Queen Solomon Read online

  copyright © Tamara Faith Berger, 2018

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Berger, Tamara Faith, author

  Queen Solomon / Tamara Faith Berger.

  Issued also in electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-372-8 (softcover).

  I. Title.

  PS8553.E6743Q44 2018

  C813′.6

  C2018-903941-8

  C2018-903942-6

  Queen Solomon is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 565 4 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 566 1 (PDF)

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

  I, so and so, one of the lowliest,

  have probed my heart for ways of grace.

  – Abraham Abulafia

  She came back for me the first Monday in March, the day that I quit school for good. It had been almost seven years since she’d left. Now she stood on our porch buzz cut, draped in fur, with some middle-aged, square-jawed fuck toy beside her.

  ‘Long time, bruh,’ she said. ‘This is Christof. From France.’

  He was at least fifty, long hair, with grooves in his forehead.

  With no hair she looked gaunt, more severe than before.

  ‘Can’t we come in?’ Her gaze fixed right through me.

  Under the light of the porch, her eyes had that same telltale sheen. Tongue-tied, I could not acknowledge either him or her again.

  Then the guy took off one glove and held out his hand for me. It had this strange, metallic, free-floating warmth. Then he set that same palm on the back of her neck. Barbra moaned just a little, as if it was hot. Her lips were sun-cracked. My mouth lost its spit. I thought she was back here to mock me again.

  ‘How’s tricks? How’s your dad?’ Barbra seemed nervous and grinned.

  ‘Okay and okay.’ I felt myself spin. I half-blocked the doorway, gut roiling. My dad is not the bank machine.

  ‘What?’ Barbra asked, still smiling right through me. ‘What’d I do? What’d I do?’

  I remembered those teeth, light-speckled and ridged. I stepped backwards too fast, discombobulated.

  Then, unrestricted, Barbra shifted herself sideways and just pushed in right past me. Her little French fuck toy followed suit. He dragged some duffle bag in, kicked it up against the wall. Air from outside formed a bubble around me. I watched Barbra hand him her matted fur coat. I watched him slide open our mirrored front closet. Cold sweat had flattened the shirt on my back.

  My voice came out hoarse. ‘No free hangers in there.’

  Barbra laughed for some reason. I smelled like rye bread. The guy dumped both their coats on the slumped duffle bag. He wore army pants and a peasant blouse. Then he bowed at me weirdly before traipsing down our hallway toward the john.

  I turned and stared at her, fucking perplexed. ‘You gonna tell me what in God’s name you’re doing here again?’

  I sounded just like my father. Why was she back in our house with that middle-aged shyster?

  Barbra tried not to keep smiling, sucking in her bottom lip. She stared at Abigail’s drawings in the front hallway, the new ones that had just been framed.

  ‘These are good,’ she said coyly. ‘She’s gotten really, really good.’

  Brazen, avoidant, that same gruff tickling voice. Did she actually think she could just be reinstated?

  ‘We came from Peru,’ Barbra said. ‘This is just a pit stop, all right?’

  My blood pumped too fast. Surprise, no surprise. You already came and you conquered, bitch. Do not come back.

  ‘Hey. Relax, bruh. Why don’t you chill out a bit?’

  I stress-checked my phone. My girlfriend was going to be here too soon. Barbra and Ariane were going to meet. God, there was nothing I could do about this now.

  For seven years, I’d been trying to deal with myself in this world. I’d thought that graduate school was going to do that for me. I’d thought that reading book after book and then writing a thesis was going to sweep all my thoughts into actions at the very least. I was wrong. I still lived at home with my father. School had not carved my fucking problems out of me. Because I had this original problem, the origin of all my problems: Barbra, the leghold trap in our basement. Barbra the Israeli who infiltrated our house for eight fucked weeks when I was sixteen.

  My fundamental problem: I turned Hebrew, fractious.

  My whole entire head: five-fingered, forked.

  I sensed the shyster roaming around somewhere behind me. Her breasts were still massive. I smelled her beef-stock armpits. She wore this weird, rose-coloured, silky potatosack dress. Striped stockings. Buzzed hair. I wanted to touch her. That pinkish sack dress made her look like an inmate.

  ‘This place hasn’t changed one bit, not at all.’

  My father was the one who had brought Barbra here. I was the one who made the bitch bloom. Bloom is not the right word, but it’s what I use for a molester.

  I was still living at home after seven fucking years when I should’ve been in the US like my sister, who was winning genius awards.

  The shyster reappeared at her side. He clamped his hand back on her neck. Her shorn head tipped backwards. She moaned freer and shivered. I know white men think they master the universe like this.

  §

  There used to be a building near our house where women sat on green-painted benches in a small cement courtyard behind a buckling ten-foot-tall fence. Those women watched their kids play on a set of rusted monkey bars. My mother told me that the building was for victims of domestic abuse.

  ‘When a man hits the woman he lives with,’ my mother said, ‘it’s called domestic abuse. Being here means that the women have left their abusive situations.’

  I remember trying to imagine exactly what the men did to those women who were smoking with each other on the benches behind the fence. Why did their clothes look too big or too tight? Why was the building rundown? Why didn’t their kids go to school? I imagined a knock-kneed kick from a man in a suit and one of those women writhing on a kitchen floor. I imagined her raggedy nightdress and a purple eye socket. God, it was disturbing. All their kids on the monkey bars, screaming. I saw flour bags exploding. Sex by the man in a suit. His belt out and pants down, smothering her.

  I would never hit a girl, I promised myself when I was ten.

  But when Jessie Yung in Grade 6 said that my breath smelled like cat food, I wanted to punch her in the gut.

  And once, in Grade 8, I touched Mia Greenwald through her T-shirt while she was passed out drunk on Joel’s basement couch. I knew that was abuse, domestic abuse.

  Sometimes I hated my sister, too, when we were kids. I hated her so-called special needs. I knew there was actually nothing wrong with Abigail when everyone treated her so carefully.

  As I grew up, I think this is what happened: there was something that bothered me in general about girls. It was how they sometimes acted dainty and sometimes crude – even in the same sentence – and no one called them on it. They were two-faced, I’m saying, they herded together. Sometimes I wanted to enter their groups and make space for myself so that they couldn’t so flippantly lord their duplicity.

  It was not my mother who pinpointed this tendency in me.

  The Israeli bitch found it and used it immediately.

  §

  My father put her headshot on the fridge about one month before she arrived. It was an old-looking, folded, passportsized shot,
black and white, with a camera flash flicker lodged in one of her eyes. She had frizzy black hair bobby-pinned slick on one side. Tiny, mottled, square-shaped teeth and doe eyes like a caricature.

  ‘Naive,’ said my mother to my father. ‘That’s a woman, not a kid.’

  ‘Ruth, you of all people should understand,’ my father said. ‘She doesn’t have a family. Her family let her go when she was five. She’s been in Israel without her family for years.’

  ‘We learn to place kids within their communities,’ my mother said.

  ‘Come on, where the hell do you suggest they should’ve “placed” her? There are no Jews left in Ethiopia, Ruth! We had Operation Moses and Solomon for that. We are trying to help orphans get a handle on their lives.’

  ‘Orphans,’ my mother snorted.

  My mother was finishing her Master of social work. ‘I’m not sure your “team” is using the right word.’

  My father said that he fought to sponsor this exchange student, a Jewish one from Israel, a Jewish student who needed it. My father always repeated that he was the only Jewish member of his Rotary Club. My mother thought the Rotary Club was sexist. My father said that my mother didn’t know what she was talking about.

  ‘That girl was transferred to Israel by the military,’ said my mom, ‘when Israel had no long-term plan for integration. It’s a total disaster. Look at Tel Aviv. It’s all white. It’s for whites. They abducted the Yemenis, too. Israel has absolutely no framework for understanding race.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Ruth. These people are Jews – not Black people who are offended by the colour white,’ my father yelled. He turned to me. ‘Tell your mother, Israel always has a plan.’

  Before I met Barbra, I was kind of on my dad’s side.

  ‘I am not cooking for this person I don’t even know,’ my mother told my father on the day she was set to arrive.

  ‘Social work, Ruth? Sometimes I don’t know about your compassion.’

  Me and Abigail were watching America’s Next Top Model in the family room. Fatima was getting her photo taken on a dairy farm in short shorts and a USA crop top. Fatima had just confessed to Tyra Banks that she had been circumcised when she was a kid.

  ‘Clitoridectomy is the removal of the clitoris,’ Tyra Banks explained to the other models, glossy-eyed, holding Fatima’s hand. ‘Because they don’t want a beautiful woman like this to be free!’

  There was no way Abigail understood all of this. She was glued to the screen, mouth-breathing. Fatima broke down in tears on a haystack. Tyra bent over, hugging her, crying, too.

  I walked up the stairs to the kitchen, my back wet with sweat. Even in a heat wave, my mother wouldn’t turn on the AC.

  ‘Passive-aggressive,’ my father said, glancing at me. He was holding the Windex and had a dishtowel over his shoulder. ‘Your mother is very passive-aggressive.’

  ‘He thinks I can write off this whole summer,’ my mother said to herself.

  My father sprayed the lowest part of the fridge around the grates. ‘I thought your mother would be happy that an Israeli is not in the army,’ he said.

  ‘She can’t live in that country if she doesn’t finish her bloody tour.’

  ‘The girls don’t do “tours,” for God’s sake, Ruth.’

  ‘Right. They just deal with the trauma of the boys.’

  ‘Listen to her, trauma. What do they teach you at that place?’

  ‘You mean the fucking University of Toronto?’

  ‘Listen to how you’re talking in front of your son.’

  ‘What comes out of my mouth is my choice, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Again. Oh my God.’

  Both of them exaggerated whenever they got in a fight. I’d call it melodrama but that wouldn’t be exact. Their fights were more like the slapstick of lapsed communication. My father had wanted to pick Barbra up at the airport with all of us. He said he wanted it to be a family affair. My mother said my father didn’t need to involve all of us any more than he already had in his saviour fantasy.

  I thought, the saviour fantasy is a family affair.

  My father had made up a bedroom for Barbra in the basement even though we had a spare room upstairs. ‘An eighteen-year-old needs privacy,’ my father said. He set up Barbra’s makeshift room – a box spring and mattress surrounded by curtains, a bar fridge, and a bridge table with a shitty computer – right where me and Joel played Reaper of Souls.

  ‘I want to have the house presentable for this girl and it’d be nice if you would all help me,’ my father shouted as he picked at the bottom of the fridge.

  ‘Shhhhaaa!’ yelled Abigail from the family room.

  My mother swiped her phone.

  My father found some kind of hairball in the fridge grate. He put it on the counter in front of my mother. ‘What’s this?’

  My mother frowned and kept staring at her phone. ‘A piece of shmutz.’

  ‘This girl is coming all the way from Israel – don’t swear at me, Ruth – and she’s going to have nothing to eat.’

  My mother threw her phone in her purse and got on her jean jacket. ‘A house produces shmutz.’

  ‘You are not a martyr, Ruth. Don’t act like a bloody martyr.’

  My mother laughed. ‘Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?’

  Then my mother whipped open the pantry door so hard that it hit the wall.

  ‘Stop making noise!’ screamed Abigail.

  ‘You’re making your daughter upset.’

  ‘I’m making bloody tuna.’

  My mother jerked around the kitchen, leaving cupboards and drawers open as my father kept spraying and wiping the fridge. My mother slit two cans of fish, whipped the tops into the sink. She’d been applying for teaching jobs for the last six months but she hadn’t heard back yet. My mother usually made tuna salad with celery and pickles. I watched her dump way too much mayonnaise into a bowl. Then she heaped clumps of the gunk onto pumpernickel bread.

  ‘You’d better not make this girl feel uncomfortable,’ my father said.

  My mother smashed a bunch of bread together and wrapped the sandwiches in plastic. ‘Don’t worry. She’s all yours. I’m going to a film.’

  ‘Stop it!’ said Abigail from the other room.

  ‘Tell your sister where I am,’ my mother said to me on her way out. My father slammed the fridge door and went after my mother.

  I walked back down to the family room. Fatima, pinkeyed, now posed in a fluorescent green bikini beside a horse who nosed her right between the thighs.

  ‘God, this show is really fucked up.’

  ‘I love Fatima,’ whispered Abigail.

  The phone rang once upstairs. The TV was too loud. I sat down beside my sister who was sucking her fingers. Why was my father so obsessed with the food? Why was my mother acting so angry? I thought, maybe she just didn’t want to take care of another kid? I mean, she didn’t need to take care of me anymore, but Abigail, even at eleven years old, was work. And my mother was always writing for school now, doing work.

  I let Abigail put her feet on my lap. I thought the headshot on the fridge would not want even to eat dinner. I thought she’d be jet-lagged. She’d want to go straight to sleep.

  I had just started The Metamorphosis. Gregor the cockroach fell off his own bed. I thought I’d tell my dad we should just order pizza or something – tuna fish on pumpernickel was way too specific. That girl probably hated tuna. I thought we should just ask her what she wanted to eat.

  I heard my father pounding down the stairs. ‘Two hours!’ he yelled before he left through the front door.

  I was thinking of my mother in the theatre alone. She was probably so mad because my father seemed so concerned about this one Ethiopian-Israeli orphan. It’s true that he seemed to have these weirdly elaborate plans for her – making bedrooms, cleaning up, planning outings and visas – when he didn’t ever seem to be doing that kind of extra stuff for us.

  After two more episodes of America’s Next Top
Model, me and Abigail heard my father’s car in the driveway. The trunk slammed. Abigail quickly turned off the TV. Gregor Samsa was taken care of by his sister, initially. Abigail was pretty squeamish. I couldn’t ever imagine her being nurselike with me.

  ‘I hope I like her,’ whispered Abigail, bouncing both her knees.

  Grete was the only one who ever accepted Gregor as a bug.

  ‘This is where the kids put their shoes, na’alayim.’

  I cringed. My father was trotting out his Hebrew.

  Abigail jumped up off the couch then abruptly sat down again, jamming her head onto her knees, smothering nervous laughter.

  My father kept speaking extra loud and extra slow. ‘Can I take your coat, your me’il? No? Lo? Okay, keep it on, but it’s hot today, right? This is where we hang our me’ilim. It’s going to be a wet summer this year, so you’re lucky we’ve got an extra raincoat – me’il, me’il geshum, right? Sometimes it rains here even in the summer. Don’t worry if you don’t have a cooler me’il. Ruth will lend you one of hers, or we can get you a new one because you’re not the same size.’

  My father laughed. God, it was embarrassing. Abigail, for some reason, punched me in the arm.

  ‘You ate on the flight, ken?’

  My father was now in the kitchen. Me and Abigail stayed in the family room. The doe-eyed headshot had not said a word.

  ‘The weather’s not bad here,’ my father rambled, ‘but the traffic is ayom. Dreadful! I’m sure you have bad traffic in Israel, too, of course.’

  God, was this my father acting like the saviour?

  ‘Do you want to sit down, Barbra? H’bayit shli, oo h’bayit shlach. My home is your home.’

  Fuck. I bet he’d practised that.

  I stood up. Abigail kicked the back of my knee.

  ‘Don’t!’ she hissed.

  I tiptoed up the half-staircase toward the kitchen.

  ‘Hungry, Barbra? At re’eva?’

  My ears got plugged with a rapid heartbeat. A six-foot-tall woman loomed over my father. I only saw her from behind. Maybe my mother was right. My father, multi-armed, waved the bundle of my mother’s tuna fish. The woman had shiny black hair slicked back into a bun and a puffy black plastic bomber jacket. I thought of duct tape. Female boxing. A giantess.