My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  ~ complete all of his school work;

  ~ maintain a grade average of at least seventy percent for the remainder of the academic year;

  ~ visit Monsieur Vien every day after school for the rest of the semester;

  ~ write an essay on the theme of violence to be submitted by Christmas break;

  ~ consult an expert and undergo social-psychological assessment.

  Hugo scowled. Who did Boner think he was, dictating who his friends could be, forcing him to see a shrink? He folded the sheets in two.

  Vien stopped him before he could shove them in his bag. “You have to sign,” he said. Vien picked up a pen. “Here.”

  Hugo refused to take it.

  “Did you not hear me? You have to sign.”

  Hugo took a step backward. No way he’d stoop to such indignity.

  “Don’t be stupid, Hugo.”

  Hugo pointed to the bottom of the first copy, where the parties to the contract were identified. “That’s wrong.”

  Monsieur Vien stared at him blankly.

  “It’s not my name.”

  Vien looked at the sheets, which he’d laid flat on his desk, and then back at Hugo. “It’s what’s in the register, Hugo. As far as this school is concerned, this is who you are.”

  Hugo shrugged. The school could go screw itself. They wanted to make him miserable with all kinds of restrictions like he was some sort of little criminal? Then they should be clear on who they were making miserable. “My name’s Hugh Stern.”

  There was a pause as Vien pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “Why are you doing this? Because of Vladimir? Don’t be an idiot.”

  Hugo was not an idiot. Nor was he blind. He’d seen how the Russians were treated in the school—all of them. And the Iranians. Anyone who spoke any language other than French.

  “You know,” said Vien, his voice a little gentler, “your name’s not so bad, Hugo.” He smiled, his eyebrows joining to form a hairy arch. “René Lévesque,” he said, bobbing reverently. “Your dad. It’s a pretty amazing club, if you ask me.”

  Hugo looked out the window. Darkness was falling, and the glass had turned reflective. Instead of the sky, his own frowning face, yellowish in the indoor light, stared back at him.

  “I’m serious, Hugo,” said Vien. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Neither is Stern.”

  “No,” said Vien. “Your mother’s name is perfectly fine as well.”

  “Not my mother’s. She changed it. My grandfather’s.”

  Vien nodded. “It’s a fine thing to respect your grandfather, Hugo. But just think for a moment. Lévesque is the name your parents gave you. The name you’ve had since birth. You can’t just throw it away on a whim.”

  Hugo bit the insides of his cheeks. He must not speak. Not one more word. This was no whim. Vien was a hypocrite. They all were. Even his mother, the so-called feminist, who had tossed out her entire heritage for a man.

  Vien sighed. “This is how it happens. Every time. You’ve heard of the Acadiens, right, Hugo? In New Orleans, people call them Cajuns. None of them speaks a word of French anymore. Well, maybe a word. But not much more than that. Same thing in western Canada. Manitoba, Saskatchewan. Those provinces used to have real French communities. Thriving ones. Now it’s just a few old people speaking a language their children couldn’t be bothered to learn. Soon they’ll be dead, and then it will be over. And the worst part of it is, they have no one to blame but themselves.” He paused to wipe his glasses. “Your father loves his language. Is that such a bad thing?”

  Above them, the fluorescent tube flickered and hummed.

  Vien walked to the door and cut the power to the dud light. Shadows crowded in.

  “He and I were like brothers, you know.”

  Hugo looked at Monsieur Vien’s dark face. His anger was fading, just like the light outside. For the first time, he stopped wanting to get away.

  “During our first two years at Saint-Jean, we were both day students, but in grade nine I became a boarder. That was when I started hanging out with your dad.” Vien blinked. Without glasses, his eyes looked vulnerable, like a mole’s. “Grade nine was the year we both lost our fathers.”

  Hugo’s breath went slow. He did his best to remain still, not that it seemed to matter. Vien wasn’t really talking to him anyway.

  “My dad didn’t die,” Vien said quietly. “He just left. We didn’t know where. I later learned he’d been living in Maine. A little town called Belfast … But that’s a whole other story. When I was in high school, all I knew was that he was gone. And Luc’s father was gone too.”

  He glanced quickly at Hugo. “You’ve heard about that, I presume?”

  Hugo nodded. His grandfather had committed suicide. His mother had told him the story just after he turned eleven.

  “So, there I was,” Vien continued, “sent away by a mother who could no longer cope. Living by myself in a tiny bedroom on the third floor of the east wing. You don’t really know that part of the school. It’s closed off now. Used for storage. The experience could have shattered me. But it didn’t, because I had a friend named Luc Lévesque. I kept running away to your grandmother’s house. She’d always feed me a hot meal, and your father would set me straight. He didn’t have to say anything. It was enough that he knew what I was going through. He was going through it too. Two boys without fathers.”

  He fell silent. When he looked up, his expression had changed. “You happen to have a father, Hugo. Let’s not lose sight of that fact.” He pushed the contract across the desk to Hugo. “Sign.”

  Hugo shook his head. What had happened to his dad thirty-five years ago had nothing to do with this. But his mind hovered for a moment over his grandfather. He knew about the suicide, sure, but somehow he’d never imagined his dad as being part of that event. He’d never stopped to wonder what it had been like.

  He would not take the pen Monsieur Vien was holding out to him—a cheap ballpoint, its end chewed into splinters.

  “Come on, Hugo. This is ridiculous.”

  Hugo shook his head. Vien didn’t know his dad. Not deep down like Hugo did.

  “Okay,” said Vien, visibly pissed off. “If I put ‘Hugh Stern’ in here and delete ‘Hugo Lévesque,’ you’ll sign?”

  Hugo stared at him. Was this a trick? He nodded, tentative.

  “Once you do, however, that’s it. You understand that, don’t you, Hugo? No backtracking. No more changes.”

  When Hugo still didn’t answer, Vien got in his face. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Without another word, Vien made the change by hand on all three copies of the contract. It looked messy—a big slash with the new name scribbled in a hurry underneath. “There you go,” he said, clearing a space on the desk.

  Writing a name was not the same as saying it. The new signature felt awkward to Hugo. It looked awkward too—the unpractised scrawl of a child. Not that Vien seemed to notice. Hugo had to sign all three copies. The instant he was done, Vien gathered them up and stuffed them in his drawer.

  “Now we can discuss your project.”

  Hugo looked at him, unsure what he was talking about.

  “Two thousand words,” said Vien, shutting the drawer with a bang, as if the contracts might run off like bad mice. “On violence. A vast topic. You could do anything, basically. Within reason.” He walked over to a filing cabinet beneath his window and raised one of the long metal flaps to get at the drawers. “Does al Qaeda interest you? I’ve been collecting clippings ever since 9/11. I’ve got a fair-sized collection on bin Laden.”

  “I’m not a mujahid,” Hugo said. It was a term he’d learned recently from CNN.

  “I’m not saying you are,” said Vien, impressed.

  “People died in the Twin Towers attacks.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  Hugo looked down at his shoes. They were badly scuffed. He hated his uniform, hated the fact that you could get a detention if Boner caught you wa
lking down the hall wearing the wrong shoes, or even wearing an undershirt under the scratchy school polo.

  “I’m not saying it has anything to do with you.”

  Hugo resisted looking up. He was staring at two tiny letters, an H and an S, that he had carved into his black leather toes. From over at the filing cabinet, Vien was watching him. Hugo could feel his eyes. “Not necessarily, anyway,” said Vien.

  Did he think Hugo was violent, one of those misfits who shot up their schools, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High? Hugo had been pretty intrigued by that story. He was eleven years old when it happened, just about to enter high school. He’d watched the reports over and over on the news, trying to imagine what he would do if someone tried something like that at the college he was planning to attend.

  He sat up in his chair. Vien was still watching him. Hugo scowled.

  Vien came back to the desk and busied himself with a fat binder of papers. “I’ve got to do some photocopying. Look through my files in the cabinet, Hugo. I’m sure you’ll find something of interest. I’ll be back in half an hour and we can talk.”

  After Vien left, Hugo continued to sit for a while. Stacks of assignments filled every millimetre of space on the surface of Vien’s desk. Vien’s papers and notes were strewn about in no discernible order. Hugo flipped a binder open and found pages of lectures written out in Vien’s inimitable scrawl. Some were so ancient they’d turned yellow. He’d been at this a long, long time, old Vien. It seemed like a shitty life. Slightly less shitty than being a student, though, because at least a teacher could choose. Monsieur Vien could. He could pack up his briefcase any time and leave.

  Hugo looked longingly out the window. He could leave too, of course. Walk right out of here, never to return. Transform himself into a street kid or something. Find an abandoned warehouse down near the canal. The nights were turning cold, but kids still did it. Kids around his age. He’d seen them outside the metro stations with their scruffy dogs and squeegees, begging for spare change.

  A picture on Vien’s desk caught his eye, the lone photograph sitting among the piles of papers. A young man smiled out at him. It took Hugo a second to recognize Vien. Happy-looking, his arm encircling an equally young ponytailed blond woman. She was not smiling. She was very sexy, though, her breasts bulging out of a low-cut white blouse. His wife? Hugo glanced at the clock. Seven minutes had gone by. He forced himself over to the filing cabinet.

  When Monsieur Vien returned, some forty minutes later, Hugo was sitting at the back of the room at his own desk, totally absorbed.

  Monsieur Vien deposited his papers and came to see what he was reading. The clippings were from the seventies, many of them as brittle as dried leaves. Vien picked up the article Hugo had been looking at. The photograph accompanying the newspaper article showed a bearded young man with hooded eyes.

  “Jacques Lanctôt,” Vien said, surprised. Then, proudly, “I met him once, you know.” When Hugo looked up, Vien was smiling. “The last of the big-time dreamers. He still believes. After everything he’s been through.”

  Beneath that clipping was another one with a group photo. Lanctôt was front and centre, clean-shaven and looking a little older. The headline was “Off to Cuba.” Everyone in the picture, including two women at the edge of the group, was holding a cigar. The article dated back to the early eighties. There had been some kind of literary exchange between Montreal and Havana.

  Standing next to Lanctôt, looking serious in a black turtleneck, was Hugo’s father. His hair was black, tied in a ponytail just like Lanctôt’s. He was considerably taller than Lanctôt, but with their hair and colouring, the two men could have been brothers.

  Vien laughed. “Your dad knows him personally too. Many writers in Quebec do. Lanctôt’s a publisher. He published your father’s poetry before he became famous.”

  Hugo felt his cheeks warm.

  “Lanctôt isn’t violent, Hugo, if that’s what you’re about to suggest. I did a lot of research on him. This,” he said, pointing at the fat file on Hugo’s desk, “is from my master’s thesis. Lanctôt’s group called itself the Liberation Cell. They were kids, basically. Young intellectuals defending an ideal. Utopians, every one of them. If there was violence in the FLQ, it was in the Chenier Cell: the Rose brothers and Francis Simard.” He looked at Hugo. “You’ve heard of them?”

  “They’re the ones who killed the labour minister, Pierre Laporte.”

  Vien shook his head, making a face. “Laporte was found dead,” he corrected. “No one’s entirely sure how it happened. He was discovered strangled in the trunk of an abandoned car on the South Shore. Members of the Chenier Cell were charged with murder and did time in jail. Paul Rose got life, even though it was later proven that he wasn’t present when Laporte died. But Lanctôt? He had nothing to do with all of that. He was a teacher, Hugo. A thinker. A man of dreams. At a certain point, those dreams led him to acts that might be considered extreme, but not to murder. Not to violence. All he did was hold a British diplomat named James Cross hostage.”

  “Trade commissioner,” corrected Hugo.

  Vien smiled. “Okay. Trade commissioner. They’re just words, Hugo. It amounts to the same thing. Although it was a clever tactic on the part of the British to couch imperialism in the language of commerce. We weren’t the only place where they did that, by the way. Ever heard of the East India Company?” He put the article about Lanctôt back on top of the pile, covering up Hugo’s father. “Anyway, Cross survived, right? He walked away unharmed.”

  The radiator behind them banged and then settled, making Hugo jump. Vien didn’t actually believe there’d been no harm, did he? Cross had been held at gunpoint for fifty-nine days. All through the autumn of 1970.

  “It was a different time, Hugo,” Vien said, his upper lip moist from the warmth of the room. “You have to see it in context. You couldn’t speak French at work back then, not even to a fellow francophone. We were second-class citizens in our own home.”

  For the next half hour, Vien tried to convince him that Lanctôt was a victim of history and of the Canadian government, a man who dreamed of a better society. Surely, that was no crime. He wanted to protect his language and his culture. For this, he was exiled and eventually imprisoned. Hugo’s father knew and liked him. All kinds of Quebec writers did. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the man. He had the courage to stand up for his beliefs, that was all.

  Hugo slouched against the wall, staring at his scuffed shoes as Monsieur Vien expounded. Vien walked over to a dusty bookshelf near the door and pulled out a book, Nègres blancs d’Amérique, by someone called Pierre Vallières.

  “Read this before you cast aspersions,” he said. “The Québécois are a peaceful people. Jacques Lanctôt never had any intention to do anyone harm. And he didn’t end up doing harm. James Cross walked out of that room in Montreal North without a scratch. That’s worth bearing in mind.”

  Hugo stopped listening. It was clear that Vien had his theory. And that this theory was not to be challenged. He didn’t want Hugo’s thoughts on the matter. He wanted his own view of history handed back to him. Word for word. Good luck with that.

  Vien talked for several minutes more before dismissing him. Hugo couldn’t look at him. He gathered up his things as quickly as he could and left the classroom.

  At the school’s main door, Hugo stopped to shove the book Vien had lent him into his knapsack. “White Niggers of America.” What a title. He stepped outside. It was depressingly dark. He hated how early the light disappeared now. It must be past five. He thought fleetingly of his mother, who would be waiting at home.

  His first day back at Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and now this afterhours session with Vien, had worn him out. Was this what his life would be for the rest of the term? The year? From class to detention. Detention to home. His days as regimented as a prisoner’s. He’d speak the language they dictated, write essays on topics they decreed, describe the world not as he saw it, but as they
did, so they could tell themselves it wasn’t all arbitrary, that there was some kind of meaning out there. It was pathetic. They’d even deprived him of his friend.

  He kicked at a pile of dead leaves and swore, thinking of Vlad, missing him. Vlad would have cracked a joke, made him laugh at the absurdity. “Fuck it,” he said again, more loudly, right there on the school’s front steps. “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.” His fatigue was gone now. His body felt springy, alive. He could have run straight up the mountain. He could have benchpressed his own weight. “Fuck it. Fuck it.” He was yelling now, throwing English obscenities into the darkening sky. He wished his father were here. He’d shout in his fucking French face.

  He looked around the yard, remembering the crazy man who hung around the Guy-Concordia metro station whom everyone called l’hurleur, “the screamer.” No one had heard Hugo, fortunately. He walked down the path leading to Sherbrooke Street.

  At the gates, he stopped and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. Without giving himself a moment to think, he pressed the speed-dial button.

  Vlad didn’t sound surprised, although it had been two weeks since they’d spoken. “Where are you?” he said, as he always did. His substitute for a hello.

  Hugo looked behind him at the Saint-Jean ramparts. It was too awkward mentioning school. “Downtown,” he said gruffly.

  “You with someone?”

  “No,” said Hugo. “You?”

  “Nope. You’re timing’s good, my friend.”

  Hugo smiled and announced he was on his way. Screw the contract. How would they ever find out where he’d gone? And if they did, how would they stop him from doing it again? Put an ankle bracelet on him? He wasn’t some sex offender in Florida. Hugo hugged his arms and began walking west toward Vlad’s place. He’d only taken a few strides when the lamps lit up all the way down Sherbrooke Street, like lights in a harbour guiding ships to shore. He decided to take it as a sign.

  Vlad’s high-rise was on Fort Street, two blocks from the school. His parents were separated and he lived alone with his dad. Hugo had never met the dad, though, because he was always out working. In Russia, he’d been a math teacher, but here in Quebec the only job he could find was house painting. And he seemed to do it day and night. It was a temporary thing, according to Vlad, although they’d lived in Montreal for over a decade.