Nikolski

by Nicolas Dickner

  Soon afterwards, Joyce’s uncles boarded up the doors and windows with old planks of wood.

  The house survived Lyzandre Doucet by only a few weeks. Its aging skeleton, afflicted by terminal osteoporosis, leaned farther and farther seaward. It seemed to just barely hang on to the shoreline. The great September tides gave the coup de grâce to its fragile footing, and it went adrift one Saturday morning. It floated for a while, and then the waves tore it apart and scattered the debris.

  Uncle Jonas’s postcards, misshapen and covered with purplish jellyfish, were all that came back with the tide.

  Joyce heard about the wreckage only three months later. The whole village was settling the bets that had been collecting for decades at the old house’s expense, but by then Lyzandre’s granddaughter was already in Sept-Îles, completely taken up with her arrival at high school.

  She had long looked forward to this chance to be rid of her uncles, aunts and cousins, and had not taken her father’s benevolence into account. One phone call had been enough for him to arrange her accommodations, so that, stepping out from a little-known corner of her kinfolk, an uncle and aunt were there, waiting for Joyce on the pier at Havre-St-Pierre.

  The intrusion of these distant relations was like a bolt from the blue. Was this family of hers inexhaustible? Joyce wondered, raising her arms up to the sky. Would she have to escape to Vladivostok in order to elude the clutches of her family tree?

  Leaning over the handrail of the Nordik Express, she scanned the small crowd huddled in the pouring rain. She had never met these two new personae and did not have so much as a photograph to identify them. She finally spotted a stout individual wrapped in a green poncho, unfazed by the storm and displaying a wilted cardboard sign where one could make out the word Joice. Beside him, a small lady in a yellow raincoat was holding in one hand her umbrella and in the other a Tupperware container full of maple fudge.

  Joyce estimated that she could easily slip by them and disappear without being noticed. She looked at the sky. The remnants of Hurricane Paloma, which had travelled up from the Bahamas, had just reached the north coast of the St. Lawrence. The rain and squalls would last for another two days.

  “Bad weather for running away,” Joyce reasoned as she went down the gangway.

  They tossed Grandfather Doucet’s old blue duffel into the back of the orange Suburban and set off toward Sept-Îles.

  As she chewed on a piece of maple fudge, Joyce gave perfunctory answers to her new aunt’s questions. (Yes, she’d had a good trip. Yes, she was eager to begin high school. Yes, her father was fine, and by the way sent his regards.)

  What she was really thinking about, however, was just one thing: Route 138. Hypnotized, she looked at the headlights reflecting on the wet asphalt. At last she was leaving her father’s nautical charts and journeying into an unmapped world, teeming no doubt with unknown perils, but where every road she might wish to take lay open to her. Later she would understand that this liberty was in fact limited to the 138, but for now she watched with fascination as the little villages slipped past: Rivière-à-la-Chaloupe, Rivière-aux-Graines, Manitou, Rivière-Pigou, Matamec and the Maliotenam reservation.

  If she had been the one holding the wheel of the orange Suburban, she would have continued on to Tadoussac, Pointe-au-Pic, Quebec, all the way to Montreal, where the 138 turned into Sherbrooke Street and plunged into the mysteries of the city’s core.

  But it was her uncle’s sweaty hands that held the steering wheel, so they stopped in Sept-Îles.

  Five years passed.

  Fifty thousand school days.

  Two million hours of Cramer’s Rule, of compound-complex sentences with appositive subordinate clauses, of the Treaty of Utrecht, of the atomic mass of potassium nitrate, of anticlinal curves, of constant acceleration in a vacuum, of gross domestic products.

  Resolutely locked inside her deep-sea diver’s suit, Joyce waited for the stopover to be over.

  When she turned seventeen, she was told she must choose the trade she would ply for the rest of her days. This, at any rate, was the opinion of her high school career counsellor, Mr. Barrier. As earnest as a recruiting officer, he received the students one after another in his beige office. Height, weight, physical condition, psychological profile, attitudes, aptitudes—the students trooped in and out, the counsellor counselled.

  Joyce’s case was tricky. For all her limited social skills, her rejection of authority and her impertinence, she still managed to chalk up impeccable grades in every subject. And this excellence prevented her from being shunted aside. Mr. Barrier questioned her testily. What contribution did she think she could make to society? Sooner or later, you had to choose!

  Joyce responded with an ambiguous pout. Her five years in Sept-Îles had not supplied her with any certainties. She was aware of only two passions: mathematics and cutting class. Now, it did not take a career counsellor to realize that the prospects held out by these two disciplines were less than promising. What could be in store for a homeless mathematician or a landless surveyor?

  Weary of this tedious tête-à-tête, Joyce finally announced that she would like to be a cartographer. Mr. Barrier raised an astonished eyebrow but did not hazard any comments. A choice was a choice, and he would at last be able to close Joyce Kenty’s troublesome employment file.

  The recess bell rang just as she was leaving Mr. Barrier’s office. Ten minutes of freedom before Mr. Turbing’s computer science course. Joyce decided to get a breath of air.

  It was a misty Thursday morning with no sky or horizon. Every step she took made a sucking noise on the ground, and an imperceptible breeze carried the scent of the sea up to the high school. Joyce walked across the yard to survey the outside world through the mesh in the chain-link fence. She looked at her watch. Only six minutes of freedom left.

  She sighed.

  In her view, Mr. Turbing’s classes were part of a vast obscurantist conspiracy. Under his sway, the creative potential of the computer lab was reduced to that of an assembly line. His course was entirely based on Logo, a computer language that involved moving a metaphorical turtle across the monitor of a Commodore 64.

  Joyce despised Logo, assembly lines and the authoritarian incompetence of Mr. Turbing.

  When the bell signalled the end of recess, Joyce scrambled up the Frost fence, jumped down on the other side and headed off, while three youths sharing a spliff behind the garbage bin looked on indifferently.

  Of course, it would have been simpler to leave by the main door, but why bother to swim against the tide if you’re not going to do it in style?

  Most of the truckers coming through Sept-Îles refuelled with diesel and caffeine at a restaurant called Chez Clément on Laure Boulevard.

  Laure Boulevard was actually Route 138, and all traffic on the Lower North Shore necessarily transited through there. At its western end there was nothing special about the boulevard, but if you came in from the east, after two hundred kilometres of peat bog and scattered spruce, there was always something dazzling about the string of Dunkin Donuts, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s and the like. Overwhelmed by the glitter, motorists would not even notice Chez Clément. For the truckers, on the other hand, this was a vital oasis, one they looked forward to for hundreds of kilometres.

  That morning, there were only two trucks in the huge parking lot. Joyce pushed open the restaurant door and savoured the unique atmosphere of the place: imitation wood counters, orange vinyl seats, plastic ferns, a bar section with muted lighting, and the local radio station providing background music. Two veteran truckers sat at the counter swapping the morning’s gossip. Accustomed to talking over the VHF radio, they seemed careful not to interrupt each other, and inserted a brief silence between each of their replies.

  Joyce installed herself within earshot of the truckers (something about a big Chrysler wedged into a guardrail) as Francine, with a knowing smile, brought her her usual black coffee and morning newspaper.

  Joyce g
ave her a wink and took a sip of coffee.

  The main front-page story was the dismantling of the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary. No photograph accompanied the article, so Joyce, unaided, had to picture thousands of GDR residents jostling at the border. There was also a piece about a pileup on Highway 40, and another about John Turner’s resignation.

  A few pages on, there was a report on the latest reduction of cod quotas. Joyce’s uncles would likely be fuming for weeks. She felt a pang of joy at the thought of not having to cook for them anymore.

  Then, squeezed between two ads for long-distance services at the bottom, an item suddenly caught her attention:

  FBI ARRESTS TOP-RANKING PIRATE

  Chicago—After months of investigation, the FBI has apprehended the leader of a major pirate gang.

  The FBI yesterday arrested Leslie Lynn Doucette, a 35-year-old woman who headed the largest ring of pirates ever to be dismantled in the United States.

  Doucette, who also went by the alias Kyrie, is accused of pirating computer voice mail for the purpose of planting “information lines” in the messages. It is believed these information lines allowed over 150 accomplices to exchange credit card numbers and long-distance calling card numbers. The FBI seized several hundred card numbers as well as the authorization codes of numerous corporate telephone systems. The total worth of this fraud scheme is estimated at 1.5 million USD. Doucette, a Canadian citizen, went into hiding in the U.S. in 1987 after being sentenced for similar offences perpetrated on Canadian soil. She had been living in Chicago for a number of years with her two children.

  The cup of coffee stayed suspended in front of Joyce’s mouth. Around her, the universe spun in slow motion. Sounds came to her in strangely distorted fragments. Time had stopped. Nothing else in the world mattered but the forty-line epiphany at the bottom.

  Joyce finally came around and looked at her watch. Time was once again on the march, and in fact seemed to have sped up considerably. The two truckers paid for their coffee, dropped their tip money on the imitation wood with a clatter and went out to continue their runs, one to Havre-St-Pierre and the other to Montreal.

  Joyce carefully tore out the news item, slipped it into her shirt pocket and made her way back to the high school.

  It is 5:40 a.m. and still dark when Joyce arrives at Clément’s restaurant the next day.

  The air is saturated with various oils—unleaded, diesel, bacon grease—and the gas pumps seem to vibrate under the fluorescent lights. In the west, the last stars have gone out.

  A dozen trucks are parked in the half-light, engines idling, running lights turned on low. A tranquil scene. Some drivers are still asleep in their cabs, others are drinking their first cup of coffee at the restaurant counter. One of them has lifted the hood of his truck and is checking the oil, a flashlight clenched between his teeth.

  Without hesitating, Joyce walks toward the truck. When the driver sees her approaching, he turns the beam of his flashlight on her face.

  “What do you want?” he growls.

  Not exactly encouraging. Joyce has prudently taken a few steps back and, for a moment, considers turning around, going back to her bed—maybe the sheets are still warm—and dropping the whole thing.

  She is about to beat a retreat when a detail brings her up short: at a certain angle, the trucker’s head—gaunt face, goatee, severely receding hairline—reminds her of someone. But who? Her memories flip by like a library card catalogue. Twentieth century. Political figure. Russia. Revolution. Goatee.

  With unreal precision, Joyce remembers in a flash where she saw this face for the first time: on one of Uncle Jonas’s postcards!

  The card had been pinned up for years in the Doucets’ kitchen, right beside the King Cole calendar. It had been posted from the U.S.S.R. in November 1964, but little else was known about it, for the only legible words were those of the postmark: — Leningrad—12 XI1964. Each time she looked at this card, Joyce imagined her uncle Jonas in the middle of a snowstorm, his beard coated with frost, asking a bewildered longshoreman where the nearest mailbox might be.

  On the back of the card was a scarlet stamp of Vladimir Lenin, pasted there like a tiny wanted poster offering a bounty of 16 kopecks for the head of the ferocious Bolshevik.

  Struck dumb, Joyce stares at the trucker’s severe features. There can be no mistake: here is Vladimir Lenin, lost in the parking lot of a truck stop in Sept-Îles at a quarter to six in the morning.

  Joyce smiles at the anachronism. Then she gets serious again. If Uncle Jonas had the guts to haunt the icy docks of Leningrad when he was fourteen, who can prevent Joyce—no less a Doucet than he was—from doing as much?

  She takes a deep breath and hazards a step in Vladimir Lenin’s direction.

  “I’m going to Montreal. Can you give me a ride?”

  Providence

  JOYCE SITS SURROUNDED by marine mammal identification handbooks, rolled-up posters and piles of travel brochures. The young woman behind the steering wheel manoeuvres skilfully through the rush-hour traffic, while her co-pilot, fumbling with a map of Montreal from 1979, carps about the one-way streets.

  The couple picked Joyce up seven hours earlier, aboard the ferry from Tadoussac. A stroke of luck, as they just happened to be on their way to Montreal to give a series of lectures on the whales of the estuary. The woman drove unhurriedly, fingers interlaced behind her head, steering with her knees, while her partner explained to Joyce the intricate breathing cycle of the great sperm whale.

  In Quebec City, they insisted on treating Joyce to lunch. She then dozed off amid the stacks of flyers, and awoke when they were already in the heart of Montreal.

  “End of the line!” the woman announces cheerfully. “Where would you like us to drop you off?”

  “Anywhere is fine,” Joyce answers with a shrug of her shoulders.

  The woman smiles at her in the rear-view mirror, cuts sharply across the right lane and stops the old blue Hyundai next to a Metro station. Joyce collects her bag and, in the time it takes to slam the door shut, finds herself alone in Babylon.

  She rubs her eyes and notes the name of the Metro station: Jean-Talon. It means nothing to her.

  Where to begin? She looks around, spots a telephone booth. She pushes the door open and hefts the phone directory. A vague sense of anxiety washes over her. Can she have underestimated the population of Montreal? Her fingers speedily flip through the pages: Dombrowski, Dompierre, Donati … Doucet. No trace of her mother’s name, not even a Doucet F.

  The Montreal phone book is as deserted as the Tête-à-la-Baleine cemetery.

  Joyce staggers out of the phone booth, her stomach in knots. Her reasons for running away no longer seem as clear as they did this morning. The sun is going down gradually at the far end of the boulevard. Soon it will be night, and she feels all at once very, very much alone.

  She adjusts her bag on her shoulder and starts walking in no particular direction.

  After two blocks she ends up at the Jean-Talon market. The air is cloying and laden with essences and odours, with wafts of alcohol, pollen, putrefaction and engine oil.

  Joyce stops dead in her tracks. Never in her life has she seen so much garbage at once.

  She is unable to turn her eyes away from the boxes of fruit compacted and tied up in juicy cubes, a mishmash of peels and cardboard. She contemplates the multicoloured layers of leaf stalks, leaves, vegetable cores, mangoes, grapes and pineapples, interspersed with fragmentary phrases: Orange Florida Louisiana Nashville Pineapple Yams Mexico Avocado Manzanas Juicy Best of California Farm Fresh Product Category No. 1 Product of USA.

  The accumulation of trash reaches its peak at the west end of the market. A garbage truck is parked there and two garbagemen are throwing cratefuls of flowers into the monster’s mouth. From time to time, a gigantic steel jaw descends, chews up the mass of leaves and cardboard and unceremoniously gulps it down.

  Joyce stares at the truck, completely spellbound by all this wa
ste. She has never experienced such a sense of abundance.

  Suddenly, her nose starts to twitch. She looks down and sees a Styrofoam bin stained with pink spots. She fans away a swarm of flies, squats down, holds up the bin and sniffs. Fish blood. The smell is so familiar to Joyce that she feels tears welling up in her eyes.

  She pulls herself together and looks around. On the nearest storefront a huge salmon is leaping skyward, circled by the name of the business in red neon: Poissonnerie Shanahan.

  She feels strangely relieved.

  The door opens onto a jumble of antennae and pincers—Miscou lobster, $10.99/lb. Joyce admires the tank for a moment, then swings around while taking in the details: cod livers in oil, Norwegian bacalao, pickled periwinkles, garlic snails, freeze-dried shrimp, Bavarian-style marinated herring, sea horses in Cajun sauce. And under lock and key in a custom-built cabinet, several microscopic jars of bright orange caviar, as costly as uranium 237.

  In the glass display counter, dozens of creatures are laid out on a bed of crushed ice. Joyce has seen most of these fish only in her father’s reference books: tuna, snappers, goatfish, mullets, groupers, mussels, crabs, giant scallops and miniature hammerhead sharks.

  Behind the counter two men are conversing in Spanish. The taller man steps up, wiping his hands. He looks Joyce up and down.

  “Have you come about the job?” he asks with a Cuban accent.

  “The job?”

  “Do you have a résumé? No? No résumé? No importa. Any experience in a fish shop, at least?”