by C. K. Stead
Back in my apartment I’m getting ready for my big empty bed when the fire alarm sounds. I remain very calm, reading the instructions on the back of the door. I should inch the door open. If there’s flame out there I should close it again and head for the balcony. I’m on the twelfth floor—twelve out of thirty-four—and I remember someone saying the longest ladder would only go up ten floors. If there are no flames and not too much smoke I should proceed groundward by the stairway. Don’t use the lift. I put on shoes, take my big coat and scarf, toque—but no, why not die in style? I put on the Helmut Schmidt cap and make my way to the stairs. There are no flames, no smoke, just the clanging of bells, deafening, impossible to ignore, and a lot of people, increasing in number as I work my way down. Walking to the university in daylight on a Sunday it seemed Quinton had been vacated—all but two or three of us, unwitting survivors who had missed news of the evacuation or survived the neutron bomb. But why should anyone come out on a cold Sunday? Outside working hours a North American city in winter is a lot of people watching television or reading. Here they come now, down the stairs, wearing anything from nightdress to battledress. We gather in the foyer. The firetruck arrives. Someone on the eighth has set a kitchen alight. It’s soon out, but down in the foyer we’re getting to know one another. Someone has a tape deck, a regular ghetto-blaster up on the railing of the mezzanine, and soon we’re all drinking and dancing, the flashing red and orange lights of the firetruck turning the lobby into a disco. This is Locomotion again. Oh, hot-blooded Bodil! Oh, chilly Ms Valtraute! Where are your furry collars? Where are your sexual politics?
Lonely and tearful, happy to be clasped to Melancholy’s incomparable bosom, the Distinguished Visitor dances solo among the beer cans in the flashing lights of Quinton’s largest firetruck.
SEEN FROM OUTSIDE, the Hubert Harrison-Jones Memorial Building (in which ‘the office of Ashtree’ is situated) is anonymous dull brown, executing a quarter-turn to imitate a bend in the river, so all its rooms along one side look down that wooded slope to the ice. Inside, it’s all white stucco, glass and open spaces, with cloth banners in orange, green and gold hanging down through two and three floors of a central opening area and catching the afternoon sunlight.
I sit at Alban Ashtree’s desk reading a poem-sequence by Alban Ashtree. Maybe he sat here writing it. It’s about Death and the Snow Maiden. He longs for Death. He longs for the Snow Maiden, who has red-gold hair. I keep looking up from the poem and down through the trees below the window. The shadows appear curiously blue across the clean white surface. Through the trees comes a tall shapely figure. She pauses at the top of the slope to regain breath, pulling off her toque and shaking out a shower of red-gold hemp. She looks up at this window and I wave nervously down to her. In a moment, looking up as if at me, she appears to be in tears. Is that possible, or an effect of the light? There’s no return of my wave and in a moment she’s skimming away out of sight, around towards the main entrance.
I turn to the poems submitted for tonight’s Creative Writing session. Some contain Snow Maidens and other Divine Derelicts. The Ashtree, it seems, like the one in Wagner that sheaths the magic sword, casts a long shadow. The sun’s still shining and I tog up and go out trying to find a firmly trodden trail, down to the river. In less than twenty minutes I’m on the bank, the ice stretching away upriver and down, with drifts of snow heaped on it. I want to walk on it, never having walked on water, and I’m sure it would be safe. There are ski-tracks across it, and someone has told me the ice is two feet thick. But there’s no one about, I’ve seen the trail of thaw where warm water spills out from the upriver power station, I know my optimism where water is concerned often leads me into error (is Ms Valtraute an Aquarian?) and I can imagine how quickly the heavy German tweed would go down. One Distinguished Visitor vanished without trace! So I content myself with one long look and two photographs. By the time I’ve found my way back up the slope my legs feel deeply chilled and my face is burning.
My phone rings. It’s Dan Dugan wanting to talk about the submissions, and warning me to go easy on blonde Megyn Kegan, who is under sedation for an unhappy affair. I promise all due caution with Ms Kegan. My eyes go around the room while we talk over the poems submitted, and I notice drawer number three with its few millimetres of overlap. I wonder about calling Mrs Merrill in to unlock and re-lock the cabinet with drawer three in place, but the nervous urgency of that Friday afternoon has gone, replaced by something else—curiosity? No I think it’s more the serious scholar’s sense of responsibility to an inquiry in hand: a sort of academic/forensic professionalism. So, not yet, thank you, Mrs Merrill.
IN MY APARTMENT this weekend, devising diversions and exercises for myself, I did some jogging. The apartment is large, but not large enough. I ran I think it was fifty times from the entrance to the sliding doors that open on to the balcony, then past the television set into the bedroom, around and across the double bed, back through the living room to the door again. Then I got more adventurous and extended my run out of my apartment into the vestibule, or lobby, or whatever that space out there is called. The building is circular you understand, with elevators running up the middle. When you step out of an elevator you’re at the still centre, with green carpet (green on this floor—different colours for different floors) longer haired but matching the apartment in colour, and running off the floors and up the walls, I suppose for insulation against noise. Encircling this central space runs the corridor off which the apartments open. So I listened out for the bells that would warn me if the lift was stopping at my floor and included that circular corridor in my run. It made for some fine turns of speed, and a little excitement.
MY FIRST PUBLIC LECTURE as Quinton’s DV is called ‘What is Modernism and where did it go?’ The department seems to like the title, but in the course of delivering it I stray away from my notes and begin to talk about Ashtree’s poems; and I wind up with a quotation from one of his unpublished notebooks—one of many memorable remarks of his I’ve found and jotted down on scraps of paper and which I’m just beginning to systematise. ‘To be perfectly lucid,’ the quotation goes, ‘is to deprive yourself of mystery and your reader of that sense of effort and discovery necessary to high art.’
Chairman Hyde is silent as we walk away from the lecture theatre. We’re joined by Dan Dugan, Eugene Fish and one or two others. The talk is desultory and general. Only the most routine plaudits for my lecture. Have I caused offence? We drink coffee in the Faculty Club and Eugene Fish tells a story about a gay tourist at the Vatican watching the Pope in purple soutane officiating at some important mass, swinging a censer. ‘I love his drag,’ the tourist tells the woman next to him, ‘but his handbag’s on fire.’
Back in my/his office I take down Ashtree’s poems again and read here and there, trying to remember what I said about them and to guess where in my remarks I went wrong. And then a small fist knocks at the door and it’s a fur collar standing there surrounding the freckled blue-eyed face of Ms Valtraute. Has she come to say something nice about my lecture? Only indirectly. She asks could we talk some time about sexual politics in Commonwealth poets. I pretend to consult a crowded diary before suggesting tomorrow and 4 p.m. ‘Let’s go for a beer,’ she says, ‘so it will be business and pleasure.’
‘I look forward to it,’ I say, truthfully.
A minute later there’s another knock. Bob Wilcox, who has the office next to mine, is inviting me to eat pizzas with him and his teenage daughter and his daughter’s friend who is from Mexico. I throw Ashtree into my bag and follow Bob down to the carpark. At the pizza place the two girls talk in Spanish and play records while Bob and I talk about French Canada, and Margaret Trudeau having sex in a car with Jack Nicholson, and Commonwealth literature, and finally Alban Ashtree. Bob wasn’t there to hear my lecture, so I explain how I drifted on to the subject of Ashtree’s poetry, and then felt uncertain what people thought of the lecture. ‘Well I guess,’ Bob Wilcox says, ‘they don’t like him.’
‘You mean his work? They don’t admire it?’
‘Oh his work’s OK,’ Bob says. ‘It’s him they don’t like.’
On the way back from the pizza place Bob gives some friends a lift. Daughter Monica climbs on to my knee to make room for them, and for a few minutes I have hair in my face and my arms around a teenage daughter.
OTHER CASUAL ENTRIES in Ashtree’s notebooks read: ‘I am too much given to doing my duty’ and ‘Writing is a poor substitute for sex. But so is everything except sex.’
It seems clear that the moment Bodil refused Ashtree’s request to let him kiss her in the street outside the disco, she regretted it. Next day they met by chance in the city art gallery and, being an honest and direct Scandinavian lady, she told him. He suggested he kiss her at once, behind a large piece of sculpture, but she had something more thorough-going in mind. What’s not clear is why they did not use Ashtree’s hotel room. Of course it may have been some sort of bizarre preference. But whatever the reason, Ashtree’s record is plain enough. That night the big German Ford was parked at the edge of a ploughed field outside the town, with its windows up, its seats down, its engine running and its heater working. And while snow drifted down Ashtree discovered (his notes are graphic) what a respectable Danish bourgeois lady meant when she said, ‘If I kiss you I get excited.’
ANOTHER APHORISM FROM the cabinet: ‘The generation of writers before mine suffered the pain of going unread because they were Canadian. Mine lives with the indignity of being read only for the same reason.’
And a postscript: ‘Most of the bastards live with it without discomfort.’
A familiar dilemma—and unfamiliar candour! And yes, I can see they would not have liked him.
THE FORECASTERS HAVE BEEN predicting that some high-level meeting of contrary streams of air over the Rockies will send temperatures ‘soaring towards zero!’—but I’ve seen no sign of it. The bus strike, long threatened, has begun, and I walk to Quinton University across the high-level bridge wearing pyjamas and socks under my trousers and on my head the toques, the one with the mask under the other. Where is the Helmut Schmidt look? The little cap of wapiti suede lies crushed and defeated at the bottom of my bag. Below the bridge I can see skiers on trails through the trees that cover the slopes down to the river. In a school playground children rocket down an ice-slide into a bank of snow. A hot-air balloon floats over the city. A bookshop has a display of the work of a Canadian woman poet who killed herself in Quinton three or four days ago. If they’d had the display last week, would she be still alive?
In Ashtree’s office I discuss the works of Iris Murdoch with a PhD student who is writing a thesis on them. He’s a Kurd from Iraq, and he won’t be returning home. He calls me Professor Ashtree, and seems not to understand what I mean when I tell him the name on the door is not mine. I read poems offered me by a sessional from Bombay. They are full of fine old flourishes, as if the English language had been set aside this past century and taken up fresh out of the cooler. He too farewells me as Professor Ashtree. I take a class on ‘The Waste Land’ for which I receive a faint round of applause. At 4 p.m. I keep my appointment with Ms Valtraute. We drink beer under the drab rafters of the Graduate Club, and talk about Allen Curnow, and Les Murray, and (drifting off the theme) her childhood on a farm in Saskatchewan. The farmhouse had no electricity and no central heating. It was heated by a furnace in the kitchen. In Libby’s bedroom upstairs icicles hung from nails in the wall, frost formed on the inside of window panes, and the water in the glass by her bed was frozen by morning. Until she was twenty she never saw a tree taller than eight feet. She was twenty-three when she first saw the sea. I don’t tell her how far into my forties life has taken me before showing me my first frozen river.
As for Curnow and Murray—she may be more relaxed over her beer but she’s not prepared to sign an armistice in the war of the sexes, and I can see will convict them, Curnow especially, of transgressions. We call a cab and cross the river to the town side, to a Japanese restaurant where a cook in a tall white hat prepares a meal for a dozen people grouped around a table which adjoins his large electric hot-plate. It’s a curious combination of East and West, intended to be orientally occidental but better described (it’s my little joke for Libby Valtraute) as accidentally disoriented. We get a lucky number with our meal and Libby wins third prize, a little Japanese vase. I am given a free set of chopsticks.
The meal has been large, enjoyable if unremarkable, and the sake has loosened us a little. I suggest coffee at my apartment, which is only a couple of blocks away, and I’m aware of the predictable pattern of all this, and the fact that, feminism or not, I am permitted to pay the bill. The coffee is instant—all I can offer; but we turn the lights down and look out at the city towers glittering in the icy air, and the broad white wandering ice-path of the river under starlight. I sit beside Libby on the couch and now and then our knees touch. What next? Who is to make the first move? What about feminism? Has she no principles—or is this just a big Man Trap leading to a small Saskatchewan fist in my Pacific mouth?
MY SECOND PUBLIC LECTURE, a week after the first, is called ‘Modernism—an art of fragments’, and it goes much better than the first because I stick to my notes and keep off the subject of Alban Ashtree. At question time an elderly academic expresses doubts. Fragments are fragments, he says, and art is art. My reply is to remind him of Eliot’s ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruin’ (already quoted), and remind him that this is a very old battle, long ago fought and won. ‘This is literary history,’ I tell him, and he detects in my sighing tone the suggestion that so is he—and takes offence.
My eyes wander over the audience towards Libby Valtraute inconspicuously placed near the back door. I haven’t seen her today though I’ve been conscious of her in bed with me during the night. She has in the past few days taken possession of the spare key to my apartment and she comes and goes according to whim, or some schedule of her own, often creeping in after I’ve gone to sleep and leaving early before I wake. Only her fat-free yoghurt in the refrigerator, her lemon and honey soap in the bath, and her red-gold hempen hair around the plug-hole, reassure me that she’s not a figment or an invention. But though I’m certain of her reality and occasional presence in my bed, I can’t be sure whether it’s an accurate memory or a deluding dream that I woke in the middle of the night to find her cradling my head against her naked breasts and weeping silently into my hair, murmuring a word I can’t catch but which puts into my sleep-fuddled brain the thought of breakfast.
An hour or two after the lecture I come into the Faculty Club and half a dozen of the Comp. Lit. Department are discussing it. There’s an awkward silence until Eugene Fish explains to me that they’ve been discussing my resemblance to Alban Ashtree, and the coincidence that I should be occupying his room. It’s not just appearance, he tells me, but certain gestures, body language. For some reason today it was particularly noticeable.
I’m not sure this is something I want to know; but some dark part of my brain is listening to Ashtree’s forename, Alban, as they pronounce it, and hearing something quite close to ‘All Bran’. Is that what I have woken to, hearing Libby whimpering it as she wept in the night?
THE HIGH - LEVEL MEETING of air-streams with its consequent thaw comes and goes too rapidly to change very much. For half a day the snow turns to slush in the streets and begins to run away into gutters, but that night it all turns to ice again and in the morning fresh snow has fallen. Bob Wilcox has the afternoon off and finds gear for me so we can go cross-country skiing. We take a trail down to the river and cross the ice to follow another trail along the river bank for an hour or more until it brings us to a lodge where there’s a fire and hot drinks. It’s late when we get back and in the Faculty Club there’s a tense atmosphere. Eugene Fish tries to tell us something but stutters to a halt. Chairman Hyde assumes the mantle of his office and delivers it straight. The department has had a telegram this afternoon. It’s a
bout Ashtree. Not good news. Bad in fact. A grievous loss. Ashtree died in an avalanche yesterday, climbing or skiing somewhere in the Austrian Alps.
I LIE AWAKE IN my overheated apartment wondering what it would be like to die under an avalanche of snow. It seems such gentle soft stuff and I’m so unfamiliar with its ways I can’t imagine it as a violent death; but then I think of the sea, and the weight of water crashing down as surf …
I’m drifting towards and away from sleep, asking myself could anyone be called Alban Ashtree and die so alliterative a death, in an avalanche in the Austrian Alps. Are there Alps in Austria? Or, on the other hand, if it’s real and true, could it really be an accident? Has Ashtree seen himself off—designed a picturesque end for the poet of the Snow White Goddess?
Without getting out of bed I phone Libby Valtraute again but there’s still no answer. I slide back both panes of the little half-window that opens from my bedroom on to the balcony, and for a few moments the cold blast is refreshing, but soon it’s too cold and I close one pane, leaving the other just slightly open. Out there the moon is shining on the snow that has heaped and frozen in layers on the unused balcony. I wonder whether Libby has heard the news of Ashtree’s death. I have his latest book of poems by my bed and I open it and read the lines
Idea of a river was harder than
the river itself while the winged
mercury fell through floors
through ice through
layers of sleep that were
a kind of death.
His reputation has been growing in recent years—everyone seems agreed on that, and Chairman Hyde has said there will be Canada Council money for whoever gets the job of editing his collected works.
I pull the sheet over me and turn off the light. From this angle the big white moon appears balanced on the balcony rail. My eyes flicker towards sleep again and the moon’s face is the face of Libby Valtraute. ‘Alban,’ she weeps. ‘Alban Ashtree.’