Ante invests a lot of effort in maintaining Croatian folk traditions–and also in assimilating: he never misses an occasion to emphasise his pride at being a Canadian citizen. He hasn’t been back to the old country for years; the Bahamas are better for holidays. He isn’t a romantic but an investor and a paragon citizen of the New World; the immigrant community enabled him to establish a business network, and his foster-country gilded its strands.
Less than a month after I’d moved in, he strode radiant up to the stand where I was showing a demonstration video for selling a weight-loss ring. He’d just concluded a record wholesale deal for the stain remover Didi Seven. We quickly crammed my things into the van, picked up his wife and two daughters, and zoomed off towards the Niagara Falls to mark the joyous event. It was inhumanly cold: the dusk had turned to black by the time we arrived, but the place where the river plunged downwards shone brightly in the beam of mighty floodlights. A huge, icy monolith reared up above us; fine liquid dust rose out of the cauldron below, merging with the misty air and congealing in a cloud of rainbow crystals. From the edge, secured by a high fence, one could look down into the chasm. We stood there gazing for a time and then headed back towards the van. But not before Ante had immortalised us with his digital camera. On the photo, a little removed from the embracing female triangle and looking away, glum, wet and pinkish, I was visibly out of place and called for editing out.
That same evening, I found a few interesting offers in the nationwide advertiser, went for a walk and made arrangements in a telephone box. I stole out before dawn and the coach left at seven. Winnipeg sounded ideal: far away from the colonies of Croatian emigrants, in the middle of one of the most sparsely populated countries on earth.
It took my body quite some time to adapt to the hard, physical work in harsh weather conditions; but mentally the effect was quite therapeutic–anaesthetic to be precise. I’ve liked the boss from our very first conversation, and that impression has constantly been reinforced. He treats us all respectfully, without racial prejudice; in fact, the four of us whites who are currently employed do our friendly best to make up for not belonging to the Wong family. The firm prospers owing to good management and market conditions, like a harvest where the produce leaps into the hopper all by itself. The manager, Mr Wong, buys up nineteenth-century colonial buildings like tanneries and steelmills in order to do them over, or demolish them and erect new ones, which he then sells, mostly to new Canadians imported from China. And there’s no discernible tendency for demand to slacken.
All of Wong’s four sons are employed in the firm. The eldest is his right-hand man, while the youngest does the hard and dusty work together with us, without reprieve; he too will get a place in management when he’s earned it. Theoretically he’s already a millionaire, but he doesn’t show it in any way. He doesn’t drive a sports car and doesn’t even wear a watch. He’s full of enthusiasm but unobtrusive–a nice, regular and sociable guy who never says no when we go for a drink after work. He’s mad about songs by Shakira, Anastacia and whatever their names are; he’s constantly humming to himself in falsetto, with choreography added when he thinks no one’s watching. Nor with any of the other Wongs did I detect the slightest trace of gloominess or anxiety. For sure, there’s simply no room for such concepts in their mental make-up.
Jeremy and I are part of the demolition team; we operate in buildings which aren’t earmarked for the wrecker’s ball but are stripped of everything except the load-bearing walls. We use jackhammers, mallets and crowbars to knock down ceilings and partitions; we pull up floorboards, remove carpentry, rip out wires and pipes, and throw everything into the truck, large and small pieces alike, and sweep out the bare skeleton. Then the construction guys take over and convert the building into a shrimp house, laundrette or TV shop; we’re not involved in that bit.
I was actually in no hurry to find work, but when Jeremy suggested I join him, I said Why not. And so for three months now we’ve been getting into his chevy five days a week at seven thirty and driving to the firm’s office, where we change into our gear and are taken to the current worksite. In the evenings, one of us fries up something for dinner and the other does the washing up, and the next day vice versa. There’s almost nothing I haven’t told him about. His perpetual, sphinxlike smile intrigued me at first, and got mightily on my nerves, till I accepted it as part of the decor. The guy has just got it right.
The days pass, and I must say I’m also starting to find a certain satisfaction in reducing buildings to rubble, and the fatigue the strenuous work fills my body with, and also in thinking of the quiet, industrious, reliable Chinese families who arrive here and build a different world amidst the ruins, multiply and spread, and take over continent after continent.
It all now seems very distant; that time of pure pain pervading everything around me, down to the very last detail of my surroundings, when going on for just one more day seemed impossible and pointless, when the only conceivable thing after getting back from the office was to crash into bed without dinner or a shower. My body demanded nourishment, gave warning signals by way of spasms and trembling, but after the first mouthful of food my hunger would disappear. The nights bore me away to painful chasms; still, they recharged a minimum of energy, sufficient for me to get to my feet in the morning and grasp some object, something real and existing. But it wasn’t enough for me to free myself from the pain which unfailingly woke up with me and held me firmly in its grip, unable to be silenced. It would inevitably break through fitfully in howls and screams for help, or I would scratch at my skin or slash myself with a razor–enough for a little blood to flow; that would calm it for a while. But any word, sight, smell or taste could become an association, a cruel allusion; everywhere was a minefield and everything led to that same place–the one which would never be. When my rational mind capitulated and stopped inventing straws to clutch at, my dreams took over; your face would appear for a fleeting instant, faint as a watermark, or I’d hear words like I’ll be a bit late but don’t worry, I’m coming. And I’d wake up with a pounding heart and tears which never stopped.
Now I feel much better. When I’m at work, hours can pass without me thinking of you. I no longer recognise you in every single woman I see. I don’t study the details of their bodies any more, their gestures or facial expressions, the invisible aura etched around them, just to create the sweet pain brought by the comparison with what I held for a moment in my hand. I’m convinced the day will come when a cup won’t evoke your hand and the way you hold it and raise it to your mouth, when a toothbrush won’t remind me that you’re perhaps now brushing your teeth on the opposite side of the planet; I’ll be able to speak your name again and also come to live with the thought of it being spoken by another.
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