Indians on Vacation

by Thomas King

  “Sergio Leone made westerns in Spain,” says Mimi. “That’s how Clint Eastwood got his start.”

  “I’m a journalist, not an actor.”

  “Blackbird Mavrias.” Mimi holds her hands out and forms a marquee. “Dead in Prague. Coming soon to a theatre near you.”

  We stand around for a bit, and when nothing happens, we make our way back to the hotel. When we get there, we find the front door locked. We try our room key, but it doesn’t fit.

  “Maybe they lock the front door at night,” Mimi suggests, “and you have to ring a bell to get in.”

  “It’s only nine thirty.”

  “This isn’t Toronto,” says Mimi. “This is Prague.”

  I can’t imagine that locking tourists out of their hotel rooms is part of traditional Czech culture, so I walk around the front entrance and search for a bell. I knock on the door. And then I knock some more.

  Mimi isn’t concerned. “Spending the night on the Charles Bridge wouldn’t be the end of the world. Remember San Francisco?”

  “The Golden Gate?”

  “That was fun.”

  I’m trying to think of something clever to say about Indians on bridges when, suddenly, there’s gunfire. And then a scream.

  “Come on.” Mimi heads back to the movie set at a trot. “Let’s go see who died.”

  A WHILE BACK, Mimi decided that I was depressed. I was sleeping more than she thought necessary, and I was beginning to watch reality shows that involved people shouting at each other and throwing chairs.

  “I’m not depressed.”

  “And the rages?” Mimi held up a hand and began ticking off each finger. “Cellphone companies. Bank fees. Robo calls.”

  “Nobody likes robo calls.”

  “Not getting your favourite table at Artisanale.”

  “That’s disappointment.”

  “You get upset by the little things. I don’t think that’s normal.”

  “I like that table.”

  “As I see it,” Mimi told me, “you have two choices.”

  Most things in life, according to Mimi, involve at least two choices. I know better than to ask what they are. I know she’ll tell me.

  “You can get therapy.”

  “What’s the second choice?”

  “You can get a dog.”

  At one point in our communal lives, we had had cats. Wesa and Mr. Bean. Two Burmese. They were lovely animals. But having pets was difficult, and when the cats died of old age, even though we were sad and knew we would miss them, there was the sense of relief that a burden had been lifted.

  “A dog?”

  “I think you have a hole in your heart,” Mimi told me. “I think a dog might fill it.”

  I didn’t have a hole in my heart, and I didn’t want a dog.

  “Why don’t we go to the humane society,” said Mimi. “Just for a look.”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s therapy.”

  So we went to the humane society. The woman at the front desk told us that at the moment, their supply of unwanted dogs was low.

  “Let’s look anyway,” said Mimi. “What can it hurt?”

  There were four dogs. In cages. As soon as we stepped into the room, they all started barking. The noise was startling, but it was the smell that stopped me in my tracks. Even Mimi was momentarily immobilized.

  “Our dog would be happy,” she said. “These dogs are frightened. That’s what you smell.”

  The first cage we came to contained a thirteen-year-old dog named Muffy. She was a Lab-pointer mix. Her owners had brought her to the shelter because they couldn’t afford to get Muffy’s teeth fixed.

  The minute Muffy heard us, she got off her mat, limped over to the front of the cage, and gave us a sniff.

  “She’s mostly blind,” the volunteer told us, “and deaf.”

  When Muffy was done sniffing, when she realized that we were not her family come to take her home, she limped back to her mat.

  Mimi had been wrong. I had been merely disheartened before. Now I was depressed.

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, on the Charles Bridge, watching the movie crew rearrange the lighting for a reverse shot, when I look back and see that the front door to our hotel is now open.

  I point this out to Mimi.

  “You do like to catastrophize,” she says. “I thought we had agreed to leave Eugene and the Other Demons at home.”

  There’s a woman at the front desk. She speaks fluent Czech, and I speak fluent English, and we rock the languages back and forth until the question is settled.

  Turns out there has to be someone at the desk at all times. So, if the desk person has to go to the bathroom, or duck around the corner for a smoke, or nip down the block for a pastry, the front door to the hotel is locked. I want to ask her what happens to the people who might be inside and want to get out, but I haven’t the energy.

  We walk upstairs to our very hot room, lie on our very hot bed, and roll into the centre like a couple of boulders recently blown out of a volcano.

  Still, Mimi is in excellent spirits.

  “It must have been exciting.”

  “What?”

  “Uncle Leroy,” says Mimi. “Travelling around. Seeing all of those countries. Seeing Prague.”

  “He didn’t travel because he wanted to travel.”

  “Still. It would have been an adventure.”

  I get up and turn on the television. Most of the channels are static, but I find a show where a woman points to numbers on a large board and then takes off pieces of clothing until she gets down to her bra. On another channel is a game show of sorts where six adults in diapers try to control an enormous beach ball.

  And there’s a news channel whose lead story is a demonstration somewhere in the world. Outside an imposing building, police in riot gear are in a confrontation with a grim-faced mob. Men with backpacks and suitcases. Women with babies and cardboard signs. Children holding blankets and toys. All pressed together and milling about like cattle in a pen.

  I was hoping for something like Elementary or NCIS or Castle. I wouldn’t be able to understand the dialogue, but the plot would be easy enough to follow.

  Mimi rolls over. “It’s a nice hotel,” she says, “but what the hell are those?”

  I don’t see what she sees. And then I do.

  “Are those spiders?”

  There is no good answer to this question.

  “I’m going downstairs,” I tell Mimi. “Maybe the hotel has an electric fan.”

  “What about the spiders?” Mimi calls out after me. “Ask them about the spiders.”

  The woman at the desk seems happy to see me. “Fan?”

  “For the room. It’s hot.”

  “Hot?”

  “Yes, the room is very hot.”

  “You are to use air conditioner,” she tells me.

  This is one of the problems with language. I know every word the woman uses, and the sentence makes sense. There is a subject, a verb, an infinitive, and an object. Articles optional. When this happens, I always try to guess at intent, and in this case, I can only come up with one explanation.

  “The room has an air conditioner?”

  “Yes,” says the woman. “Of course.”

  I had looked for an air conditioner and had not seen one.

  “I will show you?”

  “Yes,” I tell the woman. “Please.”

  So she locks the front door, and we go upstairs.

  “Honey,” I call out to Mimi, who is probably still on the bed but who could have slipped into a tub of cold water, “we have company.”

  Our room has a slightly awkward arrangement. The door to the room opens into a short hall that leads to the sleeping area on the left and to the bathroom on the right. The hallway is a dead space more or less, and this is where the air conditioner is.

  In the hallway, above the door to the room.

  The woman flips a switch on the wall that looks like a light switch but isn’t. As s
he does, I can hear the whirl of something that might just be an air conditioner.

  “There,” says the woman, and she points at the grill above the door.

  I feel like a fool, of course, but I don’t see how an air conditioner stuck in a hallway above a door is going to cool a bedroom that is fifteen feet away and around a corner.

  “It feels cooler already,” Mimi shouts to me.

  I hold my hand up to the grill, and yes, I can feel air coming out. It’s the same temperature as the room, but I withhold my comments. It might well cool down in a few minutes.

  “Thank you,” I tell the woman, who is already heading back down the stairs to unlock the front door.

  “Let’s not make it too cold,” says Mimi.

  I hold my hand up to the grill again. There doesn’t seem to be much chance of that happening.

  “What about the spiders?” says Mimi. “Did you ask her about the spiders?”

  OUR TRIP TO THE humane society was a disaster. I was better off not knowing about Muffy.

  “It’s not your fault,” Mimi told me.

  It was quite clear that Muffy would die in that cage. She would never see the people who had been her family for all those years. She would die alone.

  “And Muffy has nothing to do with residential schools.”

  “What?”

  “I know the way your mind works,” said Mimi. “You see an animal in a cage, and you think of residential schools.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Remember that story you did when the prime minister officially apologized for the damage the residential-school system had caused? Remember what you said?”

  “I said such apologies were worthless.”

  “You also said that Canadians treated their pets better than school personnel treated the children in those schools.” Mimi gave me a hug and held it longer than necessary. “Okay,” she said, “what kind of dog do you want?”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE. We’ve wrapped up our first day in the city and are tucked in our hotel room with an air conditioner in name only and a family of spiders on the ceiling.

  “There are sixteen,” Mimi tells me. “Eight large, five medium, three small.”

  Everyone has idiosyncrasies. Balzac drank over fifty cups of coffee a day. John Steinbeck kept exactly twelve sharpened pencils on his desk to make sure he always had writing implements. Flannery O’Connor had a thing for domestic poultry. Benjamin Franklin started each day with an “air bath,” which consisted of sitting in the nude and exposing his private parts to the morning breezes.

  Mimi counts things. She’ll count almost anything, but she’s particularly fond of keeping track of bodily functions. She likes to tell me how many bowel movements she’s had in a day, how long it takes for her to pee—her record is forty-one seconds—and the amount of mucus she snorts out on her daily jogs.

  And now that she’s noted the number of spiders and their size, I can’t get to sleep. We can hear the tourists outside the window as they walk back and forth across the bridge in the dark, and we can hear music floating on the night air.

  Mimi sits up suddenly, slides out of bed, and goes to the window. I stay where I am. I know trouble when I see it.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says.

  I imagine that most cities are beautiful at night, when all you see are the lights against a night sky, when everything else is in shadows.

  “Look.” Mimi drags me out of bed and marches me to the window. The cafés are aglow. Reflections dance off the cobblestones. “Everyone is so happy. Are you happy?”

  “Yes,” I tell her, “I’m happy.”

  “Shit, Bird,” she says, “can’t you lie any better than that?”

  Now that Mimi is awake, there’s no stopping her. I vote for staying in the room, but evidently, this is not what people on vacation do. So we get dressed and find our way to a café, where a man is playing a guitar and a woman is singing.

  Mimi turns to me. “‘I’ll Be Seeing You’?”

  “It was big in the ’40s,” I tell her.

  “Sure, but why are they singing American tunes in the Czech Republic?”

  Mimi and I stand off to one side and let the music flow over us. We stick around long enough to hear the woman sing most of the songs that Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole made famous—“Let’s Fall in Love,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Again,” “Unforgettable”—and the music makes me somewhat homesick. If I were home, I’d be in front of the television right now with Muffy and a sandwich.

  Happy, well fed, safe.

  WE DIDN’T GET a dog from the humane society. But a week later, Mimi came home from her weekly jaunt to the thrift stores. She has a circuit that she works, much like a trapper on a trapline.

  Salvation Army. Goodwill. Value Village.

  And each time she goes, she comes home with a large plastic sack. Sometimes several.

  “You’ll never guess what I found.”

  I was watching Casablanca and really didn’t care what Mimi had found.

  “Go on, guess.”

  I don’t know how many times I’ve watched the movie. And I have no idea why I find it soothing to hear Bogart and Bergman say the same lines over and over.

  “It’s not candles,” said Mimi. “And it’s not shoes.”

  Paul Henreid doesn’t do much for me, but Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault and Sydney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari are terrific.

  “A dog,” said Mimi. “I found you a dog.”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, and as we walk back to our hotel, the fog rolls in. We hadn’t been expecting this. Before we know it, the city disappears, and we can barely see beyond our hands.

  “When you’re lost in the woods, you’re supposed to stay where you are, so that the searchers can find you.”

  “We’re not in the woods.”

  “It’s the principle,” says Mimi.

  “And there aren’t any searchers coming to find us.”

  But Mimi’s point is well taken. If we try to battle the fog, we could really get lost. I don’t know if there are sketchy neighbourhoods in Prague, parts of the city that tourists are advised to avoid, but if there are, I don’t want to stumble into them by mistake.

  “We could just stand here,” Mimi tells me, “and wait for the fog to lift.”

  “That could be hours. We could be out here all night.”

  Mimi steps in close and takes my hand. “I had an uncle who went to residential school. Blue Quills in St. Paul. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “This the famous Uncle Leroy?”

  “No, another uncle. Everett. One time, he ran away from the school with two other boys. They just started walking. Had no idea where they were. Didn’t know that Standoff was almost six hundred kilometres away.”

  “Long walk.”

  “Made it as far as Killam before they got caught. Said the fog was so thick, they had to hold hands to keep from getting lost. Just like tonight.”

  “So, this is your excuse for us to hold hands.”

  “Mum says they had a box of matches with them, but the matches got wet from the fog, and that was that.”

  “Chanie Wenjack.”

  “Sure,” says Mimi, “that’s the story everyone knows. Children running away from residential schools. But it’s not the only one.”

  “What happened to Everett and the other boys?”

  “They were taken back to Blue Quills,” says Mimi.

  “So, they didn’t die?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s the end of the story?”

  Mimi holds my hand a little tighter. “Those stories never end.”

  THE DOG THAT MIMI takes out of the bag is about the size of a small pillow, with blond fur, floppy ears, and a sweet face.

  “Her name is Muffy,” Mimi tells me. “And she loves you.”

  “A stuffed dog?”

  “You don’t have to walk her or clean up after her or train her.” Mimi puts the dog on my chest so her nose nuzzles
my neck. “And she loves you.”

  I’m not sure how I feel about a stuffed dog, but Muffy is cute, and all in all, it’s a reasonable compromise.

  “And when we travel,” says Mimi, “if the two of you become inseparable, we can throw her in a suitcase and take her with us.”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE. It’s two thirty in the morning, and the fog looks as though it has settled in for the night.

  “If we find the bridge, we should be okay.”

  Suddenly, somewhere in the fog, we hear the voices of men singing. At first, they’re far away, but then they get closer.

  “Come on,” says Mimi. “We’ll follow them.”

  “You want to follow drunks?”

  I don’t know if the group of men are Czech or German or Russian, and I guess it doesn’t matter. Mimi swings in behind them, and we wander along blindly, listening to something that sounds martial but could be a sports-team fight song.

  “We have no idea where they’re going.”

  “They’re tourists,” says Mimi. “Tourists always head for the bridge.”

  This is one of the logical fallacies they teach you to avoid in journalism school, and I’m about to point this out to Mimi when a statue appears in the fog.

  “The bridge,” she says.

  I’m not ready to concede. There are probably statues all over Prague.

  “And our hotel,” says Mimi, with a condescending wave of her hand, “is right over there.”

  Mimi doesn’t wait for me to object. She leads us down the stone steps and around a corner, and there is the hotel, right where we left it.

  “Like an arrow from a bow,” she says.

  The room is still hot. The air conditioner is still making encouraging noises. The spiders are still on the ceiling.

  Mimi crawls into bed and begins snoring almost immediately. I pull a chair over to the window so I can look out at the foggy, foggy night and enjoy the rumour of a breeze.

  I’m not sure that I would want to die in Prague, but it’s probably as good a place as any. The city has a certain antiquity to it, a certain dignity. Much better than wasting away in a Toronto hospital, laid out on a plastic bed, wired to a monitor that counts down each heartbeat.

  Dying here would be more glamorous. In a small hotel on the river Vltava. Looking out at the Charles Bridge.