed the excitement of a coal delivery when the truck parked in the lane alongside the building and Mr. Portuguese opened the little wooden window that covered the coal chute.  Glistening lumps would then tumble into the coal bin, filling the air with a cloud of thick dust.  As punishment for getting dirty, Mameh would scrub me so hard bits of skin accompanied the schmutz swirling down the drain. But no matter how hard she rubbed, Mameh failed to scrub off my enthusiasm.

There were other fun things to do down in the basement apartment. Mr. Portuguese liked beer. When he finished emptying the tall Dow bottles, he would leave them sitting on the kitchen table. Madeleine and I were charged with clearing them away by lining up the bottles on the kitchen floor starting from the doorway and going all around the room.  When the bottles reached the opposite side of the door, Mr. Portuguese would bring out the wooden beer crate and we got to fill it up before he carted it away. The next day, we would start all over again.

 The most fun thing of all in their basement apartment was watching Pépinot et Capucine on the French TV station. It was 1952 and there was no television on the second floor in our apartment.  Instead, I had a baby brother who cried a lot and a mother who was busy feeding him, changing him, cuddling him. She also talked to him a lot. Madeleine’s apartment was much more fun, especially as I was beginning to understand and speak French. How could my mother be so mean as to take away my only playmate?

I was not allowed outside on my own, so all my outdoor activities involved accompanying my mother to one of three neighbourhood parks. While my baby brother slept in the carriage and my mother napped on the park bench, I would run off to find other children to play with. Sometimes I even found one or two who spoke Yiddish.

Sundays were my favourite day and I knew it was Sunday because my papa was home and not at work. On his one day off, he was never too tired to take me for a walk—just the two of us—to the park. We talked about all sorts of things. When the squirrels approached us begging for one of the peanuts Papa always hid in his pocket, he would let me have the nut so I could feed the squirrel from my own hand. Then, he would remind me that this was our secret because Mameh would be upset. She thought a squirrel’s bite could make me sick. I loved Sundays with Papa but Mameh did also. I heard her say so, because sometimes, she said, she needed all her energy for my baby brother. So, all the other days now, without Madeleine, Pépinot, and Papa, were long and sometimes sad.

One day I heard something that encouraged me to believe I had found a new friend. There was a large wooden radio set sitting on the dining room table tucked in the corner of our small apartment. When I sat next to the set it was almost as big as me. My love affair with the radio began the first time I heard a wonderful song where I understood some of the words. It began, “O! Mein Papa…”

I became obsessed with that song, sitting on the table waiting for it to come on. When it did, it was magic. I pressed my ear to the scratchy fabric stretched across the speaker to get as close to the sound as I could. Sometimes, those three little words brought tears to my eyes and especially when I learned the rest of the line: “…to me he was so wonderful.”

The singer was Eddie Fisher, and thanks to him and the radio, I soon learned many more English words but remembered less of the French that Madeleine and Pépinot had taught me. After that, my playmates were all English-speakers so the next time I heard French it was in Grade Three when Miss Pedersen, my homeroom teacher a native of Saskatoon, began our first French lesson: OO-vreer la fen-et-rah. Fair-meer lah port.

I never did become fluent in French…perhaps because of that one little louse, a language opportunity was lost.