“Larry,” she said.
“Becky.” She could hear Greg’s drone in the background. The country was glued to this; it was almost as big as a Stanley Cup playoff with two Canadian teams.
“You didn’t call me back,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“We’re still BFFs, right?”
“Sure.”
“Larry?”
“What?”
“You’re grumpy.”
“Why would I be grumpy?”
“Yes, why?”
“Especially after delivering an election to your doorstep like Domino’s.”
“Dominoes?”
“Pizza.”
“Ah. Like the House special.”
“The House of Commons special.”
“Funny.”
“Not really.”
“Larry. To the matter at hand. Can TALKS is handling the Liberal leader’s rebuttal, right?”
“Yes. The CBC doesn’t have the crew to handle—”
She didn’t care about the Corpse’s plight. “You’ve read his speech?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s good.”
“It is, isn’t it? That’s what I thought.”
Pause.
“It needs to be not,” Becky said. “Just saying.”
“I understand,” Apoonatuk said.
“You’ll be at his speech?”
“I’m on site now.”
“You know the crew?”
“They’re mine.”
When she fell silent, Apoonatuk laughed. “Along with a team of interns from Carleton.”
Becky cackled. She never knew she had that in her. “So creative,” she said.
Becky arrived back by Greg’s side as the moody public broadcasting crew traipsed away, bound for the pub with their inflated paycheques. She gave Greg a peck on the lips—anything to blot that agonizing pink—and he asked if she’d read Tai Chi’s speech.
“It’s hysterical,” she said. “The usual gibberish-fibberish.”
Instead of inviting the gang to stay and watch Tai Chi’s address in the Langevin office, Greg sent Doc, Chief and Clark away. “And take that prick assistant with you,” he demanded.
Becky curled up in a corner of the couch, Greg sat in the armchair, and they watched CTV’s subsidized American programming, sixty minutes of tits and autopsies, while waiting for the main event. In the midst of six commercials, Greg cut to Can TALKS. There was a shot of the main door of the House of Commons, now dramatically padlocked, waiting for Greg to officially prorogue the session with Lise’s consent. A header—Special Announcement—sat upon the screen, then disappeared as a custodian pushed a cart into the frame and the broadcaster returned to a Florida orange juice commercial.
“What’s happening?” Greg said.
“I’ll get Doc.”
“Get Chief.”
Chief dashed in. “You’re not going to believe it.”
“What’s happening?”
“The coalition didn’t use the right format. It won’t synch up with the Can TALKS requirements, and now they’re taking it to the Corpse. The Corpse is so retro they can handle it.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, it’s amateur hour on the Rideau.”
“How could Can TALKS not use the right format?”
“Interns! They were using interns! Does somebody there love you or what?”
Becky changed the channel. “Be quiet! He’s on!”
Tai Chi, dressed to ascend, was somehow dwarfed by the archivolt of the House of Commons oak and iron door. He was also slightly out of focus, while the British Columbia coat of arms was razor-sharp, sun rays jutting upward. His face was supposed to dominate the screen; they weren’t on a Hill tour of the hanging tracery. Was the camera hand-held?
Becky found it almost impossible to concentrate on what he was saying—that beautiful speech, intellectually crafted, humane, and ready to resonate more forcefully than the cacophony of the corporate media and Conservatives combined. The effect was of an academic croaking a Canadian Tire catalogue of guerrilla manifesto and call to arms.
“It’s over,” Chief announced. He polished his cuticles with his shirttail. “DOA.”
“Not yet,” said Greg. “When does the GG get back?”
Clark, Clerk of the Privy Council, spoke up on cue. “She just hung up on me.”
13
AFTER THE SENSITIVE OPERATION in the Afghan theatre, Lise headed to the alternate Great Lakes: Victoria, Albert, Edward and Tanganyika. Six pays en douze jours: Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and her own St. Bertrand, an irritant, a pimple on the big butt of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
If it was Monday, it was Nairobi, and while the new energy kid on the block, CanCrude, spun deep offshore exploration in the Indian Ocean to African officials, Lise chugged dark roast, to promote Kenyan caffeine, with the President’s first wife (she wasn’t to mention his legal second wife) at Isak Dinesen’s Coffeehouse and Museum. After which she jetted to Ito refugee camp in Dadaab, close to the northern border with Somalia, to offer newly arrived malnourished child refugees MREs from MSF.
Another day, Rwanda. Lise met privately with President Kagame, who’d arrested the opposition leader and shuttered the pro-opposition newspaper minutes before her arrival, and deflected his complaints about the Canadian PM, who’d dumped Rwanda from a priority list and randomly refused entry to his officials.
While she delivered an official apology for Canada’s passivity in the face of the 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 Rwandan people—and she chose people instead of Tutsi minority—were hacked with machetes in churches, thrown maimed or dead into the Kagera River, and chased and chopped to pieces on the deck of the swimming pool at the Hôtel des Mille Collines (her head rested that night on the feather pillows of the Kigali Serena), the trade mission focused upon partnerships in coltan, an exciting ore critical to mobile phone and video-game console production, and tossed ostrich steaks on the hibachi.
She had to pick her battles.
In between state dinners, symposia and orphanage gift shop stops, where blind children sculpted Hummers out of toxic river mud to ply to tourists, Lise phoned René, winding up his shoot and counting down to the wrap party, and texted Niko, on deep pharma-pilot back at 24 Sussex.
No news was good news.
Another day, and it was, because she was counting down les jours, she shook nice with another permanently elected president in Kampala, Uganda.
At Makerere University, she drew the attention of the Canadian press to a terrifying new disease with high morbidity in the northern Acholi region, in which young children started nodding at mealtimes, refused food, drooled profusely, and then erupted, over weeks, with grand mal seizures. Lise unveiled a research partnership with the University of Montreal that would figure out why these children were violently nodding themselves to death by malnutrition. Was it tainted bush meat? A mystery worm? First World mine tailings?
At the state dinner, she schmoozed with Indian-Ugandan expats who’d returned to the home country to continue becoming even bigger tilapia than they’d been in their pre-Idi days. The first national mineral survey had them tickled black.
And so it went.
Near the omelette nook in the dining room of a five-star hotel somewhere in air-conditioned Dar es Salaam, Lise learned that Margaret Lee was down for the count with a GI. The jaunt to Mwanza, Tanzania, to a hostel for prostitutes beaten up by Russian black marketers, had been cancelled. Lise attacked her frittata while being briefed about the impact of poachers, but not climate change, on the gorillas of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.
When Lise asked the aide for the Ottawa sitrep, the top item cited was Finance delivering a fiscal update. No mention of the unveiling of Lieutenant-Colonel Aisha K.
Lise’s final African stop was St. Bertrand. When she stepped onto the tarmac at the airport in the capital, Jolie Ville, her o
lder sister Solange, tall with a retro Afro, waited while the newish Western-puppet president greeted her. Then Solange enfolded her.
“Little one.” Solange squeezed the air out of her.
Lise squealed, caught up in the warm welcome.
“At last you’ve come back,” Solange said.
The women hung on to each other, human bookends pressed together without anything to hold up but themselves.
“Forty years,” Lise said. She didn’t know how she’d avoided it for this long; the excuse that the country wasn’t user-friendly only went so far en famille.
“Kiss the ground,” Solange ordered.
“Should I?”
“It’s your true home and native land,” Solange said. “You must.”
So Lise did, hitting the Hades-hot concrete in her chartreuse Chanel, with the sun reflecting off the grenade-punctured terminal. She pressed her lips against the cement until her bottom lip burned.
The Canadian press snapped.
Margaret Lee, healthy again and fully mobile, fumed.
When Solange pulled Lise back onto her platform shoes, to the wild hoots of the dignitaries and the applause of the Western-puppet president, Lise took a breath and the physical landscape went stunningly HD. The country hit her solar plexus: to the north, the sea of verdant tea plantations, hills of red clay; to the west, the unbelievable blue of Lake Victoria; to the south, the litter of crashed planes, like a bizarre adventure playground beside the runway, and the IMAX volcano, Mount Agogo, rising above the capital, above everything.
In front of her, east, the joyous face of her sister, with her father’s close-set eyes and bossy nose. Solange’s voice, with the narcotic echo of their mother’s cadences: Eh hehn. Eh hehn.
That evening, Lise joined Solange and her husband, Dr. Samuel Soleil, an AIDS hospice director, for a private dinner at their home. They lived in an updated bungalow in a gated quartier not far from the sisters’ parents’ former estate, and the courtyard was garnished with banana trees, hibiscus and patio lights that surged on and off with the power. In the night sky, a distant lightning storm provided the alternate light show. Lise’s security had taken over the entire quartier, and the supper conversation was interrupted by bursts of staticky walkie-talkie chat beyond the adobe garden walls.
“It is wonderful to finally meet you,” Lise said to Samuel. Over the years, there had been promises of visits but life intervened: Samuel was setting up a practice, or Lise was pregnant, or in mourning, or in production. “I heard so much about your good work when I was with ouiCARE. Your pediatric palliative initiative.”
Samuel nodded, without adding that Lise’s work too had been frankly quite terrific. Her sister had married their own kind; Lise had never done that, and she suddenly wondered why.
“Listen, Lise,” Solange said, leaning across the table. “We have to level with you.”
“Sure,” Lise said. She didn’t know what to expect. Did they need money? For the hospice? Was Solange ill?
“Samuel and I have brought back the President.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jean-Louis Raymond. We’ve smuggled him back into the country.”
Lise held her head in her hands over the couscous. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“He’s not far from here,” Samuel said.
“Et bien protégé,” Solange added.
“He’d need that,” said Lise, “along with the personal militia.” She turned to her sister. “Es-tu malade?”
“No,” Solange said.
“Sheltering a deposed leader in your backyard. Taking on the Western powers. The U.S.”
“Et toi,” said Solange. “You represent America’s petrostate. Bowing to the corporations. The ones who’ve raped your real country with structural adjustment.”
“Oh my God,” said Lise.
“Who’ve stolen our mineral rights,” Samuel added.
“You know Canada was part of the coalition, with France and the U.S., who threatened and coerced him to get on that plane to Joburg. Who abducted our democratically elected president.”
“Don’t go there,” Lise said.
“If you don’t have a seat à la table,” Samuel said, “alors, tu es au menu.”
Lise sat silenced. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed as if the walkie-talkies outside the walls had gone mute. Everyone at the table noticed at the same time. Then there was a crackle and a choppy monosyllabic spatter.
“Okay.” Lise shrugged. “I give up. Okay. I have to agree with you.”
Solange reached across and clasped Lise’s hand.
“How could I not, big sister? As I visit on a trade mission wearing humanitarian sunscreen. SPF 200.”
Lise and Solange hugged. Samuel went into the kitchen. The radio came on—a Paul Simon song from Graceland, for God’s sake—and he came back with colder beers for all.
“What is the plan?” Lise said. “Besides getting yourselves killed in a coup? Oh, Jesus, don’t tell me your plan, or I’ll have to—”
“We want your help,” Samuel said.
“My powers are limited,” Lise said. “Reserve. Really.”
“You can influence your government,” Samuel said.
“Sway public opinion.” Solange tucked an arm around Lise’s shoulder.
“Mon Dieu,” Lise said.
“We need debt relief,” Samuel said. “And we want to retain our telecommunications.”
“As we sit here speaking treason and plotting,” Lise said, removing her sister’s arm, “that’s what DFAIT’S working on. Right now! Privatization.”
They stared at her. Like, get with the program.
“You have more power than you know, Lise,” Solange said.
On cue, Samuel pressed a button on the laptop by the table and a YouTube video of Lise kissing the tarmac at Jolie Ville airport appeared. “Two hundred thousand hits,” he said. “Already.”
“Not every black girl gets to be the King of England,” Solange said.
The next morning, Lise was towed away by the Western-puppet president to the local UNESCO Heritage Site, the Former Slave Depot, on the shore of Lake Victoria. It also bordered the Arab quartier with its narrow streets, lime-washed walls and houses built as postscripts to the huge, dark bolted doors.
The Former Slave Depot was cramped: a few remaining underground chambers preserved near a Catholic church. There were no queues. Lise slouched in the cavern; she couldn’t stand at full height. A shallow canal cut into the floor opened directly onto the lake. Africans from lesser tribes were captured and stashed underground, waiting for passage east. All slaves were chained to the floor, not even allowed a squat to excrete, and sanitation was left to the lapping lake—washing bodies and whisking away feces. Of course, people drowned, children too, lying prone and chained below rising storm waters or floods. The survivors were finally crammed on magnificent dhows bound for Mwanza, and then beyond to Zanzibar, Oman, Yemen, Persia.
Through a window as wide as her hand, she could see the lake. For some reason, the sacred shade of blue, the sheen of the surface, took her back to the farewell for her first husband.
His body had never been found, of course.
But they’d restocked his canoe. His Nokum had packed smoked rabbit, beaver and bear, and fresh-baked bannock stacked on combustible paper plates, so he would never go hungry. Lise had folded and packed his winter clothing, so he would never be cold. Their marriage blanket stained with menstrual blood and blessed afterbirth. His toiletries kit with nail clippers and Q-tips and condoms and Mennen. Then she’d poured gasoline so generously from bow to stern. She would never forget the heat from the fire on the water.
There was to be no relief for Lise in her birthplace.
A few minutes, later, outdoors again, free, she turned and almost fell into the pit: three statues, an African family, mother, father and adolescent son, planted four feet deep. They were collared. They were chained to each other with the original iron shackles. The parents—w
ithout power. The boy was looking toward his mother, and it was then Lise saw that they were legless, sculpted from the waist down in feces and seaweed. Their long arms coalesced and grew into their torsos. They weren’t going anywhere.
The Western-puppet president nattered on. Lise didn’t hear him.
Lise had stood upon sacrosanct ground in her role as Governor General and as an African-Canadian: Auschwitz; Pol Pot’s killing fields; the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, in Paris, on her honeymoon with Brett; and the rather plain stump of a rare Sitka spruce on Haida Gwaii. She knew how to take on humanity’s real hit parade, as René called it. It was her job: forbearance, forgiveness, these F-words. But all of her training in protocol, her self-regulation, reserve, the quantum control of her demeanour, was out the window.
She thought of Niko.
She whimpered as she stood on the iron-red earth of her birthplace, with the scent of frangipani frying her brain. And then she crumpled on the ground; she wouldn’t get up. The President beseeched her. Lise heard Margaret Lee curtly advise the press to delete any video of the Governor General keening in the dust.
That night, Lise proceeded through the VIP area at the Jolie Ville airport and passed a serious-looking posse of men, African and U.S. operatives, hurrying a skinny, newly middle-aged African man in a flapping suit and hornrimmed glasses. Margaret Lee was distracted and on a high-priority distress call from the PMO and didn’t see him at first. He was being muscled toward departure and Lise and Co. were heading in the opposite direction. He turned around and said, “Lise Lavoie.”
Margaret Lee was suddenly coaching, “Keep moving, keep moving,” but Lise stopped because she recognized him. It was Jean-Louis Raymond, former president of St. Bertrand and her sister’s smuggled fugitive, who shouldn’t have been in public or in the country.
She had always, truly, admired him.
“President Raymond,” she said.
“Look at what they are doing to your country.” He meant St. Bertrand, she thought. “We need your voice.”
She was shocked that he knew who she was.
A hand was clamped over the President’s mouth, then Raymond did something that made the guard remove it—did he lick it? They hustled him away down the pest-stripped corridor.
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