Dazzle Patterns

by Dazzle Patterns (v5. 0) (epub)

  The soldier called up a husband and wife, the woman with the baby. Her husband pulled their papers from his inside jacket pocket and the soldier examined them, looking up intermittently. He asked questions, Where did you arrive in Canada from? What are you doing for work? The husband answered in slow English. At one point the wife talked to him in the Low German of Russian Mennonites and the man frowned at her and shook his head.

  “English only here, please,” the soldier said, pushing a paper towards the man, and tapping at a place on the form. “You sign here.”

  The man leaned towards him, concentrating hard. Then the soldier handed him a card.

  “Keep this with you at all times. And report to us immediately if there is any change in your situation. You understand?”

  The farmer nodded.

  It was noon by the time the soldier called Fred’s name. He looked at the clock on the wall. “Oh, time for lunch,” he said.

  Fred imagined the plump sandwiches, perhaps a piece of cake, carefully wrapped, in the lunchbox the man drew from under his desk. “Come back in an hour,” he said.

  Fred sat on a stone bench, leaning back against the building, letting the sun warm his face. Off in a distant hedge a bird sang. When he was a boy, before he began his apprenticeship that allowed no idle time, he used to search out birds in the forest, mimicking their songs to draw them close. Perhaps he would ask Arthur Barnstead to show him some of the local birds.

  “WHEN DID YOU come to Canada?” the soldier said, taking in Fred’s good jacket and pants. Fred had worn his best clothes, hoping to make a respectable impression.

  “In 1902. I was fifteen.”

  “Just answer the questions asked, sir,” the soldier said. “And your work now?”

  “I work as a glassmaker at Acadia Glass.”

  “You look like you’re doing well.” The soldier glanced again at Fred’s jacket. “How much are you paid there?”

  “Seventeen dollars a month,” Fred said.

  “No other sources of income?”

  Fred hesitated. He wasn’t sure whether he should mention the design competition. He had a feeling that this man would not welcome information that was not easily categorized. Besides, Fred hadn’t actually been paid yet. “No.”

  The soldier flicked Fred’s papers and leaned back. “Do you know that these papers are not up-to-date?”

  They were the papers he had had since he and his parents had arrived. They had been updated in Hamilton, when they became naturalized Canadian citizens.

  “I don’t understand,” Fred said.

  “You are no longer a Canadian citizen.”

  Fred felt blood pulsing under his collar.

  “You should have received notice of revocation of citizenship last year.”

  Fred searched his mind, trying to breathe normally. “I was working in Hamilton. Perhaps it got sent there after I moved.”

  “Why did you leave Hamilton?”

  Fred’s throat closed. Lena had left and his parents had died. The factory had become more and more difficult to work in, with all the Germans demoted. He needed to find somewhere to start over. “They needed a glass-blower who could make scientific equipment. It was a good job.”

  “And it was closer to the war.”

  “Closer to the war?” Fred said.

  “Halifax is a very important port to the war effort.”

  “I am a glassmaker. I came here for the job.” Fred said.

  The soldier was leaning over his paperwork, making notes. He sat up and looked at Fred coldly. “Then that is exactly what you should do, Mr. Bacher. Anything else will put you under suspicion.” He said the last word with emphasis and pushed the papers towards Fred. “Sign here.”

  By the time he walked back down into the city, the day was emptying itself into a long dusk. In gardens backing onto lanes, children, overtired from the sun-shot day, played, their laughter on the edge of tears.

  36

  JANE TWIRLED A PIECE OF HAIR in her fingers, looked at it closely, and pushed it back behind one ear. “Why don’t you come with me? You can get yours done too.” She pulled a cigarette out of the silver case and lit it.

  “What the devil?” Mary strode into the room, bosom first, her long skirt swirling. She waved her arms. “Jane, put that thing out.”

  Jane stubbed the cigarette out under her easel bench and dropped it on the floor.

  “I have invited one of my acquaintances, Lillian, to model for us today.” Mary’s grey eyes glinted. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking only heroic subjects are worthy of our attention as artists. The impressionists’ models were often prostitutes and dancers. Mary Cassatt, the American artist, painted in Paris with the impressionists. Her studies of women and children are very fine.” Mary held up a print of a woman looking tenderly at a little girl in her lap.

  Lillian arrived and Mary closed the book. The model carried a bassinet, which she placed on the floor beside a divan in the centre of the room. The child began to cry while she disappeared behind a screen to undress.

  Jane looked furtively at Clare, bugging her eyes out.

  Lillian emerged in a simple red robe. She picked up the baby, sat on the divan, and opened her robe. The baby drank greedily, grunting quietly, one pink hand idly picking at the silky cloth.

  Mary gave Lillian a sly look then glanced around the room. “You can see that she is not nude, though there may be some exposure.”

  A couple of the girls giggled. Elsie, who had finally returned to classes, twisted her engagement ring nervously on her finger.

  Clare looked over at Jane, who had begun drawing. She was leaning into her easel, her hand moving quickly, surely. The lines were simple, eloquent. Clare felt the familiar admiration and the companion envy at its heels. How did Jane manage with nonchalance to create such sensitive drawings? Mary stopped and looked at Jane’s drawing thoughtfully, her face softening. Then she walked on without a word. Clare sensed that even Mary resented the ease with which Jane worked, the utter indifference with which talent was bequeathed.

  “Don’t spend too much time on detail too soon,” Mary said, circling around again to Clare. Clare had laboured over Lillian’s robe, following one fold only to get lost in labyrinths of light and shadow. “The relationship between the mother and child is everything. Work on how the two interact, the attitude of the mother’s head, leaning towards the child, the child reaching for her.”

  “PLEASE COME with me today.” Jane linked her arm in Clare’s as they walked down the front steps an hour later. “Just to keep me company.”

  On the waterfront, they passed the Chinese grocer’s open bins of greens and barrels of sulfuric eggs in packing straw, a dim door open to the warm day, where three men in belted canvas pants and rolled shirtsleeves leaned on a bar. One of the men aimed a brown stream at a spittoon, and said something that made the others spin heavily on their elbows, laughing as they watched Jane and Clare enter George’s Barbershop next door. Clare lifted her hand to her eye patch.

  The barber, a tiny man with a shiny face, looked up from the soaped head lying back in the chair in front of him, flinching at Clare’s eye patch, then taking in Jane, who was wearing a pink floral summer dress, though it was still early spring.

  The barber leaned towards the bald, soapy head. “Your wife looking for you?” The man’s eyes flew open, and the barber barked at his joke before turning to Jane. “Back already?”

  “It’s growing,” Jane dropped into one of the barber chairs.

  The barber turned to Clare. “How about you, miss?”

  The room was close with the heat of the kettles. Sweat trickled down Clare’s spine. Her hair felt heavy.

  “I don’t have any money.”

  The barber looked at her cannily. “You leave me the hair and I can do it for free.”

  Jane twisted in the chair. “You didn’t offer that to me!”

  “I’m afraid your hair is less …” he lifted a feathery strand, “desirable.”r />
  LATER, back in her room, Jane glanced in the mirror, fluffing her hair, and fell backwards on her bed, then jumped up and pulled the little silver case and matchbox from her sweater pocket, lit a cigarette, and offered it to Clare. Then she lit one for herself and walked to the window, where she looked anxiously out at the street, before yanking the yellow curtains closed.

  “Do you think we’ll get another chance to draw naked men?” she said. “Elsie said her parents complained to the school, and Mr. Lismer has had to promise it won’t happen again.” Jane looked at Clare slyly. “Listen. I have a plan.”

  Clare coughed up a lungful of smoke. She still hadn’t mastered smoking. She twisted her whole self towards Jane to take her in with her good eye.

  Jane blew out a plume of smoke. “As soon as the war is over I’m going to Paris to study, like Mary. Anyone who wants to be a serious artist needs to go to Europe.” Jane dropped her voice. “At the Beaux-Arts women get the same education as men, including the study of the nude.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Women can go to bars or jazz clubs without chaperones. Imagine,” she pranced across the room, leaned on the windowsill, and peeked out between the curtains, “being that free. Oh, do come too!” she cried, pouncing back onto the bed.

  Clare caught her own reflection with a start in the mirror. She turned away from her eye patch and studied her image, her long, bare neck, her full lips, the sleek brow curving over her bright eye. She looked like someone else, despite the patch. Someone freer. Someone who would go to Paris to study art. Her heart beat like wings. “I couldn’t possibly afford it.”

  “What if you could? Would you go?”

  Clare hesitated. “Of course.”

  Jane’s face blazed. “Meanwhile, there’s always us.”

  “Us?” Clare said.

  “We can model for each other! Look, I’ll go first.” Jane butted out her cigarette and started unbuttoning her sweater. She climbed out of her skirt and bloomers, as if on a dare. “Come on, don’t be such a prude.”

  Clare started to laugh, and, stubbing out her own cigarette in a hairpin dish, picked up Jane’s clothes as she shed them and threw them back at her, until they both collapsed on the bed, Jane triumphantly naked. Her skin was very white, speckled here and there with little sandy constellations of freckles. Her breasts had tiny, very pink nipples, like those of a child. Her hipbones rose sharply from the bowl of her pelvis and her pubic hair was as pale as her eyelashes.

  “Jane?” Mrs. Biggs clutched the doorknob in one hand, a bouquet of mock orange in the other, a few white petals drifting to her feet. She pushed her head forward, her smile fading.

  Jane plucked randomly from the pile of clothes on her bed. “Mother. How was the garden show? Clare and I were just talking about today’s class … you see Mrs. Hamilton wouldn’t let us draw the nude, so I thought we could model for each other.”

  Mrs. Biggs looked at Clare now. “Hello, Clare.” The older woman picked up a robe that was hanging on the back of a chair and shoved it at Jane. She looked back at Clare. “You look different.”

  “I’ve had …” Clare lifted her hand to her head, “my hair cut.”

  37

  FRED PUMPED THE FOOT PEDAL to inflate the bellows. The gas flared and the cryolite tube softened in the blue flame, until a fragment broke away, a knot of glass, which he inflated into a sphere at the end of his small blowpipe.

  Fred picked up one of the glass rods Karl had sent, each a twist of different coloured glass. They were exactly like the glass rods he’d watched his father using years before, the same ones that the old glass-makers at Lauscha had used to make marbles and doll eyes. When the rod was heated, Fred dabbed its molten colours onto the iris at the centre of the sphere, turning it in the flame. Another rod to fashion the colour around the iris’s edge. Then the black centre, the pupil and, dropped from a height so that the falling glass was thread fine, the red veins on the white of the eye.

  Later he would deflate the sphere slightly by drawing air out of it with his mouth and shape the back into a cup. Then he would melt it and make another and another, until he mastered the glass, the twists, the precise colours and striations.

  “No two people’s eyes are exactly the same,” his father had told Fred when he was a child at his father’s worktable. “That’s why this part of the eye is called the iris, after the Greek goddess of the rainbow.”

  Fred held his handiwork up to the light — the green needed a touch of grey. And the amber flecks clustered around the iris, which scattered outwards from the pupil, must settle in a fine line, along the rim. He needed perfection.

  He remembered the first time he saw her, in the packing room of the glassworks. He’d thought her ordinary — dark hair and hazel eyes, her attention taken up by some story one of the girls was telling. She was listening unselfconsciously, absorbed as a child. But by the time he’d finished showing her his glassware he had noticed that her eyeteeth were pearly and overlapped her front teeth slightly; there was a faint asymmetry to the line where her lips met and a tiny dimple darted in and out of her left cheek. Her hair gleamed under the light over the glass bench. Her eyes were grey-green, flecked with gold. Since that day it was not simple attraction but, rather, an alertness he felt around her, a desire to watch her, as he might have watched a chaffinch in a hedge along a country lane.

  Jack Bell appeared, rumpled, unshaven, at the shop door. “Time to close up, Mr. Baker.”

  Fred turned the gas flame off and set the glass eye delicately on a tray. He got up and began moving his equipment from the worktable to his bench. Jack Bell lingered at the door watching. He had aged ten years over the winter. He hadn’t been to the shop in weeks. When Fred had wondered out loud about this at work, Ernie Ryan had said, “Yeah, well, he lost his nephew. Took a piece of shrapnel. Huns wouldn’t take him to the Red Cross. Bloody barbarians. If I didn’t have a weak heart from scarlet fever, I’d be there. I’d be happy to shoot them and leave them to die.”

  “I just heard about your nephew, Mr. Bell. I’m very sorry,” Fred said.

  Jack pulled himself up straight. “Did you go to the registry?”

  “Yes. I went right after we spoke.”

  “I’d like to see your papers.” Jack stepped into the room and walked from kiln to kiln, looking into the dying flames. “I wonder why you didn’t go sooner?” he said accusingly.

  Fred picked up his coat from a hook beside his bench. “I never received notice. It must have gotten lost in the mail when I moved from Hamilton. I’ll bring in my papers tomorrow.”

  When Fred had left the registry he’d sat for few minutes on the bench outside. The bird he’d listened to earlier was still singing. He remembered Arthur Barnstead’s comment that day at the school, watching the wounded jay outside his window: birds were always fully alive. He envied them that and more: citizens of the forests and hedges of their birth, they could never be without a country.

  38

  THE MEN FROM THE NIGHT CLASSES wore their best shirts. They sat together watching the girls climb onto the train, arms overflowing with baskets of food. Fred got up when Clare arrived, offering her his seat, but Jane was waving at her from the back of the car.

  Arthur Lismer met the students at the station and led them up the hill towards his house, which looked out over Bedford and the river’s mouth. Marjorie, his little girl, watching from the porch, ran inside as soon as she spied them. Esther Lismer emerged a moment later, untying the strings of her apron. Mary was there already, dressed as always in her long dark wool skirt, but today wearing a light blouse and a wide-brimmed hat, which she tied firmly under her chin as she strode out to meet the students.

  Jane was flushed from trotting. Clare had to jog to keep up with her as she ran on ahead to meet Mary.

  “You can follow Jane up to the house to drop your things,” Mary said, watching Jane taking the stairs two at a time. “She seems overexcited.”

  “She’s decided to go to Paris to study as soon a
s the war is over,” Clare said. “Like you.”

  “Actually, I took my first and most important instruction in Berlin. I had an exceptional teacher there. I only went to Paris …” she looked away briefly, “after.” A dragonfly hovered near Mary’s head.

  “Was it wonderful?”

  Mary flapped at the dragonfly and it zigzagged off. “It was many things: cold rooms and bad food, hard work, long hours. There were many rejections before my work began to be accepted in the salons. It was,” she was looking off to the distant hills beyond the river, “wonderful. I only came home because of the war. I applied to Lord Beaverbrook to return as a war artist. Who knows the country, the people, better than I? But, other than nurses, they do not send women into war.” She clasped her hands behind her back. “It can’t be long now that the Americans have joined in. As soon as the war is over I will return. To paint the battlefields.”

  Was Leo in one of those fields? Who, tilling them, or building a new road, when the war was long over, would know he lay there, a boy raised on Annapolis milk and apples, a boy with agile limbs and a gap between his front teeth.

  “My fiancé went missing,” Clare said.

  “Yes. I’m sorry.” Mary’s face took on a grimness. “It’s for men like him that I’m determined to paint the places watered with Canadian blood, before they grow over and are forgotten.”

  And what if we don’t win? Clare thought. No one ever said such a thing out loud. It was unthinkable and therefore unsayable.

  “And what about you?” Mary asked. “What do you want to do?”

  Elsie would be getting married in the summer. There were still two weeks of classes and the show of student work. Clare tried not to think about the trickery her idle eye would get up to after the end of term.

  “My parents don’t believe art is proper work for a woman.” Clare laughed, but her laughter sounded tinny, even to her. The future felt unbearably dreary. The old ache returned to her eye. She still hadn’t gone to talk to Jack about her old job. “As long as I can continue studying …” she said before her sentence petered out.