My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  Alfred Stern did not blink.

  Her father had always been good with words. There had been a time when the thing she’d hated most about him was the flow of them.

  His eyes were still on her. She busied herself by hanging up her jacket in the locker at the foot of the bed. She sat down in the visitor’s chair. She picked up his bad hand, focusing on it to avoid his stare. The fingers were curled in on themselves. They clenched tighter at her touch. Hannah managed to get her thumb up under the pinkie and work her way inside to the palm. The muscles there were hard, as densely solid as bone. One of the nurses had said massage would help. She pressed into the hollow of his palm, trying to loosen things, feeling his resistance.

  Her father observed her closely as she did this, but his face remained blank. It was as if he’d detached himself from everything—the room, his daughter, even his own hand, which he was now eyeing as if it didn’t really belong to him. He didn’t seem upset that she was holding it. This was both relieving and astonishing: the angry words that didn’t come.

  The hand began to warm and loosen. She kept kneading it, looking up now and then to check his face. It was a habit, this checking. Trying to catch the atmospheric shifts. He seemed content enough, but with Alfred she could never be sure. Despite the blue hospital gown, despite his shrivelled old man’s body, there was still vigour in him. Plenty of strength. She must not underestimate the strength.

  The previous evening, for the benefit of the night nurse, Connie had referred to Alfred Stern as a shtarker. Connie liked Yiddish expressions and used them often, with varying degrees of precision.

  Alfred Stern had spent his life refusing to acknowledge any acquaintance with the language in which he was fluent. Like many survivors, he had done his best to erase the signs of his Jewishness. Only the accent had betrayed him. He had come to Canada at sixteen, too old to rub out this mark of a Viennese childhood.

  Alfred’s hand jerked from her grasp and fell onto the sheets. Hannah stared. It jerked again, like a netted fish. She bolted out the door to find the nurse. By the time she returned, her father was lying quietly, his hand inert beside him, clenched once more into a fist. The nurse had stayed at her station, explaining to Hannah in a bored, somewhat condescending voice that it was nothing to get excited about. It was just the random firing of disconnected nerves, a common occurrence in stroke victims.

  Hannah looked warily at her father, not quite trusting the nurse’s words. He looked like a sleepy child, not threatening in the least. She took his fingers up again and recommenced the rubbing, gently, watching his face for signs. His eyelids, purpleveined and thin as rice paper, fluttered for a couple of seconds and closed. His breathing grew deep and even.

  This new post-stroke father was an enigma. Neither his face nor his body betrayed anything. And without words, she had no compass anymore, no map, no road into the sudden desert that was Alfred Stern.

  What, really, did she know of him? In the hazy light from his window, she stood and tried to summon memories. What she recalled most clearly were the fights. They were stamped into her in a way the good times were not. There had been good times in the Stern family, plenty of them. Her childhood had been happy, overall. But the face that came up in the happy memories was her brother’s. Benjamin was two years older than she was and, until she turned nine, her closest ally and friend. He was the person she’d played with, the one who’d taught her all the important things—how to draw, how to read, how to ride a two-wheeler. Their father had been around, but not intimately involved.

  The fights had been intimate. They’d started when Hannah was older, the year she turned ten, just before puberty. They were not physical. That was not her father’s way. Nor were they loud. Despite the disadvantage of age, Hannah could not claim she’d been an innocent victim. Most of the time, she was the one who provoked them. It was easy. All you had to do was disagree.

  She disagreed often, for no matter how painful crossing him was, it forced an acknowledgment. It was a way of seeing her own small self reflected in his eyes.

  Benjamin never did this. He was no fool. He had seen what Alfred did to people who contradicted him. Early in life, he developed a survival strategy. On the outside, he looked like a regular boy, playing sports and goofing around, but if you observed him closely, you saw it. He only spoke when spoken to. He kept his views to himself. Eventually, he even stopped sharing them with Hannah.

  Their father was just the opposite. Full of opinions. Constantly airing them. Arguing, forever arguing.

  Hannah didn’t look like her father, but as a child she’d shown signs of his gift for words, and also of his combativeness. People had predicted she’d follow in his footsteps professionally. But in the end, it was Benjamin who had become the lawyer, although he’d had to move three thousand miles away to do it.

  Hannah lowered her father’s hand, still clenched though he was asleep, and laid it on his chest. The contraction was permanent and would grow worse unless they worked on it every day. She gave the hand a final caress and pulled the sheet over it.

  Connie arrived several minutes later. “I was beginning to worry,” she said, and covered her mouth when she saw that Alfred was asleep.

  She was wearing a tailored brown suit and looked younger than her seventy years, although the strain of the last ten days was starting to show. She turned and smiled at the nurse who had followed her into the room. “Annie,” she said, “this is my daughter, Hannah.”

  Hannah looked at the pretty young nurse. Her name tag said A. Syjico.

  “Hannah is our youngest,” Connie said to the nurse. “Her brother, Benjamin, is a lawyer in Vancouver.”

  Nurse Annie smiled. “A family of lawyers.” She flattened the vowel, turning lawyers into liars.

  “Not all of us,” Connie said. “Hannah’s a translator. She does her husband’s books.”

  Annie nodded pleasantly. She looked young—too young to tell people to be quiet and let her work. She was carrying a meal tray, waiting for Connie to finish. But Connie was now onto the subject of Luc. She told Annie how he’d won the Governor General’s Award. “He writes in French. In Montreal, he’s a celebrity.”

  Hannah glanced at her father, who was still asleep.

  Connie also looked at him. “Alfred’s a celebrity too, of course. He comes from a family of celebrities. His grandfather was a renowned rabbi in Vienna. This was before the war.”

  Hannah rolled her eyes.

  “There’s an old Hebrew saying,” Connie said. “Le dor va dor.” She paused, letting the foreign sounds hang in the air before giving the English translation. “From generation to generation.”

  “Oh,” said Annie. “I like that. Can you repeat it?”

  “Le dor va dor.” They were among the very few Hebrew words Connie knew, not that she would admit this to an audience as appreciative as Annie.

  “I’ll have to remember that,” she said sweetly. “For my other Jewish patients.” She rolled Alfred’s table close to the bed and swung it in front of him.

  Alfred’s eyelids fluttered open.

  “Well, hello there,” Annie said.

  His lack of affect didn’t bother her. On the contrary, it provoked a stream of talk, which Annie kept up without pause as she moved energetically around the bed, plumping pillows, straightening sheets, pulling Alfred out of his slouch.

  “Lucky man,” Annie said cheerily, “with your daughter here to visit from Montreal.” She bent over him, fussing.

  He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t looking at anything, really.

  “Feeling better without the tube?” Annie asked.

  Hannah realized why he had looked so shrunken. The long blue feeding tube was gone.

  “We can see your face now,” Connie added.

  It was true. His face was more visible. But there were still no emotions to read there.

  Lunch that day was butterscotch pudding. Nurse Annie took the top off the pudding cup and spooned a dab into Alfred Ster
n’s mouth.

  He swallowed and immediately opened his mouth for more, like a baby bird.

  “Good,” said Annie in the tones of a nursery school teacher, her face amplifying each emotion. “This is great,” she said. “Some stroke patients never manage to swallow again.”

  Connie frowned. “How do they eat?”

  “With tubes. Short term, down the throat, like your husband had. Long term, right through here.” She tapped Alfred’s belly.

  Alfred swiped at the pudding cup with his good hand. “You are hungry,” Annie said, laughing and gazing down on him like a favoured child.

  When at last Nurse Annie took the tray away, Hannah followed her out of the room. She felt lost, suddenly, unwilling to part with the woman’s cheery faith, the energy that made Alfred Stern eat butterscotch pudding as though it were the thing he most cherished in life.

  They stood between two large hampers overflowing with soiled laundry. “What can we expect?” she asked. “I mean, is this … is this the way it’s going to be?”

  The nurse put a hand on her arm. “It’s still early. Not even two weeks. For the moment, it’s best to take it slow. One step at a time.”

  Hannah waited, hoping for more, but Annie had to go. That was it, then. One step at a time. No compass, no map.

  4

  L uc didn’t own a cell phone. Using Marie-Soleil’s phone, he checked the messages on his voice mail. There were three from Serge Vien, audibly agitated but saying little, and two calmer, equally uninformative messages from a Monsieur Ducharme, the vice-principal at the school, leaving a private number. Luc tried to dial it and found that he couldn’t. His hand was shaking. Marie-Soleil had to do it for him.

  There had been “an incident,” Ducharme told him, when finally Luc got through. His son was fine, but Luc’s presence was required. How soon could he be at the office of the school principal, Monsieur Bonnaire?

  Luc asked for details. “Just come to the school, Monsieur Lévesque,” Ducharme said in his unruffled voice. “Come now.”

  Marie-Soleil took the phone and pressed End.

  He looked into her eyes and thanked her. Then he ran up the street, awkwardly, worrying inanely how his back would look to those lovely young eyes.

  THE SCHOOL’S MAIN DOOR was open. Immediately inside was a second door, locked, and a receptionist’s booth. He gave his name to the young woman in the booth and she buzzed him through. She started telling him which way to go, but he ignored her. He already knew. Up the worn main stairs to the second floor. Left. Three doors to the glass-walled waiting room. Nothing had changed. Not even the smell of chalk and ammonia cleaner. Luc looked through the glass into the waiting room, searching for his son. It was empty. The door was locked. He searched for a buzzer, but before he found it a man opened the door.

  Principal Bonnaire. Luc had never met him before. He was surprisingly short. The students surely made jokes about it— and just as surely mocked his absurd comb-over. He shook Luc’s hand with great formality and led him into the inner chamber, an office with a single small window. A serious-looking man in a raincoat who had apparently been conversing with the principal before Luc’s arrival stood up, but Bonnaire didn’t introduce him. He simply pointed to an empty chair, and Luc sat down.

  “First, let me say what an honour this is,” Bonnaire told him. He had crossed to the other side of his desk, an immense laminated structure with a dull grey surface that occupied most of the room, and was now looking down on Luc and the other seated man. “I only wish,” he said, throwing back his shoulders and standing to his full height, “that the circumstances were more agreeable.”

  Luc registered the body language. This would be a bad man to defy.

  “What are the circumstances?” he asked, trying his best to be polite. The lights overhead were fluorescent, turning everything, including the principal’s face, a sickly shade of greyish green. The air was hot and dry.

  Instead of answering, Bonnaire sat down. With excruciating slowness, he opened the top drawer of the immense grey desk and pulled out a dark object.

  Luc stared.

  “You recognize it?” Bonnaire asked, holding the gun out so that it glinted in the artificial light.

  Of course Luc recognized it. The long, cruel snout was unmistakable. It was a Luger. But the Luger? Could that be?

  Bonnaire waited.

  “Yes,” said Luc, unable to avert his eyes. “No, I mean.”

  Bonnaire was watching him closely. “Yes or no?” he said. “It cannot be both.” He put the gun down on his blotter, which was green, with wide borders of brown leather. The desk was spotless. No papers to be seen, no little yellow Post-its curling with age, their glue dried out and ineffectual. No paper clips or piles of earplugs like the ones cluttering Luc’s desk at home. More significantly, Luc thought, no photographs of anyone near and dear. The messy details of life seemed entirely foreign to this officious little man.

  “I know that kind of pistol,” Luc said, for he had to say something. “It’s a Luger. My father used to own one.” He closed his mouth, already regretting the statement. Why had he divulged that, of all things?

  The man in the raincoat leaned forward, resting his elbows on muscular thighs. He was tall, beefy under the coat. Definitely an athlete in his youth. “Used to?”

  “My father is dead,” Luc explained.

  “Where is his gun now?” the man asked, his chin lifting. His gaze, which was trained on Luc’s face, was uncomfortably direct.

  “How should I know?” answered Luc. “The last time I saw it was in the 1960s.” He looked away. A single plant sat on Bonnaire’s metal computer table. The leaves were two shades of green, shaped like arrows.

  “What was your father doing with a Luger?” asked the man.

  Luc turned, unable to hide his annoyance. “May I ask who you are?”

  The man glanced at Bonnaire. There was something going on here, some plan being followed.

  “This is Detective Sergeant Audet,” Bonnaire said. “Of the Montreal Police.”

  Luc’s heart started to race. “My father fought in the Second World War,” he said, struggling to sound calm. “He brought the Luger home when he returned from overseas.”

  The detective regarded him with professional blandness.

  Luc felt his face redden, as if some ugly secret had been laid out before them on Bonnaire’s scrupulously clean desk. His right shoulder began to twitch. He reached over, trying to keep his hand steady, and picked up the gun.

  The contraction in his shoulder unwound itself. The Luger was smaller and lighter than he remembered. He pressed his palm painfully into the grip. He had held his father’s gun only once, when he was ten years old. It had been kept in a locked strongbox, the only key to which was on his father’s key chain. One day, Luc had stolen the key.

  “There are quite a number of them in Montreal,” Detective Sergeant Audet said, almost casually. “You’d be surprised to learn how many. Collectors’ items. Souvenirs.”

  Souvenirs. A memory of the big dark basement of the Laporte Street triplex sprang up, uninvited, in Luc’s consciousness. As kids, he and Rémi had played there with their father’s souvenirs: a mildewy gas mask and a canteen that made tap water taste like rust.

  “You didn’t keep your father’s gun after he passed?” asked the detective.

  Passed. Luc hated that euphemism. And from a man who had no doubt seen a corpse or two in the course of his career. “No,” he said.

  “A valuable item like that?”

  “Valuable?” Luc looked at the thing in his hands.

  “People pay thousands for them.”

  Luc didn’t know where his father’s Luger had ended up. He had no desire to know. “I’ve never had any interest in guns,” he said.

  Audet was staring at him openly now. “So you don’t own one?”

  Luc shook his head.

  “And your son?”

  “You think this gun is Hugo’s? Is that what this is
about?”

  Neither man spoke. Audet’s eyes narrowed. He was making his mind up about Luc, and the verdict didn’t appear to be positive.

  “Look,” Luc said, struggling to sound calm, “I’d like to help you, but I can’t if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

  Bonnaire finally took pity on him. “That gun was found in your son’s knapsack at ten o’clock this morning.”

  Luc tried to absorb this piece of news. A gun. In Hugo’s knapsack. The two things refused to conjugate in his mind.

  “So, to your knowledge …” began Audet.

  Luc straightened his back and took a deep breath. “To my knowledge, my son has never set eyes on a real gun, let alone owned one.” That felt better. The bewilderment was starting to dissipate. A welcome sense of righteousness had taken its place. Luc was a pacifist. It was implicit in every book he had written. Did this man not know who he was?

  “Just to be clear,” said Audet. “You yourself have never seen this firearm before?”

  “Of course not,” said Luc sharply. “And even if Hugo somehow managed to get his hands on a weapon like this, why would he bring it to school?”

  “That’s the question,” said Bonnaire. “That certainly is the question.” The little man was smiling at Luc through tented fingers.

  Luc met the condescending gaze. “Where is he?”

  Bonnaire didn’t answer. This was obviously part of some insulting game plan.

  Luc felt a prickling heat in his face. He had a sudden comic vision of himself with steam puffing out of his ears. “I want to see my son.”

  “Monsieur Lévesque. Je vous en prie. Hugo is fine. He is with our vice-principal.”

  “You’ve questioned him?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bonnaire. “Oh, we’ve questioned him. But he hasn’t given us answers. That is the problem.” The tone was calm: the calm of a petty sadist. A tiny Bonaparte presiding over a tiny empire. Luc could imagine his son hating this man. Small hating small.

  He turned to Detective Sergeant Audet. “We’re talking about a crime here. Carrying a gun around in a knapsack. He’s underage, but it’s still a crime, right?”