For Leonard, the Communist Party was a revolutionary party. Communism suggested bliss for both of them, but for Emmett it was more diffuse, more gradual than Leonard’s dream of overthrowing the existing state of things. Emmett admired Leonard’s belief, but he had to say, “I don’t see it, Leonard, I don’t see a revolution happening in Toronto.”
“Then I’m going to Russia,” said Leonard.
Chapter Eight
On a morning of first snowfall, cars schussing past, snow clinging to the underside of wet boughs, Emmett walked to his favourite bakery. He was trying to imagine an entirely different arrangement, overthrowing the existing state of things in Toronto. The owner of the bakery was a woman in late middle age with floury hair and buttery skin, rosy as apple pie. Snow parachuted down around him on a street fragrant with warm bread. Hushed, on the sidewalk with its few people, a pretty young woman smiled at him. The day splayed north toward solstice.
Though Emmett had been speaking only English for more than ten years, his Japanese was still good enough to get him a job translating Japanese documents from the Taisho period for a professor at the University of Toronto, a scholar of Asian history. It paid well, and he could choose his own hours. He’d switched from studying British history to studying Japanese and Chinese history, becoming one of a small group of students interested in Asia. The Canadian government was paying for his education because he was a vet. An untouchable, one of Bomber Command, he would earn no medals, but he did get free tuition. Snow lit his rooms where he worked in the afternoon, fostering a deep addiction to privacy. Privacy, not solitude.
He felt incomprehensible, and so he didn’t, he couldn’t, begin to make himself clearly known to anyone. It happened every time, when a conversation would come around inevitably to self-definition, he’d be tongue-tied — or, rather, bored, as if by a too-difficult calculation. His life had been contrary, a series of duplications: two homes; a father who’d dominated and also abandoned him; heroic war service that was also the shame of his nation. He had no words for himself. He felt like an empty room without light, but for the borrowed light from his friends and the radiance of their ideals.
He did not want to be bourgeois, this thing Marx loathed venomously, but he liked to wear a tie. He liked to feel superior to other men, he was competitive — though he had no appetite for business, preferring quieter work; he knew he could never make a living in sales. Passenger planes flew overhead. The city shucked off its drab wartime camouflage; money was evident in the new cars, the busy restaurants and bars. He agreed with Marx that power is something inhuman, manipulative, indifferent, mocking the sacrifice he’d made, bombing civilians. He admitted to himself that he’d been duped. It would never happen again.
By now, seven months after meeting John Norfield and Leonard Fischer, Emmett was wary of the Toronto communists. But from his reading of Marx, he’d learned something key, something that would guide him. He thought that the others, Leonard and his acolytes, didn’t understand this, in their doctrinaire absorption of what they thought was communism. It was almost a trick of mind, Marx’s trick, whereby a man could disaffect from what Marx called “the dead generations” that weigh “like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Emmett chose to train himself to live without belonging because belonging to anything, any sort of human community, requires a certain costuming, a borrowed language that thus makes a man a caricature.
Toronto was not ripe for revolution. But Emmett Jones had set out on a discipline that was revolutionary; he would strip away self-deception — and this discipline, he knew, would take constant practice, would necessarily comprise his very being. He would always have to make himself new.
Chapter Nine
Leonard Fischer’s bachelor suite. Leonard at the window, looking down at the park where the man wearing a white shirt tucked into dark trousers ambled across the grass, his big empty hands swaying at his side. Emmett and John Norfield joined Leonard at the window. A cold summer, an early fall. Curled yellow leaves drifted softly from the ash trees. No one said anything. Then Leonard grumbled, “Same asshole.”
It occurred to Emmett that the man had a routine, that he got off work and walked home across the park.
Leonard turned to John Norfield. “You know who he is, John?”
Norfield waited, and then he said, “No.” Everything fell into that gap, that almost kindly pause Norfield had permitted before lying to his friends. The man in the white shirt had been present all summer, not only in the park but on the street; wherever John Norfield was, so was the empty-handed man in the white shirt tucked into dark trousers. Norfield must know who he is.
The fellow in the homburg hat — that dandy with the diamond ring — they all knew about him; even the student acolytes knew about him. The Homburg Hat was hometown, he was RCMP, and his surveillance made being a Toronto communist an interesting game, a serious sort of delinquency. But this guy in the shirt, this empty-handed man, he looked real; he didn’t seem Canadian.
Leonard was wheezing, plaintive, “Who he’s working for?” His lungs mewed. He rubbed his face like he’d rub it off. With one sad eye on Norfield, bitterly, tenderly, Leonard said, “How come you’re so important you’ve got somebody always following you, John, huh? Schmuck.”
“C’mon,” Norfield said. “I have some money. Let’s get drunk, shall we?”
“You have some money, do you,” Leonard grumbled, jealous, suspicious. “Lot of money in the book business?”
“I sold a poem,” said Norfield, and Leonard laughed and said, “He sold a poem.”
Emmett knew that Norfield wrote poetry; he’d seen him scribble lines of verse into a black notebook, though John never offered to let him read any of it. Now he looked sideways at John’s fine features and said, “People buy poems?” John gave a surprised laugh and put his arm around Emmett, as if to protect him.
They drank till after dark; they ate fish and chips, then they drank a lot more. The pub was set below the sidewalk with a view of pretty stockings hurrying past.
Leonard grew garrulous with the first four pints and then got morbid, estranged, too lucid. He looked around at the porcelain British bulldogs, their bowlegs, bowties, the red tip of a dog’s tongue at the crease of its black porcelain lips. Gothic stone arches, portraits of Sir Wilson Hidebound, Sir Henry Thirdson. Leonard peered at the brass inscriptions, his pants riding low on his bum. “How can you stand it?” He lurched back to their booth, taking his handkerchief from his pants pocket. “How can you bear being hijacked, fer fugsake? The entire fug-ig country’s just a booby prize for every fraud who couldn’t make it in Egg-land.” He glared at Emmett contemptuously. “It’s one big fug-ig sed-up, this whole country.” He finally blew his nose.
Emmett drank his pint.
“Prove otherwise!” Leonard shouted.
A waiter wearing a white linen napkin tied at his waist stopped at their table, a tray of beer balanced on his forearm.
Emmett said, “There is no otherwise to prove.”
Leonard put his elbows on the table and glowered, “Engage in a dialectical debate, you prick.”
“I’m not going to prove anything to you.”
“Fake British. Fake Victoria. Fake Parliament. Fake country. This whole country’s a fraud. At least the States had the guts to have a revolution.”
“You’re an old woman when you’re drunk.”
“You’re an old woman when you’re sober, asshole.”
Norfield sighed and adjusted his shirt cuffs. The waiter finally put the beer on the table. Even the waiter felt superior, they all felt superior to one another, in a pretentious little backwater built on mutual contempt. “This is a stupid argument,” Emmett said.
Leonard said, “I want a fug-ig cigarette. I haven’t had a cigarette since I’m fourteen.” He blew his nose again.
Emmett’s finger tracked the foam running down his glass. He was tired of himself. He’d been working long hours, translating between Japanese and English, an
d now he’d had too much beer. He thought about how hard Japan had tried to keep the British out, to keep a purity that Canada could never know — by definition Canada could never be anything but a mimic.
“There’s this Japanese painting,” Emmett said. “It’s old, this painting. Ancient. Very beautiful.” The brush, loaded with ink, weighted by the blackest ink. “It was painted by a philosopher,” he said. “A Buddhist monk. Hasegawa Tohaku.” In the sixteenth century Hasegawa Tohaku raised his arm, withheld his hand with the brush, then his soul made a decision, his arm descended, he created sentient, silent pine trees in mist.
“I don’t speak Japanese, remember? Hungarian, Yiddish, German, but no Jap.”
“Forget it.”
“Go on,” said Leonard, mopping the sweat on his forehead. “I’m being a boor because I’m tired and drunk and it makes me sad. Go on, say what you must say.”
“I don’t know. It’s pine trees.” Emmett tried to stand up. “And mist.” He sat down again. “It’s like overhearing God or something. The pine trees are conscious.”
The painting was done with a brush of bamboo, broom, with the richest black ink. He wanted to say that the artist had revealed a consciousness in mist, in pine trees, an austere presence. The finest form of purity. Emmett said, “Fleeting. Incredibly delicate. And humble, in a grand way. Majestic and grand, grandly noble, and grandly — remote.”
Leonard dug at his ear.
“You’d know what I mean,” Emmett said, taking up his beer and drinking, “if you could see it.”
Leonard reached for him, “C’mere,” tenderly gripped his head between his hands and whispered, “You’re a fug-ig idealist.” Idealist was a Toronto communist insult.
“Yeah. But it’s a beautiful painting.” Emmett pushed himself upright. “And now. I am going to take a piss.”
“You got it up the ying-yang!” called Leonard after him. “Emmett, my friend!”
Emmett turned around.
“Don’t forget Pearl Harbor.” Leonard rubbed his own heart, repeating sadly, “Never forget it.”
“Why would I forget it?”
“You come from there, right?”
Japan. He shrugged.
Leonard rubbed his chest so hard he popped a button on his shirt. “You make a living, that’s okay, speaking Japanese. Translating. That’s an honourable trade, I know.”
“All I know is, I’ve had seven pints. Eight pints exactly.”
“I know you’re not Japanese, I got eyes, you’re no Jap. But hey, the Japanese are dangerous. I mean it. They’re dangerous.” He made a noise like an airplane smashing into the table, spilling beer everywhere. “Tsk, look at me. Zayt moykhl.” The way he mopped it up with his shirtsleeve, sheepishly, reminded Emmett that Leonard had had a mother, he’d had an older sister, he’d paid attention to them when he was a boy, before they were murdered. “Do whatever you want,” Leonard was saying. “It’s not up to me.”
Emmett turned away. “I’m going to take a leak.”
Leonard sadly dabbed at the beer on the table. “Anyway. America got ’em good.” His mass, the way the new fat sat uncomfortably on a body starved while it was still growing, and a private darkness coming down on him, making Emmett realize again, how much effort it must take Leonard to keep going. He heard Leonard say in a low voice, “We’re unforgiveable.”
Emmett stopped. He returned to the damp table. “Who is ‘we’?” Leonard was concentrating on the continents of beer on the table. He shook his head. “The living.”
Norfield was quiet all night. When they left the pub, he ducked into an alley and threw up, holding his narrow black tie to the side and missing his shoes. He patted his lips with his handkerchief and remained perfectly groomed, seemingly sober.
They waited for him and started walking again. Leonard laid his hand on Norfield’s shoulder, saying, “John, John,” but Norfield shrugged it off.
“John,” Leonard said again. “There’s your friend in the hat.”
Across the street, the short, well-built man wearing the homburg hat and a fine pearl grey raincoat that caught the light moved through the crowds of pub-crawling students. Mr. Farce. He seemed so securely secret he didn’t imagine himself visible. Emmett stopped walking and stared. Norfield, with a cigarette between his lips, took his arm and said, “Walk,” pulling him forward.
Four or five blocks later, they parted company. Norfield said he had work to do, and left them, calling goodnight over his shoulder.
Emmett couldn’t go home — he was renting the third floor of a house off College; the widow downstairs would evict him if he came home smelling of liquor. He and Leonard walked on to Leonard’s suite. Leonard was elaborately pessimistic, talking about an uncle who was in trouble in New York. He said he’d lived there with him, with his uncle and aunt, who took him in when he first left Europe after liberation, and now his uncle was in trouble. He recited a poem about a star called Antares, a long, moody, complicated poem he said he wrote when he was a kid. He said he should go see his uncle, but he couldn’t because he’d be arrested, “and what use would I be to anybody then?” He said, “This place is going to kill me. It’s a big fug-ig pawnshop. Look! I’m falling south! I’m falling all the way to America!”
The streets of Toronto fall south to the lake. Sleety rain fell, the wind gusting. Emmett took Leonard’s arm and they ran north into the wind, Leonard wheezing and the gutters filled with rain and yellow leaves roiling down, the slick road going blue.
Chapter Ten
When Emmett woke up in the only armchair in Leonard’s suite, Leonard was seated at the end of his cot studying him. Emmett had a life-threatening hangover and broke out in a sweat as soon as he opened his eyes. Looking at Leonard’s droopy face didn’t help. It was barely day. The room stank like always. Leonard said, “I have to leave the country.”
Emmett said, “Goodbye then,” and closed his eyes. He, too, thought about getting away, going nine or ten pints back into his recent history. He sweated alcohol, he would never, ever drink again. “You told me you can’t cross the border. You said they’d arrest you. Please go to sleep, Leonard.” He heard Leonard try to breathe through his congestion and added, “I’m sorry, man.”
Leonard stood up, the smell of weariness coming off him, gamy, friendly. “You want the bed? I can’t sleep. Take the bed.”
Emmett could hear him dumping coffee grounds into the sewage sitting in his sink. His heart was pounding so bad he’d never get back to sleep, especially on Leonard’s sweaty flannel sheets. He said, “I don’t understand why you’d go to jail. If you cross the border.”
“Long story.”
“I’ve got a few minutes. I’m composing my obituary.”
The coffee pot on the hot plate, the smell of electricity. “My uncle,” Leonard stopped to blow his nose, “studied to be an electrical engineer. This is in Munich. Immigrates to the States when he’s eighteen years old. This is 1914. Marries an American, my Aunt Miriam. Works his ass off. Loves America, loves America. You heard this story.”
“No I haven’t.”
Leonard went to look out his window. He said, “In 1940, he’s been in America for twenty-six years, he’s already over forty. Then Congress passes this thing, this Alien Thing. Right? Everybody, Jews, Germans, everybody who’s not American has to write a letter of explanation to President Roosevelt. The FBI doesn’t like his letter. They watch him. They sit outside his house, they tail him when he goes to work, they open his mail, I bet they tapped his phone. They watched him like hawks all through the war. Then I show up. He finds me through the Red Cross and gets me sent to him. I’m staying with him and Aunt Miriam in New York. He tells the FBI, this boy is my nephew from Hungary, leave him alone. They don’t believe him. They think I’m a German, faking it. My uncle. A very smart man who never had a chance. Breaks my heart. Still.”
Leonard placed a cup of coffee on the arm of Emmett’s chair; Emmett felt its heat and opened his eyes. The early daylight hadn�
��t yet committed to sun or cloud-cover.
“Don’t burn yourself with this coffee,” Leonard warned. His voice sounded forced, like bad acting. He went to the window. Then he made an elaborate show of tiptoeing over to the radio, turning it up loud, then tiptoeing in his oversized shoes back to the window, where he waved Emmett to come over. Emmett pulled himself up and went to stand beside Leonard at the window.
In the null dawn, the man in a white shirt tucked into dark trousers strolled across the park below, his empty hands swinging at his sides.
Leonard put his finger to the side of his nose. Emmett asked, “Who is that guy?”
Leonard had a sort of rubber face; he could make a frown like a huge smile upside down. “Fugged if I know.” He tapped his nose again. “But my money’s on him being Norfield’s handler.”
He wondered if Leonard was setting him up, playing him for a patsy. He turned the radio off and in a normal voice, he said, “What’s a ‘handler,’ Leonard?”
Leonard took Emmett’s face between his hands. Emmett braced himself for a kiss, but Leonard whispered in his ear, “Soviets.” He shoved Emmett’s head away, squinting to gauge his impact. Again, the warm hands either side of his head, and Leonard whispered, “Norfield’s got himself in deep.”
He tiptoed to the door, held it open till Emmett passed through, locked it behind them, didn’t say another word for a half-hour, shushed Emmett when he tried to speak, kept him walking till they reached the rail line north of Dupont. It was a lukewarm morning, no wind or sun or rain. Emmett was confined in his alcohol-poisoned body. “I honestly have to rest.” He sat on the track.
Leonard heaved himself down beside him, then scoped the area and asked, “Want me to finish the story?”
Mr. Jones Page 5