The Street by Mordecai Richler

why, Hartt retorted, does your wife work?
    “Well,” Buhay said, “somebody in the family has to earn a living.”
    The regulars were tolerant of Tansky’s communism, but unresponsive.
    “If you ask me,” Segal said,
“all
politicians are dirty crooks.Promise, promise, promise, that’s before elections. All they want to do is line their pockets.”
    Not all the men were non-voters like Segal. The horse players and a majority of the gin rummy bunch unfailingly voted for the Liberal candidate.
    “Aw, it just wouldn’t look good for our people to elect a commie again. You know what I mean?”
    In our riding,
Time
ventured, the big battle was between Liberals and Communists. “Communist-voting Cartier riding, an anomaly in conservative Quebec, is heavily industrial. About 40 per cent of the voters are French Canadians. Communists make their appeal to the other 60 per cent, which includes Jewish, Ukrainian, Hungarian and Polish workers. Cartier also includes Montreal’s flophouse, red-light and underworld districts where votes go to the highest bidder.”
    Well, yes, but …
    The truth is Lou and some of the others voted Liberal because their sons, impecunious McGill students, were hired each time there was a federal, provincial or civic election, to go down to the cemeteries with notebooks and compile lists of all those who had died since the last census. Other students were paid to represent the dead at the polls, which, naturally enough, enraged Tansky.
    “Let’s face it,” Sugarman said placatingly. “Most of them would have voted Liberal anyway.”
    “It’s a typical corruption of the democratic process. So-called.”
    “Look at it another way, then. In Russia there’s no problem.”
    Tansky, the first of many communists I’ve known, was always extremely kind to me. When I came in on a message he slipped me a chocolate biscuit or maybe a piece of bubble gum. Only once did he demand that I commit myself politically.
    “Awright,” he demanded heatedly, as I entered the store. “Ask the Hersh kid. He can tell us.”
    “Gwan. What does he know?”
    “Listen here,” Tansky said, “do you study Canadian history at your lousy school?”
    “Sure.”
    “Tell me what you know about the Riel rebellion?”
    “We haven’t come to that part yet.”
    “That doesn’t surprise me. Now tell me something else. What does it say in your book? That the Indians were lied to, cheated, and exploited left, right, and centre by lousy imperialist adventurers like Jacques Cartier or that the so-called noble explorers saved Canada from the savages?”
    “It says that Jacques Cartier was a hero. LaSalle too. It says they were very brave against the Indians.”
    “You see, at the age of eleven they’re already stuffing their heads with capitalist propaganda. I’ll bet there’s nothing in their lousy book about the fortunes those bringers-of-Christianity made on the fur market.”
    Although I liked Tansky enormously, there were others, among them my uncles, who were hostile because he defiantly ate pork and remained open for business on Yom Kippur. Our family was orthodox, we disapproved of communists, but there was a certain confusion about who and what actually was red. To begin with, I was led to believe that a communist was somebody who wrung chicken’s necks rather than have them slaughtered according to the orthodox ritual. For when I saw Bernie Huberman’s mother doing just that to a chicken in her back yard I was given a straightforward explanation. “She’s a communist, a
roite.”
    The family downstairs turned out to be communists too and I was warned not to speak to them. They moved in around one o’clock one May night while we sat in judgment on the balcony above, eating watermelon. I had been allowed to stay up late because of the heat wave.
    “You see all those little boxes they’re moving in,” Segal whispered.
    “Yeah,” my father responded eagerly.
    “You notice how they’re all the same