“I don’t,” he said, trying not to sound impatient. But she asked even more questions than his most annoying clients. Even so, he liked her, though he was not sure why, except he thought her a striking woman and likely a kind and gentle one. He was reminded of his delight in the early years of his three children. Their expectation that he knew everything and their endless questions. The innocence. The wonder.
It also reminded him of Vivian when she had found out he was psychic and asked him what she was going to do when she went to college. He had laughed and said, “Can’t do it, Vivian. I leave that stuff at the office.” His former wife had done everything she could to turn his children against him, but gradually they had come around as they had wanted their father in their lives. So now, his adult children brought their families to the farm. Just recently, his son had helped him cut down a dead tree just before more snow had fallen
“I wonder if you might have lunch with me some time. Or coffee.” Her voice trembled slightly.
“Pardon?” he said, perplexed. This kind of situation was unfamiliar. A client came for a reading and left. Perhaps over a few appointments, there might be some kind of rapport established. But he did not make arrangements to meet anyone elsewhere. As soon as his last client left, he would be on his way out of the city, letting thoughts of the farm take over. He glanced at her again, saw her even features and her piercing glance.
“Well, I suppose I could,” he said, aware this was something he was considering not only because the woman created a spark of longing in him, but because Heather would be away. And there were, as well, the puzzled feelings around this woman he could not yet decipher. What harm is there in it? he wondered, as he felt himself nodding. He gripped the arms of his chair.
Sue started to talk about her husband again, almost as if the conversation had not taken a turn for a moment. Almost as if nothing had passed between them, that there had not been a tacit decision.
“He was married before. A long time ago,” she said. “She was killed in an accident soon after the wedding. He told me about that, but he never told me about Thomas. It sounds as if he had a brief fling with a childhood friend when they were in their thirties. I was married to him for ten years and I thought we knew each other well, but I didn’t know something that important.”
“And did you tell him everything?”
Her body turned rigid, like an animal caught at night in the beam of a headlight.
“All the same, you did know each other well,” Hans continued as if he had not noticed her revealing body language. “And you know that you loved each other. What about his son?”
“I gave him a watch of his father’s and we talked and talked. He seemed to like and trust me, but I guess I was wrong.”
“I don’t think so,” Hans said. He turned off the tape.
“Why did you do that?”
“Oh, it’s almost finished,” he said. Whatever was hidden below the surface would have to wait. Whatever secret she had lived with for such a long time would be hard for her to face yet. “Anyway, there’s nothing else for me to tell you. Not at the moment anyway. Should we decide when to have lunch?”
His work brought him into contact with many people, but often he felt isolated. Even his friends and neighbours regarded him with a certain amount of awe or suspicion. He was looking forward now to the prospect of getting to know her better, and away from his office routine.
“All right,” Sue said, sounding doubtful now, perhaps wishing she had said nothing. Almost echoing Heather who had also sounded that way all those years ago when he had first called her. But in every other way, these two women were different. Heather was taller and with more angular features than Sue’s. She was younger. This woman, Sue, was his age and less likely to notice his lines and wrinkles. Or so he thought. And she had lived through the war, too, although in a different country than him and undoubtedly with other experiences.
“Maybe next week?” he said.
The war still haunted and intrigued him. He often read books about it and tried to put together pieces that as a child had not cohered. He was curious now, suspecting he and Sue would have a common language around their early lives. As the child of a British soldier, Heather understood what he had told her, but Sue would have memories of the same time frame.
“Or the week after.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “You pick a date. I don’t come into the city on Tuesdays or Fridays.”
She took a calendar out of her purse and looked at it. “Thursday then,” she said.
He wrote it down. “There’s a little Thai restaurant over on Bloor Street near Spadina,” he said. “I forget the name. It’s on the north side.”
“So I’ll meet you there at what time? Noon?”
“That’s it then,” he said. “Noon.”
*
Two weeks later, Hans walked from his office through drifting snow to meet Sue at the restaurant, not in the least surprised to find her waiting at a table. Not because he had known she would be there, but because he knew she was a punctual person. She would be apologetic if she arrived somewhere even five minutes late. She had not told him these things, but he knew. He might also have guessed as much.
He smiled broadly as she waved at him, shaking the snow from his boots.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said. She had picked a good table. It was off to one side, on its own, where no one would be straining to hear their conversation.
“Not long at all,” she said. “I just got here.”
As they waited to give their order, Sue looked at him with a quizzical smile. Are you really here? her eyes seemed to ask. He was convinced this rendezvous was out of character for her. Ordinarily, she would never have gone to a psychic in the first place either. She must have acted on a whim when she had suggested having lunch with him, something he knew should elicit caution. Nonetheless, here she was across from him, making conversation.
“I noticed the photographs in your office. A lake. A barn. Are they places you’ve been?” Sue asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I took them myself. I love taking photos.”
He smoothed his white paper napkin on the table and began to sketch. Since he had stopped smoking, it was difficult sometimes to keep his hands occupied. In only a few seconds, he created the winding curve of a river flowing through a forest.
“You’re an artist,” she said, surprised at how quickly the strokes began to form a picture.
“I doodle,” he said. “I drew everything when I was a child. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I saw some of the great masters in the galleries in Amsterdam. We were too busy on the farm. It had to wait until I went there with some of my friends.”
“What’s the name of the main art gallery in Amsterdam?” she asked. “I remember going there. I’ve been trying to remember. You know the gallery where I would have seen The Night Watch, Rembrandt’s famous painting.”
“The Rijksmuseum.” He wrote it on the napkin underneath the sketch and gave it to her.
She opened her purse and tucked the napkin inside her calendar.
Suddenly, he felt a need to touch her with something personal even though he seldom talked about his past. “I was a child during the war,” he said.
“Me, too,” she sighed.
“At five, I spent three months in a concentration camp.”
“How could that be?” she asked. “I thought you were Dutch. Where was the rest of your family?” She spoke as if she mistrusted this information.
“In other camps. I was alone. But I escaped,” he said. “I spent the night in a ditch before finding someone who would hide me.”
“That’s an amazing story. How did you get out?” She still looked as if she were not sure whether to believe him or not.
“I just did what children do and went through a gate that was open and kept on wa
lking. No one was looking for a child to leave. I can’t remember too well really. Maybe someone helped me.”
“Why were you in a camp in Holland anyway?” Sue asked.
“My family had a bedroom in an attic where they hid Jewish people. Someone must have told the Nazis.” Anyone could have betrayed them, seeking some advantage.
“Did you know what was going on?”
“Only that I was never supposed to tell anyone about the people in the room. And I didn’t. But they found out. It was horrendous. I saw things that day I’d never want to repeat. I don’t know if I even had words for what I saw then.” He still sometimes had nightmares of men attacking their house, men wearing dark clothes and carrying torches and guns. He almost forgot Sue was sitting across from him.
“I remember the war, too,” she said. “Or at least the end of it. This man I didn’t know moved in. He turned out to be my father. My mother talked about him when he was away and read bits of his letters to us. He called me ‘Baby.’ I didn’t like that. Before he came, I heard my mother talking to people about ‘overseas’ and I thought it was a place, maybe like Toronto where we went once to see him when he was on leave. I know that because there are pictures and later I was told what they were. That was before he sailed. By the time he came back, I had heard enough about guns and tanks and people murmuring maybe he would die that I thought he was someone in a story. Not a real person at all. My older sister, Maggie, prayed every night though that he would come home safely.”
Yes. It would have been frightening for her also, but in such a different way. A time of waiting, not knowing, yet in a safe haven.
“A lot of Dutch people came to Canada during the war and there were a lot of Canadian soldiers in Holland,” he said. “So this seemed a natural place to emigrate after I was married. I learned English working in restaurants. That was at the end of the fifties.”
Waiting on tables had bored him before long, but without any other Canadian experience he had not been sure what else to do. With the four languages he knew — Dutch, English, German, and French — he had thought he might be able to freelance as a translator. Not able to make enough at that alone, he had found seasonal work in city parks as a gardener, and, later, part-time work with at-risk-youth in a community centre. That was where he had met Heather. Married at the time, he had been careful not to show his attraction to her. When his first wife left him, he thought of Heather often and finally went back to see if she was still there. His former boss told him that she had gone to work at a downtown hospital and agreed to call to ask if she would give permission for Hans to have her telephone number.
“I guess my story is growing up in a frontier town,” Sue said. “In the northern bush, far south of the actual frontier now. I guess the frontiers are in space these days.”
“Or somewhere else entirely.” Like a parallel world, he wanted to say, where spirits guided those who were open to them, but he refrained. He sensed that such a statement might make her leery of him. It might even frighten her. As if he were a creature from another dimension himself. Little did people know though how much like them he really was, relying on intuition and a gift he had been given. Nothing more spectacular than that. And it had seemed natural to follow the path this gift had opened for him.
“You told me in my last reading that I’m a nomad,” Sue said. “Why?”
“I think what I said was that everything would change for you.”
“I guess that was it, but I seem to recall you used the word nomad.”
“Whether I did or not, you are like one. There’ll be no arriving for you. You’ll find a new path, a new direction, and when you reach the horizon, you’ll seek another.”
“It sounds as if you’ve likely done that yourself.”
“Yeah.” And he had always found surprises as he approached those horizons.
The waiter stood beside the table. “Are you ready to order?” he asked.
Hans looked startled and reached for the menu. As Sue asked for lemon grass soup and stir-fried rice, he supposed she had probably already read it.
“No, nothing to drink,” she said. “Water.”
“A mango salad,” Hans said. “And a Blue.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I’d like a beer, too.”
Hans told Sue more about the war then and what he remembered of the soldiers who came to question his parents, of the fear he had felt when the soldiers had taken him away. It was an era they had shared even though they had lived in different circumstances. They had all been fighting the same war, the Nazis the common enemy.
“It was a strange time,” Sue said. “Not understanding what Maggie was praying for. And then one day we had a flag on the lawn. The Union Jack. Or so I was told as we looked at pictures later. All the neighbourhood children gathered underneath the flag for those photos. It wasn’t long after that my father turned up.
“‘How’s Baby?” he asked. I ignored him, climbed down from my chair and went to find my teddy bear. “Maggie was really happy.”
“Um,” Hans said. It was not at all similar to what had happened to him, but she had experienced a profound absence that war brings and seemed to have an almost visceral reaction when anything to do with the battlefield or the life of soldiers was mentioned. He was aware he had not told her that his wife had grown up in England after the war and was considerably younger than he was. Nor did he tell her that Heather had flown to London only a few days earlier.
*
Sue walked along the sidewalk in the bright sunlight, feeling strangely euphoric. Her body, which had seemed dead for months before Jerry died, felt something stirring. As if from the ashes, a sprig of grass was poking through. She was worried someone might have seen Hans hug her when they parted. As if her judges — her long dead parents, or Martin — were watching over her shoulder. Although it would more likely be Emily who would say her judgment was lacking, that her behaviour showed a lack of propriety. She would not even be able to tell Maggie.
Walking down Spadina, she saw an art supply store. Thinking about how Hans had sketched so effortlessly, she recalled a photograph she had taken of a planter full of bright yellow and orange nasturtiums. Watercolours would not capture the vivid effect she needed. Some paintings in that medium were bright enough, but she knew she wanted vibrant colour.
“You might try acrylics,” the clerk said. “They’re easy to use. They’re water-based and dry quickly.” She pointed out tubes with labels in different colours.
Ah, Sue thought. Alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, burnt umber. She would need white and black, of course. Titanium white. Carbon black.
She also bought a charcoal pencil. Her ironing board was set up in the kitchen with a thin piece of board on top where she had left a sketchbook open. The night before, she had drawn two elephants with intertwined trunks. When she arrived home, she painted them red, blue, and purple. On a larger sheet, using the photograph she had taken as her guide, she drew a planter full of nasturtiums. The largest painting she had attempted, she saw it now gradually beginning to take form and shape. Ultramarine and then the crimson mixed with it created a vibrant purple. When she was finished for that day, she thought she would move everything upstairs to the desk in Jerry’s office where the rest of her art materials now were.
A sound came from the back porch and, looking out through the window, Sue saw a squirrel run across the wooden slats, pushing a piece of bread. Some neighbour must put out food for the animals. The crumbs ended up often in an empty crevice under the roof where birds built nests in summer. The previous year, there had been a robin with her family living there, little heads reaching up, beaks open for worms. When Sue had gone out onto the porch, the mother robin had dive-bombed her, then sat on the rail of the porch next door and shrieked. Sue was relieved the raccoon that had pooped on the back porch seemed to be gone. For ten years, one h
ad made his mound of litter right outside their back door, always on the same spot. Could it have been the same racoon for all that time?
Suddenly overwhelmed with loneliness, the painting on the ironing board had no meaning for her. What would her husband want her to do? She did not know. Surely, in having embraced Thomas, she was being loyal. But a little voice, some judge sitting on her shoulder, murmured that what she and Jerry had needed was to tell the truth to each other. And now she was compounding everything with persistent thoughts about another man and not even Jerry would understand about Hans. She was not even sure she understood herself except that she could not stand the empty house. She could no longer stand talking to Jerry and knowing he was not there. At least Hans was alive and tangible and whenever she thought about him, something stirred in her.
She turned on the radio to a station playing classical music. Jerry would have been able to tell her who the composer was. If she could become absorbed in painting again as he had in music, she would feel better. And so she worked on the shades of plants and trees in the background of the nasturtiums. She wondered what Hans would say about her work. At some point, colour and form usually soothed her, but instead she kept thinking of Hans. Recalling also that once when she had been deep in meditation, all the famous paintings she had ever seen had streamed across what seemed like a screen as she watched in wonder. Vincent van Gogh’s, Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Picasso’s Guernica. It was not like that now. Nothing worked and she could not concentrate as thoughts of this unknown man flitted in and out of her mind. And why had Thomas not called at least to say goodbye? She was relieved when the phone rang to hear another voice entirely.
“How are you doing?” Martin asked. “Emily and I want to have you over for dinner.”
“Thank you.”
They picked a date.
“I thought we could ask one of the lawyers from —”
“Too soon, Martin,” she said. “I’d like to just spend an evening with you two.”
“All right,” he said. “I also wondered when I might come round to start planning the memorial for Jerry. Would today be possible?”
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