The Last Season

by Roy MacGregor

  I am praying. Me? Praying? But the words rise with ease, followed by my stomach …

  There is a soft touch on my hand. Warm. Skin. I glance at it, forcing my eyes open, and it is what I fear: long fingers, pale, ringless, unpolished, pure.

  “Okay?” Kristiina asks.

  “Yes,” I lie. “I just need some air.”

  She says nothing. I stare out at the sea, stunningly aware there is nothing there to be looking at. She stands beside me, hand still gracing my own. She is fortunate I’m not holding hers; this ship is fortunate the railings are steel.

  “Did you receive any medicine?”

  “No.”

  “I will see that you get some.”

  Like cousin Jazda’s old pony, Joe, I allow myself to be led away and back inside, but not toward the bar again. We take another turn, go down a stairway and come into a narrow, poorly lit corridor with cabin numbers on the doors. She stops at one, checks her key, inserts it and opens the door. I follow, expecting to find Pekka and Pia waiting, presuming this to be the women’s place for the night.

  “Where’s Pekka?” I ask.

  “Your friend Pekka is next door,” she says. Her voice is cool.

  “Pia?” I say unnecessarily.

  She jerks the key toward the wall. “Pia is there, too. It is Pekka’s little joke, I think.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “That is not necessary,” she says. The cool is gone from her voice. Yet I take no joy from it. I do not wish Kristiina to be here, nor Pekka. All I wish is that I could be somewhere else, steady.

  I lie down, thinking it may have all passed outside, and Kristiina gets two pills down my throat. I sleep, I think, but only for a moment. When I come to it is as if the bed has been turned to elastic, sinking deeper with every dive, soaring higher with each rise. Standing up, convinced the floor will be sturdier, I am suddenly thrown to my knees as if Eddie Shack has pole-axed me from behind; I am almost unconscious, creeping on hands and knees to the toilet, where I am ill again. Yet when it is over Kristiina is still there, waiting, a cool washcloth ready for a hot forehead. She helps me back into bed and through the night it is the same cycle, each time astonishing only in that it has come again. But always Kristiina is there waiting. That son of a bitch, Pekka. Some little joke. Some impression I’m making.

  It is over again, I think. I’m sure I have been sick again. The washcloth is cool, fresh, so I must have been. There are voices at the door. Not Pekka. Not Pia. Official voices. I feel hands on my clothes, unbuttoning, unzipping. I feel my underwear being rolled down and quick, cool hands spreading my cheeks. Suppositories! I feel them rise, two of them, up into my rectum like a shiver, tickling and spooking at the same time. I bury my face in the pillow, cursing Pekka.

  “Hi.”

  It is Kristiina’s voice, fresh as first meeting. I roll over in the bed, focusing. “Hi,” I say back. “Sorry.”

  “There is nothing for you to be sorry for, Felix. Do you feel better?”

  “Much, thank you.”

  I stare at her and she looks down smiling. There is nothing of the night on her: eyes still clear and bright, hair as light as Queen Anne’s lace. I run my hand through my own hair. It is greasy, matted.

  “You should shower,” she says, reading my mind. “Then we will go up for some breakfast.”

  The shower is weak but welcome, the hot water peeling off the sick shell and letting the old skin breathe again. The spray is so hot it almost burns, but I cannot adjust things. Either hot or cold, no in-between. The steam fills the stall and I close my eyes and hold my arms around my chest like I’m holding a baby. I suppose in some ways I am.

  “We have come,” Pekka announces once we have checked into our hotel, “to study the Swedish perverts close up.”

  “How close?”

  “As close as you want, old man. What’s your choice: Basic screwing? S and M? dogs? sheep? donkey? gays? lesbians covered in mud? rubber costumes? There’s even a man here who does an act with a vacuum cleaner, if you wish.”

  I blush, not for me but for Kristiina.

  “Look!” shouts Pia. “He’s embarrassed. Isn’t that sweet?”

  I look at Kristiina, feeling for her, having to put up with this. But she, too, is laughing.

  “I suggest the Chat Noir,” she says.

  “Bor-ing,” Pekka says, drawing out the word as he has heard me do so many times previously.

  “Fantasia,” Pia says.

  “Ohhh, yes,” agrees Kristiina.

  I look at her, confused — but I dare not ask what it is.

  Nor do I have chance to ask Pekka before we get there. Fantasia is a hole in the wall, a simple red neon sign and a sandwich board set up on the sidewalk to tell you who is on whom tonight. A staircase leads down to a vast cavern of darkness and strobe lights and music that pounds like the ship’s hull. But no one dances. There is no room. We check our coats and I see, faintly, that Kristiina has changed to a shiny black, slight slinky, dress. The contrast on her skin is startling, almost lewd, forcing me to focus on the rising line heading down between those marvellous breasts. She should have covered up more.

  Up on stage are two men and a woman, but I can only tell this because spotlights are shining on their genitals. Over their heads they wear white sacks with eye slits. The woman is well built, like she has just stepped out of a Playboy cartoon, and the one man is tall and skinny while the other is short and fat, Mutt-and-Jeff style. The short man has a tuba tied to his back and he carries it as if he is a hunchback. The woman lies down on a raised mattress, spreads her legs, and the short man with the tuba crawls onto his stomach until he fits into the “V” her legs make. The mouth piece of the tuba disappears into her pubic hair. The tall man, now visibly excited, comes up and begins thrusting his penis into the bell of the tuba. Over the speakers comes a flatulent burp, which I shortly realize is a tuba solo. I recognize the tune but cannot name it, and I stand there holding Kristiina’s perfect hand while three people and a tuba go at it on stage, and then suddenly it comes to me that I don’t recognize the song because of its location, not its melody. The last time I’d heard it was in St. Martin’s Roman Catholic Church in Pomerania.

  O Come All Ye Faithful.

  I am out leaning against the railing of the SiljaStar. But I feel fine. A different ship, a different voyage; this time the seas are calm, wall-to-wall blackness under a sky unlike any I have ever seen before. It’s depth, that’s what: the sky has depth here, the constellations at different distances, three-dimensional. I am too used to city skies with outer shells. Or, in L.A., no sky at all.

  Kristiina stands beside me, sucking in the air as if she had a straw running the forty feet or so down to the water line. When she releases the air it is with a shiver of resignation.

  “Pekka cannot understand why you are so angry with him,” she says.

  “Pekka pissed me off, I guess.”

  “Why — what did he do?”

  “Ah, everything had to be sex. He was grossing me out, a bit anyway.”

  “You?” she laughs. “The big National Hockey League star?”

  “Well, there were women there,” I say defensively.

  She laughs. A shriek. I can sense the other stargazers turning from their constellation to me. The Big Dipper.

  “You were upset because Pia and I saw?” she asks incredulously. I shrug, hoping to shake it off. I know when I’m entering a no-win situation. Talking is one game I do not play well.

  “We are grown girls.”

  “That’s not the point,” I say, not having a clue what the point is by now. I just want to finish, wrap up, get out. “Stuff like that should be banned, that’s all.”

  “Banned?”

  “Yes. Should be a law against it.”

  She is still smiling. I love the smile. But I want it for me, not against me.

  “A law to protect whom?”

  “You. Other women. Kids.”

  “But it’s all right fo
r you, is that it?”

  I detect a chill entering her voice.

  “No. I wouldn’t be able to go either.”

  “But you’re not worried about yourself?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “Tell me, big hockey star, by what right do you decide what’s proper for someone like me to see or do?”

  “Oh come on, Kristiina —”

  “No. You come on. What about the film we saw. It was mostly women.”

  “Yah, but …”

  “But it’s different for them, is that it?”

  “They’re different kind of women.”

  “What about the men that pay to watch?”

  “They’re men. They …”

  “Men! It’s all right for them to pay money and watch women performing with each other.”

  I sense I have her. I speak gently, wrapping up perfectly. As a gentleman.

  “They’re adults. They can decide for themselves.”

  It doesn’t work. She doesn’t smile. Doesn’t laugh. She snorts.

  “And we cannot decide for ourselves, is that it?”

  I say nothing. I am retracing my steps, reviewing the argument. It works. Can’t she see it?

  “Batterinski,” she says gently. I turn toward her, ready for peace, eager for victory. “I think I like you better sick.”

  She turns and is gone. And I do not know how to follow.

  We part at the docks, Kristiina heading east with Pia and Pekka, me choosing to walk up first to Stockmann’s, the big department store, to pick up a warmer coat and then to the 3B tram back to the Inter-Continental. All I take from her is a light kiss on the cheek. Sixty hours together, naked bodies and genitalia around us all weekend, one night complete in the same bedroom, and all I have to show for it is an aunt’s buss on the cheek.

  Batterinski and another chance blown — nothing new there. I head up, head down, toward them market stalls and past the gathering drunks. Bad sisu, Pekka calls it, as if to say the drunks are an unavoidable blight, the disease we require to understand what health is. The first time I saw them here, sitting on the benches with their paper bags and taped-on rubbers and torn coats, staring at me with their rheumy eyes and scabbed noses and swollen lips and tongues, I had a momentary thought that I’d seen them before. I had to work backwards: Griffith Park (no, not quite, too much clothes on here); Philadelphia, by the shipyards (no, wrong colour); Edmonton, down along the river (no, no Indians here). And then it came to me. Pomerania. And not bad sisu or out-of-work blacks or drunken Indians. But Poppa. And Martin Shannon. And Dombrowski. And Jazda. It could have been Easter back home. The women in the living room with their coloured-bread sandwiches and tea and short-bread, the men in the woodshed with their bottles and curses and busted lips and bruised fists. Home Sweet Home.

  “Batterinski!”

  I turn, unsure. A surly-looking, black-faced devil stumbles forward, holding his coat wrapped around him by the force of his hands in his pockets. It has no buttons.

  “Batterinski!” he says, challenging.

  “Yes.”

  He smiles, broken black teeth over swollen gums, the tongue thick and wet, searching for something. Finally he finds it. “Polish,” he says. “Polish.”

  I nod.

  He thumps his chest. “Me Polish.”

  He sticks out his hand, letting the coat flop open to reveal nothing beneath but grey, filthy long underwear. I have to take his hand. His fingers are dirty, knobby, like carrots that haven’t been thinned properly and have grown together in clumps. He won’t let go.

  “Poland,” he says, grinning proudly.

  “Poland,” I say.

  “Solidarnosc,” he says with great sadness. I detect tears welling in his eyes, I think, but it is hard to tell.

  I nod again, and smile. How strange. He thinks we are brothers simply because he has seen my picture in the papers — probably woke up on a bench one morning to find me staring him straight in the face — and deduced from that that we are both Polish. I am tall; he is short. I have styled hair; he has none. I have just left Kristiina; he has just left his bottle, his love. I have money; he wants it. I set down my bag and rummage in my pocket for some change, pulling out a mittful of Finnmarks.

  “Here,” I say.

  He looks at the money and then back at me. I think for a moment he is going to bat my hand away. He looks angry, as if I have insulted him. How do you insult a bum? But then, quickly, he scoops up the coins and pockets them.

  “Poland,” he says, as if it were a salute.

  “Poland,” I say.

  He turns and walks away, not even a thank-you or further word. He doesn’t look back. He is probably thinking I gave him the money because we are both Polish, brothers.

  How appropriate: I am still thinking Poland when I get back to the hotel and there is a thick letter — no, a thick envelope — waiting at the front desk from Poppa. I take a shower and while I’m drying my hair order up three Koff beers from room service; then I’m ready to read:

  R.R. #2

  Pomerania, Ont.,

  Canada

  Dec. 11, 1981

  My dear son,

  First the news here, okay? This winter’s a corker. Snow and freezing rain and snow and thaw and freezing rain again and more snow have made the lakes impossible. Can’t go out on the skidoos. Can’t ice-fish and probably won’t be able to even later. Ice’ll be too thin with all that crust up top, if you know what I mean.

  Poor deer this year. Dombrowski got his and Hatoski got his but none of us out here got any at all. I say it’s the crust. It’s thick enough for the wolves to ride but the deer break through and get caught. You can hear the wolves any night, mostly down in the swamp but once, anyway, close enough I blasted with the 12-guage just to button them up.

  Batcha’s not too good. It’s her blood. A kind of cancer I don’t know anything at all about. Doc Jarry says she’s too old — she’s ninety-four, you know, son — to bother with pulling her through tests and stuff like that down in the city. He says it’s up to you and me whether we tell her or not and since you’re not here my vote wins cause I say no. I can’t say what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her but what she could know wouldn’t do her any good either. So that’s it, decided.

  Now, about this letter. You know as well as anyone that I’m not your average “retired” gentleman. I’m 76 years old, I worked hard all my life — and could still work hard if I had a job, I’m telling you, I’m strong, I feel real good, I still got all my faculties (or at least those I had to begin with). I’m less like Danny Shannon’s father, spending his government pension down at the beer parlour, and I’m more like Jaja was when he was this age. Not interested in slowing down. But the problem is, son, I haven’t got much to do with my time. Until now, that is, and if you’re agreeable.

  You’ll remember those crates of Jaja’s, the wooden boxes piled in the cellar just by the kindling box? You maybe didn’t pay too much attention to Jaja all those nights he sat at the desk scribbling away under the coal oil lamps [does Poppa really think I, who had to memorize Krasinski, would not remember?], but what he was doing was writing a kind of family history. [Still trying to convince himself Krasinski was a relative, like the Jazdus no doubt.] It’s all in Polish — he was a very smart man in that language, your Jaja — and I must admit I’m not up to translating it. The heavens, however, have chosen to smile on us and I’m being helped by the goodness of your cousin Marie Jazda (Hi, Felix, hope it’s going well — Marie) and she’s helping me and putting everything into good English and typing up everything nice and neat, like this here letter. (I need the practise. I’m hoping to get on the Polish-Canadian Congress translating the tapes they do of immigrants, so this helps me as much as it does your father — Marie)

  How we work is I read the original, then mark lightly in pencil sections I think you would be interested in, and then Marie and I go translating, though she does most of the work and takes what she calls “liberties”
with the wording. (Not too many — Marie) I’m lucky if I mark up on page in every twenty or thirty. You mind Jaja was a man of detail.

  Anyway, I guess you’re wondering why. Well, I already explained I want to do something, but I also want you to have this, Felix. It’s a record of who we are, see. It’s all there should you or your children ever want it. I hope you will. I need not remind you that the Batterinski name is now yours alone. Your beloved Matka, may that saintly woman, my dear wife, rest in eternal peace, she would have wanted you to have this, I am sure.

  Jaja must have known what would happen to him. At the top of the first box I found a note dated January 1, 1955. That’s the first day of the year he passed away, of course. I personally would have liked to have examined all this stuff years ago, but Batcha would never hear of it. I suppose it brought up too many memories of her dear husband for her. She still doesn’t like it (She’ll hardly speak to me! — Marie) but I’ve told her she’s just acting silly. After all, it’s been nearly 27 years. Anyway, here’s what he said.

  January 1, 1955

  My dear children,

  I began writing this history in September of the year 1951. It was the evening after young Felix went to his first day of school and I realized then and there that he was to be instructed entirely in English. The Separate School Board of Education in Renfrew (made up, I remind you, of Irishmen) had decided Polish could exist only as what they call an “extra-curricular” subject, which I translate to mean they consider Polish second-rate.

  A people’s language is not a hobby. I decided that I would encourage my grandson to learn Polish and our own Cassubian in the hopes that it would not be lost forever. Other families decided likewise. And I also decided to write down what I knew of the Batterinski name and what it means to be a Batterinski, for it is a proud name in our people’s history.

  I had at one time the idea that these papers might be published, but Canada does not care about the Poles. The first volume I sent off to the publishers in Toronto and it was returned unread. They don’t publish in Polish; they could care less to translate.