Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  After she had left for work, Forde stood over the toilet in the second-floor bathroom. The intense, rich yellow, the Day-Glo brightness of his urine, gave him daily pleasure. The vitamins did it. He wasn’t sure if it was the E, the beta carotene, the C, or the Megavits. He had read in a newspaper article that vitamins C and E “captured free radicals’; he had no idea what that meant, and wasn’t curious, but he enjoyed the sound of it. It made him think of warfare against insurgent forces in fetid jungles, sibilant native blades, parang and kris.

  Even the toilet itself pleased him. It was probably seventy or eighty years old. Against the back of the bowl, in purple script, was the word ‘Vitreous.’ And above that, in a wreath of what might have been acanthus leaves, was the toilet’s name—‘Prompto’.

  He flushed the toilet and watched his brightness diluted, swirled away. He stood looking at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror as the plumbing groaned and water rilled and spirted, silence rising, settling.

  He wandered into his frowsty study and sat at his ugly government-surplus oak desk. Beyond its far edge the scabby radiator. Then the blank wall. Two years earlier he had faced the window but had spent too much time gazing out, watching passersby and the busyness of dogs.

  Usually he enjoyed the daily solitude and drew the deepening silence of the house around him like a blanket. But on this day the silence burdened him. He sat looking down at the gold-plated stem-winder, which always lay flat on the desk to his right. He wound it every morning, pleased every morning by the feel of the knurled winding knob. He had bought it at a pawn shop cheaply because engraved on the back of the watch were the words: Presented to George Pepper in recognition of forty-five years’ service to the Canadian Cardboard Box Company.

  It amused him to think that this was the only presentation gold watch he’d ever have. No such flourishes were likely to conclude his career. He kept the watch on the desk as a talisman, a spur to effort, as memento mori, as a reminder of the world to which he gratefully did not belong. He thought of the watch as ‘George.’ He sometimes talked to it.

  This is a lovely bit of writing, George, even if I say so myself. And why not? No one else will.

  I think we can get another hour in, George, before we’re completely knackered.

  He wound the watch.

  He sighed.

  He sat staring across his desk’s familiar clutter. He had no appetite for writing necessary letters, for providing references and recommendations, for the fiddle of filing. His last novel was now six months behind him—almost a year since he’d written seriously—but he remained listless, uncommitted about what he might do next, bored.

  When he was in the grip of first-draft writing, he risked nothing that might break the flow. Ritual and omen ruled. He laid in stocks of Branston pickle, wooden matches, tins of Medaglia d’Oro. His heart leapt at the cawing of crows. He did not like to leave the house, did not open his mail, did not shower, wash, or shave, slept in unchanged shirt and underpants, sat in his study smelling the smell of himself.

  It was only on Friday mornings that this obsessive routine was interrupted. On Friday mornings the cleaning lady hired by Sheila arrived at nine and made his life unendurable until noon. He had begged and remonstrated, but Sheila had offered as the only alternative that he clean the house himself as she had neither the time nor the energy. And definitely no inclination. He saw fully the justice of her position but felt put upon.

  He attempted politeness when he let the woman in, attempted conversations about the weather, the heat, the cold, the damp, but could never understand more than a word in five of anything she said. Although he closed his study door and put on his industrial ear-mufflers, he could still hear her imprecations and mad Portuguese diatribes, her crooning monologues punctuated by sudden squawks and screeches directed at vacuum cleaner or doorknob.

  She had once left a note on the kitchen counter that read: Mis mis erclen finisples.

  It had worried at him most of the afternoon.

  Sheila had read it with impatient ease. Miss. Mister Clean is finished, please.

  According to Sheila, Mrs Silva had an unemployed husband with three toes missing on one foot from an industrial accident, a son who was a bad lot, and was herself a devoutly Catholic hypochondriac whose spare time was divided equally between her priest and doctor.

  He could not understand how Sheila had found any of this out, how she understood anything the bloody woman said, but he had come to suspect that Sheila’s ability to understand Mrs Silva, bereaved Romanian upholsterers, and monoglot Vietnamese shelf-stockers in odoriferous Asian stores, had less to do with some rare linguistic talent than it had to do with the fact that she was a nicer person than he was.

  He started to link up the doodles.

  One of John D. MacDonald’s thrillers came into his mind. He’d always admired the title: The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything.

  He was supposed to be polishing an interview which was supposed to appear in the summer issue of Harvest, but Harvest was doubtless two issues behind where it was supposed to be so that all of its three hundred subscribers would have to wait with bated breath until the summer of next year before they could devour his profound and penetrating insights into this, that, and whatever, so that, all in all, six of this and half a dozen of the other, all things being equal, when push came to shove, polishing the bloody thing up did not seem an enterprise ‘. . . of great pith and moment,’ he declaimed into the study’s silence.

  Who said that?

  Fortinbras?

  Hamlet himself?

  He plodded downstairs to find a copy of The Complete Plays and to make a cup of tea. Better for his health, Sheila insisted, than coffee.

  I must put my pyjamas, he chanted, in the drawer marked pyjamas.

  I must eat my charcoal biscuit, he recited, which is good for me.

  As he stood waiting for the kettle to boil, he looked at the New York Times Atlas of the World Sheila had left open on the counter. He took a roll of Magic Tape from the kitchen drawer and started to tape up the tears in the tattered blue dust jacket; he’d been meaning to do that for weeks. Often, after dinner, they sat over the atlas finishing the wine and squabbling happily over holidays they would never be able to afford. Sheila’s most recent creation had been a trip up the Nile to see the temples, but without getting off the boat because Egypt was hot and smelly and every historical site was plagued by importunate dragomen, smelly and anti-Semites to a man, and one could surely get a sense of the temples while remaining in one’s deck chair and being served large Bombay gin martinis.

  A snort of laughter escaped him as he thought of the words “consort with Slovenians.”

  Her performance that morning had not, of course, been about Slovenians, World War II fascist groups, or deported Jews. It had been what he thought shrinks called “displacement.” It was that, simply, she was upset that he was going away, and although she had not yet said so, she was even more upset that at the conference he would, for the first time, be meeting Karla.

  Sheila did not like Karla. She had taken against her from the arrival of the first letter. She always referred to her as “your Commie pen pal.”

  The conference was to be held in the Alps at a lake resort called Splad. The brochure about the hotel and its services was written in an English that charmed him. He thought it strange that in a Communist country a hotel would offer to launder silk handkerchiefs; they also offered to launder Gentlemen Linen and Nightshirsts. He had studied the sample menus with fascination; he particularly liked the sound of National Beans with Pork Jambs. It seemed certain that the whole expedition would provide him with unimaginable comic material.

  But he had scarcely bothered to glance at the programme itself when it had arrived from the Literary and Cultural Association of Slovenia, disliking the hairy Eastern European paper it was printed on and the fact that the paper was
not the normal 8 1/2 by 11 inches, but 8 1/2 by 11 3/4, an intensely irritating deviation probably traceable, like the metric system, to the meddling of Napoleon.

  From horrid experience, he knew that the papers would range, from deconstructionist babble to weird explications in uncertain English, of the profundities of Mazo de la Roche and Lucy Maud Montgomery.

  Not that he would be caught listening to any of it; he would rather, he thought, sit and listen to a washing machine.

  And ranged between the deconstructionists and the simply uncomprehending there would be interminable feminists in frocks and army boots, gay theorists in bright-green leather shoes, huddles of Slovenians in suits discussing Truth, the State, the Writer, smart-alec Marxist smarty-boots, chaps in tweed from New Zealand. . . .

  But looking on the bright side, his expenses in Slovenia would be covered by the Literary and Cultural Association, and his travel expenses to Slovenia would be covered by the Department of External Affairs, which was also to pay him a per diem and a small honorarium. This, together with another honorarium from the Slovenians for reading, might mean returning home five hundred dollars ahead.

  And he’d be freed from his desk, from the chipped radiator, the blank wall facing; he’d be free of the house, he’d be out and about, out in the world, free of the weight of his numbing routines.

  His spirits rose at the thought of leaving behind the wearying end of Ottawa’s winter, the snow beginning now its slow retreat, revealing Listerine bottles and dog turds. He would be leaving behind brown bare twigs and flying towards a world in leaf, in the alpine meadows, gentians.

  And, once ensconced in Splad, he would perhaps meet someone who would wish to write about his work. Perhaps a convivial evening in the bar might lead to further translation. . . . Nor could he deny that he enjoyed the attention, couldn’t deny that it made him feel expansive to answer questions, pontificate, disparage Robertson Davies.

  “What I don’t understand,” Sheila had said, probing at his contradictions to deflate and anger him in these last bickering days before his flight, “what I can’t follow is why it gives you pleasure to impress people for whom you have little or no respect. Why is that?’

  “Well, it’s not so much the people,” he’d explained, “it’s what they represent.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Well . . . a certain interest, a respect even . . . these are academics from all over the world, you know.”

  “And according to you some of them can’t speak English and the rest talk gibberish.”

  “I’m not saying it’s a desirable situation, Sheila, but one’s reputation rests to a certain extent on how much attention academics pay to one’s work.”

  “One’s reputation does, does it?”

  He had shaken his head slowly to convey a weary dignity.

  “And one doesn’t feel,” she’d probed further, “that disporting oneself in front of people one disdains is rather . . . well . . . pitiable?”

  He sighed and sipped at the tea.

  Lighted a luxurious cigarette.

  Closed the atlas.

  And there also awaited in Splad the pleasure of holding in his hands a translation, into Serbian, of his third novel, Winter Creatures. His translator was travelling to Splad from Belgrade bringing the book with him. At a conference two years earlier in Italy he’d been approached by a man—and actually he wouldn’t swear to the absolute details of any of this because he’d been rather drunk himself and had not quite grasped everything the man was saying, what with the noise in the bar and the accent and the syntax—by a man whose father was Serbian and whose mother was Croatian—or possibly it was the other way round—who worked for a cultural radio station and magazine in Belgrade and who was an actor and impresario who translated works in English into Serbian on behalf of the Writers of Serbia Cultural Association, and who, when not involved in manifestations, worked by day as chauffeur to a man of extensive power.

  After his return to Canada, Forde had largely forgotten this loud stranger with his winks and nods, his glittering gold fillings, his finger tapping the side of his nose, until the telephone calls began.

  Ripped from sleep at 3:33, heart pounding, staring into the digital clock inches from his face, Forde croaked into the phone.

  “Hello?” he repeated.

  “Here is Drago.”

  “Who?”

  “Drago! Drago!”

  “Who is it?”

  He flapped his hand shush at her.

  3:34

  “You will visit me in Beograd. We will have much talking.”

  “Beograd?”

  “Yes! Yes, Robert Forde.”

  “Excuse me . . . you’re . . . from Bologna?”

  “Yes, certainly Bologna.”

  “I’m sorry. For a moment, I . . . ah . . . rather disoriented.”

  3:35

  “In Beograd we will together drink Nescafe.”

  This had been the first of many calls.

  All came in the small hours.

  “Get his fucking number!” hissed Sheila, furiously humping the sheets over her shoulder. “I’ll phone him in the middle of his fucking night, fucking Slav fuckheads.”

  Forde soon came to dread that ruthless, domineering voice. Drago bombarded, hectored, rode roughshod.

  He was implacable.

  He was impervious.

  “Here is Drago. You have written: ‘American students littered the steps.’ This littered is not a nice word, not a possible word, it is meaning excrement and rubbish and so would offend the Americans, so we find a compromise word. . . .”

  He wondered what the book would look like. He presumed it would be a paperback but didn’t know whether they went in for the quality paperback format or whether they produced paperbacks in the utilitarian French style. He realized that he didn’t even know if Serbian was written in the Roman alphabet or in Cyrillic. He wondered what Serbian readers would make of Winter Creatures given Drago’s strange queries and frequent assurances that he would ‘make things come nice.’ He suspected that the novel had been less translated than traduced. So why was he so gratified to have his novel badly translated into a language he couldn’t read?

  Forde did not delude himself.

  He had not forgotten the wellingtons phone call.

  “Wellies,’ said Drago. “This means, I think, venery.”

  “What?”

  “You know, Robert Forde, what I am saying.”

  “No, no, Drago! Wellies are rubber boots.”

  He had listened to the echoic international silence.

  “Short for wellingtons.”

  “Never,” said Drago, “in all my reading and my talking, never have I heard it called so.”

  “It?” he’d squeaked.

  But he was gratified. As he sat doodling at his desk, he hummed. Had he liked cigars, he would have smoked one. Had there been a mirror in his study, he would have inclined his head with all the benign courtesy of a grandee.

  “ . . . consort with Slovenians. . . .”

  He grinned at the radiator.

  He was even pleased by Sheila’s moody assaults, pleased and a little flattered that after all the years they’d been together, she could still flame into jealousy. Not that she had the slightest cause for concern. As he’d told her repeatedly, his friendship with Karla was a purely literary friendship.

  Her first letter had arrived some three years ago from the University of Jena in the German Democratic Republic. She had expressed her admiration of his novels—a colleague at the University of Augsburg had lent her some volumes—and although her syntax and vocabulary were sometimes peculiar, he’d been pleased to receive her praise. No one from East Germany had ever written to him before. She had ended her letter by saying that her great sorrow was that she had not been able to read his
first two novels because she could not obtain them. Was it possible he could send her copies? For such a resolution of the problem she would be most grateful.

  “Why has it always got to be you?” Sheila demanded. “Why should you have to pay for the books and postage?”

  “Well, I’ve never thought about it before but I don’t think their currency trades. They can’t buy things with it in the west.”

  “Well, how did her letter get here then, with an East German stamp on it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how that works.”

  “Well,” said Sheila. “I’d say there’s something suspicious about it.”

  He had sent her the books and within weeks they were writing back and forth regularly. What other Canadian writers should she read? Who were reliable critics? Which books were most loved by the Canadian people? She loved to read about Red Indians and Eskimos and the North. Was Grey Owl thought a great Canadian writer? Canadians, as she had studied in Margaret Atwood’s book Survival, had invented the genre of the wild-animal story. Should she read Ernest Thompson Seton? An anthology at the university contained an Ernest Thompson Seton story entitled ‘Raggylug, the Story of a Cottontail Rabbit.’ Was this one of his most loved stories?

  Forde had dealt with all this misplaced enthusiasm firmly. He had explained that no books were beloved of the Canadian people with the sole exception of Anne of Green Gables, and that only because it had been on television. Most Canadians, he had explained, were functionally illiterate. No stories by Ernest Thompson Seton were ‘most loved’ because only academics knew who he was.

  He explained that most Eskimos worked in collectives with power tools turning out soapstone seals. The North was actually a vast slum run by the federal government’s Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the landscape littered with empty oil barrels. There were Red Indians but no longer of the bow-and-arrow variety. They were not to be called “Red’ Indians. Indeed, they were not to be called ‘Indians.’ In Ottawa, people of the First Nations wearing traditional braids and cowboy boots were almost bound to be high-priced, hotshot lawyers.