Greetings from the Vodka Sea

by Chris Gudgeon

  The How was one thing, the How Could He was another. It wasn’t Anna; she barely concerned herself in his affairs beyond the usual social and domestic duties. As long as the social order wasn’t challenged, Anna, the good old Canadian, remained docile. But Dr. Cole — Sondra really, but he loved the pretentiousness of her full title, and it underscored that she was a professional, a New Woman in the New World — she kept him on a short leash and seemed to know everyone in the city. He had to be discrete, or word would get back to his mistress. Of course, discretion was just what he wanted. Discretion turned him on. The other part of the equation, though, was difficult to work through. How could he bring himself to kiss her? How could he bring himself to make love to a woman so old and so . . . expansive? It may seem a vanity, but he was certain of his powers of seduction, particularly in this case. He was well kept, again for his age, sophisticated and successful — these things mattered more than almost anything to a woman. But most of all, he would represent for Thérèse that moment in time when she had been so much more than she is now (in being much less), when she had been (and this is critical) an object of desire. Here lay the key to the whole seduction. Whereas in a man’s fantasy, the woman was the subject of desire (the subject, that is, of erotic fulfillment), in her own mind, she needed to feel like a sexual object. Not in the utilitarian sense, something to be used and discarded (that came afterwards), but almost in an iconographical sense: something greater than what it was; something steeped in meaning; something venerated and desired, but always with the understanding that while it could be approached, it could never be fully possessed. There was something mythic about this kind of love — about seduction. Something very Greek. So, from that point of view, the seduction was easy. But what about him? How could he do it? How could he love her again? How could he make love to her again?

  . . .

  He almost blew it. Sunday morning, and Anna had asked him to walk along Lakeshore. The weather was unusually temperate for this time of year, and Étienne thought nothing of it. Of course, just past the public pool (still open this late in the season), who should the fates decree would walk towards them but Thérèse and her husband with a young child, no more than a toddler, whom Étienne concluded must be their grandson. Étienne considered leading Anna off the pathway down toward the water, on the pretext of looking for birds. But the writer had already seen them. An encounter was unavoidable.

  “We have to stop meeting like this. People are starting to talk.”

  “Mr. Wonnacott, how good to see you. I was just telling my wife about your work. Anna, this is the author I was telling you about. He’s going to be helping the clinic . . .”

  Introductions were made all round, and when it came time for Thérèse to shake his hand she played the scene perfectly. Barely a flash of recognition in her eyes, but when he permitted his hand to linger a moment in hers, she did not repel it. He could feel the warmth transferring between them. And that was it. A moment of doting upon the child (whose particulars were never fully explained), some pleasant “good afternoons,” and the meeting was terminated. It could not have lasted more than three minutes. But Étienne believed he’d turned what might have been a small disaster to his advantage. He’d definitely made a connection with Thérèse, reinforced by their spontaneous pact of secrecy. Perhaps she’d been embarrassed — no doubt she had — but kept it to herself well. Another woman might have been flustered, which would have aroused suspicions in the husband, even a dullard such as this. But she conceded nothing. She was better at this than Étienne ever expected. So potential disaster was turned into gain. The gods had brought them together and tickled her interest. The next time they met, she would be ready.

  . . .

  It was not who he thought. When the receptionist told him there was a writer in his office, he expected to find Wonnacott waiting there. But it was that journalist. The Pole. Madrn.

  “Just a few questions, monsieur le docteur. If I may . . .”

  He always had just a few questions. He’d always bring up names: Georges-Benoit Montel; Raymond Chouinard; Abbé Pierre Gravel. Antiphon.

  “I’m just trying to put together the facts, monsieur le docteur. There are so many missing pieces to the puzzle, yes?”

  You’d think Madrn (a dissident himself with a dubious past who still courted extremists of both the right and the left) would let well enough alone. He had been one of the first people in Canada to write about Oswald Mosely’s Blackshirts and had also interviewed key members of the FLQ and even introduced them to visiting celebrity radicals and rock stars. When Pierre Valliers showed up at John and Yoko’s Bed-In for Peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Madrn was there, slouching in the background.

  Mostly, Étienne had been able to keep Madrn at bay. The journalist had approached him several times with an interest in doing an article or book or something on the roots of French Canadian radicalism. Étienne demurred: he’d been a student only; he knew nothing of radical politics; having spent only a few years in Quebec, he had very little to add along the lines of cultural or social observations. Once, at a party for the Belgian consul, Madrn tried to bait Étienne into confessing . . . something or another. That he’d been a fascist or had befriended fascists or spoken to someone who knew a fascist, Étienne was never sure. The consul himself came to Étienne’s defence, saying that he knew of the doctor’s family, that they’d comported themselves during the war no less nobly than his own (the consul, a charter member of the Fellowship of the Veil, was being perfectly truthful). The Pole was playing the odds. He knew that every man, and certainly any man who’d safely come out of Europe in the last thirty years, had a shadow in his past, and he took it as a personal affront whenever anyone tried to keep his private business private.

  “It was a long time ago, sir. I’m sure it’s a time many would rather forget.”

  “And you, monsieur le docteur? Would you rather forget? Hmm?”

  “I, Mr. Madrn, I have nothing worth remembering.”

  . . .

  These are the facts as Étienne did not remember them, exactly as they were never reported to that journalist. In July of 1940, mere weeks after the aging Marshall Pétain had signed the armistice agreement (not out of cowardice or a particular fondness for Hitler and his politics, as some maintained, but because he very rightly perceived that capitulation under the Nazis would be vastly more palatable than defeat), Étienne and his family moved from Rhône, that ancient Roman city where his father had worked as a general physician, to Verrière, where his uncle was mayor and where his father was granted an administrative post with the local hospital council. Here, Étienne (nee Paul André Emmanuel Étienne Boussat-Antiphon; he’d added du Chatelait, rather uncleverly, because it was his grandmother’s maiden name) began his internship, having already completed his formal studies. Here, at his uncle’s insistence, he also took nominal membership in the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism and, after that, the Legionnaire Security Service, pledging to fight democracy, Jews and the Resistance, in that order. Eventually, he was pressed into service of the Franc-Garde of the French Militia, a fervently anti-Gaullist organization whose main objective seemed to be the systematic denunciation of every French man, woman and child who was not a militia member (and many who were). Étienne satisfied the mandate by providing key militia officials with an endless supply of names taken from the hospital death rolls. That they were dead only enhanced Étienne’s status; the militia appeared to be carrying out its mandate to a degree of efficiency rarely seen in France. In the waning hours of the war, as the Allied victory seemed imminent, Étienne’s father sent him to Spain with a small collection of gold and a large assortment of false documents. While being tried in absentia for crimes against the state and sentenced to ten years of national disgrace, Étienne obtained a six-month student visa for Canada (that this twenty-year-old man had a high school student visa seemed not to disturb the immigration officials), and, following a ten-day voyage on a Cunar
d freighter, he landed in Montreal. He left immediately for Quebec City, where his uncle assured him he would find men not unsympathetic to the Cause. What that cause was, Étienne wasn’t sure. But he hoped most emphatically that it had something to do with allowing him to get on with his life.

  . . .

  So you can see that Étienne’s world was full of statues, which is perhaps why he found himself thinking of Medusa. A painting at the provincial gallery set this train of thought in motion, an avant-garde artist’s depiction of the gorgon myth, an ugly head — nostrils splayed, asymmetrical eyes, wrinkled and hirsute skin, full, chapped lips, her hair a nest of serpents — set upon the beautiful body of young woman. She was surrounded by onlookers who, captured by either her hideousness or her beauty, had turned into marble statues in the Classic, Grecian style. Étienne had stood transfixed, considering the detail of each snake, and smiled when he recognized that Medusa, at least for a moment, had turned him to stone as well. He thought of Thérèse, for numerous reasons (most of them quite obvious), and returned to that image over and over again whenever she entered his mind. In fact, he began to think of her as Medusa, mentally transplanting her head onto the body the artist had rendered, and in his internal conversation he referred to Thérèse directly as Medusa. He even began to call the planned seduction the Medusa Project: his own little joke.

  . . .

  There were improprieties. In fact, Madrn’s next article would expose a lot of them. Laporte’s unseemly connections, for one. He had strong ties to organized crime in Montreal, and there were some, including prominent FLQ supporters, who believed that the Laporte kidnapping was actually the work of professional hit men. Perhaps they were even working with the tacit approval of Bourassa and the police. How else could you explain the fact that the kidnappers had managed to walk away — in broad daylight — with the deputy premier of the province, snatch him right from under the noses of the police and army? Even given the legendary ineptitude of Quebec’s police force, this was a little too hard to believe. In allowing Laporte to be kidnapped, Bourassa had rid himself of a man who was at once a dangerous political rival and a potential embarrassment to his government.

  “We should talk, comrade. I mean it. I have a lot of information. It could be useful.”

  The driver did not respond. None of the men did. There were at least two kidnappers, Madrn believed, probably four. That’s the way the FLQ operated: safety in numbers. They were just young guys really, punks, mostly politically unsophisticated, in the game for the thrill of it, the danger, the righteousness, the brotherhood. They bombed and kidnapped like other young men gang-banged.

  “For instance, do you know about Operation Essay? Hmm? This is no accidental occurrence, my friends, this ‘crisis.’ The government — Trudeau — has been planning this for months. A secret plan with the army and the cops. You guys think you’re in the driver’s seat, my friends. You’re not. You’re playing into their hands, I can tell you that right now . . .”

  He hadn’t seen their faces, hadn’t seen anything of them, in fact. When he felt the pistol on his neck, he’d gone without question. He raised his hands and said, “Just tell me what to do, boys.” At first, he thought — he hoped — that they would simply ask him to interview them, to get their side of the story out, and that they were merely going to extraordinary lengths to protect their identities and locations. But when they pushed him towards the box and directed him to get into it — well, that’s when he knew he was in trouble.

  Madrn pressed his lips to the holes and sucked in some fresh air. The van smelled new, a rental, no doubt. The air inside the box — a storage trunk or maybe a packing crate — was mouldy, with a more pleasant undertone of wood. Cedar, he thought. Yes, cedar.

  “I also have a line on some guns, my friends. Kalashnikovs. Almost new. I can get them for you for a song . . .”

  . . .

  Not long after his visit to the gallery, Étienne received a package from Madrn. It arrived by regular post; Anna brought the unsealed envelope to him in his study. Inside was a draft manuscript for an article the journalist was writing for a leading English-language Quebec daily, an article that more or less accurately detailed, among other things, Étienne’s flight from Europe and his rise within the rightist circles of New France. A typed note invited the doctor to correct any errors and craft, if he so desired, his own rebuttal. It ended with a short, handwritten addendum, underlined for emphasis. “We should talk!” Étienne read the article once, then, after cancelling a ten o’clock appointment, read it again. His first impulse was to write a stinging letter to the editor, defending himself and demanding, in advance of publication, an unequivocal retraction. His second impulse was to call a lawyer friend with intimate knowledge of Étienne’s circumstances. His third impulse was to call a cabinet minister or two and ask them to apply the kind of pressure that could get a story like this killed. In the end, he read the article again; there was something about Madrn’s prose that appealed to him. Emotionless, motionless, almost hypnotic, not charged, as Étienne would have expected, with political rhetoric or intent. The result was that Étienne came across as a calculating fiend, coldly detached from the events of the time, seeking only to protect and further himself. Was he really such a monster?

  Étienne picked up the note and scrutinized it. The handwritten message was curious. Why should they talk? Was there something Madrn wanted to say that could not be entrusted to a note? Did he want, Étienne speculated, to offer a deal? Perhaps this was part of a primitive blackmail scheme, his present (as was always the case in blackmail) held hostage by the past? He could hear his wife puttering in the sitting room next door and wondered how the revelations would affect her. She could surprise him but didn’t do it often. The story would no doubt devastate her. And now Étienne put the note down and, slumping deep into his chair, dropped his head into his hands. He thought again, almost speaking the words aloud: Am I really this monster?

  . . .

  Étienne had grown up in the age of statues. In Rhône there were gods and statues everywhere. But now he lived in an age of radio, of television, of journalists and Marxists. Of politics. One couldn’t even trust one’s mistress anymore. Étienne could no longer tell who was having whom: was Sondra his mistress, or was he hers?

  And now they were having lunch again, and she was playing the role of conciliator. Étienne was upset about the package he’d received. He left the precise details of the package vague and would only say that, despite the outward appearances of civility, his was a cutthroat profession.

  Sondra ran her hand through her long hair, streaked with grey. She wasn’t that old, really, thirty-four or thirty-five, he guessed (he’d never asked — a gentleman didn’t — although he was certain she would tell him if he did), and could easily have coloured it. Most women of her age would.

  “It’s like anything. There’s is only so much room at the top, there is always someone circling around to take your place. Anyway, enough of this business.” But this business did not leave his mind, and he came back to it several times over lunch and later, back in her apartment. They’d made love in the usual manner, after coffee and the radio news, on the bed in the spare room (neither of them felt comfortable doing it in her bed, with its ghosts and shadows). He’d only just finished when he rolled off and said, “You know, this business — it will kill her.”

  “Kill who?”

  “Anna. It will kill her. She always likes everything to be the same. She never wants anything to change. Of course, things change all the time, everything changes around her . . .”

  His voice trailed off, and Sondra pulled the yellow sheet up to her neck. Étienne stood and picked up his shorts, which he’d neatly folded over the back of the armchair at the foot of the bed. He thought of how much more comfortable chairs were these days, less decorative and more utilitarian than when he was a boy. When he’d been growing up, his mother had chairs that no one was allowed to sit in. Étienne dressed in silence. T
hese silences were beginning to define his life.

  . . .

  Madrn tried a different tack.

  “Look, if it’s money you’re after, I can provide you with what you want. I’m not a rich man by any means, but I have some . . . resources.”

  What these men failed to realize was that Madrn had been a hostage his entire life. Born in a country that did not exist, surrounded by invaders who looked like him, talked like him, ate like him, stank like him. And the secret was . . . the secret was that once you become a captor, you also become a hostage.

  “I’m just thinking out loud, of course, but what’s in my mind is some sort of negotiable commodity. I’m thinking specifically of heroin right now, but that can all be discussed. The point is, I’m willing to swing a deal. But you have to tell me what you want.”

  In Poland, everything had been a negotiation. He’d negotiated his way out of the army and into the polytechnic institute, he’d negotiated himself in and out of bed, he’d negotiated for an ounce of caviar and for a loaf of bread. Once he’d traded cigarettes for toilet paper, only to trade it back again for more cigarettes. The What was never significant, it was what the What did for you that mattered. A man with something to trade has status, and that alone makes him a hostage.

  “Do you know how I got to this country? I invented myself. That’s right, comrades. I gave myself a mother and a father, I gave myself a wife and three small children. I bought my freedom on their backs, my little invented wife and our make-believe brats. They were my collateral. My money-back guarantee.”

  Nothing. Silence still.

  “Maybe you just want your freedom, a one-way ticket out of here? Where do you want to go? Cuba? Algeria? Hollywood? Just tell me. Getting you there — the documents, the contacts — that’s the easy part. It’s making up your fucking mind. That’s the difficulty.”