by Leon Rooke
5
A DREDGE OF MAUPASSANT
In the spring of the year 2004, by Odessa’s black bay, waters snarling under high winds and Dutch steamers tilting, God met his old combatant, Isaac Babel, uttering threats against the cobblestones as he trudged his wicked way from the station along Pushkin Street up towards Vasatyatava Square.
God was astounded. The dead generally avoided Him.
Next came Maupassant, not exactly behind Babel, nor beside him either. Occasionally scrabbling along on all fours, syphilitic still, the old throat wound clearly visible. As though a door in Dr. Esprit Blanche’s madhouse at Passy in Paris had opened and here the wretch was.
Both of them. God’s knaves, His villains.
Cursing the dusty startled trees, avoiding lorries, carts, fork-lifters and the like when able.
Two old lyricists paired forever, God thought, rocking on His heels, intent on remaining calm.
Refugees from the storied Hereafter. Arms flailing as they advanced against strong headwinds, their pace now a depraved shuffle-fraught weave of baby steps.
God took refuge behind a decrepit stall selling fish cooked over charcoal fires to housewives of drunken seamen. It would take Him a minute to recover.
Babel, the exact image of a Jew so ravaged, so stunted by time’s lashings, that even from a distance God could see through the sockets of His eyes all our tomorrows come and gone.
Yids and shikers.
Dreck.
Babel and Maupassant caught sight of God and their steps quickened.
“Hey, Bigshot, you!” Babel shouted. “I want a word with you! Big Mouth, Mr. Fancy Dan! Don’t turn your back on me, you lordly fake!”
Maupassant came on in a crouch, like a dog scenting evil. You cannot come back from death as any one or any thing other than what you were when you were at your worst. Rule number thirty of the Golden Tablet.
The Frenchman’s throat slit but still able to summon his own insults. “You there!” he bellowed at God. “You scoundrel, you cur, you carrion of a Prussian!” – a line that suddenly slipped into his memory from an early success, BOULE DE SUIF, Ball of Fat, that dear woman made to prostitute herself for the sake of a stagecoach packed with corrupt imbeciles.
A John Ford film, 1939, no credit given Maupassant.
Too late to run.
God, waiting, brusquely shook off the offer of a fish sandwich. Expensive, I’ll say. He hated fish. Fish was a thug’s food. He was shaking. He didn’t like any of this.
6
YOU WILL NEVER KNOW MY MAKER’S BODY
Each morning about eight o’clock Egi Balduchi, with a wheelbarrow to convey his ledgers, sandwich board, card table and folding chair, plods along Toronto’s sidewalks until he arrives at what he deems to be a suitable corner. Here he sets up shop, in winter hunkering down in his seaman’s coat against the wind, in summer placing his chair so that his face catches the sun. Once satisfied that all is as it should be – the twenty-six ledgers alphabetically arranged, pencils at the ready – he hurries into the nearest donut shop to pick up a takeaway coffee and muffin. Balduchi needs the shop not solely for breakfast. Thamn-al-batn, trouble with those insides.
While the counter person fills his order, Balduchi keeps watch over his goods. Nine years ago, before Balduchi knew unhappiness, a thief ran off with his wheelbarrow. He chased the thief all along Bloor Street West, finally losing sight of him in the brush and valleys of High Park. At the bandstand rag tail dancers said to be from Port-au-Prince had been performing Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Good stuff, Balduchi had thought at the time, almost grateful to the thief.
Balduchi’s present wheelbarrow is painted green. He wishes he had bought a red one, because red would draw the eye better. He should have been more selective with the chair as well. The chair he now employs is a fold-up web job, light aluminum but hard on the back. The straps are going. He had wanted to use one of the throw pillows from the sofa, but Ula, way back when, had told him not to be silly.
Ula had never been entirely behind his project.
His breakfast in a sack, he hurries back to his corner.
Balduchi reckons the project will consume the rest of his days, although this does not undermine his enthusiasm. He worries he will not live to see the deed through to its conclusion.
Today? Today he feels pretty good, except for Thamn-al-batn. Together with balking hands, crummy knees, a stiffness in the neck so stubborn he can’t turn his head. Drivers seem out to get him. A moment ago, crossing Front Street, the wheelbarrow hitting a pothole and wobbling, a taximan wearing a Blue Jays cap told him to put some pep into it, Dad. Pep? Where can a man of his origins find pep in these days of dwindling resources? His pipes are clogged. The old body needs a new transmission. Overhaul the engine. His left eye dribbles. Twice today the right knee has quit altogether, leaving him breathless. He’s had to grab at lampposts. The sleep of the homeless, over vents and in doorways, has tantalizing appeal. But Balduchi knows people in worse shape than he is, dead people, Ula for one, so he won’t complain.
Thamn-al-batn. He’s paying the price.
He’d started the morning along Queen Street, without once finding a corner appropriate to his mood. So he pushed the wheelbarrow south, more or less allowing the wheelbarrow and the crowds to dictate his route. He was surprised to find himself arriving at Union Station, that indefatigable crossroads of human industry. A mistake. Prospects here were always dim. “Sorry, no time,” the commuters told him. “Catch you later, Grandpa.”
He tried to take the subway north from Union.
“No fuckin’ way!” the toll keeper had told him. “No wheelbarrows.”
But in the end Balduchi signed him up. In the “E” book. Wm. Eldore Edison.
“Workiholic,” Edison had said, under ‘Occupation.’ “Always wanted to do tap dancing. Me and Gene Kelly. Now see where I am.” Married, two kids. “They inherited my good looks. One’s a horsewoman, lives in Sweden. Sweden’s okay, I been there. Me and the wife abide. They tell us to curb the dog, we curb the dog. The U.S. of A. has two million people in jail. Rwanda, they didn’t lift a hand. Good people, though. Gunslinger on every corner. But they give us Elvis. They give us Satchmo and White Bread and John Henry Barbee. You going to have pictures in that book?”
Threading along College Street, bypassing for the moment Kensington Market and the few steps home maybe for a late lunch with Frannie if she’s in, Balduchi pauses. The hip now. A briny taste on the tongue. Fuck me, as the dear girl would say.
He sits awhile on the lip of the wheelbarrow. His stomach churns and sometimes, as happens now, the churn spurts through his insides like a kite cut loose to the blue. The world keels over. The line from a book now riding the wheelbarrow wriggles before his eyes like cut earthworms. He’d picked up the book from the vacant seat beside his own not more than ten minutes ago. Maybe an hour ago. The precise time escapes him. Approaching College Station this was. “Gentlemen, Ivan Ilyich is dead.” The subway. A pretty young girl with a silver ring in one nostril, ribbon of azure stones over the right eyebrow, hair trimmed to the scalp, those clunky, what Frannie called kick-ass shoes, sitting beside him one minute, was gone the next. Her book, must be. Balduchi thinks he must have dozed off. He had been thinking of the last day of his official employment at the Department of Prisons and Corrections. The processing of an order for forty-six brooms at Kingston Prison for Women. In a dream – it must have been a dream – forty-six women in identical grey smocks, their feet bare, showing the backside of their knees and jiggling fannies, were sweeping a long corridor with blue-handled brooms. An endless rank of infantry sweepers. Got to order more brooms, a voice said. Where the dream became physically uncomfortable was when the brooms began sweeping the women. Into corners and under carpets, Persian ones at that, the carpets gliding in from an outer dark that descended slowly, a theatre curtain. Balduchi, half-awake, groaned. Someone said: “Mon, looki dot whilbarr bro I tink im sick e need helep.” At some vi
olent lurch in the train, Balduchi reached out to steady himself, and there in his hand was an open book, the type muddy except for a single line. “Spank my bottom,” as Frannie would say.
“Gentlemen, Ivan Ilych is dead.”
Me, Balduchi had thought. This author means me.
Helep, helep!
7
THEATRE OF THE EAR
“Don’t glare at me,” Babel shouted. “Crackhead! Alien roachbrain!”
God reduced His radiance to practically nothing. Why inflame the old Cossack? Why bait these hayseeds with trickery when they were as useless to divine purpose as draymen grunting among the stars?
“But look here,” He said to Babel, dancing away from the smelly Frenchman’s wild swats. “I heard you died in a Bolshevik concentration camp in… what was it, 1939, 1940?”
“Both,” Babel declared hoarsely. “Twice, you fiend. Once by a bullet in the head, Lubyanka prison, January 15th or 27th,1940. I have witnesses.”
“I had been dead forty-seven years,” put in Maupassant softly. “Not that You had not made repeated attempts on my life long before.”
God pretended amnesia, although he wasn’t God for nothing. He remembered. Maupassant’s syphilitic affliction, the madness that had struck him as a youngster. Babel’s disappearance, the seven months of torture. Charged with being a spy for France and Austria, my word. His ratting on a fellow scribbler, that sodball Andre Malraux, the fervour to recant. Lies! Lies!
Ludicrous affairs. How could He be expected to concern Himself with such trivialities?
“Another time,” barked the Jew, “March 17, 1941. Under ‘unknown circumstances.’ Ha! Unknown, my ass!”
Saliva sprayed God’s cheeks. He fumed to his roots but retained an implacable, even cheerful facade.
“Check the records, why don’t you!” yelled Babel. “One Isaac Babel death wasn’t sufficient to Your Worship’s needs.”
Maupassant clawed at Him. Despite his condition he was quick on his feet, the long nails rooster-sharp. The Frog would have drawn blood had God possessed any.
Always the insults, God thought. Death and insanity hadn’t mellowed these slagheaps in the least.
“I’m hungry,” Babel relented. “I need a woman.”
Ever the rake.
The trio toddled in a dervish up Pushkin’s fair street. Limping does, they were. Babel with his two deaths, God with the many, Maupassant on the lookout for a stranglehold. The old scribblers haggard in the pipes, rotted by hard times, God thinking about tender mercy that never had caught on with Him. The fish sandwich had left a greasy taste in His mouth. Reminiscent of the thousand-and-one Whoppers He’d consumed in his time, no french fries, alas.
Cold wind assaulted them. The air was damp and murky, thick with the odour of diesel fuel, cabbage, fish, human waste. Me here minus proper Arctic attire, God thought. Odessa, better off when it had belonged to the Turks. The Greeks.
Odessos, Ordyssos, it had been back in those inelegant, more agreeable times. He was freezing, the thumbs numb, toes icy. He had come out without mittens, without mukluks, no woolly for His neck. This thin coat stitched together from hides, rags, the skin of birds. Fat chance He will not come down with something horrible. Bejesus Me, he thought, how’d I get to this place? I blundered, must have taken a wrong turn.
Some things God had given up on. Wind, rain – all the elements. They’d proved too difficult. You gave something life – gave it Your very breath – then what?
Run for the hills.
At every street corner Babel poked Him. Maupassant pinched and clawed.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” Babel said.
“Asshole,” echoed Maupassant.
8
JOSEPHIAS
Josephias has dollars. But timidity assails him. He’s never had a woman, yet wants them. They would laugh at his acne and big feet. They would laugh at what he believes he wants to do with them. They would call him dim. So he has called again upon his old pal from childhood.
“How much?” he asks Frannie, much loved for her sliding scale.
Frannie is concentrating on the scratching of the bird in the ceiling joists and doesn’t immediately hear him. All afternoon she has been in the deep with her twin obsessions, Isaac and Guy. She’s rescued her heroes from death and taken them on an outing to the Black Sea. Odessos, Ordyssos, may God see the light.
Yes, Bro, Josephias thinks, Frannie Balduchi has time for everyone but me.
The Purloined Letter’s rear door opens to a dark alley. A few minutes later, that’s where Frannie is.
“You’re a skeleton,” she says to Joseph. “You really could do with some Eastern
cooking.”
Joseph’s hands are on her. What he brings to her always, and only, are his hands. Those hands swim and divide as do amoebae between two slides. So busy. Bees are busy but amoebae are silent, never having to pause for breath. That’s what flits through Frannie’s mind as he strokes her: high school and the science lab and herself with one eye shut, squinting through a scope. Trash. That flits in as well. She forgot this morning to put the trash out on the curb. Egi won’t like that.
“You feel nice,” Joseph whispers. “Love ya.”
“That’s good,” Frannie comes back at him. “Good, lover. Tell me when you’ve had enough.”
He never lets her remove any clothing. He never ventures below the waist. He keeps his body clear. Only those hands.
“Okay,” he says. “That’ll do me.”
Josephias of Arimathea always has had enough before Frannie expects him to. It unnerves her. The back of her neck heats up. The heat spreads. A dog’s tongue could be licking her. She feels hurt and insulted and would like to throw herself down on the ground, thrash her limbs like a child. It is all the worse because she has given Joseph the freak a bootblack rate. Exactly nothing. The few coins meticulously counted into her palm will be slipped to Gregor the insect who looks after Joseph’s glass.
“Thank you muchly,” he croaks, sliding away. He has the vacant smile of an ill-equipped traveller surprised to discover he’s survived a night in the desert.
“I enjoyed it, honey,” she calls.
She has one rule. Never insult the miserable.
9
GREGOR THE INSECT
Gregor the bartender observes Frannie Balduchi coming in from the Purloin alley. The bird in the rafters issues a small squawk. Is snow falling again? Is rain coming down? She looks a poor specimen, no question. You see a door with scratches around the lock, where thieves have gained entry, and that is the look Gregor’s Frannie has. She’s a door kicked in too often and now when the door opens the hinges squeak, the door protests, because Frannie likes to keep her door shut in fear that someone will notice the place where she lives has been ransacked.
Gregor would open the door, but he is only an insect.
10
GRASSES, WATER, AND SUN, THE BEAST…
People of Odessa gawked. They’d seen much – Mongrel hordes, angry seas, Monarchists, fiery whirlwinds, Bolsheviks – but they had never seen their Notable Son, an underfed Frenchman, and the Supreme Being lurching along like oxen roped to a cart. Even so. Even so, the faithful swarmed. Touch me, Lord, begged the many. But He would not touch them. Bless me, Lord. But He would not bless them. The sight of so many thrusting hands mesmerized Maupassant. In the author’s youth Algernon Swinburne had frightened the wits out of him by stroking his cheeks with a severed human hand. Babel was delighted. He thought the mob had come to welcome him.
The climb up Pushkin’s knoll was a wearing one. At Vasatyatava Square a swirling wind smacked them full in the face. Patches of fog drifted in the damp air.
God’s imminence lit up. He had spotted a drinking establishment behind blooming apple trees. Instantly He felt mellow and loving.
“Unlike you ghouls,” He said, “I still carry autumn in my heart.”
Babel and Maupassant looked at him, aghast.
Autumn, God thought. Sh
ouldn’t have said that.
In the minds of these degenerates he was scarcely more than whimsy. A spark for the ignorant or barren of heart. A child’s cat’s eye thumbed eons ago onto a slanted floor.
“Autumn, is it?” Babel replied. “You see here two brothers who looked upon the world as a meadow in May until you painted our eyelids with blood.”
God sneered. Patience had never been a strong suit. The old Jew’s face glistened with sweat. The wire specs aslant on the Jew’s nose, God only now noted, had cracked lenses. The flesh of both was as ashen as wet mortar upon a board. Together they would weigh no more than a pood.
But God’s suggestion of drinks enlivened all. “I am the vicar of thirst,” Babel declared.
“Drink heals the wounds of Christ,” Maupassant volunteered.
A single room awaited them. It smelled of horses and gunpowder. Fishing nets and frazzled ropes lay in heaps like ancient drunks. Toasts were offered in the dwindling light. God sat on a broken chair, his legs splayed, the frayed muffs of a fur hat flopping down over his ears. He was a drinker of some repute. He could drink these two under the table. He made a sucking noise, then snapped his fingers at a slender figure standing still as a statue in a darkened vestibule.
“Vodka for these ruffians,” God said to the woman. “Crimean muscatel for me.”
The scribblers hooted.
A dung fire warmed the room. A blue sheen wafted up from the floor. Babel said it reminded him of the Rotonde Café in Paris’s Latin Quarter when he’d visited there in the thirties. Maupassant found occasion to say he was homesick. A clock gave the time as 3:46. The hands had long ago halted. A gauge on the door marked the temperature at sixteen below zero, which seemed about right.
They soon were through the first bottle. God had His shoes off. They had the texture of gristle stripped from his feet.
“Would the gentlemen like a nice egg?” asked the waitress. “A potato?”
God, drowsing, barely registered her presence. A nerve plucked at His lips. Some kind of tick there. In the left eye also, which must have caused much confusion for the faithful along the way. A smudged tattoo occupied the back of one hand. He was a nail-biter. The eyes were blackened, as though He had a habit of walking into doorknobs.