Indians on Vacation

by Thomas King

  Dedication

  For Helen, one last time

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  About the Author

  Also by Thomas King

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  In Prague, we stay at the Hotel Certovka in the shadow of the historic Charles Bridge. Second floor. Some of the rooms overlook the Vltava River.

  Ours doesn’t.

  However, we can see the tourists on the bridge, can hear them talking, as they stroll from the Lesser Quarter to Old Town and back again, and if we were so inclined, we could lean out our window and engage them in conversation.

  We don’t.

  But we could.

  We arrive at our hotel after a twelve-hour flight from Toronto. The room is hot. There is no air conditioner, no ceiling fan to push the heat around. We’re exhausted. We fall onto the bed, thinking we’ll sleep until dinner, when a band somewhere below us begins playing a fortissimo, quick-step arrangement of “Hello, Dolly!”

  I’m sweaty and sticky. My ears are still popping from the descent into Vaclav Havel. My sinuses ache. My stomach is upset. My mouth is a sewer. I roll over and bury my face in a pillow. Mimi snuggles down beside me with no regard for my distress.

  “My god,” she whispers, “can it get any better?”

  ABOUT SIX YEARS AGO, Mimi decided that we should travel.

  “We can follow the postcards,” she told me. “Maybe we’ll find out what happened to Uncle Leroy. We might even find the Crow bundle. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “Why don’t we look for the Lost Lemon Mine while we’re at it?”

  “And the travel will give me a chance to paint other places in the world.”

  “You paint water. You don’t need to travel to paint water.”

  “You could take your typewriter and your camera. Just like the old days, Bird. You were one of the best.”

  “I haven’t used a typewriter in years.”

  “Maybe it will inspire you to finish your book.”

  “And there is no book.”

  “But there could be.”

  It’s a losing battle, but I try anyway. “Why would we want to travel, when we can stay home?”

  “Travel is broadening,” said Mimi, though that old adage has never been proven. “And it will help take your mind off your health.”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE.

  It’s too hot to stay in the room. We go outside and follow the music to a small park that is awash in food vendors and craft stands.

  And musicians.

  The “Hello, Dolly!” band is not alone. They have come to Prague with friends, an assortment of musical troupes from around the world—Germany and Spain, Austria and Slovakia, France and Portugal—all armed with a frightening array of North American show tunes.

  The “Hello, Dolly!” folks are from Brussels. They finish off the Jerry Herman hit with a flurry and give way to an assault by an Israeli ensemble and the overture from Oklahoma! A band from Italy waits its turn in the shade of the bridge. The Italians have fashioned their instruments to mimic kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures.

  One guy has a French horn that looks like a toilet.

  MY HEALTH PROBLEMS began with a thyroid that went south. When I came home with the news, Mimi told me that thyroid problems are generally a female thing and that this was a sign of my strong feminine side.

  Gout was next, followed by swollen saliva glands in my neck. Gout was chronic but could be controlled by medication. The swollen glands were more disturbing, and just to be safe, my family doctor sent me to a specialist, a young woman who didn’t look old enough to have been admitted to medical school.

  “We’ll need to do a fibre-optic laryngoscopy.” She opened a drawer and took out a coil of tubing. On one end was a small probe. The other end was attached to a device that looked vaguely like a pistol with a video screen.

  “This is an ENT scope.”

  “You want to put that down my throat?”

  “Actually,” she said, “the cable goes in through your nose.”

  “My nose?”

  “We use an anaesthetic spray.”

  “You want to put that in my nose?”

  “You’ll hardly feel a thing.”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE and it’s late afternoon and Mimi has had her fill of show tunes. We wander the food stands, check out the offerings to see if there is anything we recognize. Mimi takes a long look at something called trdelnik.

  “You think this is the Czech version of fry bread?”

  And when we run out of park and bands and food, Mimi consults the map. I can see adventure sparkling in her eyes. I can hear determination lurking in her voice.

  “Why don’t we explore the river,” says Mimi. “See what we can find.”

  What we find are several giant bronze babies frozen in mid-crawl. I take a picture of Mimi standing next to one of the babies, and I take a picture of Mimi trying to plank on a giant baby’s butt.

  “See,” says Mimi. “This is why we travel.”

  “They don’t have faces.”

  “It’s probably symbolic. I’ll bet it has to do with television and the angst of modern existence.”

  Farther along, we come upon a row of yellow penguins standing in a line on a platform in the river. Mimi consults the guidebook.

  “They’re made out of recycled bottles. It’s supposed to be a comment on global warming.”

  “Yellow penguins?”

  “Thirty-four yellow penguins.”

  We find a bench and sit down. On the river, paddleboats done up to look like swans and vintage cars drift by. The sun is low, and the light on the water is golden and glorious. I’m tempted to point out that for less money and effort, we could be sitting on a bench along the Speed River with much the same effect.

  But I know better.

  I’VE ALWAYS WONDERED if doctors are like politicians, if they actually believe the lies they tell. Having a tube shoved up my nose hurt like hell. It hurt going in, and it hurt coming out.

  “Did you know you have a slightly deviated septum?”

  “What about my saliva glands?”

  “They’re definitely swollen,” the doctor told me. “How would you feel about a biopsy?”

  “You want to cut me open?”

  “It’s the only definitive way to rule out lymphoma.”

  I said no. Mimi said yes. In the end, medical science removed one of my saliva glands. Day surgery. Home that evening with a drain bag hanging off the side of my neck.

  The following week I was back in the doctor’s office.

  “It’s not cancer.”

  “So, what is it?”

  “A swollen gland.”

  “Why is it swollen?”

  “There could be many reasons.”

  “The other gland is also swollen.”

  “We could take it out as well,” the doctor suggested. “If you like.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “As a precaution.”

  “Against what?”

  I didn’t have the second gland taken out. One round of day surgery and a scar on my neck were enough fun. As well, with the one saliva gland gone, my mouth was as dry as the Okanagan. And for all the probing and the cutting, we still didn’t know what
had caused the swelling in the first place.

  “It’s not lymphoma,” Mimi told me. “How about we leave good news alone?”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE and it’s evening and now we’re lost. Not lost lost. Just somewhat confused. We’ve come away from the river into a web of streets that don’t match the streets on Mimi’s map.

  “It’s the right map,” she assures me. “It’s just that some of the streets have different names.”

  I wonder if the map that Mimi has was printed before Czechoslovakia was broken up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. I’m not sure that this would answer the street-name question, but it might provide a historical excuse for any discrepancies.

  “Adventure,” says Mimi, and she heads down the street towards a row of restaurants, all aglow in evening dress. “Another reason we travel.”

  We stop at the first place so Mimi can look at the menu that is posted on a stand. We stop at the second one, and Mimi looks at that menu. We stop at the third, and she looks at the menu there as well. Then we go back to the first restaurant, and Mimi looks at the menu again.

  SHORTLY AFTER MY ADVENTURES with the swollen glands, I had an ultrasound on my bladder. I forget the reason for the test. I just remember the look on my doctor’s face.

  “You have a growth on your pancreas,” my doctor told me. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  He didn’t say “pancreatic cancer.” He waited for me to raise the subject. I didn’t. So Mimi did.

  “Is it cancer?”

  The doctor got me an appointment with a specialist in Toronto. I didn’t want to go, but Mimi was insistent.

  “Better to know,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “So we can plan.”

  “For what?”

  “The future.”

  AS IT TURNS OUT, Mimi already has a recommendation for a restaurant that she got from the hotel, when I wasn’t looking.

  “If you already had a restaurant in mind,” I ask her, “why are we wandering around looking at menus?”

  Mimi is unfazed by my attempt at criticism. “Research,” she says. “We’re going to be in Prague for more than one night. And we’re going to eat more than one meal.”

  Since we don’t know the public transit system, Mimi decides that we should walk to the restaurant.

  “It’s right here,” she says, holding up the map in the guidebook.

  “That’s halfway to Berlin.”

  “It’s out of the tourist centre, but the walk will do us good. Shake the jet lag.”

  I know objecting isn’t going to have much effect, but I object anyway. “That has to be a two-hour hike.”

  “Not if we walk quickly.”

  It takes us almost forty minutes to walk to the restaurant. It’s a small hole-in-the-wall, ten-table affair. There is no posted menu, and this makes the place feel oddly avant-garde. The interior is austere and feels somewhat martial, as though a squad of Russian soldiers left over from the 1968 invasion might be lurking in the kitchen.

  There’s an old pommel horse in the middle of the restaurant. So maybe I’m mistaken. Not Russian soldiers. Russian gymnasts.

  The restaurant is called Di Mateo, which sounds more Italian than Czech and, as it turns out, it is. I can see that Mimi isn’t all that happy about having found an Italian restaurant in Prague, whereas I’m delighted not to have to brave blood sausage and beet soup.

  We’re seated in a quiet corner when I notice the first of three potential problems. The music playing in the restaurant is not traditional Czech, nor is it traditional Italian. It’s Johnny Rivers singing “Secret Agent Man.”

  Second, our waiter speaks perfect English, a disappointment, as Mimi was looking forward to doing battle with the cacophony of Czech consonants. His name is Jacob, and he’s delighted to discover we’re Canadian.

  “I’m from Brno,” Jacob tells us, “but I did a modern-language degree at the University of Toronto.”

  Third, not only is there no menu posted outside the restaurant, there isn’t a menu inside either. Nothing for Mimi to hold. Nothing for her to read. No chance for her to compare prices.

  And this is when we realize that we left our novels back at the hotel. At home, whenever we go out to dinner, we take books with us, so we can read while we wait for the food to arrive. Now we’re faced with the real possibility of having to talk to one another.

  Jacob explains the choices. Three dishes. Pasta, fish, and meat. He describes each selection, the ingredients, how the dish is cooked, and what comes with it. I choose the pasta. Mimi chooses the fish.

  It’s only after Jacob leaves that Mimi notices the music for the first time. She looks at me as though I’m responsible.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  The pasta is excellent, as is the fish. Mimi orders a beer for me and a glass of wine for herself. Both the beer and the wine are from the Czech Republic, and this makes Mimi feel somewhat better.

  Jacob comes over to ask if we are enjoying our meal.

  “We are,” Mimi tells him, “but some vegetables would have been nice.”

  “Vegetables?”

  “Green beans, cauliflower, eggplant?” says Mimi. “That sort of thing.”

  “There is cabbage,” says Jacob, “and we have a wonderful tiramisu.”

  “What about traditional Czech desserts?”

  “You mean like a medovnik or a makovy kolacek?”

  Mimi’s face lights up. “Yes,” she says, “like that.”

  “No,” says Jacob, his voice repentant, and I can see that Mimi is somewhat sorry she has asked. “Just the tiramisu.”

  I’m tempted to raise the question of the pommel horse, but I don’t.

  THE SPECIALIST IN TORONTO was a heavy-set blond man with a ruddy face and a brisk British accent. This was oddly reassuring. His crisp consonants gave him an air of compassion and wisdom. I made the mistake of sharing these thoughts with Mimi.

  “And he has a penis.”

  I protested. “That’s not it.”

  “Remember that specialist you saw for the saliva glands. You didn’t trust her, because she was a woman.”

  “She was young.”

  “And she was a woman.”

  “She stuck a tube up my nose and told me it wasn’t going to hurt.”

  The doctor from Britain went over the blood tests and the ultrasound, and I have to admit, I wasn’t listening. I was trying to think of all the things I might want to do in the time I had left. It’s funny how the anticipation of bad news can drain the life out of you. I mean, you’re not dead, but the prospect of having someone tell you that you’re dying is exhausting.

  “Has anyone explained the situation to you yet?”

  Whenever Mimi goes to the doctor with me, she does most of the talking. She asks all the questions. She even takes notes.

  “Pancreatic cancer?” Mimi asks, as if this was an option rather than the answer.

  “Who told you that?”

  No one had actually said “cancer.” My doctor had talked around it. A “growth on the pancreas” and “wasn’t expecting to see this” and “you’ll need to see a specialist” was the way my situation had been framed.

  So there I was, waiting to hear how long I had to live, trying to come up with a couple of good jokes to break the tension, when the doctor told me that I didn’t have pancreatic cancer.

  “I don’t?”

  “No,” said the doctor. “You have a condition called autoimmune pancreatitis, or IgG4.”

  “And that’s better?” said Mimi.

  “It’s a chronic condition,” said the doctor. “It’s not fatal.”

  “Is it a precursor to pancreatic cancer?”

  “No, it’s not,” said the doctor. “However, the IgG4 has damaged the pancreas, which has caused the diabetes.”

  “I’m diabetic?”

  “You are now,” said the doctor.

  “IgG4.” Mimi rolled the diagnosis around on her tongue as though it were an exotic flavo
ur.

  “It’s a somewhat new condition,” said the doctor. “We’ve been seeing it in Asian and American Indian populations.”

  I remember Mimi turning to me. “See,” she said, “being Native is lucky after all.”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, and after our dinner at the pommel-horse restaurant, we walk the Charles Bridge and pause in the middle to enjoy the river and the lights of the city. Mimi snuggles up against me. I don’t know if snuggling is any better in Prague than it is in Guelph, and I don’t waste any time thinking about it.

  “Did you know,” says Mimi, “that women blink twice as often as men?”

  Mimi spends too much time on the Internet, and as a result, she’s always overflowing with irrelevant information that spills out at irregular intervals.

  “And did you know that in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, there is no mention that Humpty Dumpty is an egg?”

  From the bridge, we look down into Kampa Park and see that a movie shoot is in full swing, the crew laying cables, setting up lights, checking cameras. Dozens of tourists press against the barriers, their iPads and cellphones held over their heads.

  I have no idea what the movie is about, but one of the actors has a gun.

  “Now there’s something you don’t see in Guelph.”

  There are sawhorses blocking the stairs to the bridge. Several yellow-and-black sandwich-board signs warn against trespass. Another simply says “MIMO Productions.”

  “Murdoch Mysteries filmed some of their scenes on Douglas Street,” I remind her.

  “That’s television.”

  A man in a white dress shirt that he hasn’t bothered to tuck in drifts through the set, listing to one side, as though he’s a tugboat braced against a running tide. Short, heavy-set, bald. Dark glasses, red loafers, no socks. His sleeves are rolled up. His forearms are covered with tattoos.

  A tall, flexi-straw woman in a thin yellow dress that billows about her body like a collapsing sail floats along in his wake. She carries a thick red binder, hugs it against her breasts, as though she expects it to save her from drowning.

  “Maybe they’re making a western,” says Mimi, “and they need a Native actor for one of the principal roles.”

  “Don’t think they make westerns in the Czech Republic.”