Foreigners

by Stephen Finucan

  “You’re using a new soap,” she said once. “I like it.”

  It had been so easy to hide it from her. Already in the habit of showering after his rotation, washing off the grease and dust of the hangar, it took little effort to deceive her when it was Jenny’s smell he began to wash away.

  Finally, he could no longer carry on with the lies. Deception was too untidy, and he’d begun to pity Sheila. And this made him feel as if he was betraying Jenny. So in the end, even afraid as he was of the gossip that would surely follow in its wake, he told her the truth.

  Sheila’s reaction shocked him, left him cold. He had expected her to crumple, had imagined that she would fall to the floor in front of him, or shatter like the fragile china she had so loved to collect and put on display for all to see. But she did neither.

  She stood with arms folded tightly across her chest. She had just finished cleaning the kitchen and the dishtowel dangled from a closed fist. All around her, ceramic and stainless steel shone. She did not speak, and all Paul could think of was how when they first arrived at the house there had been nothing in this room except pipe fittings and electrical outlets, the previous tenants, as was customary, having taken their kitchen with them: counters, cupboards, appliances, fixtures, everything. Sheila had taken care of the refit. She chose the cabinets, decided on Italian ceramic for the counter tiles, high-polished faucets and the double sink, matching refrigerator and stove and dishwasher. The kitchen belonged to her and her alone.

  “It’s not that I don’t love you anymore,” he said to her, hoping that this would somehow shake her from her silence. “I do love you. I do. It’s just …” And he could think of nothing to add.

  She walked to the sink and, after wiping away a last drop of moisture from the edge of the basin, carefully folded the towel and laid it on the cool counter tile. Then she turned to face him.

  “You will book me on a flight home tomorrow. I don’t care what you tell them. Say my mother is ill.”

  The calmness in her voice frightened him.

  “Of course,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

  “Really?” she asked. “Whatever I want?”

  “Yes,” he replied, unsure of how he could ever manage to keep his word to her again.

  “Then what I really want is for you to fall down dead right here in front of me.” She smiled queerly at him. “Do you think you could manage that?”

  • V •

  After driving through the unexceptional town of Ypres, they thought they’d lost their way again. The cemetery was supposed to be on the outskirts, just off the highway heading south. But there was nothing other than low-slung red-brick houses crowding the edge of the road. Ten kilometres out of the town centre, Paul pulled onto the gravel shoulder and studied the map closely. Then he turned the car around and headed back toward Ypres, slowing again as the town came into view.

  It was Edward who saw the sign, small and green with white lettering. It bore the Canadian War Cemeteries emblem and stood at the entrance to a dusty laneway that passed between two of the nondescript red-brick houses and ended abruptly at a low metal barrier. Beyond the barrier stood the cemetery, enclosed by a short sandstone wall.

  They gained entrance through an opening in the wall and once inside stood there, not knowing what to do. To their left, from behind a tall juniper hedge that bordered the cemetery, they could hear the voices of children playing in the backyard of one of the houses. To the right was a vast and rolling meadow, its tall grasses shifting in the warm summer breeze. In the distance stood a copse of trees, elms maybe, possibly oak—they were too far away for Edward to tell. It was an idyllic view that stood at odds with this strange little graveyard that, although its grasses were neatly trimmed, felt somehow neglected, shut out of view by hedges and walls and houses.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” Paul said, looking around him.

  It seemed insufficient, did not jibe with the picture he had in his mind. He’d prepared himself for something grand. The previous November he’d been part of the colour guard at Normandy, representing the Canadian servicemen who’d fallen during the D-Day landings. Before the ceremony he walked along Juno Beach in the cold spray blowing off the Channel, wondering at the horror those men must have felt as they ran across the loose, shifting stones at the water’s edge. And then, inland, he marvelled at the vast cemetery stretches, row upon row of white markers ranging out in all directions like some sort of gruesome harvest. He’d been gripped by conflicting emotions: awe and pride and sadness. Yet none of these feelings were intimate. The magnitude of loss, the efficiency of death, the solemnity of sacrifice was too overwhelming to be visceral. But here, in this wanting, misshapen plot of land, he felt as if a cold hand had reached into his chest and touched his beating heart.

  “Did you think it would be like this?” he asked his brother.

  Edward shook his head. He’d been thinking about poppies and the lines of McCrae’s poem, about failing hands and rows of crosses. But there were no crosses here, just stark white headstones with maple leaves etched into their crowns, all but indistinguishable from one another. And there was no order to their placement, no symmetry to the layout. The rows were staggered, some running perpendicular to others; in some places stones were bunched together in small groups, while in others there was empty grass; at the far end, one headstone stood alone. The cemetery had a hurried look about it, as if there hadn’t been time to worry about the economy of space, as if burial had been a nuisance.

  There were seventy-eight headstones in the cemetery. Edward had counted them, touching the top of each one, before he went and sat down on the wall and looked out over the open field. At first he’d read the names on the markers, but soon found that he was taking in only the dates of their deaths. Of the seventy-eight, sixty-three had perished on the same day: the fourteenth of August 1917. Gas, he thought, and the taste of mustard filled his mouth.

  Behind him, Paul moved slowly through the graves, stopping for a moment at each one and every so often bending down to run his finger over the engravings.

  Edward tried to imagine the land before him torn and broken the way he’d seen in the picture book his father used to show him when he was a boy, but he couldn’t. Those photographs had been black and white, grainy, water marked. They might as well have been of the moon they were so alien to what he looked at now. It was quiet and green and sweet smelling.

  “I can’t see it,” he said to Paul without turning.

  “What’s that?”

  “All the terrible things. It must have been a nightmare here, worse than anything imaginable. The gas would have drifted across like a cloud come down to earth. They would have seen it coming. But I can’t.” He shifted himself to look back at his brother. “Can you?”

  Paul closed his eyes and let the breeze play against his face. He shook his head: “It wasn’t gas. Not here, not then. Artillery, more than likely; or they were making a push across no man’s land.” He turned back to the tombstones, reading each as if looking for one name in particular.

  This place wasn’t peaceful, Edward decided. Sedate maybe, but not peaceful. Nowhere that was ever so violent could be that. It was at rest, out of its misery. He heard the children laughing again and felt a chill. Paul came up beside him and leaned against the wall, facing the opposite direction.

  “He’s not here,” Paul said quietly. “He should be, but he isn’t.”

  “Who isn’t?” Edward asked.

  “Pappy Dan.”

  “Did you think he would be?”

  Paul nodded. “I did, yes. This was his company. At least that’s what it said on his induction papers. I found them, you know. A couple of years ago, in the archives at the War Museum in Ottawa. They’ve got all that stuff there. Packed away in cardboard file boxes.”

  “You never told me about that.”

  Paul shrugged. “I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

  “I might have been.”

  “Yo
u might’ve.”

  “Did you really want him to be here?” Edward asked.

  “Not at first, no,” Paul said. “But now that we’re here, I guess I do—or at least part of me does.”

  Edward stood up and stepped back over the wall. He crossed his arms and rubbed his shoulders as if he was cold, then walked to the closest marker.

  “I’m glad he’s not,” he said as he bent down and picked up a pebble from the grass and laid it on top of the gravestone.

  “It was a good story, though,” Paul said, his voice somewhat uncertain. “Wasn’t it?” Then he started walking again, down each row, his gaze passing from stone to stone.

  Edward, watching as his brother marched through the dead ranks, could feel his heart beginning to spill. The look on Paul’s face was that of a lost child searching for a familiar landmark that would show him safely home. He waited as Paul made another circuit of the cemetery, waited until he drew the map from his back pocket and spread it across the top of the low stone wall, then he went and stood beside him.

  Paul lifted his head and looked across the field.

  “There’s another one over there,” he said to Edward. “Maybe we should check it out.”

  Edward smiled. “Or we could just leave it be,” he said. “It was a good story.”

  “You think?” Paul asked.

  “Parts of it were,” said Edward. “Him running away with that farm girl. You know, just lighting out and starting all over again.” He reached out and took the map. “I liked that bit.”

  “Yeah,” said Paul as he watched Edward carefully refold the map and slip it into his shirt pocket. “I liked that bit, too.” He could feel his body go lax then, as if he’d somehow come untethered, and looking out across the field, he was overcome by a sense of foreignness. He was no longer certain where it was that he belonged. Then he felt Edward’s arm around his shoulder.

  “Come on, Paul,” he heard him say, as if from very far away. “Let’s go home.”

  THE TIME BEFORE

  TRY AS HE MIGHT, Elizaphan Misago could not get used to the cold. There was no escaping it. It chilled him to the jellied marrow. No matter how many layers he wrapped himself in or buried himself under, winter’s sharp finger still pricked through, penetrating skin, muscle and sinew until it needled his very bones.

  Standing behind the Plexiglas wall of a bus shelter that offered little refuge from the February wind, he thought of how warm it must be in Tallahassee, Florida, where his son lived. His son who refused to take him in; refused the sponsorship the American government required before they would issue him a visa. He recalled how the consular official in Bukavu had casually shrugged his shoulders when he broke the news.

  “I’m sorry. We’ve been in contact, but he refuses to act as guarantor. Without that, there’s nothing I can do. It’s out of my hands.”

  And as if to show that help was truly beyond his grasp, the embassy man held up his hands, fingers splayed, palms open.

  Elizaphan had thought momentarily of a bribe, but knew he had nothing to offer. All he’d once owned was gone, abandoned when he fled across the border. His home, his car, even his medical practice belonged to others now; others who, no doubt, had stripped everything as cleanly as a dog would a corpse.

  “You might consider Canada,” the American had said, a slow smile creasing his fleshy, sunburnt face. “They’re far more amenable to refugee claimants. And with your professional standing, I’m sure you won’t have much difficulty.”

  Had he known about the cold and the reluctance to accept foreign credentials, Elizaphan might have thought twice about his choice of country. He might have risked Belgium or even gone back to France where he had studied as a young man; at least there they were up front about not wanting you.

  Still, even after the college of physicians had denied him accreditation—that he’d studied at the Faculté de Médecine de Nantes did not matter; to them he was still an African doctor—Elizaphan felt there were benefits to Canada, and Toronto in particular. Other of his countrymen, he knew, would gravitate toward Montreal or Quebec City, language being their succour. Which was why Elizaphan chose differently. He did not wish any such comfort, nor did he wish the chance of old acquaintance. He wanted to avoid reminders of the past.

  Geography, though, Elizaphan had discovered, could be as feeble as will when it came to combatting memory. He’d learned that lesson shortly after his arrival in the city. It came some weeks after his caseworker found him the apartment overtop the transmission shop on Ossington Avenue. A cramped, lifeless set of rooms with narrow casement windows high on the walls that admitted very little light. The stink of motor oil, grease and exhaust fumes from the garage below made the air close.

  “This will not do,” his caseworker said. She was a short, plump woman with waxy skin and a forced smile. She had taken him gently by the elbow and tried to coax him back toward the stairwell. “Come, doctor,” she said. “I’m sure we can find you something better than this.”

  But Elizaphan stood his ground. He was determined not to return to the holding centre in the hotel beside the airport. Even with its comfortable beds, private baths and colour television, it reminded him of the camp in Zaire. He would sooner live in a dungeon than go back there. So he smiled and, in the overly polite, overly gracious, overly submissive manner that he’d come to recognize as the obligatory conduct of the refugee, assured her that the apartment would be fine.

  Elizaphan took to walking to escape the smell and the headaches it brought him. At night, with the shop below closed and the windows of his apartment open, the air was breathable. But during the day he had to flee out of doors. At first, he explored the immediate neighbourhood, the residential streets that ran between Bloor and College, and those that slipped across Harbord and bordered the park at Christie Pits. It was late summer then and the sun was still strong. He found work washing dishes at a Greek diner on Clinton Street. His caseworker had suggested that he enrol in one of the city’s adult learning centres to improve his English. It might help for when he decided to sit the examinations required by the college of physicians. But Elizaphan thought less of medicine. It too belonged to the past.

  Instead he concentrated on becoming lost in the city: a nameless face in the multitude, insignificant in his existence. He preferred the crowded streets, where it was easier to go unnoticed and to be unnoticing. Pushed along by the tide.

  Then came a Sunday morning in late October. He found himself stopped on the sidewalk out front of St Michael’s Cathedral. It was unseasonably warm; an Indian summer, the cook at the diner had told him the previous afternoon. It took Elizaphan a moment to realize what it was that had halted his progress. In consideration of the mild weather, two of the cathedral’s doors had been left open, and through them drifted the sweet voice of the choir. Elizaphan, who’d served as an altar boy in his youth, recognized the processional hymn serenading the congregation as they made their way to receive the Eucharist. He stood and listened, but did not feel the urge to enter. Elizaphan had not been to church since before Zaire, even though there had been many priests in the camp and Mass was said often.

  He walked on, heading west toward Yonge Street, before the parishioners emerged. Still, the sound of the choir and the unexpected brilliance of the sun had served to lighten his mood, and for the first time since his arrival, Elizaphan felt a sensation akin to belonging. He moved along the sidewalks as if he were weightless, bouncing on the balls of his feet. And without realizing it, he’d begun to look at the faces of those he passed by, taking unconscious pleasure in the fact that when he met an eye he did not feel the immediate need to look away.

  At Dundas, Elizaphan crossed the street and began to make his way toward the entrance of the Eaton Centre. He was happily weaving through the mob of shoppers and tourists and street kids and panhandlers, softly humming the hymn he’d just heard. When he saw the face, the song caught in his throat, stuck like a stone in his windpipe. It was there ahead of him,
motionless in the shifting throng, staring out at him. The features were immediately recognizable: the high forehead and long cheeks, the tapered chin, the thin nose and lips, the skin slightly less dark than his own. Eliel Nkongoli. But Elizaphan knew it was not Eliel. Knew that it could not be Eliel. For he had seen the man’s body himself, had stood over it and looked down upon the head split open by a machete, flies feeding in the wound.

  Elizaphan ran. Ran from the face that could not be Eliel Nkongoli’s, though the resemblance was enough almost to make him weep. A taxicab screeched its brakes as he stepped blindly into the busy roadway, the driver cursing him in a language he could not understand. Elizaphan continued running, pushing his way through the crowded Sunday sidewalks, not knowing where he was going, his mind awash with horrible images: Eliel, his wife and two daughters, seven and nine, their bodies lying bloody and torn in the foyer of the hospital.

  At night Elizaphan dreamed of the time before. When his wife, Agathe, was still with him and his son wrote loving letters and sent photographs of his happy family in Tallahassee, Florida. It was as if he were able to summon specific images and replay them in his dreams like home movies. They flickered through his slumber in brilliant Technicolor, but were devoid of sound. The one he called upon most often was his and Agathe’s last anniversary, and the trip they’d taken together to Kigali.

  They stayed at the Hôtel des Mille Collines in an executive suite with their own private balcony, but spent most of their time at the poolside or wandering through the hotel’s extravagant gardens. In his dream he did not recall the long trip from Kibuye or the disheartening drive through the slums northeast of the city, only their time together at the hotel.