Strum

by Nancy Young

  In the spring, preparations for two separate departures were kept entirely as independent affairs. A large leather traveling trunk inherited from his great-great-grandfather who moved only once, from Russia to France in 1812, provided Joël with a case large enough to pack his most treasured possessions: his entire bookcase of legal reference manuals; a stupendously large collection of Vietnamese and Chinese poetry in the original language, also translated into French; a collection of six eighteenth-century oil paintings of French country landscapes, and one of his great-great-grandmother as a very nude Turkish courtesan — the soft curves of her perfectly rounded breasts and the rich pink of her areoles repeated on her rotund cheeks and rosebud mouth.

  Into the trunks also went a full briefcase of stationery implements — parchment, linen papers, drawing pads, pencils, brushes, quills, ink pens, calligraphy brushes, wax seals, charcoal pencils, water-colors, and gouaches; a family photo-album and a gilt-framed photograph of the fat and smiling baby Philippe entwined in the folds of Lorraine’s silk brocade. A wardrobe which included four seasons of formal and casual wear and an arsenal of personal items to ensure he did not lose his up-to-the-minute debonair style while he was overseas in the fetid jungles of Hanoi was sent separately in four large table-high matching Louis Vuitton suitcases.

  Lorraine’s travel baggage was directly opposite of her husband’s. Packing only for one season, a chilly Québécois spring, she kept it to the bare essentials — the very things she had brought with her only a year ago. She abandoned all the fashion-house couture outfits of the past year, but made room for her wedding trousseau, a wedding photo-album, an album dedicated to baby Philippe — his birth, homecoming, christening, with various members of the extended family, first of everything — toys, cot, outfit, shoes, tooth — and two personal notebooks which contained a diary of her time in Paris. The last item to be prepared for travel was the guitar, newly dusted and polished, and packed carefully in a new custom-made black leather case lined in chartreuse silk moiré.

  It had become not only a good luck charm, her rabbit’s foot, but a nanny of sorts to baby Philippe. The guitar resided permanently now in his nursery, for his mother became accustomed to playing him a quiet lullaby to put him to sleep after she laid him in his cot for the night. There were times when she was certain the guitar was possessed by a spirit — just before Philippe spoke his first word, Lorraine heard an excited chorus of notes rise from the guitar in the nursery at the end of the hour during which the baby would have his afternoon nap. The mother, no longer surprised by the independent and never predictable music of the guitar, calmly strode into the room just in time to hear the baby softly utter the words, “Mamma … mam … mamam!” When he heard his mother rush in and saw her lovely face hover with a smile just above his wee cot, the animated words repeated themselves excitedly, spilling out of his baby lips like cupid’s arrows — the sweetest sound.

  Mother and child sang the words to each other for another hour, dancing joyfully around the nursery and composing a little song in time with the melody of his utterances. Instinctively she looked to the guitar and heard it chime in with an allegro — a sound like a whale rising through a foaming sea, spouting its glee into the receptive arms of mother air across planetary distances. This animal channeled its song to a companion guitar — the echo of those bellows from baleen and blowhole was then transformed into a falling allegretto in an empty schoolhouse on top of the world.

  •

  Once Col was able to bring a spark of flame to the half-burnt log embers of its last fire, the drafty fireplace in the main classroom of the schoolhouse warmed the traveler sufficiently, if not well. Downstairs there were four classrooms, varying in size from one large room for nearly fifty students down to one for only a handful. A small administrative office with built-in shelves was at the far end, adjacent to a large eat-in kitchen with bare cupboards, and two spare dressing rooms complete with showers. The outdoor toilet was yet to be discovered by the exploring couple. It stood thirty feet away from the house, on the edge of a precipice which fell away to nothing.

  Feeling like a pair of squatters in an abandoned farmhouse, the couple nonetheless made the best of the situation and proceeded to settle in before it became too dark to make their sleeping arrangements. The electricity was no longer connected and they would have to work by candle or flashlight as soon as the sun dropped below the horizon. Col calculated that they had about three hours of sunlight left. By dark they had succeeded in hauling in the bulk of their transported possessions and the scant items of furniture they had posted ahead of themselves in case of emergency. With foresight, two folding camp chairs and rollout bedding had been packed along with cooking and dining utensils and select items of personal hygiene and comfort — on the occasion that third-world housing and plumbing would require them to camp in the great outdoors — as true Canadians they were experienced wilderness survivalists and masters of the self-catered holiday. Their temporary new abode was more than they could hope for, particularly under the circumstance in which they found themselves.

  But after a cold and uncomfortable night on the floor of the classroom, Col was keen to find better sleeping quarters. At the top of the stairs to the upper floors they had found the doors securely locked. From the look of the deep scars sustained around the locks, several enthusiastic but unsuccessful attempts had been made to break and enter. In the morning light, Col carefully unhinged the door of the doctor’s studio using his Victorinox Swiss Army knife and efficiently made his way into the residence, at ease now in his new role as the proprietor.

  Timber shutters provided a complete black-out of the room, except for the rectangular-shaped perimeter of sunlight straining to shine through. He dislodged the shutters with a bold pound of his substantial fist around the bottom and top edges where they were stuck and flooded the room with a near blinding light. A single bed with a dark green quilted cover came to view in the far right corner. Beside it, a large pine writing desk supported a small, neatly stacked pile of newspapers. On closer inspection he found a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald, dated 15 March 1948, on top of two copies of the New Zealand Herald, similarly dated, a well-worn copy of The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (7th Edition), and an appointment book. Cracking open the cover of the diary, Col glanced at the last entry penciled into the book. 2 pm, Monday, 1 September 1947. Strange, he thought to himself, half a year before the newspapers.

  On the blank back facing page of the diary the doctor had drawn a picture. It was a sketch by an amateur illustrator, but he could see the care in which the ink drawing was rendered. It appeared to be a message carved in a huge flat stone in Tibetan Sanskrit, appearing like a row of tangled shoelaces hanging across a taut clothesline. The drawer had even sketched in the shadows of the stone cast by the crisp, clear high-altitude Himalayan sun. Below it was written in English: Don’t let the love die.

  This mysterious message had presented itself to him somewhere before and he pondered it for a few minutes. Could these sad parting words mean simply “Goodbye”? He considered it further and suddenly the realization dawned on him, a revelation that seemed to come over him, rather than to him. They should be taken to mean that every visitor must come back again and again. Don’t let the love die.

  Col closed the notebook and glanced at the newspapers. Over ten years had passed since the doctor was last here. The driver had made it seem the doctor and the school had been here until recent years. Evidently, his last patient must have put an end to the service. Or perhaps the doctor left for his annual trek up the mountain and never returned? Or something more sinister, like abduction by insurgents? With these dark thoughts in his mind Col moved away from the desk and toward a narrow free-standing pine wardrobe which stood alone in the opposite corner. He hesitated before opening the door. This timber box looked ominously like an upright coffin, as they are stored before being laid on a trestle table to receive their
newly dead. Over the forty-some-odd years he supervised its operations, the timber mill made its share of them — raw pine coffins — the only product the mill took orders for and they came in steadily on a daily basis, from as far as St.-Jerome, Sherbrooke, and even once from St.-Johns.

  They were made on individual order and never stock-piled, for no one wanted to see them in a storeroom. They came in two sizes, he recalled: adult and child. It was never a joyful occasion to craft a coffin. Over the years Col observed, however, that the child boxes were the most common — their doll-sized dimensions brought grief even in the hearts of the most hardened men. Here in this country at the roof-top of the world, the dead would be burned, sometimes without a coffin, their short prematurely aged bodies sent as ashes into the oxygen-vague air. Where was it, he wondered, that bodies of the dead were “buried” in the tops of trees — he had heard about it somewhere: a tribe of American Indian or in Africa perhaps? Left presumably for vultures to pick clean until the bones could be more readily cleaned and stored as relics in the family’s curio cabinet? The wardrobe handle was in his hand when Ellen halted his exploration with a loud rap on the open door and a loud clearing of her throat.

  “Uh … hum. Are you sure you want to do that?” she cautioned, her eye suspiciously on the pine wardrobe as if she had read her husband’s mind.

  “Well, why not?” he retorted feigning nonchalance. “Are you expecting a skeleton?”

  “Certainly hope not. But if there is one in there, you’d better leave it alone — at least until after breakfast.”

  “Yes, excellent idea. Could be quite a business to try and get it to go back in.”

  “I agree. Okay then, breakfast is served. Would you prefer it in the kitchen, or on the veranda?”

  “Veranda, for sure,” he answered brightly.

  “Then, veranda it is.” She turned and descended the stairs slowly, uncertain whether her husband would open the closet door or not, but hoping he wouldn’t. The probability of there being something untoward in that abandoned cupboard was middling to high. Not prone to superstition or squeamishness under normal circumstances, she had been under a bit of strain lately by the unpredictability of their lives since leaving St.-Gérard, and the constant miscommunications and out-and-out lies that had been told to her were a shock to her normal equilibrium. She could tell from the layer of dust about the place that it had been abandoned for quite some time, certainly for longer than the military truck-driver had let on. But they were under shelter, a fairly fine one at that, and skeletons could stay in their closets for just a bit longer without them being the worse for it.

  Breakfast consisted of a shared tin of pears from their transported boxes and two thick slices of bread from a loaf Ellen had brought on board the Thai plane. The morning air was decidedly cold from a night of winter-like temperatures but at this altitude the sun would warm the air and soil within hours of rising. The house was built off of the main road where the truck had rounded the hillside and deposited them the day before. A few dry oak trees spotted the area around the house, and a dry gray-brown cover of brush and tough sandy-colored grass spread from the edge of the rear veranda where they sat at breakfast to the clean line of the back boundary edge which dropped several hundred feet presumably down the mountain and back into Kathmandu.

  The calamitous monsoons that sweep across South Asia each summer ensure that fertile soils are washed down the mountain, leaving the low-growing shrubby vegetation of this area marginal at best. Further up the mountain, lush stands of rhododendron greet travelers on the vast alpine plains and tea bush border the cultivated hills where rice is grown on curving terraces like wide staircases to the heavens. The forested Himalayan mountain ranges open out to infinite forests of cedar, fir, oak, birch, and other pines.

  The village was literally on the cusp of the national park which contains the network of yak trails that lead virtually up into the stratospheric peaks. The thousand-year-old trading route between Kathmandu and Lhasa over the Tibetan plains has become over the millennia the same route of trekkers and mountaineers like Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who made the first successful ascent on the summit of Everest. Dotted along the route are a string of one-inn Sherpa villages like a bracelet of charms from Jiri to Junbesi, Kharikhola, Namche Bazaar and Pangboche before the trekker arrived at their prized destination beyond the moraine: the Base Camp, Gokyo Pass, Kala Pattar, or the great peak of Everest — or Sagarmatha herself. Around and beyond this fixed constellation, the southern ice fields of the great Himalayan Range are home to only a small population of mountain goats, snow leopards, and the inimitable Yeti.

  Yesterday’s fiasco at the airport terminal and the unbelievably precarious cliff-side drive seemed like a lifetime away to the Tenderfields. Here they were now, deserted it seemed in an unwanted and abandoned schoolhouse, their personal goods delivered unexpectedly, and an unknown future ahead of them. There seemed no way they could escape this fate that was thrust upon them. For lack of an alternative, they settled into their first meager breakfast in the Himalayas, and contemplated the view that rose before them like a crisp but surreal backdrop to an imaginary film set.

  “Himalaya! The Musical,” Ellen thought out loud with full irony.

  “Namaste, namaste!” her husband called back, like an attentive whipbird answering the call of its distant mate. Smiling wryly, her heart swelled with the rise and fall of the orchestral number in her head, as emotional as a captain on the verge of capsize and riding the last waves of his mistress the sea, and then she realized that the musical undulations were emanating once again from the guitar, still inside its case on the dining room table where she had left it, never for long letting them forget that it too was a fellow traveler on their improbable journey through this rough, uncertain, and unfamiliar terrain.

  It occurred to Ellen at this particular moment that the increased frequency of its musical emanations suggested that the spirit that inhabited the guitar was in its element here in the easy uncomplicated surrounds of the earth’s primordial summit. The tanned-leather faces of the Sherpa were so familiar, their beautiful black-haired children smiling half-naked up to them, with never a harsh look or word amongst them. These people must be linked to our native people in North America she realized. Iroquois, Cree, Sherpa, Tibetan, a shared prehistoric ice age continental heritage. It was like a revelation.

  No longer a surprise, the musical interludes were like a barometer of her mood and seemed to facilitate communications between the couple. The music was particularly a comfort to Ellen, as she felt captive to an unplanned present. Col, on the other hand, relished the adventure and the challenge of starting something new, reminiscent of the early days of the mill when he was a capable young recruit full of ideas of how to make the mill grow and make their lives the stuff of dreams. He would do it again in the sunset of his life, here in the land of refined air and unbelievably breathtaking and crystal clear views. Like a picture frame, a keyhole in the cover of clouds would suddenly throw up intimate glimpses: Ama Dablang at dusk in her pink crystalline beauty like a pristine goddess.

  •

  The plane journey home to St.-Gérard was a far cry from Lorraine’s erstwhile sojourn to her Paris adventure. Her six-month-old infant Philippe was the ideal travel partner: passive and cherubic, and with a wide-eyed look that motivated others at every turn to stand aside and let his mother pass to the front of long queues, or to proffer the last seats.

  Even with these courtesies and polite gestures, she was exhausted by the transit, but luckily, as soon as they landed on the tarmac of Montréal-Dorval Airport, adoring grandparents swept up mother, child, guitar, and luggage. A nursery had been set up in the A-framed attic guest room of their St.-Gérard home. Nightly Lorraine kept a vigil over the infant as he slept, the guitar always beside the nursing chair adjacent to the cot. The slanting walls of the nursery were painted a pale blue and three li
ght-filled dormer windows curtained in filmy white lace welcomed the spring air into the room. The breeze exited again through two windows on the other side, giving one the sensation that they were ensconced in the clouds like an eagle on a lofty thermal.

  One bright morning the boy opened his eyes to find the familiar presence of his mother’s face. He reached up with a chubby hand and touched her lips. This was the precise moment she noticed that the baby blue of her infant’s eyes had crystallized into an emerald green. His gaze upon her was as contemplative as that of an old familiar spirit, and glistening like sun-soaked pastures. Three months had passed and Lorraine had not dared to contact Bernard and her parents never mentioned him, but the color of her son’s eyes unleashed a sudden torrent of tears, an eruption of remorse bottled up in eighteen months of anxiety and confused loyalties. The enormity of her subterfuge still weighed heavily, but it was balanced against the triangular truce she formed with Joël on behalf of Mae. His secret was safe with her. She had sailed along on her precarious sea of denial for so long that she nearly forgot about the deception.

  One early autumn afternoon she found herself at the cabin on the lake. The studio window was open but she dared not approach. There were moments when she felt she was being watched, particularly when she brought the little boy, but her visits continued to be uncomplicated by unvoiced sorrows and bittersweet greetings.

  That evening on her return, Lorraine’s mother read to her a telegram from Joël — his appointment had fallen through. It read:

  HANOI NEGOTIATION AT STANDSTILL STOP IN SAIGON STOP TAKING POST IN COPENHAGEN IMMEDIATELY

  The cable was terse, but Lorraine read in it urgency not only from a political standpoint, but also from an emotional one, one which she knew would be edged with heartache. She would send a cable back the next day, informing her husband she and baby would join him in Copenhagen in two weeks’ time.