Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Even our street looked beautiful that evening with the moon like a flower over the roofs. I remembered a pair of lines from a poem my Uncle Noah had told me in German – ‘Der Mond, die weisse Lilie, / Blüht auf in Ihrer Hand.’ I was only fourteen, so I said to myself, ‘You’re blooming out in God’s hand tonight, Esther.’ And then I saw them. I saw their faces and I froze.

  “There were four young men, four of them on a corner with that look on their faces aimed straight at me. One of them looked like a rat. Another had a big chest and short, bowed legs. Another I can’t remember at all but the leader was the one I would never forget. He had rusty red hair and he must have weighed more than two hundred pounds. He beckoned to me and said, ‘Come here, you little Yid.’ Then they came walking toward me spread out across the sidewalk like a net. I looked behind me and there were a few pedestrians about a block away. Across the street I saw two middle-aged men. When they saw what was going to happen they quickened their steps and looked the other way. It was like a human net moving at me and I ran down an alley where I knew there was a repair garage at the end of it. The garage door was open and I ran inside and screamed for help but there was nobody there. There was a back door and I tried to open it but it was jammed or locked and then they had me. They dragged me into the middle of the garage with that look on their faces and the leader said, ‘All right, you know what it’s all about so take them off.’

  “I must have put both hands over my eyes. I must have tried to sink my chin into my body, for suddenly I saw stars and knew he’d hit me across my hands. I didn’t know what to do. Went down on my knees, I guess, and begged them to have mercy and let me go but there was still that look on their faces – no, on all but one of their faces, and I knew the youngest one would not have been there if it hadn’t been for the others. I think I said something about being only fourteen and that my parents were poor but the big one kept saying, ‘Take them off.’ He reached out to tear my dress off and I must have nodded. My father had made it himself and I couldn’t stand the idea of it being torn. But when I tried to undo the buttons my fingers were shaking so they couldn’t work. One of them held me from behind and the big one put out his hands and just tore the clothes off me and I was all naked there in the garage with my feet on the floor. It was solid earth and black with oil.

  “Then the big one grabbed me and his hands were like rocks on my shoulders. The others took three seats out of some cars that were hoisted up on jacks and wedged them together on the floor. He put me down on the car seats and I rolled over onto my stomach. Then he picked me up like I was a cat or a dog and began rubbing me with his hand, and his hand was filthy. He put me on my back and one of them held me with his hands on my shoulders and suddenly it was like a huge red light splitting me apart – I can’t go on telling this, I can’t go on!” She stopped. “The man who’d been holding my shoulders got me by the throat and I fainted.” She stopped again. “All of them were younger than twenty.” After a moment she resumed. “It was dark for a long time. Then a light was shining in my eyes and I screamed because I thought they’d come back, but it was only the garage owner with one of those lights they hook up under car hoods when they’re working on engines. He covered me with some kind of cloth. It was rough and smelled of oil and grease. I must have told him my name and address because soon I was in an ambulance on the way to a hospital. There were two policemen and one of them kept saying over and over in French, ‘Tell us who they were, little girl.’ Just like that, over and over. ‘Tell us who they were and they’ll wish they’d never been born.’”

  Esther stopped talking and Timothy knew the story was over. Then she looked at him and added, “Now perhaps you’ll understand why I’m not a fashionable cop-hater.”

  Her face had retreated far away from Timothy. He got up and went to the sideboard where she kept her liquor and poured out two stiff drinks. She refused hers and he poured it into his own glass. Normally he never drank anything before a show but now he thought he’d be unable to handle anything without one. He threw half of it down his throat and it seared his esophagus before it began to warm his brain.

  “That guy with his hands on your throat,” he said. “There was a Roman emperor who used to station a soldier by the head of slave girls when he raped them. At a signal the soldier’d squeeze the girl’s throat. Plus ça change. Were those kids French or English?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “A great town. I hear a story like that and I ask whether they were French or English.”

  The atmosphere in the apartment was trancelike and the whiskey was reaching him. He turned on a light and his watch told him it was close to the time he had to leave for the studio. Esther also got to her feet and now she seemed quite normal, much less charged than she had been a while ago. He wondered if telling him this story was her way of telling him that all was over between them and she would never make love with him again. Christ, was it his fault if some punks gang-raped her when she was a kid? Then he wondered if that was why she had told him she could never marry a gentile.

  She disappeared into the bathroom and he waited for five more minutes until she reappeared, tidy and collected and ready for the street with her bag on her arm.

  “I’m all right now,” she said.

  When they reached the street there was a sharp bite of autumn in the air and the whiskey hit him with a crash.

  “I’ve got to walk, Esther. That drink. I shouldn’t have taken it. Maybe I’m just tired but it seems to be hitting me a little. You take a cab and I’ll walk. I won’t be long. It’s just that I need some air.”

  “Yes, you’d better walk. If the guests arrive before you do, I’ll look after them.”

  He saw a taxi coming and raised his arm. Its right flasher started to blink, it coasted in toward the curve and stopped, he opened the door for Esther, she got in, the cab drove off, and he was all by himself.

  SIX

  If there was one quality which Timothy professed to own in high degree it was a sense of place and he always insisted that the district he was now entering had more life in it than the rest of the city put together. I could agree with him, for when I was young it had also been my favorite district. Timothy’s studio was located in a former factory not far from the shop where Esther grew up and her parents still lived. Its owner had retired and sold the premises to the network.

  This was the quarter where most of the city’s Jews had begun their lives in the New World. It had never been a true ghetto as some of their writers later said it was. There were many French families there too, even a few English, most of them working-class people. There was a discreet seasoning of quiet brothels only occasionally visited by the police, a few very large Catholic churches, one High Anglican church, and some neighborhood vaudeville and burlesque houses. However, it was true enough that if the city possessed what might be called a Jewish quarter this had once been it.

  It was not that any more, not since so many of them had grown rich and moved out into stone houses and air-conditioned apartments in the west end, into the big deals, big cars, big golf clubs, and Miami vacations where they talked with nostalgia of the dear old streets in the years when a zeyda was still a patriarch and the bagels had tasted so good, when the smoked meat was the best in North America and nostrils were sensitive to the ancestral odors of the corner delicatessen. Now the quarter had been taken over by a new wave of immigrants, mostly Greeks, Danubians, and people from the south Mediterranean shore; even by some from the West Indian islands. In the earlier days the district gave you a feeling of Riga and Bialystok, but now you could smell the narrow streets of Middle Europe and the little stone towns of the Inland Sea. And here, pronounced Timothy, “The greed was as clean as a whistle. It was as sweet and innocent as sexual desire before it is slaked.”

  There were many people in the street and it was still a genuine neighborhood. These were the people, wrote Timothy, that he wanted to reach above all others, though personally I would guess they wer
e the last people in the land he would have had a chance of reaching. “I’m getting to them,” he boasted, “before the System turns them into Kraft cheese and Holiday Inns.”

  All officials detested Timothy and so did most of the other television journalists. The network bureaucrat in charge of his section had smiled smugly when he shifted him out of the main broadcasting house into this peripheral studio in the ex-garment factory. Timothy threw a tantrum to make sure the man would keep him there, and recorded that nothing is sweeter than to have an enemy do you a favor when he thinks he’s screwing you.

  “Walking to the studio after leaving Esther I felt a surge of the old confidence. The city trembled for me and it was a trembling recorded on no seismograph. I saw a trio of young girls approaching, probably Greek but possibly Lebanese, and each one of them looked like an adventure. They were eyeing me and I knew I was recognized and yes, I thought, yes – why not some time?

  “Then I was sure I was going to be all right no matter how tired I was, that I still had it, maybe more than ever I had it, and the city trembled harder for me as I knew I would be able to seep into the nervous systems of my armchair sitters, mate with their hidden fears and truths, and make them identify with me as they would have to identify with anyone who could project what I could project, which was a saturating involvement in this instant of time when we had obliterated the the past and made Now all there is, all the old landmarks gone, all the old seamarks swallowed up in Now, world with an end closer than you think. I saw more flashes of recognition from passing strangers and what did I want with that sterile Broadcasting House on the Boulevard, that air-conditioned Versailles with its identical neon-lit cubicles where sat and labored the shirt-sleeved courtiers of King Common Man, most of them nice guys, some of them such sincere and honest guys, some of them even competent. But always there were the corridor schemers, the true courtiers of King Common Man, whom they flattered, cajoled, terrified, entertained, stupefied, and conned, all the while knowing that no matter how clever they were, no matter what they tried to make him believe, he still would rule by Divine Right because he was the sole sanction for their little mosquito dances under the kliegs and the big ideas they made him pay for, their claws and stilettos honed for any rival real or imagined, their chief fear – and it was, a doppelgänger – their absolutely accurate knowledge that if the Great King in one of his unpredictable moments of sanity should ever get bored with them, they would vanish as if they’d been vaporized.

  “So what did I care what the real bastards, the bureaucrats who called themselves Management, what they thought of me? Right now they couldn’t afford to get rid of me. So here in this district of immigrants I savored with relish the smells of real work and ambition, sweat and human bodies, fresh vegetables and espresso coffee, all those wonderful fruits and vegetables in The Four Brothers’ Market – what a title for a grocery store, poetry in that title! – and those fish at Waldman’s reeking of salt seas and themselves, the shopmen in rubber boots and rubber aprons moving learnedly among the boiled red lobsters, the olive-colored uncooked lobsters, the sleek red snappers that shone like the Aga Khan’s rubies among the gray of haddock, cod, and halibut, all those fish in such profusion it was hard to believe that soon there would be none left where they had come from, everyone knew it but they kept on dragging them in, sucking them up by vacuum into factory ships, another story in that coming up soon. And after that still another, for an Ohio man who had patented a process for making artificial beef and pork had promised to appear on my show later in the year. To live on the threshold of the possible extinction of all life above the insect and virus level and to know it – at that instant the door of a disco opened and a bearded youth with long shaggy hair staggered out glassy-eyed wearing filthy jeans with a reasonably accurate design of a red phallus and black testicles woven into the crotch, and with him came the sour stench of whatever he and the rest of them had been smoking, and behind him followed the shriek of an electric guitar sounding like some kind of metal being tortured to death – This is now! – Now is this! – All there is! – This is no-ow-ow! And then I knew that I was with it in spite of what Esther had said, I was with it all the way.

  “Then I stopped dead on a corner and spoke aloud:

  “‘But where has she gone from me?’

  “‘Where will I ever find her again?’

  “‘Where will I ever find myself again?’”

  When he reached the door of the studio building the last glimmer of twilight had faded out of the October sky and he realized that he had cut his time much too short.

  SEVEN

  At his desk in the office he became, at least outwardly, his cool professional self. Tonight’s program had been set up two weeks ago and he had left it to Esther to invite the guests and give them a short briefing, also to prepare dossiers on them for him to scan before he went out to the cameras. He had asked her to get four people, but on reading the dossiers he discovered he would have only three.

  The first was a woman of about thirty he had heard much about recently and had met at a cocktail party a month ago. She was said to be a rising poet and they had talked together for perhaps five minutes, during most of which she had placed her big hand on his forearm. A solemn face, a large full mouth, wide green eyes, and a body that could be fairly called sumptuous. He remembered that for a quick instant it had occurred to him that she might serve as a one-night stand. He remembered also that she had told him there was something she wished especially to say over the air, but now he had forgotten what this was. He scratched his head. Oh well, it would come to him later.

  He picked up the next dossier, which was on Emile Chalifour, a separatist journalist-professor who had recently been fired from his university for fomenting student demonstrations and riots. Timothy had met him several times and knew him well enough to call him by his first name, but after reading Esther’s notes, he knew him somewhat better. It emerged that Chalifour’s father was not the exploited Gaspé fisherman he talked so much about; instead, he was in the construction business enjoying lucrative contracts with the provincial government. Timothy also learned that Chalifour had abandoned his wife and three children and was living with a nineteen-year-old Anglophone girl who was seven months pregnant, his wife refusing him a divorce because she was still a devout Catholic.

  It was the second dossier that had really startled me when I first came upon it in the papers. Then I understood what André Gervais had meant when he told me in conversation I would have to revise my belief that Timothy had never had anything to do with our own lives. This second dossier was headed DR. CONRAD DEHMEL and on reading it I realized that Timothy had not known that he had married my mother. At the foot of the page, Esther had written a clear warning to Timothy:

  “When you asked me to contact Dr. Dehmel, I don’t think you knew much about him. The most important part of his life was lived in Europe in the terrible times. On no account should this be referred to on the program unless he brings it up himself. And some of it he will be sure to bring up.”

  Timothy had barely finished reading Esther’s notes when he heard her footsteps approaching, and when she came into the office his mood was accusing.

  “Where is the material on Dr. Jameson?”

  “There isn’t any.”

  “Why not?”

  “I decided not to invite him.”

  “You decided! You’re going too far.”

  “I’m trying to save you from going too far.”

  “That bastard Jameson’s trying to screw up the Medicare Plan and I was intending to –”

  “I know what you were intending to do. My brother is one of his internes and he’s a fine man. He’s not against Medicare, he’s only against having the medical profession turned into a political football. Even if I had asked him, I’m sure he wouldn’t have come.”

  “He’d have jumped at it. I know these doctors.”

  “You know nothing whatever about doctors. At a time like this, do y
ou believe a man in Dr. Jameson’s position would care to broadcast his appearance to the whole city? This place is so crazy that he’s one of the men guarded in the top floors of the hotel.”

  “So you’ve left me with nothing but Chalifour and this professor?”

  An impish smile appeared on Esther’s lips. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your poet? She’s out there waiting for you.” Esther’s smile widened. “Just how well do you know her, Timmie?”

  “I can’t even remember what she looks like.”

  Esther bent over and kissed his cheek. “Timmie, dear, it’s just possible she took advantage of your good nature for the sake of mankind. She’s a woman with a message. Anyway, you’re tired out. You’ve been living on your nerves for a week and I’m at least partly to blame for that.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, what is it now?”

  “That time I told you I’d never marry you because you’re a gentile. I’m beginning to think you took it as a personal rejection.”

  “You told me it wasn’t.”

  “You should forget all about me and find someone else and settle down.”

  “‘Someone else and settle down.’ For God’s sake let’s get to work on this crummy program. After the Pentagon it’s an awful comedown. Father’s old playmate General Sprott, I wonder how long before it penetrates his crew-cut pointed head that the little brown men have licked to a frazzle the last, best hope of mankind? And you know, Esther? At bottom he’s a nice man. That’s what’s so terrible about him.”

  “Timmie, we haven’t much time left. That Madeleine Ball – have you read any of her poetry?”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.” Another feminine smile. “She’s appearing with a cleavage of at least four inches, so maybe her poetry won’t matter.”

  “So it’s lousy! Oh well, she’ll only be on a few minutes.”

  “She’ll be on for the duration if you let her. She tells me she has something to say that will make you more famous than you are already. However, she doesn’t worry me. It’s the other two. I mean, having Chalifour on at the same time with Dr. Dehmel. They’ll make an impossibly difficult combination. And why did you ask me to invite the professor in the first place? He doesn’t fit into the kind of show this has become. I looked up the list of his publications in the university library and they run to three pages in four different languages. Why did you invite a man like him?”