Echolocation

by Karen Hofmann

  A lightening, an enlightenment. Things float through her mind and she absolutely doesn’t attach. She feels herself smile, Buddha-like, at Steve’s blurry half-moon face, watches his eyes widen, his focus snap taut.

  Oh, no you don’t, he says.

  The room gets busy. She is tilted head down, and although she has been wrapped in warmed blankets, she is shaking with cold. There are IV needles in the backs of both of her hands and four clear bags of someone else’s blood have been stacked between her feet. The room is full: More nurses have come, and the gynecologist, a tiny South Asian woman, is suddenly in the room, snapping on gloves. She crackles with energy. She squeezes Steve’s shoulder, pats Marina’s knee, explains that there is some placenta remaining, that this is causing the bleeding. Everything will be all right, she says. A little operation. Right away nurses start to lift and adjust her, moving around her in tight choreography, and the anesthetist introduces himself, deadpanning, I’m going to knock you out.

  The lights are too bright and everything is too busy.

  Steve is encouraged to walk alongside the gurney as it is wheeled toward the operating room. He grips her hand very tightly and neither of them speaks. Marina thinks, for once we are on the same wavelength. We are not connected, but for now we have found a workable mode of being. She wants to convey this to Steve but can’t think of a way to, with all of the people pushing her so quickly.

  We are not going to make it, she thinks, weightlessly, without sadness or rancour. She sees in her mind’s disembodied clarity two vessels or creatures, it doesn’t really matter which, that have gone out in the dark water and lost each other. She sees that at times no communication is possible, that all these crafts or beings can manage is the sending out of oblique signals, which may or may not be decipherable on their return. There is no advantage in travelling together, in the long run. Whatever comfort or strength comes out of their occasional synchronization is undermined by the danger that they’ll collide, dent and scupper each other, throw each other off course. Even the sending and receiving of the almost inaudible sounds is pointless at best, and often perilous, for misheard, distorted, the signals confuse and misdirect.

  They would probably be better off on their own.

  She has always privately believed that she has known precisely the instant of her conceptions, though she has never spoken of this belief to anyone else. Felt a kindling, an effervescence. Once, a shower of light and a choir, sweet and pitched almost out of her range of hearing (though that time had come to nothing, too). But there had always been a presence, a voice inside her, clear, comfortable, not trying to break through anything. Not distorted by layers of defensive mechanisms, just there.

  Already her children are muffled to her, though she listens, though she unwraps her own layers and listens to them with her nerve endings open and waving in the dangerous air.

  She wakes as she is wheeled into Recovery, and there is Steve waiting for her, reaching for her hand, tugging her back, willy-nilly, into his current.

  Her tongue is a dead, leathery thing, but she needs to wet her lips.

  First time we’ve been out together without the children in five years, she says.

  His smile is too relieved, too surprised, too grateful. Something hurts her. But she will shut it off, she will close off that site, she will fly only the disarming flags, she will wait.

  She will dismantle and wait, until the signal flickers through again, the flutter of inquiry, the secret reaching pulse.

  THE SWIFT FLIGHT OF DATA INTO THE HEART

  IT’S ONLY A HALF-HOUR DRIVE into the city on a Sunday morning, but Glen and I end up having three arguments by the time we get to my parents’ apartment. I say this to my mother, in the language of my childhood, as we come in, after she kisses Glen and the girls on the cheeks, and then finally gets to me.

  Never mind, she says. She doesn’t ask, and I don’t tell her any more.

  My parents do not ever criticize Glen, nor offer space in which I may do so. Once, I started to tell my mother about something childish, thoughtless, he had done.

  “If you start to notice every small thing,” my mother said, staring me down with her granite-coloured eyes, “your marriage will become a war.”

  I notice, though, that when the girls and I visit without Glen, when he is not with us of a Sunday, my parents are more relaxed. Their old friends are more likely to drop by. They forget to speak English.

  My parents live now in a similar-sized apartment to the one I grew up in, but a distinctly North American apartment, which is to say there are a lot of windows, a lot of carpeting and appliances. The walls and floors are dressed with deep-coloured, intricately patterned drapes and rugs like we had at home, and the dark furniture, with its heavy carving, its solid lines, is like the furniture of my childhood. My father has filled the glassed-in balcony with tropical plants of all kinds, so that their sliver of ocean view is strained through a garden. My mother says that my father is trying to recreate our villa at the coast. My father says my mother has tried to replace, molecule by molecule, our apartment in Sarajevo.

  Glen finds it fussy, claustrophobic. Thrift-store tacky, he says, but he’s mistaken about that; he’s confusing my parents’ heavily-patterned Venetian drapes, the beaten-silver bowls and jugs, the Turkish rugs, the carved Bosnian table legs, with pastiche versions, which are all he’s ever seen. Glen likes things to have straight lines, to be straightforward, a little simple.

  Because it’s my father’s birthday, some of our relatives have come – my father’s two sisters, small, olive-skinned women in head scarves and severe grey wool coats, Aunty Mirash and Aunty Bobia, and the husband of one of them, Uncle Sevo, who wears layers of cardigans and has stained yellow grey moustaches that hang below his chin. They scold me in a dialect of their language, which I don’t really understand anymore, or don’t try to understand.

  They’re kind of scary-looking; Damira avoids them, and Ally won’t even look at them. Naturally, they want to maul the children. I have to say that Glen is good at defending the girls from their advances. They seem afraid of Glen, who’s a good foot taller than any of them, and can assume an impressive formality. I am ashamed to say that even I hide behind Glen, in the face of my aunts’ intensity, their vociferous-sounding utterances, their dark thick clothing and smells. But I am not too ashamed. I notice even my mother does this: She defers to Glen when the aunts are in her house, as if to say, What can I do? Here is this tall, serious English Canadian who will not approve.

  Out of my aunts’ hearing, my mother complains – about their refusal to learn English, to dress normally, to buy their halal chickens at Superstore, which they can get to on the bus, rather than demanding that my father drive them out to Surrey.

  They don’t even eat halal all the time, my mother scolds, her round eyes owl-like behind her thick glasses. My father doesn’t keep his family’s religion, and my mother isn’t of his ethnic background. My parents are both educated, professionals, and consider religion in the same way, perhaps, as Glen thinks of their taste in furniture.

  There’s another visitor, too – they’ve brought another man with them, this time. His name is Josip, and he’s just come out from Toronto. He’s a friend or relative of my parents: someone from the old life. Like all of us, he immigrated between ten and fifteen years ago, but my parents haven’t seen him till now. There is a lot of that: reunions of people who left in a hurry, in chaos, often with very little. Now that they have found their feet, feel safe to move around, have learned some English, use the internet, they are finding each other again, they are coming together, coalescing, reforming their communities.

  There’s a lot of conversation in Bosniak, in spite of Glen’s presence, today. I can’t follow all of it. And then a call from the States, from my brother Paval, who talks more to our mother, though it’s our father’s birthday. My mother says, He’s got a new girlfriend! And my father says, He’s bought a new car! A Porsche, this time. The aunts and unc
le ruminate on the news. Porsche is the only word I can understand.

  Josip makes an attempt in English: Paval, he says, is a playboy. We all smile.

  My father says, Paval is a boy still. He does not settle. He doesn’t take responsibility.

  He left something behind, when you came to Canada, Josip says. He left behind the knowledge of how to become a man. It was in the soil, the mountains, the trees, you see.

  Pshaw, my mother says. We have lived in the city for five generations. And Paval has a great job; he’s very successful. Why should he settle down yet? He’s barely thirty.

  And what did I leave behind, Papa? I ask, beneath the rest of the conversation. By which I mean, Where am I broken? And I both long for and dread his answer. But he only pats my hand. Why, you are missing nothing, he says. You have made a good life. You have made everything one could wish for one’s children.

  I feel so terribly depressed when he says this.

  We eat my mother’s spicy lamb stew, mopping our plates with the spongy flatbread that Glen refers to as sour pancakes. Damira won’t eat any of it; she claims it’s funny-tasting, too spicy, stinky. But she has eaten this dish happily before. It’s the breakfast sandwich Glen bought her on the way here that has changed her mind, and things she’s heard Glen say. The aunts scold in whispers about Damira pushing her food away. Ally, sitting on a riser of two telephone books next to my father, eats a surprising amount. My father has figured out somehow that she will eat if she is given a teaspoon of everything on a plate, the bits of food carefully separated. How does he know this? So there is a little mound of rice, a mound of stew, a mound of vegetables in sauce. Damira asks, what kind of meat is this? My mother is about to say, lamb, and my father cuts in: Just meat, dear. But Damira won’t eat it, anyway.

  Glen eats a good helping. Later, I think, he’ll complain about the heaviness of the meal. He is getting a little fat, but it is not my mother’s cooking that is making him so.

  AFTER, WE ALL WALK through the park, slowly, except Glen who has stayed behind to watch some sort of sports on the little television set in the den. The aunts and uncle and Josip walk ahead, sombrely, exotically. My mother and I keep pace, making conversation about my possible kitchen renovation – my mother has lots of opinions, which I try to respond to politely – and my father walks with the girls, who stop and examine the things that small children examine in parks. My mother and I turn around to wait for them. They have on parkas, as it’s November, and the wind already chilly, damp. Damira’s parka is black, with fur on the hood. At five, she has already a sense of her own image; she likes to wear black, which my mother deplores. But it sets off Damira’s strawberry-blonde hair, her pale skin. Ally is darker, with brown hair and my father’s almond-shaped black eyes. She has darker skin and hair than I do, even. She’s a throwback. She’s wearing Damira’s old blue parka, which isn’t her colour. My mother says: That’s not Ally’s colour. She should have red. I’ll buy her a red coat. But I know that Ally will not accept a change; she doesn’t like change, and the burden that I carry around, the burden of Ally’s emerging difficultness, makes me feel anxious, so I say, It’s fine, mother. Don’t always be so critical.

  My father walks toward us, my two daughters holding his hands. They stop before crossing one of the park roads, waiting for traffic to go by, and I see, suddenly, that my father is getting old, and that my daughters are very small and not at all safe to be out in the world by themselves. I can see my mother thinking the same thought.

  Then Josip drops back to walk with my parents, with the air of someone who has very gallantly done his social duty and can now relax and enjoy himself. My parents press him for news of relatives, acquaintances. It’s very tedious to listen to, but my parents are a node, a connection, for a lot of other people. Their interest is necessary.

  Our family was lucky: We left in good time. My parents had connections, they got immigration papers, were able to transfer the bulk of their money into Canada. Both are university professors (retired now), in fields in which language was not a big barrier, in fields where there was demand. I hear all of the time of former doctors, engineers, lawyers, who work as janitors, busboys, drivers. My parents found new jobs at a university within a year of our landing here.

  It was as if they were able to pick us up, pick up our entire lives, and set them down in a new continent, a new city. It was as if we lost nothing, except for our house by the sea. All the terrible things that happened in our country did not happen to us, you understand. Words like genocide, tank, mass grave, are not much more familiar to us than they are to the average Canadian who watches the news. My parents tell us how lucky we are, how we must not look back.

  Perhaps lucky isn’t the right word.

  My parents were reading the papers. They had read the history books. A teacher asked my brother, at school, about the ethnicity of his surname. My parents read the signs, and decided to leave. They were right to do so. Probably. No, not probably. There have been reports from former neighbours, relatives. And all of the news, of course. Things would not have gone well for our family.

  They acted intelligently, and were saved. But now they must pay; I think in their own minds they are paying, by first of all helping so many others who have come over, and second, never ceasing to remind Paval and me of the necessity of prudence.

  AND THEN, as we are strolling through the park, Josip mentions a name I haven’t heard in a long time. It’s the name of my mother’s cousin, and also the mother of someone I used to know. I begin to listen. I listen as a blind man might listen, preparing to cross a street. This woman, this cousin of my mother’s, has perhaps died, or rather, her sister-in-law has died. Josip was at the funeral, and talked to this woman, who asked about my mother.

  And I ask, in my somewhat rusty mother tongue (but as casually as I can manage) if the woman’s son, my old acquaintance, was at the funeral too.

  No, no, Josip answers. But you see Alex, eh? Here in Vancouver? You like his restaurant?

  Which restaurant? Which restaurant? I wait for my parents to ask, or to confirm they knew this, or express surprise, but they are already talking about something else.

  Which restaurant? I ask. Josip scratches his head, rubs his fingers together, makes a disgusted sound. Can’t remember. Just slipped my mind.

  This is a good-sized city. There are hundreds of restaurants. Thousands, perhaps. And when someone says his restaurant, do they mean the place he owns, or the place in which he busses tables, washes dishes? And when they say restaurant, do they mean tables with linen covers, or a street kiosk?

  MY FATHER HAS CLEVERLY KEPT a surprise for the girls, which is necessary to get them to walk back to the apartment. Even so, Ally has to be carried the last few blocks. My mother carries her, on her shoulders: She says my father’s back has been bad lately. They will never let me carry her, and Ally won’t be touched by anyone outside the family.

  The surprise is that my father has bought a cage and a pair of very small finches, which are kept in the glassed-in balcony. I remember that he kept finches at our villa by the sea, and that they flew around the house. Yes, says my mother, spreading their seed and droppings everywhere. My father says that they will only fly around the sunroom, here, and that they must stay in their cage for a few days, to get used to it, before they are let out.

  The girls are entranced, of course. We have no pets; Glen is allergic to anything with fur or feathers. The little finches look painted, with daubs of bright russet and black and white, and beaks of an artificial-looking orange. They are tiny, cheerful-seeming. They trill with a sort of electronic sound, a buzz. They flit and trill around their little cage, as if they’re happy there. We’re all very happy with the little finches.

  Glen says to me, as we are leaving, You seem kind of spaced. You’re not really paying attention.

  My mother says: We walked too far. We’re all tired.

  MY MOTHER IS TAKING ME to lunch and shopping. It is my birthday week: I am
turning thirty-three. Glen will look after the girls, of course, my mother says. When I stop by the office where she does her volunteer work, three days a week, she is still busy. The woman who comes out of her cubicle, finally, has fine, coffee-coloured skin, the cheekbones and lips of a princess, the posture of someone who is used to wearing a crown. She gives me a haughty look, and I give her one back. My mother complains about her, at lunch. She left the documents she needs at home. Then she tells me about the woman’s husband’s sudden death, her sister’s, aunt’s, brother’s. All in a year. Her three children, not enough to eat. They’re not doing so well, she says.

  I am a refugee, I say.

  What? my mother says, sounding shocked.

  I am a refugee. A citizen, of course, with an education, a profession, a house, a car. But still a refugee. Every day, I am conscious of the space my body takes up in this city: That space seems borrowed, loaned, temporary.

  When we arrived, my father said: Look at all of this space! This country has room for you to become anything you can imagine. My brother Paval turned his Walkman louder, made himself small in the corner of the back seat of the taxi. I understood that. We didn’t want more possibilities, more of the unknown. We wanted our familiar lives back, and if that was not possible, we wanted our new lives to be small, safe, predictable as they had never really been.

  I took English as a Second Language classes. I went to university. I applied for a job on a women’s magazine. I did the work I was asked for, and some extra. I was promoted. I got married and gave birth to two children. All in a dream, it seems now.

  I was married in my parents’ living room: I wore a grey wool suit, expensive, but not new. My job interview suit. Only my immediate family, Glen’s parents and sisters, and their spouses, were invited. Afterwards, we all drove in our own cars to a good restaurant, where we had booked a room for a table d’hôte luncheon. My father paid for the luncheon. There was wine, but not champagne: my idea. Glen was pleased that the wedding didn’t cost too much, wasn’t complicated to arrange. But there: I am unfair. I wanted dignity, a minimum of fuss. I do not remember what else I thought or felt that day. I do remember there was rain, and that I carried a small bouquet of some forced white flower. In photographs, I look like a model in a bridal fashion magazine: like someone pretending to be a bride, for the sake of the dress.