Turbulent Wake

by Paul E. Hardisty

  The engineer realised now that, to his father, the sexes were involved in a titanic and never-ending struggle for power and control. And sometimes, when he was drunk, his father would rant about his own mother, about how she dominated and bullied his father. And in those skirmishes, the full-out battles, crying was losing.

  The engineer was fourteen when his father moved the family west, to Vancouver. He’d gone from a small private school where everyone spoke French and wore uniforms, to an English state high school in a well-off part of the city. On the engineer’s first day at the new school, a group of older boys beat him up and stuffed him into a locker. He never wore a tie to school again or carried a briefcase. He blended in, wore jeans and T-shirts and hoodies like the other kids, and when he needed to, he fought back. After a while, he fought even when he didn’t need to. The first time, the other boy, who was much bigger, hit him square in the eye with a straight jab. It knocked him down. As he got to his feet, he realised that he was crying. He looked around the hallway, bewildered. A crowd had gathered, and they all stood staring at him. And then one of the girls said, ‘Look, he’s crying.’ And then everyone was laughing and he could feel the shame even now from the remembering, and he shouted out that he wasn’t crying, that he had been hit in the eye, but no one listened and so he got up and faced up to the guy again and got knocked down again, and then once more with the same result, and then it was over. After that he followed his father’s example. He never cried again.

  The engineer often wondered if that made him a bad person. Or just a flawed one. The latter, he admitted. As to the former, he’d tried to be good. Tried to live up to Helena’s expectations. He hadn’t always been successful. And although he never showed his emotions, it didn’t mean they weren’t there. It simply meant that they were not anyone else’s concern. People would do best to look after their own inner selves, instead of worrying and talking about everyone else’s.

  The engineer never really knew what his father did for a living.

  Whenever anyone would ask him the question, he’d just reply that his father was a lawyer. He knew that his father had dropped out of the equivalent of high school in England, after his own dad died of cancer. He was only fifteen, and he’d gone to work doing some menial job. After a few years of labouring, he’d decided to become a lawyer. He had to finish school at night by correspondence, including learning Latin, which he’d always hated. He’d married the engineer’s mother and he’d emigrated to Canada with twenty pounds in his pocket, a new wife and a law degree.

  His father certainly didn’t do the things he’d imagined as a kid that a lawyer should do. He didn’t go to court and defend people or prosecute criminals. He was always travelling. In the engineer’s memory, his father is always leaving – his mother in tears – or coming back from some exotic place bearing gifts. One time his father had come back from Sweden and brought him a microscope and slide set. He’d loved it. But his father never talked about what he did. Although the engineer had always had his suspicions.

  The engineer knew that his father was smart and that he worked hard. He had, right up until the day he died, an exceptional memory for detail of all kinds. He was especially good with faces and names (something the engineer didn’t inherit). He articled in Canada, was hired by the law firm he articled with, and, from what the engineer could remember, must have risen quickly. As a child, one is only ever partially aware of parents’ comings and goings. Whatever his father was doing, the family would suddenly and periodically seem to have a lot of money. Soon, they were off on trips to Europe and America. They moved into a nice old house; he and his brother were sent to private school. The engineer’s father liked cars, and there was a succession of new models, a big brown Oldsmobile Toronado, and then a series of Chevy Corvettes. His mother’s wardrobe exploded, and every night his parents seemed to be out at some party, returning late (he could hear them talking, laughing sometimes, his father crashing into things, swearing). Sometimes they would argue.

  And then one day, his mother woke them very early when it was still dark and told him and his brother to get dressed. It was a school day, but it was far too early to go to school. She hustled them down to the front door and helped them with their coats and hats and mitts and handed them each a little suitcase, before walking with them through the snow to a waiting taxi. Next thing they knew they were at the airport and she was explaining that they would not be going to go to school for a little while and that Daddy would be joining them later on. A day later, they were in a hotel room in Panama City. They loved it. He and Rhys spent all day at the pool, ordering hamburgers and drinking cold Cokes and running around the hotel gardens. Later, they rented a wooden cottage near the beach. Their father would come, spend a few days with them, then disappear again. And then, just as suddenly, about a month later, they returned to Toronto. No explanation, just time to go back. A little holiday, they were told to tell anyone who asked.

  Not long before he died, the engineer’s father told him one story about that time. In a way, it helped him to put some of the pieces together. In some ways, though, it just made everything more opaque. They were sitting in his father’s house on a little island off the coast of British Columbia, looking out at the rain angling down across the bay, and his father started talking about Cuba. He used to go there a lot, before Castro and the revolution, before his sons were born. Sometimes he went on business – that’s what he called it: business. A few times he took his wife. The engineer still had a faded photo of his parents on the marble veranda of a hotel in Havana overlooking the sea. It is 1960. They look so young, he in a dark suit and tie, she in a white skirt and matching jacket and hat and gloves. The colours are faded, but you can see how beautiful it must have been. And then the revolution came.

  Everyone his father had been dealing with – the regime and the big, wealthy families – was either shot or fled across the ninety miles of water to Miami, carrying with them whatever they could. The engineer’s father and his business partners had just concluded a big deal (for what, he never said) with one of the wealthy Cuban family conglomerates and feared that they would now not be paid. They had delivered the product a few months before the regime was overthrown. By the time his father told him this story, he was old, in his eighties, and while he was still sharp, he had a tendency to skip from idea to idea. He described how he and his two business partners had flown into Cuba, just before the Missile Crisis and the blockade, on a private jet. Just out of Miami, they realised they didn’t have a corkscrew on board. They told the pilot to divert to Nassau, so they could obtain one. Corkscrew secured and with the wine flowing, they arrived in Havana to an armed escort. They were taken to the presidential palace and a deal was worked out. Castro wanted the goods – they had been confiscated in the name of the new government – but he wanted to be fair, especially because they were Canadians. They negotiated a while, trying to insist on the original cash payment in full, but they got nowhere. The Cubans offered an alternative. It was take it or leave it. They decided to take it.

  They were driven in a two-ton military truck to a bullet-riddled warehouse on the outskirts of Havana. A colonel, who was with them, unlocked the doors and led them inside. The entire warehouse was stacked from floor to ceiling with possessions confiscated from the homes of elite members of the deposed regime. There was art, jewellery, furniture, clothes, cars, everything you could imagine. The colonel told them they could take anything they wanted, as long as it fitted into the truck. They had two hours.

  The partners, half drunk, couldn’t believe their eyes. They agreed on a central collection point near the door, split up and raced into the warehouse.

  ‘It was incredible,’ his father said. ‘You can’t understand the wealth these people had.’ He looked out across the water for a while and then continued.

  ‘With ten minutes to spare, we’re standing at the collection point, looking at the pile. There was far too much to fit into the truck, let alone the plane. We
culled about three-quarters of it, but we were running out of time. Finally, we had what we thought they could take out. One of my partners, Alan, had found what appeared to be an original Picasso and a spectacular diamond necklace. You should have seen the look on his face, holding these things up for us to see. Me, I’d found a collection of rare coins and an entire set of sterling silver tableware. We did a quick tally and figured we might be close to breaking even, worst case, fifty cents on the dollar. The colonel was shouting at us that it was time to go. But we had nothing to carry all the stuff in. Alan ran off and reappeared a moment later with a big carpet. He unrolled it and we threw everything on to it, then rolled it back up and carried it to the truck.’

  ‘Not bad,’ the engineer said to his father, refilling his glass. ‘Considering what was going on.’

  His father smiled. ‘But here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘It’s always the way things work out. When we got back to Canada, we flogged the stuff, got some pretty good prices for it, especially some of the women’s clothes – furs and the like. But the Picasso turned out to be a copy. The diamond necklace was glass. We were going to lose a lot of money on the deal. And I mean a lot. Anyway, Alan, he still had the carpet – the one we carried all the stuff out with – in his garage. A few weeks later, a friend of his was over at his place and he showed it to him. Turns out, this thing was a thirteenth-century French tapestry that once belonged to King Louis IX. The mangy old thing was worth more than everything else we took from that warehouse put together.’

  The engineer’s father never spoke to him about Rhys dying. About him killing his own brother. Never once did he say anything about it. He never cried, never blamed. He just kept it all to himself.

  March 13th. Still in Geneva

  I’ve delayed my flight back to London for another day. Maria will have to wait.

  Haven’t turned on my phone for over twenty-four hours now. I just don’t want to know. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear about it, don’t want to have to deal with it, solve it, broker it, explain it or do it. I just want to be alone, to be left alone. I want to walk by the lake and sit in my hotel room and look out at the mountains and drink, and I want to do it by myself.

  I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t go to Zimbabwe in the end. My old man must have convinced her to stay with him. Neither of them ever mentioned anything about Zimbabwe that I can remember, anyway, growing up. But then again, they didn’t mention much. That’s clear now.

  Anyway, I know they moved back to Calgary soon after getting married, bought that same house I was in a few days ago, down by the river in Inglewood. It’s an older neighbourhood, big gardens, lots of big trees, houses from the start of the last century. That’s where I was born. That house.

  And from everything I’ve been told, and the few glimpses of that time I can remember, I think they must have been happy there. Maybe that’s why the old man went back there, at the end. Á La Recherche. He got a job I know he liked – he told me so, several times – with a small consulting company, and Mum finished her degree and started working as a vet. They spent a lot of time in the mountains together, hiking and skiing, just the two of them. After I was born, they always took me along, the boy they named in the middle of a West African sea when they thought they were going to die. I still have a couple of photographs of them, so young, big smiles, my little face poking out of a hooded suit, bundled into a baby carrier on my mother’s chest. They look so goddamned happy.

  I met an old drunk out by the lake today. It was early morning, just before sunrise. I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. He was sitting on a park bench, sipping from a bottle in a paper bag. You don’t see a lot of that here. It surprised me. As I walked past, he said hello, in English. Am I that easy to peg? He didn’t ask for money, just said hello. I sat next to him and we started talking. It was pretty obvious that he’d been sleeping rough. His hair was all rasta, tangled and knotted; his beard, too. It’s cold here at night, and he was wrapped up in some kind of army-surplus parka with a hood, and had an old woollen blanket draped around his shoulders like someone Van Gogh would have painted in his early period, all dark and miserly. He offered me his bottle and, what the hell, I took a swig. Some sort of foul schnapps. Super sweet.

  The old guy asked me where this is, this place. Is this Switzerland? I’m lost, he said. I don’t recognise anything.

  This is Geneva, I told him. Lake Geneva, out there. He stared out for a while at the water, and then he just shook his head.

  ‘I’m from London,’ I told him. ‘Canada, originally. I don’t know this place either.’

  ‘We’re all lost, brother,’ he said.

  The Chef

  It was the chef who’d found him, that first morning, shivering naked on his bed, delirious.

  Whatever had infected him, whatever was there now still, ripping him apart, had come upon him suddenly, without preliminary warnings of any sort. One moment he was returning from work, walking back to the guest house along the dirt road that contoured the valley slope, and the next he was doubled up in pain, his body trying to purge itself of every millilitre of fluid it contained.

  He had managed to stumble his way to the guest house, crawl to the bathroom. When he awoke later, it was dark. He was on the bathroom floor, covered in sweat and vomit and shit. He stripped himself of his clothes, struggled into the shower. Another bout of nausea sent him back to the toilet, a new level of pain fish-hooking his insides. Wet and shivering, he groped his way to the bedroom, collapsed on to the bed.

  The chef had called the doctor, waited by the young engineer’s bedside until he arrived and then assigned himself as the patient’s chief caretaker. For three days now, the chef had brought him water and sweet tea, administered the medication the doctor had prescribed. He’d helped him navigate the fifteen steps between his bed and the toilet every time his guts started to liquefy, sometimes carrying him in his arms. He washed the shit from his sheets and bathed him when he was too weak or delirious to do it himself. And in all of this, the older man was gentle and patient, respectful; and when the young engineer woke from his dreams and opened his eyes, the chef would be there, nodding to him, smiling.

  He wasn’t sure if it was the dehydration or the drugs, but the chef now started to appear in the young engineer’s dreams. His broad, dark face would materialise among images of home and displaced persons and the violence of poverty, the things he had started to understand about this place, the acute longings of loss and regret. Emerging from a dream, deep in the night, he’d lay panting under the ceiling fan, covered in sweat. The chef would be there, in a chair near the bed, eyes closed, his head titled to one side, mouth agape. In the moonlight streaming through the shutters, the young engineer would trace his gaze along the deep, L-shaped scar that ran from the man’s eye to the corner of his mouth. Over the pitted, cratered skin of his face. Across the folds under his chin, and over his big, smooth, powerful forearms. And he would wonder who this man was.

  Five weeks the young engineer had been here. And each morning, and every evening, at 07:30 and 19:30 precisely, the chef would arrive at the guest house, dressed immaculately in his white uniform, his traditional stovepipe hat perched proudly on his big head, a crisp white napkin folded over his left arm. His two assistants, young boys from the village dressed in white collared shirts, black trousers and ill-fitting shoes, would follow him in, each wheeling a trolley.

  The boys would set the table under the watchful eye and direction of the chef. One place, as if for a state dinner. Crisp linen. Two forks, three knives, two spoons. A sparkling glass, side plate, main plate, soup bowl. Evenings, he would snap his fingers and one of the boys would produce a candle in its holder. The chef would place it on the table, light it. Then he would bow and pull out the chair. ‘Dinner is served, sir,’ he would say.

  It was not what he had expected. Not at all. This was, by all measures, one of the poorest countries in the world. Civil war raged in the north, in Eritrea, and the rebels wer
e moving steadily south towards the capital. But the World Bank had deemed the dam and the hydropower it delivered to the capital important enough to fund their work, and so here he was. Living alone in a palatial guest house with a view across the valley, the dam just three kilometres up-river. Twice a day, the chef appeared with his two helpers and provided him with meals as varied and delicious as he had ever tasted. And every day after returning from work at the dam, walking through the little village that had grown around it, passing workers and their families, hangers-on and hopefuls, he would think about all of this and the disparities and the sheer blind luck that had put him where he was, and all of them there.

  Now, on the third day of the sickness, the chef lifted the young engineer’s head and raised a bowl to his lips. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘You are much better now. This will make you strong.’

  The soup smelled wonderful, tasted even better. He drank down a few mouthfuls and let the chef lower him back down.

  ‘Thanks, Hakim,’ he breathed. ‘It must have been the street food I ate. Or the water.’