February 24, 2020

Photographs

This story is nominally about an old photo album I found containing pictures from a trip my parents took to Spain many years ago. I should tell you in advance the story involves pictures of topless women at a beach. If that sort of thing offends you, you should probably stop reading. The album is one of ten we retrieved from my mother’s condo when she passed away. We took the photo albums and put them in suitcases which then went into my garage along with her black leather couch and a handful of paintings which my parents brought back with them from Singapore. We were going to get to them but we never did. My nieces called their respective dibs on the couch and paintings but they never moved either. I guess they were taking a futures option. Then, one day, I knocked down the garage in order to build a deck (full disclosure: I knocked down the garage in order to build a golf simulator, but logic, pragmatism and local zoning laws stopped that in its tracks), and all the contents were moved to an outside shed.

This spring, I decided to replace the dilapidated shed and, in doing so, rediscovered the two suitcases containing the ten photo albums from my mother’s condo. I dragged the suitcases into my basement and quickly discovered the shed and suitcases were not exactly Timex-watch-waterproof, so I had to dry out some of the photos and went to a photo editing store which specializes in restoring water-damaged pictures.

A week before my father passed away, I wheeled him down to the garden in front of his Toronto condo in order to take advantage of a nice spring day. He had already stopped reading by then. He told me, in not so many words, that he had had a good run. Marriage, family, friends, Florida, career, books. He was being philosophical but not in the least bit bitter. I asked him if there were things he had still wanted to do and he surprised me by saying travel. We had lived three years in Singapore and literally gone around the world. He planned his trips meticulously and nothing gave him more pleasure than spreading out a map on the kitchen table and planning out our destinations. The photo albums contained both pictures of our family trips and those he and my mom had taken with friends. This specific album was dated 1986, and it was of a trip they took to Spain with their best friends Taki and Anna Kizas.

In 1986, I was 27 years old and already living in Toronto while my parents were still in Ottawa. I don’t remember anything about their trip. No stories. No anecdotes. Taki was a colleague of my father’s from work. Though Greek Catholics, the Kizas family story was very similar to the Zevys. I’m quite certain they had actually grown up in Alexandria and so had the Egyptian connection.

When my father passed away, rather than follow the traditional Jewish mourning rules and rituals, I chose to honor and memorialize him by reading some of the books in his heady collection. I thought it to be a fitting tribute although not necessarily one he might have been on board with. When my mom passed away, I took possession of her two prized address and phone books—one for Canada and one for Florida—and endeavoured to call people in her life which were part of her regular and disciplined phone schedule. She would flip through her book and decide who to call and regale with the latest exploits of her beloved grandchildren. Now I was making some of these calls. They were not always easy. There were distant cousins whose only link to our family was via my mom. “Ronnie,” I would yell on the phone. “Le fis de Nanda.” (Nanda, short for Fernanda, was my mom’s nickname for most of the Egyptians.) “Ah,” they would reply, finally understanding, “the unmarried one.” “Yes, yes, the unmarried one.” Anna Kizas was on my regular call list. No woman, before or since, has ever been as happy to hear from me. My Tante Regine is a close second, but Anna always made the top of the list because she promised to pray for me in church. I’m not a religious man, but if I wanted someone to pray for me, it would be Anna Kizas. Her and Taki were two of the nicest and finest people you could ever hope to meet.

The Spain album is devoted entirely to their trip. It is not, like some of the other albums, a mish-mash of different trips and people. It was what you would expect in terms of pictures from two middle-aged couples vacationing in Spain. Cafes and vistas and churches and beaches and bulls (not really any bulls) and cobblestone streets.

Plus nine photos of topless women.

These are not pictures of the beach which happen to have topless women lying in the background. These are pictures taken specifically of topless women.

They were not in some hidden compartment or folder in the photo album. And yet, this was the first time, all these years later, I noticed them. Again, let me reiterate, this is not one photo lost amongst a sea of others. This is not Where’s Waldo. Nine photos. And I had never noticed them before.

I can hear Ellen saying, “That’s because they aren’t pictures of you, Ron.” I think that is a cheap shot. Sure, maybe I might have ignored pictures of random cousins, but this made no sense.

Now, the last thing I want to do is disparage Taki and Anna Kizas, but there is absolutely no way Marco Zevy took these pictures. My mother, may she rest in peace, did not know how to operate a camera.

But here’s the thing.

Maybe these pictures did come from Anna and Taki’s camera. They took them to the local photo development store. I am going to say Black’s camera on Bank Street. The girl behind the counter would have said, “Do you want two sets?” Before Taki or Anna, or maybe their son Johnny or daughter Mary sent to run the errand, could answer, because she did this 25 times a day, she would say, “Second set is only an extra $1.” Taki, or Anna or Mary or Johnny would say, “Okay, why not.”

Taki would then call my dad and say, “Marc,” not Marco, “the pictures are ready.” When could he drop them off? My mother would surely invite him in for Turkish coffee and a kaak or sambusek or malmul. Would they then look through them, sitting on the rattan couch my parents had brought back from Singapore? Will you look at that! It is, to borrow the words of Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride, inconceivable. In my life, I never heard my father make a sexual comment about a woman. Maybe, maybe, one time in the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, he might have said something about the high percentage of beautiful women. But that, in my mind, would have been a math-related comment.

And then what? My father would not have dilly-dallied. It was not his style. He would have placed the photos in the album right away. Maybe he waited until Sunday. The photo album, with its sticky back and transparent flap for each page. And he would have carefully and meticulously laid out the pictures. Including all nine pictures of the topless women. Were the pictures laid out in some sort of chronological order? Was there more than one beach?

When I was young, I babysat at the next-door neighbors. I don’t remember their name or that of the kids. They were very nice people who paid me generously. Their living room coffee table was one which had a cubby below the surface where they stored magazines. One of the magazines was Playboy. Right there almost in the open. We did not have Playboy in our house. I also could see, but never touch, the Playboy magazine at the barber. “Don’t tip him, he is the owner,” my father would say. Words I no longer live by. I never looked at the Playboy. Nor did my father. He read The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant.

I don’t want to suggest my father was not a man. But, he was not, to me at least, that kind of man. Not the kind of man who I read about in memoirs who takes their kid to a whorehouse on their 18th birthday. The only conversation we ever had about sex, and it wasn’t really even a conversation at all, was the summer of my 17th year before a backpacking and youth hostel trip to Europe. One of the destinations was to be Amsterdam. “There will be women behind windows,” he said. I nodded my head okay. “Do you understand?” I said I did but I didn’t. “Don’t go inside.” I said okay. And that was it. I later saw the women. I didn’t go inside.

I bring the photo album with me to the cottage. I show it to my brother, my sister-in-law, and to my nieces. I show it without describing the contents.

“Why are there all these pictures of topless woman?” asks Rachel.

My sister-in-law’s parents are at the cottage. Although not quite my parents’ generation, they are of a generation. They are the least shocked of all of us. “We all took those pictures,” says Judy. “Every North American who went to a beach in Europe came back with pictures of topless women. It was like taking pictures of zebras on an African safari.” It was part of the wild life. “But I can tell you something for sure. Your father didn’t take those pictures though,” she said authoritatively. “Nor did he put them in the album. That was your mother.” Everyone nodded their heads. Yes, they agree, this had Nona’s handiwork all over it.

So that was that.

Mystery solved.

But I am not convinced.

“Hand me that album,” I say. “Let me look at those pictures one more time.”

The end.