Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  “My husband is twelve years dead,” she said. “I live on small pension.” She hauled up her wool skirt to show wide runs at the top of her stockings. She reached for Jule’s neck again and fingered a Celtic cross Jule was wearing on a chain.

  “You are good Catholic,” she said. “Give me dinars. I need dinars.”

  But Jule did not give her money. She stood, and began the long walk back to the hotel. On the way, she was stopped by two boys who rushed at her from behind shrubbery. “Geld,” they shouted. “Five Mark. One dollar. Give sandwich.” They roared off, laughing.

  Jule thought of the faces of the women at the shrine. Every evening on TV, she watched the stooped controlling presence of President Tudjman in front of the cameras. The clips were repeated until she knew them by heart: burned bodies, bluffing soldiers, women clutching children and shouting into the lens. She thought of the police barriers surrounding the Sabor, the parliament, and the silent square above the old city. She felt like shouting, Abandon all hope! and cursed herself for considering such a thought. Later, when Carl was sleeping a deep sleep beside her, she rolled on her side, propped an elbow and said to his sleeping face, “If you don’t open one eye, I’m going to leave you.”

  At the hotel, she ate a makeshift lunch from the tiny bar fridge, which she and Carl tried to keep stocked with supplies. The closet shelf contained English cereal Carl had bought from the British NAAFI; cartons of ?-milk from the Americans at Pleso Airport; bottled water; a few cans of Tuborg from the Danes. When Carl’s French friends learned that she was at the hotel, they sent grapefruit juice and, one day, even a fresh chocolate éclair.

  On the occasions when Jule was able to get to the centre of town, she purchased brown bread and cheese. Once, she found a can of tuna. She bought an American kettle, which Carl’s electrician friends rewired to fit the outlets. All in all, she and Carl managed, in a ten-by-ten-foot room, to live, to love, to work—for she had brought her work with her and was sending articles home.

  With the TV on in the background, she began to practise German. She was willing to watch or listen to any program except Der Preis Ist Heiss. As she did not speak the Serbo-Croat language—now called Croatian here—German was the language that moved her about the city. If the shelling got worse, she would head for the Austrian border. She was four hours from Graz, three hours from Klagenfurt.

  When Carl came in, Jule decided to remind him again that there was a world outside these borders. But Carl had turned into the war. “There’s work to be done,” he said. He hadn’t had a day off since last winter, but she could see that the stress of the year he had lived in Sarajevo—before she’d even arrived—had already done its work.

  “You’ve lost perspective,” she told him. “You’re out of touch.” But he stood blinking at her as if she were the one who was out of touch. Extricate Carl, she repeated silently. Open one eye. She would find the note again and return it to the top of the heap on the bedside table. Or maybe she would just go home by herself.

  Sunday, Jule managed to get a call out to their daughter, Alex. Usually the phone system was crippled by long waits and frequent disconnections. As she talked, she stared out the hotel window at grey smoke in the distance. Carl had been back in Bosnia for three days, and Jule did not know when he’d return.

  “Work,” said Jule. “Work keeps us sane. Thank heavens I’ve brought my own. I’ve sent two articles back so far, and put my name in with aid agencies. I’ve taken typhoid pills, had hepatitis shots, whatever I need.”

  Alex was working, saving money for graduate school. She passed on her own news. As they hung up, Jule felt a sudden sense of danger. She did not understand why, but the chill that coursed through her was real indeed. She was thankful that she loved life, loved Carl, loved Alex. But there were no rituals here, no daily events to help preserve the ordinary nature of things. Everything was drama and violence and force. Even within their hotel room, grimness had set in. It was becoming more and more difficult to laugh, even to smile. Make no mistake, she told herself—allowing a momentary glimpse of home—what we do in the name of love is also done for the sake of ourselves.

  What will I do, she thought, if a rocket explodes while I’m in the city? She already knew the answer. Half-torn shelter signs were pasted to buildings everywhere—stick figures chasing after arrows. In a city of one million people she would throw in her lot. She would go to the nearest shelter and help those who needed help.

  “Danger! Danger!” Alex used to chant as a toddler. These warnings had accompanied her own precarious climbs. Sometimes she would reach a top shelf and perch there while Jule, hearing her call out, would feel her heart stop and would run towards her. They’d lived within the walls of one house then, the three of them. It had been easier to believe that one of them could enact a rescue.

  Jule had still not heard from Carl and was becoming uneasy. She could find nothing on CNN about peace talks or convoys. Though the phone lines were usually down, he sometimes managed to get a message to her by begging time on a journalist’s satellite hookup. She thought it prudent to go back into the city. To find the Canadian Embassy; to register there. Newly opened in the summer, the embassy rented rooms in an expensive downtown hotel. A Croatian clerk—the only person there—advised her about travel to Austria. She would need a multiple entry-exit visa if she left Croatia and wanted to return. The clerk wrote out a phone number and said, earnestly, “You must ask for the Department of Strangers.” In any other circumstance, Jule would have had to fight a grin. She did not go to the Department of Strangers. Thoroughly depressed, she sat at an outdoor table in a side street and ordered pizza. Though she and the waiter had no common language, she asked for champignons and fromage, the only words she’d discovered so far that seemed to be universal, a kind of pizza Esperanto.

  A young American woman made her way through a maze of tables and asked if she could sit with Jule. Am I so obviously the foreigner? thought Jule. But she was glad of the company. The young woman, Kristen, was from Boston and taught at the American School.

  “How does the war affect the school?” Jule asked, hungry for news of other humans.

  “I don’t know,” said Kristen. “I hate thinking about the war. It’s too awful.”

  “But the front line is only twenty minutes away.” Jule was startled by Kristen’s indifference.

  “Is it? Well I don’t think about it at all.”

  Jule decided to walk the long route back on the dusty highway and was passed by four screaming ambulances along the way When she approached the pink customs building, she saw rows of European transports lined up, the drivers waiting to have their loads sealed so they could continue their journeys. HOLLAND was painted across the cab of one of the trucks. She wanted to shout at the driver, “Edam! Gouda! Take me with you!” Could the whole of Europe be three hours away? An entire population where people actually chose the places they wanted to go?

  She entered the hotel and went directly to the café-bar on the main floor. As she sat down, the windows rattled furiously. The bar was empty—UN workers were always away during the day. But within minutes of the shelling, the room filled. Not with strangers, but with Croats—men and women in business clothes. Where had they come from? While everyone was ordering strong coffee, Jule sensed tension, a heightened alertness.

  She drank her own thick cappuccino and went to her room, wishing that Carl would return. The windows shuddered so violently she willed herself to stop hearing. She lay on the bed and pulled up the covers, though she was fully dressed. She thought about the past winter, ten months ago, when Carl had come home to Canada—his only leave. They’d had six days together and had unplugged the phone and locked the doors. A storm had raged outside and, after two days, snow drifted past the windows. They called no friends, read no papers. Their lives had been suspended, temporary, as if the two of them were playing house and the props would disappear if they let down their guard. Carl never once relaxed; he would be heading back to the wa
r, back to Sarajevo, in less than a week. It was his way of ensuring that he would stay alive.

  On the seventh morning, Jule drove him to the airport. As she watched him disappear into an oblivious holiday crowd, a woman she had not known was inside her raised her head and began to listen for bullets.

  Was Carl alive? Was he being shot at right now? She tried to watch CNN, but fell asleep in the middle of the news. She was turning off, like Kristen from Boston. She went out in the early morning and hiked around the old town. She entered the Ethnographic Museum, but two guards tried to separate her from her passport and she left without seeing the exhibits. “Sorry boys,” she said, and ran down the stone steps. She resolved to start wearing her passport inside a travel belt on her body.

  After ten days and without warning, Carl walked into the hotel room in the early morning. Jule saw the change even before he spoke. He sat on the edge of the bed and told her. A friend and colleague, Maria, the interpreter he’d worked with on and off during the war, had been killed by a sniper while in the cab of his truck. They had been leaving Sarajevo, part of a convoy carrying medicine and food, headed for two refugee camps. Maria had worked selflessly since the beginning of the war. She’d been the sole support of her own family, two young sons, and had lived with the boys and her mother in the basement ruins of a flattened apartment. The single bullet had been accurate, entering Maria’s skull.

  Carl was tired. He was angry. He was ready to take time off. No matter what anyone did, war went on with its violent desecrating acts. Maria had been pulled into the maw that had swallowed thousands of others.

  Jule made arrangements for her and Carl to fly to Frankfurt and on to Canada. She located and tore up the Extricate Carl sign. Carl might return to Croatia and even Bosnia again, but she knew that she never would. For now, they would get through this the way they always managed to get through. One step followed another and another. She packed her clothes, and Carl packed his—along with the unopened tin of sardines.

  They had one day left in Zagreb—a Saturday—and in late afternoon they took a taxi to the old city, circling the cobbled road Jule had trekked many times on foot. As Carl had never had a chance to visit the Lotrscak Tower, they climbed the fire lookout and circled the platform, looking out over the range of hills, the river valley and flat plain, twin spires of the cathedral, onion bulbs, crosses and domes. They took a few steps back into the tower and a sudden hailstorm descended, so they sat inside on a stone bench, leaning against the wall, waiting out the rain. They did not speak while the storm crashed down around them.

  By five o’clock the sun was beginning to shine. Far below, the cobblestones were wet and sleek. Just before leaving the tower, Jule stepped out onto the platform again and looked down. A sudden cacophony of unleashed sound confused her, and she quickly tried to locate its source. She moved from railing to railing, peering over, and saw wedding parties approaching the main square from three directions, as though along spokes to the hub of a wheel.

  First came soldier-grooms and, with them, young men who waved oversized Croatian flags out the windows of small cars. There was considerable competition for parking space and much honking of horns. The bridal parties followed on foot. Brides were dressed in long white gowns, and their skirts were hoisted above their knees as they crossed the wet cobbles. Their attendants fussed and shouted as they tried to keep long trains of lace from dragging through puddles.

  Catholic and Orthodox churches were holding simultaneous ceremonies in buildings that faced each other across the square. Civil ceremonies were conducted in a government building nearby. As each party entered, more people arrived and waited in nervous semicircles at the entrances outside. One wedding replaced the next, as fast as the ceremonies could be performed. As Jule watched, she had a sudden flash of memory: Alex as a small child playing with her dolls, inventing a game she called Bride and Gloom. Jule could not have predicted the gloom she now felt, watching these celebrations.

  She and Carl descended the tower steps and, gripping hands tightly, found themselves mingling with wedding guests in the narrow streets. Staying together and inching sideways, they manoeuvred their way to the edge of a cobbled path that would lead them down again, to the old town. Jule glanced over at Carl and saw that he might cry. There are other places in the world, she told herself. We’ll get out of this one together.

  Carl read her thoughts. “It’s about what we can live with and what we cannot,” he said. He did not try to explain. “It’s about what we are left with, in the end.”

  Jule looked back at the wedding couples with their friends and families, as she and Carl pressed together and made their way. The chaos of the scene stayed in her head: uniforms and flags, cobbles and puddles, shouts and cries, suits and gowns. But it was individual faces she most clearly remembered. She’d been searching those faces for signs of hope. Laughter. Even prophecy. In the midst of war, she had been looking for signs of love.

  The Thickness of One Sheet of Paper

  Tosh had his hand on her belly. They were at the back of the motionless bus, and neither had noticed the man from Marseilles until he twisted into the seat beside them.

  “Pardon,” the man said, his face flushed.

  “Oh, non, “ said Judith, and made a gesture away from and towards him at the same time. She wondered what he thought she and Tosh had been doing at the back of the bus while Teruko, their tour guide, was leading the others through the temple—their third that morning.

  Tosh withdrew his hand, but his face was expressionless. The man from Marseilles stared out the window. Judith gave up the impulse to explain. She did not look pregnant, but was—five months—and she felt it in the September heat.

  “My wilting gravid wife,” Tosh had said, the night before.

  “Don’t talk to me about being gravid,” Judith said. “I have to survive these temperatures. I’m not leaving this air-conditioned room, not if I’m dragged. Not even for dinner.”

  “You’ll starve our child.”

  “Too bad.”

  But Tosh had phoned room service. And the unnameable efficiency they’d come to expect with both irritation and delight had produced a four-course meal, whisked into the room. The waiter tucked linen napkins into the necks of their yukata, dressing gowns supplied by the hotel. Judith removed her napkin as soon as he left, and placed it on her lap. She was trying her best to deal with the constant supervision, the scrutiny. Gaijin. She was the foreigner. Hakujin, white face. Nothing, nothing had prepared her for this. For being the only one.

  Their guide returned to the bus, leading thirty-one bedraggled men and women. Hours earlier, they’d been strangers to one another. Now, they were pitched together for a three-day tour by luxury coach. Citizens of nine countries—Judith and Tosh were the only Canadians—they were counted by Teruko each time they placed a foot on the steps of the bus. Teruko now fired a disapproving look towards the back. Judith, Tosh and the man from Marseilles had refused to visit a national treasure, her national treasure.

  “I can’t do this,” Judith said, half-aloud, but only to Tosh. “I’m conserving my strength for Hiroshima this afternoon. I want to see the Peace Park, the museum. My clothes are sticking to my skin. I don’t want my backache to get worse.”

  “Why are you feeling guilty?” said Tosh. “If you’re falling down from heatstroke, what’s the point?”

  Judith settled into the corner of the bus. She closed her eyes and imagined their child. She did her best to pretend that this was not a land of extreme heat, not a land of ocean trenches, active volcanoes, ruthless, broiling sun. The man from Marseilles leaned sideways across Tosh, tapped her on the arm, produced a bottle of Vichy from his shoulder bag, and a paper cup. He patted his own tummy. Maybe he understood, after all.

  Judith had not considered this trip a pilgrimage until it had become one. A pilgrimage for Tosh, Sansei, third-generation Canadian who had never been to Japan. For his mother, who died before her thirty-eighth birthday in a British
Columbia internment camp. For his father, who, decades after the end of the war, had purchased a small orchard and owned, once again, a tiny piece of land. Especially for him, as he was the only real link Tosh had to his ancestral past.

  His father. Who, during their summer visits to the Okanagan, knew no greater pleasure than to sit across from them at the kitchen table after a day’s work, and instruct them in the history of his forebears. As he spoke, the muscles flexed and tightened in his arms and throat. Father, who’d been sent to Japan on a small boat with other Nisei male children of his generation for education in the pre-war years. Who, responding to some internal signal, rose abruptly from the table, clapped his hands to wake the gods, and offered a bowl heaped with cherries, or a fat, ripe peach from his youngest tree, and set it high on the altar shelf.

  It was a pilgrimage, too, for Nisei and other Sansei whom Judith and Tosh were now meeting throughout Japan. They trickled into the mainflow from San Francisco, Honolulu, Kamloops, Saskatoon. Each had crossed the 180th meridian, losing a day in mid-air. In some unplanned way, for everyone, the trip had become a search, an attempt to make sense of an ancient culture, fragments and rites of which they half knew and which they were passing on to their children, or their children’s children, with some loosely rooted feeling that they were right in doing so.

  For Tosh, there might not have been a trip at all. Three weeks before departure, he’d received a letter from Ottawa telling him that he would have to change his name legally before a passport could be issued. The name on his birth certificate did not match the name on his application. Did the missionaries, said Judith, forget to tell the Prime Minister? That, in the internment camps high above the Fraser, they’d renamed all the little Japanese children whom the Prime Minister had himself interned?