I would also congratulate Gladys. Obviously, that’s impossible, and I don’t think she would appreciate it. She wanted light, gentleness, everything honey for her daughter’s life. She wouldn’t appreciate her spending her time with a mound of pain. But I would congratulate her. For having instinctively known that Janelle was the person Lisana needed.
I think that now I am part of her world, and that if she occasionally chats with someone at the shelter I must come up in conversation as a relative or distant friend who visits her from time to time. Sometimes I try to imagine what she says about that friend. A guy in a baseball cap who always has a gift for her and who doesn’t bug her too much, even though he is fast on her heels when he comes to Toronto. A casual friend, not too much trouble, rather pleasant company.
When I get back from Toronto, people ask whether she talked about Gladys and – because the question still haunts us – whether she let anything slip about the fateful morning of September 24.
I have precious little to report. Lisana lives – exists – in a present that is running on empty and at high speed. Our conversations happen in fits and starts, kilometres of silence apart. And they are often mundane. The menu at the shelter, the potatoes she hates peeling, AC/DC, Kiss, Metallica, her favourite music, until I slip in the name of her mother, and Gladys appears in her mind. It’s also quite mundane. A dress that her mother made her, a canary-yellow dress, a dress that she didn’t like (‘too girly’) but that she wore bravely to Sunday service. Her mother’s pride as she showed off her report cards (‘I had all A’s’). The figurine (‘a ballerina in a cotton-candy-pink tutu’) that she broke while jumping rope a little too close to it and that Gladys spent hours gluing back together. It’s affectionate and respectful, and it’s always praising her mother, the most wonderful of women.
I’m not trying to stir up bitter memories, no direct questions or stealthy interrogation; I don’t want to startle her. But I had to address the morning of September 24 in some way or another. And it was when a particularly affectionate ‘Mooomm’ slipped into the conversation that the opportunity arose. We were talking about trips she would take with her mother on the train.
‘You didn’t try to go with her the morning she left?’
We were at the corner of Yonge and Queen, a particularly noisy area. I was afraid my question would get lost in the bustle of the crowd.
‘No, she told me to wait.’
‘She asked you to wait for her?’
‘No, she told me to wait. She said she would send someone to me.’
I was stunned. I had never gotten so much information. I wanted to keep going with it, but people were rushing around us. It was the end of the workday. We were in front of the Eaton Centre at the heart of the shopping frenzy. There was a terrible racket. There was no way to have a sustained conversation.
We continued along Yonge Street, me lagging a little behind and above all supremely disappointed at having let go of a promising conversation. North of College Street, however, there was a slight lull in the decibels and that was when, without a preamble, and without slowing her pace, Lisana turned to me and said: ‘Mom was wrong. I got a brother, not a sister.’
That was in March, during the long school holiday. I can’t make the trip to Toronto unless I have a few days ahead of me. Despite the nine hours of driving, I like leaving winter, which lingers where I live, to find myself in near spring. At the beginning of March in Toronto, the cherry trees aren’t yet in flower, the grass isn’t green, and nothing is budding or chirping, but you can smell spring in the air.
I regretfully left the mildness of Toronto for the long trip home with the intention of stopping at my friend Bernie’s in Kirkland Lake. I needed his advice.
As usual, Bernie let me get it all off my chest without interrupting. I could recite to him, almost word for word, the conversation Lisana and I had on Yonge Street and her completely unanticipated way of declaring her friendship. ‘Her brother,’ I said to him. ‘Can you imagine? That’s what I have become to her.’
Bernie had a completely different interpretation.
‘It’s the tail of the comet, the missing piece of the puzzle.’
There was a twinkle in his eye. I didn’t understand what he was saying. It was only after he told me a long story that I could follow his line of thought.
‘Gladys was looking for the pharaoh’s daughter.’
I hesitate a bit here before unravelling the whole story, because it is ridiculous, outlandish, absolutely incredible, and yet it is the only one that holds water. We all ended up believing it – well, almost all of us.
‘Gladys took to the rails in an impulse of desperate hope.’
The story is biblical. It goes back to the beginning of time. The Book of Exodus, chapter two. It is the story of baby Moses, placed by his mother in a basket on the waters of the Nile. It was the only way his mother could find to save her child from persecution by the pharaoh, who had ordered all male Israelite newborns to be put to death. The hoped-for miracle arrived in the person of the pharaoh’s daughter. It was the hour of her daily ablutions in the Nile, and she heard the infant’s cries. She ordered her servant to go fetch the basket from which the cries emerged. Charmed by the child’s beauty, she decided to adopt him. She asked her servant to go in search of a wet nurse. It so happened that the servant was baby Moses’s sister. You can imagine who the servant turned to. That was how the baby Moses came to be nursed by his birth mother. Raised in the pharaoh’s court, once grown up, little Moses discovered his Jewish origins and was handed by God (the episode of the burning bush) the mission to free his people from slavery and lead them to the Promised Land.
‘It takes mad hope to entrust the fate of your child to the river.’
Bernie believes that Gladys was trying to save her daughter beyond her own death and that, just like baby Moses’s mother, she took a huge gamble. She set out on the rails hoping to meet someone, somewhere, to whom she could entrust her suicidal daughter.
‘Janelle wasn’t picked at random; she was where Gladys was waiting for her.’
This story is at the limit of common sense and contrary to everything I know about Bernie. A measured, thoughtful man, loyal husband, responsible father, he is good sense incarnate. How did he come up with such a nonsensical story?
‘It wasn’t a question of common sense for Gladys, any more than for the mother of baby Moses. Extreme situations call for extreme solutions.’
I resisted, I made every possible argument against it. Gladys was too clear-headed, too reasonable to set out on a quest for a pharaoh’s daughter. Lisana was too dependent on her mother to let her leave. Solid arguments, I thought. But there was nothing for it, Bernie kept his calm and his smile. My old friend had arrived at the end of reflections he had been harbouring for a long time, and at the end of this long tunnel he found ‘the missing piece,’ the key to the riddle, what had motivated Gladys’s journey along the Northern rails.
‘Let things fall into place. Give yourself time, and at some point, it will become as plain as day to you. That woman was born on the sunny side of life; she could cling to a twig, to anything, to stay on the side of hope, light, beauty, happiness. She couldn’t leave this life without having found an emergency exit for her daughter.’
There was plenty of resistance when I in turn told the story of the pharaoh’s daughter. First, I had to convince myself that I believe it, and not by half measures, to risk presenting such an unbelievable story. It’s delusional, outlandish, inane, and, for some, monstrous. But it’s all we have, the only explanation that stands up, the only possible logic to an impossible story. What should we believe if not that Gladys set out to find a pharaoh’s daughter for her daughter?
There are different ways to refute this interpretation of Gladys’s travels. The most savage and predictable came from Frank Smarz. He took the biblical story apart piece by piece, like he would have a lawn-mower motor, to demonstrate that the two stories don’t match. The water
s of the Nile, baby Moses’s mother, the pharaoh’s daughter versus the Northern trains, Lisana’s mother, Janelle (or me). A lawn mower and a vacuum cleaner. The pieces don’t fit. ‘Who is in the wicker basket, who is on the train? The mother of the child to be saved or baby Moses? Gladys or Lisana? For your stories to work together, it would have to be Lisana on the train.’
He is pretty proud of his argument, and he is going to stand by it. The last time I went to Swastika, he was busy with his dandelion wine, and he said to me, as if I had come back again to test my biblical interpretation: ‘So are you the brother, the sister, or the servant?’ I let it go, and I left him to his smelly vats. No good would come of his wine, but he was going to stand by that too.
Suzan still holds a grudge against him. She has not forgotten the silence and the vacant windows that greeted her when she arrived from Swastika with Desmond. Deadly passivity, recklessness, or pure foolishness? Suzan leaves the question unanswered, but that doesn’t stop her from weighing the heft of her grudge in her hands. As for me, I got nothing out of the neighbourhood friends that would shed any light on their intentions. (Sorry, Bernie my friend, the question will not find an answer in the pages that follow. I have come to the end of the story, at least I think so, and I hope I will have the wisdom not to start running after all the remaining questions.)
Suzan hasn’t forgotten, ‘but since Lisana is alive … ’ she is giving Frank Smarz the benefit of the doubt. ‘That man believes only in what he sees, and he has blinders as big as sections of wall. He sees virtually nothing, and he’s perfectly happy with that.’
She is generally more relaxed, less quick to anger. I visit her regularly since she moved to Clova. We found her a little house that was not too rundown, and we fixed it up. Patrice and me. Desmond came to lend a hand from time to time. The house is the same dark red as the Restaurant Clova, and like the restaurant it has a porch with an awning. Weather permitting, Suzan sits in her rocking chair on the porch watching the trains go by. Because of course the house is a few feet from the tracks. She vibrates just as much as she did in Metagama when the trains go by, the din just as pleasant to Suzan’s ears, but no clickety-clack.
No clickety-clack, but the satisfaction of having escaped condo life and having rebuilt her solitude in the middle of nowhere.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t so much the solitary life or the house near the tracks that won her over, but the most beautiful cemetery in the world. ‘That’s where I want to be buried. All that greenery overlooking the lake, it’s the most beautiful cemetery you could ever wish for. And I’ll still be able to hear the trains from there.’
She is no longer a forest hermit or even a semi-hermit. There are days when people are swarming around her. For example, on Sundays when the Transcontinental arrives and she goes to get her groceries for the week. Patrice takes care of transferring her boxes to the back of the Nath Express. He also does small repairs for her. And for bigger jobs, for example, stacking firewood for the winter, the two of us pitch in, or the three of us when Desmond manages to tear himself away from the literati. After seeing to the wood, we eat the supper that Suzan has prepared and that goes on late into the night, because we all have a lot to say. Desmond, who is travelling the world with his novel; Patrice, who is also travelling the world but via the internet; and I, who continues to come and go between Swastika, Toronto, Senneterre, and Clova. Suzan is the only one who isn’t on the move. She is the gravitational core of our little community, ‘her boys,’ as she calls us.
She eventually got behind the story of the pharaoh’s daughter. At first she didn’t like it. Because a train isn’t a wisp of straw that you randomly entrust with your luck, because Gladys is not an adventurer, because she would have left her old friend from way back at least a branch to hang on to to understand something about the whole story. I think it’s the idea that Gladys had excluded her from her rescue plan that she finds intolerable. And then, talking about it around the table with her boys, she came to the conclusion that the story is befitting of Gladys, befitting of her incredible instinct for life.
‘Gladys was right all along. Lisana is alive, she has found some balance, and she has someone to watch over her.’
Sometimes I wonder whether Gladys isn’t with us, with her incredible optimism, because around the table there is such a desire to find a comforting explanation.
Desmond is the one who lays the groundwork for the conversation, the one who is searching for meaning, and, with the help of some wine, he can have flights of fancy that leave us perplexed and admiring.
‘Gladys is a great woman. She outwitted destiny. She is protecting her daughter from beyond the grave. The heroes of this world aren’t who you think.’
The poet has become a novelist, and he won’t let this story become mere anecdote. Every time Desmond joins us, we know there will be lyricism and metaphor at the table. The wine will flow freely (I now know that Suzan prefers red), and we will be there late into the night, rewriting the stories that fall into our hands. Suzan doesn’t last until the end of our evenings. She resists as long as she can, her head bobbing, dozing in fits and starts and coming back to us, rambling for a moment in the conversation, and gradually we see her sink down into her chair. Desmond, with the utmost precaution, almost without waking her, guides her to her bedroom. How many times before the grim reaper takes her from us? We will all be orphans.
As for me, I’ve accepted the confusion and haze. There is too much to lose trying to explain everything. I am no longer trying to scale high walls that rise up in front of me. The essential truth is found in the cracks, and I am not going to slip into them. I have already dug too much, gotten too tied up in knots that can’t be undone. All the pages behind me weigh on me. And I have never bothered to print them. Paper would lend them a reality that I wouldn’t be able to avoid. Because all these pages wait. They are full, bouncing, quivering, and they are asking me to spring them from their bytes. But what will I do with them once they are printed? No one has read them, not even I who doesn’t remember what the first one contains, and around me there will be pressure to do something with them.
‘You’re wrong. You’ll feel liberated. The weight of the pages will be lifted once they are printed.’
‘How will VIA Rail know that an old woman died because they got rid of the train that would take her home if you don’t send them your report?’
‘What do you think they will do at VIA Rail when they receive a thick wad of paper in the mail? They’re going to toss it in the garbage.’
‘And no one will have read it. You’ll have written all that for nothing.’
‘You have to publish it. The only way to release yourself from the story is to publish it.’
‘I’m not a writer.’
‘You don’t need to be a writer to be an author.’
‘I could never have my name on the cover of a book.’
‘Ask Desmond. He’ll claim authorship without a second thought.’
‘If it were me, I would let the story wander on the trains. That’s where it should be. Train to train. Like Gladys, like the baby Moses, and it will always find a traveller who will read it, and then another, and then another. If you let it wander on the trains, your story will live forever.’
No one has read it, but everyone has something to say about it. It has become shared property. I don’t really feel dispossessed or stripped of my rights. I don’t have any. I am an intruder on this story. It doesn’t belong to me. But what to do with it, I still don’t know, despite our joyfully boozy evenings.
The seasons pass, and we get the most out of them. Line fishing, ice fishing, campfires on the beach, snowshoeing in winter, gathering wood in the fall, suppers at Suzan’s. Time flies, companionable and generous. Is there deep inside me the unconscious desire to let it fly? To hold on to my pages so they keep stirring the fire of our evenings? The time I spend in Clova has become precious to me.
But I have to decide to do something with my p
ages. There are too many of them, I would agree, and as they were written they became too personal for the ‘report’ Patrice wants me to produce. Desmond is right. They will end up in the wastebasket without being read. Patrice bitches and moans. It has become an obsession. VIA Rail lets old women die; VIA Rail lets its trains die; VIA Rail will let us die by a thousand cuts. We all know that it is his online business he is protecting.
Patrice thinks this story has gone on too long, that I should have sent my ‘report’ to VIA Rail long ago, that our Transcontinental is increasingly in peril, and that, if the story of the pharaoh’s daughter was powerful enough to save baby Moses and Lisana, it could also save the Transcontinental, ‘and basta, enough, send in your report.’
Urgency is Patrice’s watchword, whereas Desmond insists on the importance of what he calls my ‘oeuvre,’ a word that makes my skin crawl. He also says ‘your novel,’ which is no better. It is outrageous, pretentious, grotesque. The humble English teacher, son of a railwayman, and spurned lover will certainly not let a novelist’s wings grow. Desmond insists, I resist, we have our little duels, and Suzan smiles in contentment. She likes to watch us argue around her table. She is the one who came up with the idea of the wandering chronicle. The idea is outlandish, she knows it, and she doesn’t push it. Too outlandish to discuss seriously, it wasn’t something we ever dwelled on for long, but it makes for a pleasant image. A story of roaming on the railway that roams on the railway.
Above us hovers the thinking of my friend Bernie, who follows our discussions from afar. Bernie is at the origin of this chronicle. Astonishingly, he is in no hurry to see it in one form or another. Report, novel, roaming chronicle, none of it matters to him. ‘No rush, we can wait.’ Wait for what? ‘For the loon across the Atlantic to publish his novel.’ What’s important is that ‘Gladys’s real story’ be safely stored in the memory of my computer and when the time comes that it can stand up to ‘the web of lies from that loon.’ My chronicle – or whatever you want to call it – is a rampart against the loon’s fanciful construction, and it will stand up in all of its truth when the time comes.
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Page 17