Praise for N I K O L S K I
WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR FRENCH TO ENGLISH TRANSLATION
“With its whirl of paradox and symbols, coincidence and blithe implausibility, Dickner’s story is an evident homage to magic realism.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Dickner does for Montreal what Michael Ondaatje did for Toronto in his seminal novel In the Skin of a Lion…. The story lingers in the mind long after the last page has been read, leaving the reader in its strange and wonderful orbit.”
—The Gazette
“An impressive novel … Dickner … has magic in his imagination.”
—The Vancouver Sun
Praise for the French-language edition:
WINNER OF THE PRIX DES LIBRAIRES
WINNER OF THE PRIX LITTÉRAIRE DES COLLÉGIENS
WINNER OF PRIX ANNE-HÉBERT (BEST FIRST BOOK)
WINNER OF PRIX PRINTEMPS DES LECTEURS–LAVINAL
“Dickner inspires the imagination of the reader to the point of ecstasy.”
—Le Monde
“If you are interested in the great wide world, submerse yourself immediately in this phantasmagorical, lively and fascinating novel.”
—Lettres québécoises
“Nicolas Dickner has a limitless imagination, great erudition and an inventive pen. He is the incarnation of the future of Quebec writing—nothing less.”
—L’actualité
“There is a real strain of romanticism in Quebec novels. One of the most beautiful is Nikolski. … It offers a breath-takingly original perception of the world, mixing geography, cartography and longing in a language and a construction both intellectually sophisticated and emotionally affecting.”
—The Globe and Mail
For Mariana Leky — N.D.
For Chana (Anya) Lederhendler, née Andruzewska — L.L.
Magnetic Anomaly
MY NAME IS UNIMPORTANT.
It all started in September 1989, at about seven in the morning.
I’m still asleep, curled up in my sleeping bag on the living-room floor. There are cardboard boxes, rolled-up rugs, half-disassembled pieces of furniture, and tool boxes heaped around me. The walls are bare, except for the pale spots left by the pictures that had hung there for too many years.
The window lets in the monotonous, rhythmic sound of the waves rolling over the stones.
Every beach has a particular acoustic signature, which depends on the force and length of the waves, the makeup of the ground, the form of the landscape, the prevailing winds and the humidity in the air. It’s impossible to confuse the subdued murmur of Mallorca with the resonant roll of Greenland’s prehistoric pebbles, or the coral melody of the beaches of Belize, or the hollow growl of the Irish coast.
The surf I hear this morning is easy enough to identify. The deep, somewhat raw rumbling, the crystalline ringing of the volcanic stones, the slightly asymmetrical breaking of the waves, the water rich in nutriments— there’s no mistaking the shores of the Aleutian Islands.
I mutter something and open my left eye a crack. Where can that unlikely sound be coming from? The nearest ocean is over a thousand kilometres away. And besides, I’ve never set foot on a beach.
I crawl out of the sleeping bag and stumble over to the window. Clutching at the curtains, I watch the garbage truck pull up with a pneumatic squeal in front of our bungalow. Since when do diesel engines imitate breaking waves?
Dubious poetry of the suburbs.
The two trash collectors hop down from their vehicle and stand there, dumbstruck, contemplating the mountain of bags piled on the asphalt. The first one, looking dismayed, pretends to count them. I start to worry; have I infringed some city bylaw that limits the number of bags per house? The second garbageman, much more pragmatic, sets about filling the truck. He obviously couldn’t care less about the number of bags, their contents or the story behind them.
There are exactly thirty bags.
I bought them at the corner grocery store—a shopping experience I’m not about to forget.
Standing in the cleaning-products aisle, I wondered how many garbage bags would be needed to hold the countless memories my mother had accumulated since 1966. What volume could actually contain thirty years of living? I was loath to do the indecent arithmetic. Whatever my estimation might be, I was fearful of underestimating my mother’s existence.
I went for a brand that seemed sufficiently strong. Each package contained ten revolutionary ultraplastic refuse bags with a sixty-litre capacity.
I took three packages, for a total of 1,800 litres.
The thirty bags turned out to be adequate—though I did on occasion enlist my foot to press the point home— and now the garbagemen are busy tossing them into the gaping mouth of the truck. Every so often, a heavy steel jaw crushes the trash with a pachyderm-like groan. Nothing at all like the poetic susurrations of the waves.
Actually, the whole story—since it needs to be told—began with the Nikolski compass.
The old compass resurfaced in August, two weeks after the funeral.
My mother’s endless agony had worn me out. Right from the initial diagnosis, my life had turned into a relay race. My days and nights were spent shuttling from the house, to work, to the hospital. I stopped sleeping, ate less and less, lost nearly five kilos. It was as if I were the one struggling with the tumours. Yet the truth was never in doubt. My mother died after seven months, leaving me to bear the entire world on my shoulders.
I was drained, my thinking out of focus—but there was no question of throwing in the towel. Once the paperwork was taken care of, I launched into the last big cleanup.
I looked like a survivalist, holed up in the basement of the bungalow with my thirty garbage bags, an ample supply of ham sandwiches, cans and cans of concentrated frozen orange juice and the FM radio with the volume turned down low. I gave myself a week to obliterate five decades of existence, five closetfuls of odds and ends crumbling under their own weight.
Now, this sort of cleanup may seem grim and vindictive to some. But understand: I found myself suddenly alone in the world, with neither friends nor family, but still with an urgent need to go on living. Some things just had to be jettisoned.
I went at the closets with the cool detachment of an archaeologist, separating the memorabilia into more or less logical categories:
a cigarillo box filled with seashells
four bundles of press clippings about the U.S. radar stations in Alaska
an old Instamatic 104 camera
over three hundred pictures taken with the aforementioned Instamatic 104
numerous paperback novels, abundantly annotated
a handful of costume jewellery
a pair of Janis Joplin–style pink sunglasses
I entered a troubling time warp, and the deeper I plunged into the closets, the less I recognized my mother. The dusty objects belonging to a life in the distant past bore witness to a woman I’d never known before. Their mass, their texture, their odour seeped into my mind and took root among my own memories, like parasites. My mother was thus reduced to a pile of disconnected artifacts smelling of mothballs.
I was annoyed by the way events were unfolding. What had started out as a simple matter of sweeping up was gradually turning into a laborious initiation. I looked forward to the time when I would finally reach the bottom of the closets, but their contents seemed inexhaustible.
It was at this point that I came upon a large packet of diaries—fifteen softcover notebooks filled with tele graphic prose. My hopes were rekindled. Maybe these diaries would allow me to put together the pieces of the puzzle?
I arranged the notebooks chronologically. The first one began on June 12, 1966.
&nbs
p; My mother headed off to Vancouver when she was nineteen, feeling that a proper break with one’s family should be gauged in kilometres, and that her own falling-out deserved to be measured in continents. She ran away one June 25, at dawn, in the company of a hippie named Dauphin. The two confederates shared the cost of gas, shifts at the wheel, and long drags on thin joints rolled as tight as toothpicks. When not driving, my mother wrote in her notebook. Her script, very neat and orderly at the outset, quickly started to furl and unfurl, tracing the eddies and whorls of THC.
At the beginning of the second notebook, she had woken up alone on Water Street, barely able to stutter a few halting phrases in English. Notepad in hand, she went about communicating through ideograms, by turns sketching and gesturing. In a park, she made the acquaintance of a group of arts students who were busy crafting delicate origami manta rays out of psychedelic paper. They invited her to share their overcrowded apartment, their cushion-filled living room and a bed already occupied by two other girls. Every night at about two a.m., the three of them squeezed in under the sheets and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes while they discussed Buddhism.
My mother swore she would never return to the East Coast.
Whereas her first weeks in Vancouver were recounted with a wealth of detail, the rest of her journey grew more and more elliptical as the demands of nomadic life evidently supplanted those of narration. She never stayed anywhere more than four months, but would all of a sudden take off to Victoria, then Prince Rupert, San Francisco, Seattle, Juneau and a thousand other places she did not always bother to identify clearly. She scraped by thanks to various paltry expedients: hawking poems by Richard Brautigan to passersby, selling postcards to tourists, juggling, cleaning motel rooms, shoplifting in supermarkets.
Her escapade went on like this for five years. Then, in June 1970, we showed up at the Vancouver central station with two huge duffel bags just about bursting at the seams. My mother bought a train ticket to Montreal, and we crossed the continent in reverse, she curled up in her seat, me nestled in the depths of her uterus, an imperceptible comma in an as yet unwritten novel.
When she got back home, she briefly made up with my grandparents—a strategic truce aimed at securing the endorsement she needed from them to buy a house. In short order, she purchased a bungalow in Saint-Isidore Junction, a stone’s throw from Châteauguay, in what was to become the southern periphery of Montreal, but which at the time still retained something of the countryside, with its ancestral houses, its fallow land and its impressive population of porcupines.
Now saddled with a mortgage, she had to take work in Châteauguay—at a travel agency. Paradoxically, this job put an end to her youthful roving, and to her diaries too.
The last diary ended on an undated page, circa 1971. I closed it, deep in thought. Of all the omissions that punctuated my mother’s prose, the most important was Jonas Doucet.
Nothing was left of that transient sire but a stack of postcards scribbled with indecipherable handwriting, the final one dating back to 1975. I had often tried to crack the secret of those cards, but there was no way to make sense of their hieroglyphics. Even the postmarks were more revealing, as they limned out a path that began in southern Alaska, went up to the Yukon, then back down again toward Anchorage, and ended in the Aleutians—more precisely, on the American military base where my father had found employment.
Under the pile of postcards was a small, crumpled box and a letter from the U.S. Air Force.
I learned nothing new from the letter. The box, on the other hand, illuminated a forgotten pit in my memory. Now totally flat, it had once contained a compass that Jonas had sent me for my birthday. That compass came back to me in astounding detail. How could I have forgotten it? It was the only tangible proof of my father’s existence, and had been the pole star of my childhood, the glorious instrument with which I’d crossed a thousand imaginary oceans! Which mountain of debris was it buried under now?
I combed the bungalow from top to bottom in a reckless frenzy, emptying drawers and cupboards, searching behind the sideboards and under the rugs, crawling into the darkest recesses.
It was three in the morning before I tracked it down, stuck between an aquarium-sized deep-sea diver and an apple-green garbage truck, at the bottom of a cardboard box perched on two rafters in the attic.
The years had not improved the appearance of the poor compass, a five-dollar gizmo most likely found near the cash register of an Anchorage hardware dealer. Luckily, its lengthy proximity to metallic toys had not demagnetized its needle, which persisted in pointing (what seemed to be) north.
Strictly speaking, it was a miniature mariner’s compass, composed of a transparent plastic sphere filled with a clear liquid in which there floated a second, magnetized and graded sphere. The inclusion of one sphere inside another, as in a tiny matryoshka, guaranteed a gyroscopic stability that could withstand the worst storms: no matter how strong the waves might be, the compass would lose neither its bearings nor the horizon.
I fell asleep in the attic with my head sunk in a cumulus of candy-pink insulation, the compass resting on my forehead.
Superficially, that old compass seems perfectly unremarkable, just like any other compass. But on closer examination one realizes that it doesn’t point exactly north.
Some individuals claim to be aware at all times of precisely where north is located. However, like most people, I need a marker. When I’m sitting behind the bookstore counter, for example, I know magnetic north is located 4,238 kilometres away, in a beeline that runs through the Mickey Spillane shelf and goes to Ellef Ringnes Island, a pebble lost in the immense Queen Elizabeth archipelago.
But, instead of pointing toward the Mickey Spillane shelf, my compass lines up 1.5 metres to the left, right in the middle of the exit door.
It is true, of course, that the planet’s magnetic field is subject to local distortions, and that north can appear to be a little out of place. There are several possible reasons for this anomaly: an iron ore deposit in the cellar, the upstairs neighbour’s bathroom plumbing, the wreck of a transatlantic liner buried under the pavement of St-Laurent Boulevard. Unfortunately, none of these theories is borne out by the facts, because my compass points to the left of north no matter where I happen to use it. This raises two troublesome questions:
What is the cause of this magnetic anomaly?
Where (the hell) is the compass pointing to?
Common sense would suggest that my imagination constitutes the main local anomaly of the magnetic field, and that I’d be better off tidying up rather than daydreaming. But anomalies are like obsessions: all resistance is futile.
I vaguely recalled my geography courses: magnetic declination, the Tropic of Cancer, the pole star. It was time to put this buried knowledge to use. Equipped with a pile of geography books and an assortment of maps of various scales, I set out to determine exactly where my compass was pointing.
After some painstaking calculations, I arrived at a declination of 34° W. Following that bearing, one crossed the Island of Montreal, Abitibi and Temiskaming, then Ontario, the Prairies, British Columbia, the Prince of Wales archipelago, the southern tip of Alaska, a bit of the North Pacific, and the Aleutian Islands, where one finally landed on Umnak Island—more specifically, on Nikolski, a minuscule village inhabited by thirty-six people, five thousand sheep and an indeterminate number of dogs.
One could therefore deduce that the compass pointed toward Nikolski, an answer that struck me as rather satisfactory, even though it had the disadvantage of clouding the issue instead of elucidating it.
Nothing is perfect.
From time to time a customer will ask me what that weird amulet is around my neck.
“It’s a Nikolski compass,” I reply.
The customer, not understanding, smiles and politely changes the subject. He asks, for instance, where he might find books by Mickey Spillane.
As you may have guessed, I don’t work in a geographical institute or
a store that deals in globes.
In point of fact, S. W. Gam Inc. is a business entirely devoted to the acquisition, presentation and retailing of the previously owned book. In other words, a secondhand bookshop. Mme Dubeau, my esteemed employer, hired me in the fall of my fourteenth year. At the time, I earned a measly $2.50 an hour, a wage that I graciously accepted so that I might survey all these books from on high with no further obligation than to read.
I’ve been working here for four years now, a span that appears a good deal longer to me than it is in reality. During that time, I dropped out of school, my mother died and my few childhood friends vanished. One of them took off to Central America at the wheel of an old Chrysler and has not been seen since. A second one is studying marine biology in a Norwegian university. There’s been no news of him. The others have simply disappeared, swallowed up by the course of events.
As for me, I’m still parked behind the bookstore counter, where, however, I get to enjoy a spectacular view of St-Laurent Boulevard.
My job is more like a calling than a normal career. The silence is conducive to meditation, the wages are consistent with a vow of poverty and, as for my work tools, they’re in keeping with a sort of monastic minimalism. No hi-tech electronic cash register; all the calculations are done manually—old-fashioned sums scratched on whatever scrap of paper is to hand. No computerized inventory, either; I’m the computer, and I have to recall on demand the last place I glimpsed, for example, that Esperanto translation of Dharma Bums. (Answer: In behind the pipes of the washroom sink.)
The work is not as simple as it may appear; the S. W. Gam Bookshop is one of those places in the universe where humans long ago relinquished any control over matter. Every shelf holds three layers of books, and the floorboards would vanish altogether under the dozens of cardboard boxes, but for the narrow, serpentine paths designed to let customers move about. The slightest cranny is put to use: under the percolator, between the furniture and the walls, inside the toilet tank, under the staircase, even the dusty closeness of the attic. Our classification system is strewn with microclimates, invisible boundaries, strata, refuse dumps, messy hellholes, broad plains with no visible landmarks—a complex cartography that depends essentially on visual memory, a faculty without which one won’t last very long in this trade.
Nikolski Page 1