Free The Street by Mordecai Richler Page A

cannot remember it as a black time, and I think it must be so for most boys of my generation. The truth is that for many of us to look back on the war is to recall the first time our fathers earned a good living. Even as the bombs fell and the ships went down, always elsewhere, our country was bursting out of a depression into a period of hitherto unknown prosperity. For my generation the war was hearing of death and sacrifice but seeing with our own eyes the departure from cold-water flats to apartments in Outremont, duplexes and split-levels in the suburbs. It was when we read of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and saw, in Montreal, the changeover from poky little
shuls
to big synagogue-cum-parochial schools with stained glass windows and mosaics outside. During the war some of us lost brothers and cousins but in Canada we had never had it so good, and we began the run from rented summer shacks with outhouses in Shawbridge to Colonial-style summer houses of our own and speedboats on the lake in Ste. Agathe.

FIVE

Pinky’s Squealer
    O NE BRIGHT , cloudless morning in July 1941, Noah, Gas and Hershey arranged to meet on the balcony of Old Annie’s candy store in Prévost, a village in the Laurentians, where their families had taken cottages for the summer. They were determined to climb the mountain behind the Nine Cottages to get to Lac Gandon, where the
goyim
were.
    Hershey turned up first.
    Old Annie, who was a tiny, grey-haired widow with black, mournful eyes, looked the boy up and down suspiciously. A first-aid kit and a scout knife were strapped to his belt. “What is,” she asked, “a revolution?”
    Hershey grimaced. “He who hears no evil, speaks no evil.”
    Old Annie’s store was a squat sinking yellow shack all but covered with signs advertising Kik and Sweet Caporal cigarettes. She wasn’t called Old Annie because she was sixty-two. Long ago, in Lithuania, the first three children born to her parents had not survived their infancy. So the village miracle-maker had suggested that if another child was born to them they should call her
alte
(old) instantly, and God would understand.
    Gas arrived next. He had a BB gun and a package of crumbly egg and onion sandwiches.
    “Knock, knock,” he said.
    “Who’s there?” Hershey asked.
    “Ago.”
    “Ago who?”
    “Aw, go tell your mother she wants you.”
    Behind Old Annie’s store was the scorched, spiky field that was used as a market. Early every Friday morning the French Canadian farmers arrived with poultry, vegetables and fruit. They were a skeptical bunch, with hard, seamed faces, but the St. Urbain Street wives were more than a match for them and by late afternoon the farmers were drained and grateful to get away. The women, who were ruthless bargainers, spoke a mixture of French, English and Yiddish with the farmers. “So
fiel
, Monsieur, for dis
kleine
chicken?
Vous
crazy?”
    Pinky’s Squealer saw the two boys sitting on the stoop, waiting for Noah. He approached them diffidently. “Where you goin’?” he asked.
    “To China,” Gas said.
    When the Squealer’s mother wanted him to go to the toilet she would step out on her balcony and yell, “Dollink, time to water the teapot.” Pinky, who was the Squealer’s cousin, was seventeen years old, and his proper name was Milton Fishman. He was rather pious and conducted services at Camp Machia. The Squealer was his informer.
    “I’ve got a quarter,” Pinky’s Squealer said.
    “Grease it well,” Gas replied.
    Habitually, those families who lived on Clark, St. Urbain, Rachel and City Hall clubbed together and took cottages in Prévost for the summer. How they raised the money, what sacrifices they made, were comparatively unimportant – the children required sun. Prévost had an exceedingly small native population and most of the lopsided cottages were owned by French Canadians who lived in Shawbridge, just up the hill. The C.P.R. railway station was in Shawbridge. Prévost, at the foot