Speak, Silence

by Kim Echlin

  My room had no doorbell. He would park his motorbike under my window and honk for me. One night he must have been drunk because he wouldn’t stop honking when I did not wake up and someone from the second-floor apartment leaned out the window and dropped a bottle of milk on his helmet. I knew nothing of any of this until I left for work and saw broken glass on the sidewalk. In the afternoon I went to look for him at Shakespeare’s to tell him my news. He wasn’t downstairs so I ran up the Hafiz staircase, a few words on each step—I wish…I could show you…when you are…lonely or…in darkness…the astonishing…light…of your own…being—and there he was at the top, reading, I thought, waiting for me. I moved his book and sat on his lap and he told me about the milk bottle. He said he would have been killed if he had not been wearing a helmet.

  I said, Let’s go for a ride. I have something to tell you.

  But he said, I can’t. I am going to the airport.

  Where?

  He said, I have to go.

  I was so surprised I could not speak.

  He said, Do not be angry. I will write soon.

  The subharmonics of lies.

  I said, Write? I don’t want paper.

  Please, he said. He put his arms around me. From the first time he had warned me.

  His hair fell over his left eye.

  He said, I have to memorize your face. I want you to remember how I almost died for you on my last night in Paris.

  Ta gueule, I said.

  He liked my bad language and I was studying his rueful smile and he said, I have to go before I change my mind. I cannot stay here. I don’t want to hurt you. I do not love as you do.

  And then he let me go.

  The rude severing, never, never again trust the body’s desire.

  He walked down the steps…being…of your own…light…the astonishing…and I thought, What am I going to do now? And he disappeared through the door.

  I looked into the empty space where he had been. I thought, I will love you even to death, even while my ashes are being tossed into the wind and there is nothing left of me, still I will love you.

  I sat on the floor with a book that I did not read and when I went downstairs a little later, George was sitting out front smoking, his birdcage on the sidewalk beside him. He tipped the silver case in which he kept his hand-rolled cigarettes toward me and I took one and sat down beside him. The budgies were making a racket.

  What’s wrong with them? I asked. The soothing nicotine. The wretched flavour. The irritating birds.

  There is a new one in there, he said. They’re claiming their territory, I imagine.

  Tsssssk. Tssssssk.

  Small territory, I said.

  Always is, said George.

  We watched them and watched the darkness over Notre-Dame.

  He left, I said.

  Who?

  You know, Kosmos. Didn’t you see him?

  I don’t keep track of the tumbleweeds, said George. Where did he go?

  He would not say.

  Your Ottoman lover, said George.

  I might die, I said.

  George rubbed the end of his cigarette between his fingers.

  Love’s not Time’s fool, he said, Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  That’s no answer, I said.

  Poetry is always an answer, said George.

  * * *

  —

  I wrote letters to Mam about working in the shop and about Shakespeare’s and I sent her the short pieces I was mailing to Canadian Forum, Notes from a Flaneuse in Paris, though I did not attach much importance to them. Mam’s letters described the garden and the election and what she was reading. The night she got her glider licence she wrote on the outside of the envelope, Celebrate! Loneliness seeped through her familiar large-looped handwriting. I pictured her sitting at the kitchen table with her writing box open, choosing a card and lifting her pen. She wrote that now she was going to train to fly cross-country. She described the sensation of a hot thermal, the rushing sound and rising in the air. In another letter she wrote that she wanted soon to sell the old family house and move somewhere else and at the very end of the page she wrote that a man had asked her on a date. She ran out of paper so she turned the page sideways and wrote up the margins and around the top as if writing sideways was a better way to tell certain stories. It is flattering, she wrote, but my word, he just wants to sit around—our first date we went to a movie and the next time he wanted to come to my house to dinner—I don’t want to take care of any more men—or anyone—the garden is almost done now—I’m drying mint this year—love, Mam. And she put a mint leaf in the envelope.

  * * *

  —

  Kosmos sent me postcards but there was never a return address or a surname. The first card was a photo of a wall and barbed wire and he wrote, Thinking of you in Berlin. Next was an antique card from a dervish house, I am thinking about bridges and you and I am writing my play. And then a card with a picture of the ocean from Mljet Island on which he wrote, If you were here, Calypso, we could stay seven years.

  I wanted to write, Go home to Penelope.

  The last card I ever received from him was a Henry Payne painting of men choosing between red or white roses. On the other side, I must decide to go home or not, thinking of you. It was mailed from London. The card was an advertisement for a play at the National Theatre and I wondered if he had found work there. I mailed a letter to Kosmos, c/o The National Theatre, London, England, to tell him my news, but I received no answer.

  I left Paris forever a few months after he did. I could not survive living in a cold-water walk-up and working under the table in a print shop.

  I could not imagine doing what I was going to do alone.

  I gave my landlady a forwarding address, but the old woman never forwarded anything. If cards came, she probably used them to line the bottom of her birdcage.

  Mam met me at the airport. When the thick glass doors opened into the world I came from, my young city of immigrants and refugees and people born on the land, I felt destroyed. I did not want to be here and I did not want to be in Paris. There Mam stood alone, where she and my father used to be. Her curly hair was pulled up at the back of her skull in a way that made her high cheekbones pretty. She held her arms open to pull me close and I could see she had thrived in the year we had not seen each other. She was holding me in the crowd at arrivals and she smelled like our old home.

  She said, I missed you.

  I’m pregnant, I said.

  Toronto, Sarajevo

  I wanted to keep my baby. I look back now and it seems simple but it did not feel simple then. How would I support a child and how would I work? How would it be for her with no father? Who would be her family?

  But there was this other feeling that I had few words for. It was a feeling of I can do what I want. It was in the air. Women were speaking. Shedding old shames. Working as bus drivers. As judges. As radio hosts. Keeping their babies. People said things like, I don’t like a woman’s voice on the radio, or, Women are too emotional for boardrooms. But women kept doing things anyway. I watched people condemn my rounding stomach and look for a ring on my finger. I told Mam about this and she said, It’s none of their beeswax.

  I had to laugh. I could not remember her being defiant in this way.

  I said, So the wedding part does not bother you.

  She said, Don’t let them criticize you. Live your life.

  I wish I could give this fierceness to all young women.

  Mam showed me an enormous old family Bible. On the Births, Deaths and Marriages pages, someone had scrawled after my great-great-great-grandmother Bridget-Margaret Muireb’s name, Biddy. She was nine years old when she left Ireland during a famine. What did she do? Who took care of her? She had got pregnan
t by a soldier back from the Crimean War and she died in childbirth at sixteen. Hunger. Child pregnancy. Death. This tale of her life was written on a piece of vellum paper in fountain pen ink and tucked between the pages of Genesis by the same anonymous and neat hand that had written her nickname on the family tree.

  Mam said, Our whole line comes from that girl.

  * * *

  —

  For a while I tried to forget about Kosmos. I got a job with an airline magazine, easy, disposable writing, flip it open, wait for the flight to be over. The editor was Jacques Payac, a former newspaperman and a war correspondent. He had been hit by shrapnel and his left leg was amputated above the knee so he took a desk job. At the interview I told him about my life in Paris, about living in a bookshop and working at the print shop on the Place des Vosges. I showed him a couple of my pieces, one about releasing ortolans from their fate as a delicacy to be eaten under napkins. He laughed at that one and hired me for features and said, I don’t have much money. But you’ll have fun. Short trips. Write for tourists. Find interesting angles.

  I said, Sounds good. Thank you.

  He rose crookedly, righted himself, extended his hand to shake mine and said, Start tomorrow.

  I picked up my bag and when I was partway through the door he asked, By the way, are you pregnant?

  I said, See you in the morning.

  He said, All right.

  I thought, Even if I do not get to keep this job I will be friends with this man.

  This began a busy time of travel and the best job I could have hoped for. I went for a week to Egypt to write about the pyramids because of a new direct Cairo route. While I was there I did not stay in the airline hotel but I lived with an old woman in the tombs in the City of the Dead below the Mokattam hills. I wrote about that. I went to Angkor Wat because of new flights to Asia and I travelled to the pepper fields to see the hidden HIV villages. Back at home I travelled on a float plane up the Labrador coast to cover some American hunting lodges and I stopped at Hebron where all but four people died of the 1918 flu. The survivors chopped holes in the ice and weighted the corpses with rocks in the freezing water until they could bury them in the spring.

  Everywhere I went I wrote two pieces, one a travel piece for the magazine and one about what I really saw. Jacques called me young man and he was gnarly and pragmatic and occasionally he asked me to verify facts, distances, prices, locations. He said, You’re cheaper than a bunch of freelancers and you’re fast. I just have to keep making up pseudonyms for you.

  I wrote a piece about walls engraved with the names of the dead. Names cut into marble and granite, carved into wood and stone, nailed onto trees and doorways and fences. Even on the moon they left a plaque to dead astronauts. Walls and borders are the natural habitat of ghosts. I do not invite ghosts in but I do not close myself to them either. I hear their voices like birdcall in the dark. They are perceptible through stone and brick and plaster. I think sometimes ghosts surprise even themselves. They have things to tell us. If we can hear, they are everywhere.

  One day Jacques called me into his office and I saw the stack of my what-I-really-saw pieces and he tapped his finger on them and said, Why so much death and disease, young man? What am I supposed to do with these?

  I don’t know. Publish them.

  * * *

  —

  When I got too pregnant to fly, Jacques taught me copy editing and layout. I had travelled so much and written so fast that we had a year’s worth of material anyway. He gave me a travel gadgets section at the back to write—portable luggage weigh scales and ostrich feather pillows and rabbit-ear corkscrews. The advertisers loved it and I marvelled at human ingenuity put to no purpose at all. I liked to sit late at the office with Jacques while he rolled cigarettes and smoked. Sometimes I talked to him about journalists like Daniel Defoe and I.F. Stone who put together stories from what was around them, from public domain records and industry reports.

  He said, You just say that because you’re chained to home like I am. What are you hanging around with an old guy for?

  I said, You’re the only writer I know.

  Lord help you then, and he leaned back in his chair and put his good leg up on the desk.

  I said, You know what they have in Belfast?

  To make him laugh I told him about the loos that rise out of the sidewalks after dark, and I said I wanted to do a feature on international uritrottoirs. He asked why I hadn’t thought of being a real reporter.

  I said, Someday.

  Oh, he said, the kid.

  Jacques smoked deep into his lungs and held his hand-rolled cigarettes with his thumb and forefinger from above and mostly did not talk when he smoked, as if smoking and talking were separate activities.

  He blew rings. Finally he said, Why not rewrite some of your ghost stories. Five hundred words.

  I said, They’re not ghost stories.

  He said, I can publish them under a different byline, maybe Joe de Pone.

  Will Joe de Pone get paid?

  Joe’s expenses are the same as yours. I can find fifty cents a word.

  It sounds like my work just doubled.

  Suit yourself.

  I said, I want it.

  Jacques buried my Joe de Pone column at the back of the magazine between the ads. Once I was at a party and someone said that my colleague de Pone must be a strange man to write about such obscure, sad things.

  I said, He’s a good guy. Not much different from you or me.

  * * *

  —

  I bought a house on Sibelius Park with money my father left, his last gift. My house was made of brick and it was close to a school, with a front porch and a tree, a good place to raise a child.

  The day I moved in, Mam came over with a cardboard box. She said, House-warming present. It’s a cast of my grandmother’s face. My grandfather made it.

  Inside the box was a smooth white plaster cast. The face had high cheekbones and was delicate and heart shaped. The eyelids over the eyes seemed large under the small forehead. I imagined the teenaged girl lying still while her older fiancé made a cast of her face. Did she think it was romantic that he wanted to preserve her image in this way? Was she flattered that he wanted a copy of her face? How did she breathe while the older man hovered over her, waiting for the plaster to dry?

  Mam said, My grandfather was a strange, violent man. I was afraid of him. We stayed out of his way. I don’t know what he did except church three times on the Sabbath and his taxidermy in the back porch. You couldn’t even iron a shirt on a Sunday.

  Mam traced her finger over the small nose, the firm chin. She said, But everyone loved my grandmother. Her name was Minnie Mae.

  I said, Let’s hang her in the living room.

  Mam said, I’m selling the big house. I don’t need it anymore. I was thinking I could move to that low-rise across the park from you and help with the baby. But if you don’t want this, I’ll move out close to the airfield.

  What about not wanting to take care of anyone?

  You’re not anyone, she said.

  She offered me small delicacies during my pregnancy, vanilla from orchids and rosehip teas and daisy oil, and a recording of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet because I love the double bass.

  She said, These are tender days, Gota.

  * * *

  —

  While I was having my baby and watching her grow, I did not know where Kosmos was. I was at home making a childhood for Biddy with birthdays and parks and slides and swings, flying with Mam and swimming in the lake, ice-skating and walking in the ravines. But other women were trying to take care of their children in wars. I saw them when I watched television.

  The world watched. Did nothing. Edina was there. Edina was no longer a lawyer in a loving marriage, a woman who walked on a summer evening with her family. She was
filthy and thirsty, hiding from soldiers in a mountain forest. She watched her father shot in front of her, saw her mother and her daughter dragged away by soldiers in heavy boots. She was locked up and raped day after day, beaten, starved and assaulted. No one was coming.

  * * *

  —

  The disappearing minutes of the newborn are water over a stone. When I walked with Biddy I had passing daydreams about turning a corner and seeing Kosmos. I was sometimes lonely in the sleepless first months, when my arms ached and my breasts were full, when I lived in minutes and not hours. I used to walk with her to Mam’s apartment across the park or to Jacques Payac’s office on Bathurst Street or to the mothers’ groups where I listened to young women complaining about their partners not helping enough and about feeling sticky and exhausted and not wanting to be touched. This was strange to me. I wanted to be touched. I told them I freelanced, that Mam came every day, that, in fact, I did not get tired of her help. She had a knack with babies, knew how to create calm. Sometimes when I was with her and the baby I felt a strange déjà vu, and I wondered if I were remembering my own baby time. Biddy must have felt it too because she was settled and curious and watched everything, sovereign over our tiny world. She was easy to soothe and distract. Sometimes late at night after she was asleep, Mam walked across the park. If I was reading or writing she did not come in, only said, Hello, just out for a walk.

  But other times she sat with me on the porch for a while.

  Are you lonely? she would ask.

  I don’t have time to be lonely. You?

  She said, Not really.

  Do you miss being married?

  I could not bear to ask her if she missed my father.

  We listened to the cry of a nightjar in the park, to the city’s low thrum.