Indians on Vacation

by Thomas King

  I’ve never been much for games. In a past life, I made the mistake of getting a PlayStation. Tally and Nathan had loved insanities such as Uncharted and Gran Turismo. For me, being lost in a computergenerated jungle and shooting at anything that moved, or sitting in front of a monitor for hours, crashing cars into one another, had been a mind-numbing, soul-sucking experience I never want to repeat.

  “Did you stop writing because you could not find justice in words?”

  Not that board games were any better. Roll the dice. Spin the wheel. Leave everything to chance. No skill required.

  “When you look at the world, what do you see?” Oz closes his eyes. “A peaceable kingdom? A calamity of the absurd?”

  I ignore Oz and his mutterings and concentrate on my fruit bowl. The strawberries look fresh. The pear is from a can.

  “Corporations, governments, profit, and war. The planet as commodity.”

  “Video game? Board game?” I poke at the blueberries. “Does it have a name?”

  “My friend’s game,” says Oz. “He may call it ‘Bees and Bears.’”

  I stop poking. “Bees?”

  “Bees and Bears.” Oz begins chuckling. “A long time ago, the Bees made the mistake of sharing their honey with the Bears. The Bears were delighted, and having discovered the pleasure of sweetness on the tongue, they began roaming the land, searching for Bee trees. And each time they found one, they would destroy it in order to get the honey. You can see the problem? Yes?”

  “Bears as weapons of mass destruction.”

  “This was, as you might imagine, a disaster for the Bees. And they quickly came together to discuss what could be done about the unacceptable behaviour of Bears. Of course, the answer is easy enough.”

  “And this is the game? Bees and Bears?”

  “But look at the time.” Oz stands suddenly and holds out both wrists. “I will be late.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “Golden Lane,” Oz calls out as he hurries past the buffet. “It is not to be missed.”

  Mimi arrives in the breakfast room just as breakfast is being cleared away. She sees the danger immediately, grabs two plates, and plows her way through the staff and the food as though she is clearing snow off a sidewalk.

  “You didn’t wake me.” Her hair is wet, and the label at the back of her shirt is sticking straight up in the air.

  “Not my job.”

  “I could have missed breakfast.”

  “Then get up earlier.”

  “I need nine hours,” says Mimi. “You know I’m no good without nine hours.”

  I seldom sleep more than four hours a night. Some nights I don’t sleep at all.

  Mimi blames Eugene and the Other Demons, but I’ve never been able to sleep for more than six.

  “You know what happens when you don’t get enough sleep.”

  “You get more work done.”

  “A lack of sleep leads to problems with the immune system and early onset dementia.”

  “I thought you told me that as you get older, you need less sleep.”

  “The Institute to Confound and Demoralize,” Mimi tells me, “has decided that that is no longer true.”

  The Institute to Confound and Demoralize is something that Mimi has made up to deal with the contradictions that seem to arise with alarming frequency.

  Coffee is bad for you. Coffee is good for you.

  Red wine helps blood health. Red wine reduces your ability to fight infection.

  Exercise is essential for general fitness. Exercise contributes to inflammation of the joints.

  Kale, the silent killer.

  Mimi is the only person I know who can eat and talk at the same time. “So,” she says, “what shall we do today?”

  “Fly home?”

  “The castle,” says Mimi. “We could see the castle.”

  “We’ve seen more castles than anyone should have to see,” I say. “The Loire Valley?”

  “Those were mostly châteaux.”

  “Mont Saint-Michel? Neuschwanstein? Alcazar? Versailles?”

  “Versailles is a palace.”

  “Sleeping Beauty Castle?”

  “Disneyland Park? In Paris?” Mimi shakes her head. “I hope you’re being ironic.”

  “We don’t have to travel to see castles,” I remind Mimi. “We have Hatley Castle in Victoria and Casa Loma in Toronto.”

  “Prague Castle is older,” says Mimi, “and it’s one of the top ten things to do when you’re in Prague.”

  “So?”

  “So we’re in Prague,” says Mimi. “It’s going to be sunny. You should wear a hat.”

  A FEW YEARS BACK, we had gone to the south of France. Uncle Leroy had sent the family a postcard from Nice, and Mimi thought we might find the Crow bundle in the Picasso Museum in Antibes, which was just up the road.

  I didn’t have much hope. “The big Picasso Museum is in Barcelona,” I reminded Mimi, “and we looked there already.”

  “Picasso was influenced by African art,” Mimi had countered. “Good bet he would be interested in something like the Crow bundle.”

  “Picasso was in Antibes for less than a year.”

  “More than enough time to talk Uncle Leroy out of the bundle.”

  Of course, there was no way that this could have happened. Leroy would have been in Nice around 1904. Picasso didn’t get to Antibes until 1946. By the time the artist took up residence on the second floor of Château Grimaldi, the Indian would most likely have been dead.

  But we caught the train from Nice to Antibes and spent an afternoon at the museum. Mimi liked La Joie de Vivre. I liked The Goat. We both enjoyed the view of the Mediterranean from the sculpture garden.

  Afterwards, we wandered the town.

  “Nikos Kazantzakis’s house is around here someplace,” Mimi told me. “Maybe we can go in, and you can channel your Greek side.”

  “Kazantzakis?”

  “According to the guide, Kazantzakis wrote Zorba the Greek while he was living here.”

  “In Antibes?”

  “And there’s a square named after him just off the Rue du Bas Castelet.”

  We wandered around some more, until Mimi found the house.

  “Do you feel any Greek literary zeal swelling up inside you?”

  There were no signs to indicate that we could tour the place, and I was just as happy to stand outside. Mimi walked up the path to the front door and looked in a couple of windows.

  “‘I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.’” Mimi took my hand, and we strolled back to the port. “That’s the epitaph on Kazantzakis’s grave in Heraklion. What do you want on yours?”

  “‘Dead,’” I told Mimi.

  “Bird, that doesn’t sound like an epitaph. That sounds like a complaint.”

  Port Vauban in Antibes is the home of the Yacht Club d’Antibes. It’s the largest marina for luxury boats and yachts in the Mediterranean. Mimi and I took our time walking around the outer ring of the harbour.

  I had Mimi stand by the seawall so I could take a photograph.

  “Any one of these yachts,” she said, “could feed a small country.”

  At the top of the harbour was a sculpture by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa. A seated figure with his knees drawn up against his chest, made up of white letters knitted together into a transparent skin.

  From a distance, it looked for the world like a mound of bleached coral.

  “It’s called Nomade,” Mimi told me. “Plensa is supposed to be suggesting the constructive potential of an alphabet. As a writer, you should understand that.”

  The sculpture was hollow. You could stand inside or climb up on the letters.

  “What do you think?” Mimi asked me. “Does the world seem different when you look at it through language?”

  Even from halfway up the structure, the sky over the sea didn’t look any less blue. The town in the distance didn’t look any less touristy. The flotilla of sailboats, cabin cruisers,
and mega-yachts stacked up in the harbour didn’t look any less ostentatious.

  “You see that?”

  There was an enormous yacht parked in the harbour with a coal-black hull and a bright white superstructure. On the side of the hull at the water line, someone had spray-painted, “Know Me for What I Am” in sloppy red letters.

  “Someone was determined.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “You’d have to have a boat to do that.”

  “Yacht graffiti.” Mimi wiped an imaginary tear from her eye. “Another heartbreaking First World problem.”

  The ship sat high in the water, so you couldn’t see if there was anyone on deck. All the windows were blacked out, so you couldn’t tell if there was anyone home. I suspected that the ship had a helicopter pad, possibly two, and a complement of swimming pools, but you would have had to have been in the hills above Antibes, looking down on the marina, to be sure.

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE. We debate whether to walk up to the castle or take the tram.

  I vote for the tram.

  “Exercise wouldn’t hurt us,” says Mimi.

  “It’s too hot,” I counter. “You were right about the hat.”

  The hill is steeper than I thought, and I’m glad we’re taking the tram. It reminds me a bit of the cable cars in San Francisco.

  When we get to the castle, I point to a sign at the entrance. “Three hundred and fifty to get in?”

  Mimi snorts. “Bird, that’s 350 Czech crowns. It’s about twenty dollars Canadian. And that’s for Circuit A. There’s also Circuit B and Circuit C, which are cheaper.”

  “So, we get the cheap tickets?”

  “If we get the cheap tickets, we could miss something.”

  “Such as another church.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Mimi tucks the guidebook into her pack and heads to the ticket booth. “Let’s get going before the tourists show up.”

  St. Vitus Cathedral is just inside the main entrance. There is an Asian couple on the front steps, getting their picture taken.

  “What do you think,” says Mimi. “A wedding?”

  The woman is wearing a white ball gown. She holds the sides of the skirt out like a fan and turns one way and then the other as the photographer follows her with a camera. The groom stands behind her as still as a statue, his tuxedo jacket open, his thumbs tucked into black suspenders.

  “Remember Santorini?” says Mimi. “The little blue domed church in Oia with the couples lined up to have their photographs taken?”

  Suddenly, the man begins dancing around his bride, stopping every few steps and freezing in an action position that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with a wedding. The woman continues swaying from side to side, her dress floating around her like a soft breeze.

  The man stops and strikes a pose, his arms crossed, one foot in front of the other, his chin up, his eyes fixed on the sky. The woman slides in behind him and drapes herself over his shoulders.

  As though she were an accessory.

  Mimi leans into me. “You want me to dress up in a wedding gown and wrap myself around you?”

  According to the guidebook, Prague Castle is the largest castle in the world.

  “Where do you want to start? There’s the Old Royal Palace, St. Vitus Cathedral, St. George’s Basilica, along with the Picture Gallery and the Powder Tower.” Mimi looks at the flyer she got when she bought the tickets. “But the tower is closed right now.”

  “Too bad.”

  “And there’s Golden Lane.”

  “That’s where Oz said we should go.”

  “Oz?”

  “He’s the guy I talk to at breakfast,” I tell Mimi. “When you’re still asleep.”

  Mimi looks at me sideways. “This Oz,” she says, “he happen to be a friend of Eugene?”

  “Oz is real.” I don’t try to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Eugene and the Other Demons are something you made up.”

  “They’re real enough,” says Mimi. “I just gave them names.”

  “If you would get up in the morning, I’d introduce the two of you.”

  “This is what happens when you don’t get enough sleep,” says Mimi. “You get cranky.”

  The good news is that the castle is not all that crowded. The bad news is that it’s boring.

  “This is Vladislav Hall,” Mimi tells me, as we stand on a vast stone floor with a web of arches overhead. “They used to bring horses in here for many of the celebrations.”

  “Horses? How?”

  “There’s a special ramp called the Knights’ Stairway.”

  “What did they do with the you-know-what?”

  “The hall is sixty metres long by sixteen metres wide.” Mimi stretches out her arms to show me the scale. “The arches are twelve metres off the floor.”

  Wandering through old buildings is not my idea of a vacation. Sure, there’s history here, but most of it revolves around state-sponsored mayhem and gratuitous violence. Assassinations, expulsion of ethnic groups, court intrigue, occupation by Nazis, Russians, and the International Monetary Fund.

  Blood and money.

  All reduced to postcards, flags, garnets, Mucha posters, and beer cosmetics.

  “You could say the same thing about Toronto,” says Mimi. “Or New York. How about trying to find something positive about the place.”

  “Restrooms.”

  Mimi takes my hand. “You’re not going to make a fuss about that again, are you?”

  “I just don’t see why they can’t provide tourists with restrooms.”

  All of the major tourist destinations in Europe have washrooms. But you have to pay to use them. And for as much as we’ve travelled, I’ve never gotten used to coin-operated toilets or bathrooms with sentinels at the entrance who take your money and dole out slivers of thin toilet paper, as though each piece were a sheet of hammered gold.

  “Charging to use a bathroom is just wrong.” I can feel myself warming to the task. “Remember the restaurants in Italy where they brought us bread at every meal? The bread was terrible, but they charged us for it anyway, even when we said we didn’t want it.”

  Mimi puts her arms over her head and stretches from side to side. “Maybe that’s why we travel.”

  “So we can pay for bread we don’t want and rent time in a toilet?”

  “To complain.” Mimi stops stretching. “Maybe we travel so that we can complain.”

  FRANKLY, I DON’T NEED to travel in order to complain. I can find plenty of things to criticize without stepping out of the house. Big box stores such as Walmart that treat their employees like indentured servants. The religious right that can always find someone to hate. Politicians who acknowledge global warming but take no actions that would affect corporate profits. The gun lobby that believes thoughts and prayers are the proper response to the killing of schoolchildren.

  I can even complain about where I live.

  Guelph, Ontario, is a lovely place. University town. Couple of rivers, the Speed and the Eramosa, running through it. Eric the Baker. Artisanale. The Bookshelf. Wyndham Art. In the summer, when they lower the floodgates, you can canoe the Speed up past the Boathouse, all the way to Victoria Road, before you begin to run out of clearance.

  But my idea of paradise is the Northwest Coast. Somewhere like Tofino. Open ocean. Fog. Rain. Where it’s never too hot, never too cold. Goldilocks country. And grey. Where the dominant colour is grey.

  When Mimi and I were both working, our jobs controlled our landscape. Now that we’re retired, we could live wherever we wish.

  “Bird, all your friends are in Guelph.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “What would your friends think, if they heard you say that?”

  “I bet my health would improve if we lived on the coast.”

  “Didn’t we decide that the geographical solution never works?”

  “Why don’t we try? You like the coast.”

  “For a vacation, sure. But I like s
unshine.”

  “Sunshine is overrated,” I tell Mimi every time we have this discussion. “If you die before me, I’ll move to the coast.”

  “We could compromise and move to Alberta. Mom would like me to come home. And we could ride horses. Remember how much fun that was.”

  I tried to imagine myself on the prairies.

  “Sure,” I would say every time the discussion got to this point. “Hot summers. High winds. Rampant racism. Religious intolerance. Right-wing politics.”

  “I need sun, Bird. I don’t like being cold.”

  I don’t know for sure if living on the coast would improve my outlook on life, but I’m convinced that it’s worth a try.

  “If we moved to the coast, I’d leave Eugene and the Other Demons in Ontario.”

  Mimi is skeptical about this. “That a promise?”

  “Absolutely,” I tell her. “I’d be happy on the coast. Happy, happy, happy.”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, walking around the grounds of an old castle, looking at old buildings, when Mimi stops me.

  “Bird, did you know you’re sweating?”

  “It’s hot.”

  “It’s not that hot,” says Mimi. “Are you okay?”

  I always like it when Mimi is concerned about me.

  “Is it your blood sugars?”

  Eugene is standing in the doorway of St. George’s Convent. He has his camera out. Smile, he shouts. For the obituary.

  “I’m fine,” I tell Mimi. “Nothing a house on the coast wouldn’t cure.”

  “Jesus, Bird,” says Mimi. “I did tell you to wear a hat.”

  Golden Lane is at the far end of the castle complex. The statue of the naked boy that Oz had told me about is in a small square just before the entrance to the lane. There are a number of tourists standing around the statue, taking pictures.

  Mimi squints into the sun. Then she walks over to the crowd. Then she walks back.

  “The tourists,” she says, “you want to guess what they’re doing?”

  I don’t know what I had expected, but Golden Lane isn’t it. The lane is a long, narrow street of brightly painted cottages all stuck together, the kind of long, narrow street you can see in almost every city in Europe. Not to mention North America. Petit Champlain in Quebec City, Maiden Lane in San Francisco, Government Street in Victoria, Acorn Street in Boston.