Nikolski

by Nicolas Dickner

  “A little,” she says with some hesitation, thrown off by the turn of events.

  “A little? What do you mean, a little? You’ve sorted sardine cans at the IGA?”

  Joyce scowls. No one gets away with insulting the great-great-granddaughter of Herménégilde Doucette! She is about to fling a Miscou lobster at his face and clear out when the second man puts down his cloth and walks up to her, hands on hips.

  A silence worthy of a Sergio Leone film settles on the fish store.

  With a commanding gesture, he has Joyce come around to the other side of the counter, pulls out a peculiar orange fish, lays it on the cutting board and draws a knife out of its sheath.

  “Can you fillet this?”

  Joyce has trouble believing that ten minutes after arriving in Montreal, here she is with her hands on a fish, hemmed in between two inquisitorial Latinos. She sighs, picks up the knife and tests the blade with her thumb. After that, everything happens very quickly. She slices off the head of the goatfish, amputates its pectoral and dorsal fins, makes a precise incision along its back, locates the spine with the tip of the knife and, as deftly as a samurai, cuts the fish open from end to end. The blade slides back and forth along the vertebrae. Joyce extracts the skeleton, a slimy jade jewel which she nonchalantly chucks into the garbage can.

  Fifteen seconds by the clock.

  The two men inspect the fillets, nodding their heads in approval.

  “¡Vale! Can you start tomorrow morning?”

  Joyce leaves the Poissonnerie Shanahan with instructions to come back the next day at nine a.m. sharp. She crosses the street and, when she is certain no one is watching her, takes a whiff of the blood smell still clinging to the palm of her hand. With her eyes closed she can almost believe she is back in her father’s kitchen in Tête-à-la-Baleine.

  A streak of blue and white jolts her out of her reverie.

  A police car glides ahead of her with the quiet slowness of a shark. The driver turns his head in her direction, sunglasses covering his selachian gaze. A shiver travels through Joyce from her coccyx to the nape of her neck.

  The car drives off going south. Joyce lets out a sigh of relief and looks at her watch, which tells her it is getting late. A red sign in the glass door of an old building attracts her attention. For Rent—furnish 11/2—heeting and electristy incl—now vacant see janitor in basemint.

  She ventures down to the basemint, and wavers between the furnace room and an unmarked door. She knocks on both. The janitor, yawning, opens the unmarked door. A Kraft Dinner aroma drifts out from the apartment.

  “I’m interested in the one-and-a-half,” Joyce tells him.

  The janitor looks straight at her without speaking, and scratches the rim of his belly button. He leans against the door jamb, revealing nearly all of his tiny apartment: floor strewn with dirty clothes, piles of pizza boxes, closet filled with three rusted sinks, messy toolbox. And a TV set playing an old episode of Miami Vice at maximum volume.

  “Do you have a job?” he finally mumbles, noisily raking his fingers over his three-day beard.

  “At the Poissonnerie Shanahan, right across the street.”

  He sniffs, grabs a heavy set of keys and, without a word, starts to climb the stairs ahead of Joyce.

  They go up to the third floor and stop in front of apartment 34. The door is scarred with numerous gouges from a crowbar. The janitor peevishly sifts through his set of keys. He quickly loses patience and begins to try the keys one at a time. The lock finally responds, with a metallic click and the creaking of wood.

  The inside looks exactly like the outside: half the cupboard handles have gone missing, a light bulb hangs out of its socket with its optic nerves exposed, some sickly lotuses are flowering around the window, the bathroom is cramped, the refrigerator was manufactured at about the same time as the first Apollo rockets, the walls are pocked with cigarette burns and, as for the carpet, its uncertain colour tends toward Soviet green.

  Rounding off the picture is a suffocating stench, a blend of stale air, mould and rug disinfectant.

  Joyce examines the room with a blissful smile, dazzled by the mere prospect of having her own little Providence Island.

  “I’ll take it,” she stammers, and sets Grandfather Lyzandre’s duffel bag down on the floor.

  The janitor utters a growl—One growl for yes, two growls for no, Joyce concludes—and goes downstairs to get a blank lease form.

  Now alone, she pulls out of her pocket the newspaper clipping about Leslie Lynn Doucette, smoothes it out on her thigh, and pins it to the wall with a rusty thumbtack that she has found lying around.

  Political Refugees Get Priority

  STE-CATHERINE STREET. Seated at an imitation marble table covered with puddles of drying coffee, Noah has just finished his first letter to Sarah. He pushes aside the clutter of glasses, unfolds his road map of Manitoba and studies the landscape with his pen in his mouth.

  Sarah is in the south of the province, somewhere in this maze of villages, of roads laid out in a grid, of rivers that run in a straight line for hundreds of kilometres because nothing gets in their way. All the areas of the map look alike. Yet she can’t be everywhere! Where should he send his letter? Manitou, Grande-Clairière, Baldur? After a series of sketchy calculations, Noah addresses it to General Delivery in Ninga.

  At the next table, a vagrant wearing a Maple Leafs hockey tuque is talking to himself. This no longer surprises Noah, who has gotten the impression that all Montrealers talk to themselves. He licks the flap of the envelope, folds it down carefully and wipes a bead of saliva off the paper.

  The next part is the most difficult: the return address.

  Noah spreads the Journal de Montréal over the road map, opens it to the “Apartments for Rent” section and peruses the columns of cryptic abbreviations and unknown neighbourhoods. He came into town less than forty-eight hours ago and knows nothing about the local geography. Mile End, Hochelaga, Longueuil—where should he live? He finally gives up and, with his eyes shut, points arbitrarily.

  When he opens his eyes his finger has landed in the middle of an intriguing ad:

  TO SHARE 4½ PETITE ITALIE NON-SMOKER

  NO PETS FREE IMMEDIATELY.

  POLITICAL REFUGEES GET PRIORITY.

  CALL POISSONNERIE SHANAHAN ASK FOR MAELO.

  At the next table the monologue grows more intense, with the guy pointing a threatening index finger at an imaginary listener. Noah reads the ad over again twice and decides this is the ideal offer. He fishes a handful of change from the bottom of his pocket and goes out in search of a telephone booth.

  After three rings, a young girl answers. She speaks with an edgy voice and a curious accent. Noah asks for Maelo, who comes to the phone.

  “I’m calling about the four-and-a-half to share. Is it still available?”

  “It’s still available,” Maelo affirms. “You know I give priority to political refugees?”

  Stammering, Noah says, “I come from Alberta.”

  “Okay,” Maelo answers, apparently satisfied. “So, how about we meet at five-thirty?”

  Starry ray, rainbow smelt, sturgeon, herring, sardine, sea trout, eel, cod, hake, threebearded rockling, John Dory, mullet, red goatfish, thicklip grey mullet, Atlantic bonito, swordfish, ocean perch, Norway red-fish, American plaice, lumpsucker, dab, rock sole, Atlantic saury—the apartment is teeming with fish. They swim on every wall, in the form of posters, postcards and polychrome rubber scale models.

  The place is clean and tidy, but Noah notices nothing except the fish. Has he stepped into the abode of some sort of fish fiend?

  “This is the first time in ten years the room is unoccupied,” Maelo explains. “I’ve always lived with a dozen cousins. They showed up at the rate of one a month. Every night we had to figure out how to make room for everyone. We would sleep on the couch, on the floor, under the table. We would take turns sleeping.”

  Noah’s eyes are wide open. You can have enough cousins to fi
ll an entire apartment like this one?

  “But where did they come from?”

  “From San Pedro de Macorís, in the Dominican Republic. My whole family is from there. Five generations of Guzmáns in an unbroken line. My greatgrandfather founded the city, and today all my cousins are leaving for New York or Montreal.”

  “They don’t like San Pedro?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that, they adore San Pedro. But you can earn a better living here. Now my grandmother Úrsula has been left all alone in the family house. Ninety-three years old, as hard-headed as a tortoise. She’s never travelled more than five kilometres from the sea. Well, this would be your room. It’s not very big, but …”

  Noah steps gingerly into the room. Not very big? This one room alone contains as much living space as all of the old silver trailer. He feels like a cosmonaut who has gone out for a walk around his Soyuz and discovers the void in every direction: millions of stars, infinite spaces, and pangs of nausea. He holds onto the door jamb.

  “So tell me, why have you come to Montreal?”

  “I’m here to study archaeology,” Noah gasps, wiping the sweat from his neck.

  “Archaeology? Cool! I’m going to have an intellectual for a roommate! Listen, if you want the room, it’s yours. Ordinarily, I would ask 170 not including electricity, but in your case 160 will be fine.”

  “When can I move in?”

  “Right away. Do you have a lot to move?”

  “Everything is in here,” Noah answers, patting the side of his backpack.

  Maelo looks at the pack and smiles.

  “We’re dealing with a genuine refugee! I’ll lend you some sheets.”

  The mattress is lumpy, the pillow completely flat, and the quilt is studded with starfish, but none of it should prevent a good night’s sleep. As soon as the bed has been made, the apartment-sharing arrangement is finalized with the payment of the first month’s rent, an outlay that reduces Noah’s wealth to the square root of zero.

  Here is a crucial question: How will Noah manage to fall asleep in such a huge space?

  Lying amid the starfish, he can hear the air throb around his bed and the tiniest sound wave bounce and amplify on the walls. He has never had a space that belonged to him alone—except the pygmy-size bunk bed in the silvery trailer—and he doubts that he will be able to fill up these thirty cubic metres of outer space with his meagre assets: three road maps, some clothing, a pad of letter paper and an old book with no cover.

  In sum, he feels unworthy of occupying this place, as if he were afraid of wasting something. But what exactly would he be wasting? Space? Cubic centimetres? Emptiness?

  Can emptiness be wasted?

  Scale 1:1

  THE NORTHERN BLUEFIN TUNA (Thunnus thynnus) is an astonishing animal.

  A good-sized female can lay as many as twenty-five million eggs at a time. This profusion testifies to the voraciousness of the tuna’s predators. Each microscopic larva has no more than one chance in forty million of reaching the adult stage, eight years hence. The survivors grow into superb creatures—a fifteen-year-old tuna can easily measure three metres in length and weigh in at three hundred kilos. Some individuals, though rare, can weigh up to seven hundred kilos. Such specimens are called, rather perceptively, Giants.

  Tunas are gregarious and tend to gather according to size: the smaller they are, the more densely populated their schools will be. Conversely, the Giants often swim alone. They are wonderful swimmers, and from one season to the next they migrate over unimaginable distances. They spend the summer beneath the Arctic Circle, and in the winter take refuge in the tropics, travelling from one hemisphere to the other as easily as a city-dweller changes neighbourhoods. Some specimens tagged in the Bahamas have later been sighted in Norway and Uruguay.

  To produce a kilo of protein, a bluefin tuna must swallow 8 kilos of herring, herring that have previously consumed 70 kilos of miniature shrimp, which in turn have ingested some 200 kilos of phytoplankton. Thus, beyond outward appearances, 2.5 kilos of tuna lying on crushed ice in a fish store represents something like a half-ton of plankton—a terrifying equation that would drive away the customers if it were revealed to them by mistake.

  “The golden rule of fish stores,” Maelo explains, “is never mention the food chain to the customers. This isn’t Japan.”

  Because, as everyone knows, the Japanese have strong stomachs and steely eyes, and they buy their tuna at auctions held right on the blood-soaked wharves. The clientele of the Poissonnerie Shanahan is, shall we say, more delicate, being by and large made up of suburbanites from Laval-des-Rapides, Chomedey or Duvernay. But one should not be fooled by the innocuous demeanour of these predators. According to some estimates, the bluefin tuna population in the Atlantic has declined by 87 per cent since 1970, a rate that matches quite closely the expansion of the suburbs over the same period.

  “It can thus be deduced,” Maelo concludes, “that suburban development is very much in step with the movement of the tuna shoals.”

  He slices a thin strip of raw tuna, slides it into his mouth and chews it with an ambivalent expression on his face. He seems torn between his respectful admiration for the Giants, and the delicate taste of their flesh—an insoluble dilemma. He shakes his head and puts down the knife. The sashimi lesson is over.

  Fifteen-minute break. Joyce pours herself a cup of black, too-sweet Dominican coffee, and goes to sit in the back doorway with her feet propped up on an empty box of mussels. A sip of coffee and a thin smile. She watches the already familiar bustle of the Jean-Talon market. What seemed larger than life a few days earlier has now taken on familiar proportions, a scale of 1:1.

  It has been seven days since she ran away, and Joyce is becoming accustomed to her new routine. She shows up at work exactly on time, listens dutifully to Maelo’s biology lessons, smiles at the fussiest customers and makes progress with her Spanish. Her aim is to become a model employee, to blend in with the great mass of sardines in the shoal, to dissolve into the ecosystem.

  The golden rule of running away: Pay attention to your camouflage.

  In this regard, Joyce could take some pages out of her own mother’s book. She has looked up all the possible variations of her name in the phone directory and harassed a half-dozen telephone operators, all to no avail. Did she assume a new identity and start a new life with a suburbanite? Has she gone into exile in the Bahamas? Is she still alive, even? A total mystery.

  Joyce has the feeling that the last ties with her buccaneering forebears are slowly unravelling. She hangs on to the newspaper clipping about Leslie Lynn Doucette as the ultimate proof that the family vocation has not died out. And yet she knows nothing about this distant cousin. She has no idea of her plans, her buccaneering techniques, her favourite targets, her modus operandi and, especially, the fatal error that allowed the FBI to nab her.

  Joyce will have to learn everything on her own. Piracy is a self-taught discipline.

  Maelo appears in the doorway and announces that there will be an exciting lesson on the anatomy of the octopus (Octopus vulgaris). Joyce finishes her coffee and stands up.

  “So tell me, Maelo, if I’m not mistaken, you come from the Dominican Republic, right?”

  “You’re not mistaken.”

  “And Miguel and Enrique, they’re from Cuba, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So why doesn’t your fish store have a Spanish name?”

  “Because of the Irish immigrants who used to work in the Miron quarry at the start of the century. Every Sunday afternoon, they would play lacrosse right on this spot. They called it the Shanahan Athletic Club. Over the years, the lacrosse field became a bus station and then the Jean-Talon market. All that’s left now is Shanahan Street. You see down there at the other end of the market? That’s where the fish store used to be.”

  “And where have the Irish gone?”

  “I have no idea. But the Miron quarry has been turned into a garbage dump.”

  S
an Pedro de Macorís

  THERE ARE TWO SAN PEDRO DE MACORISES.

  The first is located on the southeast coast of the Dominican Republic, at 18 degrees north, 69 degrees east. The second occupies the eastern side of St-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal, in a perimeter bounded to the west by Christophe-Colomb, to the north by an imaginary line running through the de Castelnau Metro station, and to the south by the Colmado Real grocery store, on St-Zotique Street.

  Maelo was the founding citizen of this second San Pedro. He arrived alone in the middle of winter in 1976 and learned everything the hard way: the cold, the French language, the geography of Montreal, the bureaucracy, Radio-Canada, pâté chinois, unemployment and Guy Lafleur. He found this mixture hard to stomach. He soon considered calling the whole thing off and going back to his hometown, but while he was rolling some coins he was saving to buy his return ticket, a cousin, the first of many, called to announce that he had arrived at Mirabel airport.

  Maelo’s hopes were renewed. Reinforcements were on the way!

  He had started out as a shy immigrant and became a colonizer. The bonds between San Pedro de Macorís and Montreal grew stronger, woven as they were out of enthusiastic letters, chaotic telephone calls, and Western Union money transfers. Family members began to pour in. Cousins invaded the airport, euphoric and shivering. Maelo played the role of the seasoned veteran. He housed the newcomers, found them employment, gave them food and drink and then released them into the wilds. And without intending to, he became the gravitational centre of this new community. He organized fiestas and cenas, meetings, lunches, get-togethers in cafés. And when there was nothing on the agenda, people went to lounge at his house as if it were the public square of some invisible city.

  These gatherings culminated on the night of the Dominican presidential elections of 1986, when Maelo announced the holding of a great jututo—a meeting that involved the whole family protesting against the candidacy of Joaquín Balaguer, drinking rum and then quarrelling over the future of the republic.