Nikolski

by Nicolas Dickner

  But it takes more than a good pair of eyes and a few ounces of memory to work here. It’s crucial to develop a particular perception of time. The thing is—what’s the best way of putting this?—that different avatars of our bookshop coexist simultaneously in a multitude of discrete times, separated by very thin ellipses.

  This warrants some explanation.

  Each book that enters here can meet its next reader at any moment in the history of the shop, in the future as well as the past. Whenever Mme Dubeau sorts a new shipment of books, she repeatedly consults her version of the Encylopaedia Britannica—some thirty notebooks where she records all special requests made by clients since February 1971—to see whether, ten years before, someone may have been looking for a title among the freshly arrived books.

  From time to time she grabs the telephone with a triumphant smile.

  “Mr. Tremblay? This is Andrée Dubeau at the S. W. Gam Bookshop. I have some good news. We’ve just received The History of Whaling in Fairbanks in the Eighteenth Century!”

  At the other end, Mr. Tremblay represses a shiver. Here he is, abruptly transported back to the pristine icebergs that haunted his nights throughout the heat wave of 1987.

  “I’ll be right over,” he mumbles feverishly, as if he’d been reminded of an important appointment.

  Mme Dubeau crosses out the request and closes the Britannica. Mission accomplished.

  I can’t leaf through those thick notebooks without trembling a little. There is no other occupation that provides as accurate a measure of the passage of time—a number of the clients recorded in those pages are long dead. Some aren’t the least bit interested in the books anymore; others have moved to Asia without leaving a forwarding address—and many will never find the book they so coveted.

  I wonder if there may not somewhere be a Britannica of our desires, a comprehensive repertory of the slightest dream, the least aspiration, where nothing would be lost or created, but where the ceaseless transformation of all things would operate in both directions, like an elevator connecting the various storeys of our existence.

  Our bookshop is, in sum, a universe entirely made up of and governed by books—and it seemed quite natural for me to dissolve myself in it completely, to devote my life to the thousands of lives duly stacked on hundreds of shelves.

  I have sometimes been accused of lacking ambition. But might I simply be ailing from a minor magnetic anomaly?

  Here we are, nearly at the end of the prologue.

  It took me two weeks to fill the thirty bags that the garbage collectors pitched into their truck this morning. One thousand eight hundred litres of ultraplastic— thirty years of living. I’ve kept only the strict minimum: a few boxes of souvenirs, some furniture, my personal effects. The bungalow is up for sale and a couple of buyers seem interested. The transaction should be finalized within a week.

  By then I’ll already be somewhere else, in my new apartment in Little Italy, just opposite the statue of old Dante Alighieri.

  The garbagemen have finished their work and are mopping their foreheads, wholly oblivious of the story they’ve just taken part in. I watch the truck effortlessly chew up the bags and swallow whatever was left of my mother.

  The end of an era; I find myself in virgin territory, without signposts. I look around nervously. The Nikolski compass is lying on the floor near the sleeping bag, forever indicating 34° W. I slip its cherry-red strap around my neck.

  The garbage truck drives away. In its wake, the moving van arrives.

  Grampa

  NOAH WAKES UP WITH A START.

  Everything in the trailer is quiet. He hears nothing but the noise of a car travelling down the road. Curled up in her sleeping bag, Sarah is softly breathing in the lower bunk. He rolls over on his side, hoping to get back to sleep, but can no longer find a comfortable position. And yet this narrow bunk seemed so vast to him when he was five years old. Now not a night goes by without him garnering a bump on the skull or a bruised elbow.

  So he struggles in silence, looking for that comfortable position, only to find after a few minutes that he is fully awake. Sighing, he decides to get up, noiselessly climbs down the ladder, pulls on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

  Two Chipewyan Indians are seated at the kitchen table. Their long white hair is braided and their hands are wrinkled. Noah doesn’t know their names. One is his great-great-grandfather. As for the other … not the faintest idea. Very little is known about them, except that they lived and died in northern Manitoba at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Noah greets them silently and goes out.

  The trailer is anchored in the middle of forty million hectares of rye shrouded in a fine mist, which is punctured here and there by a few electricity poles. The sun is still below the horizon and the air smells of wet hay. The rumble of a tractor can be heard in faraway spurts.

  Noah walks barefoot to the edge of the field. A thin thread of water runs at the bottom of the irrigation ditch. The pungent tang of diazinon blends with the scent of clay—familiar fragrances.

  Just as he starts to unbutton his fly, he hears a pickup truck approaching on the road. Hands on hips, he cuts short the procedure. An old red Ford comes into view, rushes past, speeds off toward the west. When it is far enough away, Noah sends a long stream of urine shimmering into the ditch.

  Walking back to the trailer, he reflects on this peculiar display of modesty. He can’t shake the unpleasant feeling that the vehicle was encroaching on their territory, as if Route 627 actually ran through their bathroom.

  On close examination, that image isn’t so very far from the truth.

  For years, when asked where he’d grown up, Noah would sputter some vague response—Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta—and swiftly change the subject, before any more questions were raised about this shadowy taboo.

  Rare indeed were the individuals to whom Noah would eventually disclose the true (though unlikely) story of his mother, Sarah Riel.

  The starting point was the summer of 1968, when she left the reservation where she had been born, near Portage la Prairie. She was sixteen and about to marry a certain Bill, who was from Leduc, Alberta. More often than not, his skin disappeared under a sheen of crude oil, but no one was fooled by the camouflage; the man was white—actually a little pink around the joints—and by marrying him Sarah lost her Indian status, and the right to reside in a reservation.

  The full significance of this administrative nicety loomed up ten months after her wedding, when Sarah bolted from her conjugal abode with a black eye, a garbage bag hastily stuffed with clothes and the firm intention never to look back. She borrowed Bill’s car and trailer and began to roam between the Rockies and Ontario, in step with seasonal employment.

  When the Department of Indian Affairs introduced certain amendments to the Indian Act seventeen years later, Sarah could have claimed her Indian status. But she never did go through the required process; she had gotten so used to the road that enclosing herself in a reservation was unthinkable.

  Anyway, she liked to reiterate, she would never let a bunch of civil servants decide whether or not she was Indian. True, her family tree did include a few French-speaking offshoots, but anywhere beyond three generations back there were only old Indian nomads, forced by treaty to settle down, then confined to countless reservations with exotic names like Sakimay, Peepeekisis, Okanese, Poor Man, Star Blanket, Little Black Bear, Standing Buffalo, Muscowpetung, Day Star or Assiniboine.

  A half-dozen of these elders still haunted the trailer, seated for all eternity at the star-studded Formica-top kitchen table. These serene, speechless ghosts would watch the landscape roll by, and wonder where the hell all the buffalo had gone.

  Noah’s father, for his part, hailed from the distant shores of the Atlantic. He came from an Acadian family of the Beaubassin area, headstrong settlers whom the British had deported to the four corners of the American colonies: Massachusetts, Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania or Virgi
nia.

  Noah enjoyed the contrast between the two branches of his genealogy, the paradox of being the descendant of both the reservations and a deportation. His enthusiasm, however, was based on a misperception, because his ancestors had not in fact been deported. Like many Acadians, they had absconded a short while before the Grand Dérangement to seek refuge in Tête-à-la-Baleine, an isolated village on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, past the reach of any road.

  It was this secluded place that, two centuries later, would witness the birth of Noah’s father, Jonas Doucet.

  He was the seventh offspring of a bountiful family: eight brothers, seven sisters, five cousins, two uncles, an aunt, a pair of grandparents—in total, three generations of Doucets crammed together in a tiny cabin. He had been baptized Jonas, a stroke of luck, as the biblical repertory might have inspired names with a less agreeable ring, like Elijah, Ahab or Ishmael.

  You grew up quickly in that lost corner of the continent, and at fourteen Jonas was already slinking about in the port of Montreal, some eight hundred nautical miles upstream from his native village. He hired onto a wheat freighter bound for Cuba, with the round trip scheduled to take less than three weeks. But Jonas changed ships in the port of Havana and hopped aboard a cargo leaving for Trinidad. A third cargo took him to Cyprus. From Cyprus he crossed the Suez Canal headed for Borneo, and from there he went on to Australia.

  Sailing from one port of call to the next, Jonas rounded the globe a dozen times. As the harbours came and went, he moved up the ranks, from the kitchen to the engine room, then from the engines to the radio.

  After a few years as assistant, he earned his licence and became a full-fledged radio operator.

  Jonas enjoyed this curious profession halfway between electronics and shamanism, where the operator conversed with the upper atmosphere using what, for the uninitiated, was an obscure rhythmic language. Taking on the shaman’s role did, however, involve certain hazards; the old sparks—those who stayed at the switch for too many years—often suffered from an irreversible atrophy of the vocal cords. They could be seen mouldering in portside taverns, looking like jaded griots, incapable of communicating other than by tapping out bursts of Morse on their beer mugs.

  That prospect gave Jonas pause, and he decided to settle down on terra firma.

  He glanced around nervously as he stepped ashore in the port of Montreal, ten years after his departure. During his absence, Quebec had been shaken in quick succession by the death of Premier Maurice Duplessis, the FLQ Crisis, the modernization of Montreal, Expo 67 and the sexual revolution. What he discovered was a far cry from the mariner’s life or the industrial hurly-burly of port cities, and especially from the Quebec of his memories, which added up to fourteen years of squalor in a tiny village on the Lower North Shore.

  As soon as his foot touched the ground, Jonas was overcome by a bizarre malady: he could no longer move about on steady ground. Old sea dogs are familiar with this balance disorder, which comes from being too long exposed to the rolling of the sea. There is no cure for land sickness except to ride it out for a few days, while the inner ear naturally grows accustomed to the situation. Still, Jonas was worried; the days went by and the horizon kept on tilting. When he sat down, the dizziness would knock him off his chair. When he stood up, the nausea would send him puking over the guardrails. When he lay down, he would flounder back and forth across the bed like a channel buoy, and wake up trussed in his sheets.

  After two weeks of this queasy regimen, he resolved to apply a radical remedy that would either save him or slay him: he would cross the continent solo.

  While this exploit may seem trivial, it’s worth recalling that for Jonas the shortest line between Montreal and Vancouver now ran through the Panama Canal. Nevertheless, he hiked his duffel bag onto his shoulder, went out, green-faced and wobbly, and stuck his thumb in the air along Highway 40.

  A week later, Jonas found himself alone on a back road in Manitoba, sweating profusely, stretched out on the gravel, waiting in vain for the nausea to subside. He had vomited the contents of his stomach tenfold and, between two heaves, berated himself for not having put to sea again. To think that at the very moment he could be navigating on the northern Indian Ocean, gently tossed by a monsoon storm, with his forefinger on the telegraph key …

  High in the sky, a covey of interested vultures glided directly overhead. He closed his eyes, ready to let himself die of thirst and dizziness. When he opened them again five minutes later, Sarah was there, proffering a canteen of tepid water.

  It was Grampa’s easy rolling that restored Jonas to life.

  Grampa was a 1966 Bonneville station wagon, wider than it was long, its beige paint peppered with rust spots and its radio refusing to pull in anything but country music on the AM dial. The wheezy motor of this ocean liner, prematurely used up by tens of thousands of kilometres of trailer duty, made it impossible to exceed fifteen knots except when running before the wind. This road-bound vessel, which had never seen anything but flatland and more flatland, somehow knew how to feign to perfection the swell of the sea. Perhaps its shock absorbers had been manufactured near the Atlantic? Perhaps its weary tires had been salvaged from the sides of a tugboat?

  Whatever the case, the simulated rolling rescued Jonas. He breathed more easily, the nausea faded and the giddiness went away, so that within a few hours the dying man, saved from sunstroke at the eleventh hour, metamorphosed into Corto Maltese.

  That evening, Sarah invited Jonas to move into the silver-coloured trailer. It should be said that she’d been rambling for nearly two years, and the loneliness had been at times hard to bear. So Jonas wanted to make it to the other coast? No problem. The crossing could be bartered for a little company.

  The couple was fated to last for only 1,500 kilometres. No more was needed.

  In late August they reached the eastern outskirts of Fort Macleod, Alberta, at the fork in the highway. Route 2 ran north, in the direction of Calgary. Route 3 climbed toward a bluish vanishing point in the Rockies. Sarah pulled Grampa over on the shoulder of the road and summed up the situation:

  “The Pacific is that way, straight ahead.”

  Jonas hiked his bag onto his shoulder once again, took a deep breath, vaulted over the Rockies, changed river basins and plunged into Vancouver headfirst, amid the torrential rains that then enveloped the Pacific Ocean.

  Noah made his entrance nine months later.

  Legend has it that he drew his first breath in Manitoba, somewhere between Boissevain and Whitewater, near the railroad tracks, in a spot that, according to the road maps, is located at the exact geographic centre of Canada. The truth is that it was the exact centre of nothing at all: an immense forest of spruce stretched to the east, blackish peat bogs to the north. To the south, the Turtle Mountains, and to the west, a plain that appeared to end in China.

  One thing was certain—the nearest ocean was two thousand kilometres away.

  However unlikely this may seem, Noah learned to read from road maps.

  Sarah had appointed him chief navigator, a job that involved keeping an eye on the cardinal points, the magnetic north and, incidentally, the contents of the glove compartment. He therefore spent the long prairie hours exploring that tight space smelling of dust and overheated plastic. Besides small change, unpaid traffic tickets and cookie crumbs, it contained dozens of road maps: Ontario, the Prairies, the Yukon, North Dakota, Montana, the West Coast and Alaska. Grampa’s glove compartment enclosed the entire known universe, carefully folded and turned in on itself.

  Over the years the maps had become almost transparent, riddled with little gaps along the seams. By dint of deciphering this paper topography, Noah came to understand the alphabet, then words, sentences, paragraphs. Road Information, Federal Picnic Grounds and Weather Broadcast were the first words he was able to read. Sarah soon added the names of some Indian reservations—such as Opaskwayak, Peguis or Keeseekoowenin—while pointing out which of his great-great-uncles or second cousins
lived there. Strangely, she never suggested they go visit their invisible kin. Noah did not press the point. His family tree was, like everything else, a transient thing that receded with the landscape.

  The day came when the maps were no longer enough to slake Noah’s curiosity, and he turned to the only tome in the family library: a battered book forgotten by Jonas when he had left in haste.

  The book had followed an unimaginable trajectory. After several decades on the shelves of the library of the University of Liverpool, it had been stolen by a student, been passed from hand to hand, escaped two fires and then, left to its own devices, returned to the wild. It had crossed thousands of kilometres in various bags, travelled amid the cargo in damp crates, been thrown overboard but continued on its way in the acidic belly of a whale, before being spat out and retrieved by an illiterate deep-sea diver. Jonas Doucet finally won it in a poker game in a Tel Aviv bar one intemperate night.

  Its pages were brittle, spotted with countless small rust-coloured specks, and if you buried your nose in it you could detect vegetation patiently endeavouring to colonize the depths of the paper. Not only was this Noah’s one book, but it was also one of a kind, bearing a host of distinctive signs. In the middle, for instance, there was a large, brownish bloodstain. Between a fossilized mosquito had made its home, a tiny stowaway flattened by surprise. And scribbled in the margin was the mysterious word Rokovoko.