The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  “It’s a nice little Riesling from the Rhine Valley,” she told me. “I have it sent by the case. It’s cheaper that way.”

  Magda has only a very modest pension to live on. She told me the amount. It’s enough to make you wonder how she manages to survive on so little. And yet Magda seems to be well fed: you’d think she ate at Mom’s every morning and ordered the Louis Cyr special with ham, bacon, and sausage. If I had to guess, I’d say she weighed 120 kilos. She was big boned and had plenty of meat on her. A far cry from Claudia, my little mermaid. Magda liked to tell jokes.

  “Do you like jokes?”

  “Uh, yes. Do you have one for me?”

  “Yes. It’s very funny. I heard it a long time ago, but I still tell it because it makes me laugh every time. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “So, Kapriel, there once was an old woman who liked to read in the park. One day, she sat down on her favorite bench in the park near her home. Suddenly a pigeon arrived and she had a very pleasant conversation with it. The two got on famously. But time passed. The old lady asked the pigeon to come ’round the following afternoon at four o’clock for tea. The pigeon agreed.”

  “That’s very funny,” I lied.

  “Wait, that’s not all! The following afternoon at four o’clock, the lady waited for the pigeon to arrive but it never came. Twenty minutes past four and it still hadn’t shown up. The lady was bitterly disappointed. At four thirty, the pigeon rang the doorbell at last. The lady rushed to open it. ‘Ah, there you are! Wherever were you?’ she asked the tardy pigeon. ‘I’m terribly sorry, ma’am,’ the pigeon told her. ‘It was such a nice day I decided to walk.’ Hahaha! Isn’t that charming? It was a doctor who told me it. I was sad, and he wanted to make me laugh. What was his name again? Beck! Yes, that’s it! His name was Beck.”

  Magda laughed at her own joke for a couple of minutes more. It wasn’t every day that someone took such pleasure in telling such a lame joke.

  “You see? If the pigeon had flown, he’d have been on time! Hahaha!”

  I laughed, even though I knew Magda and I weren’t laughing for the same reason.

  “Do you know any jokes?” she asked me.

  She’d caught me a little off guard. The only jokes I knew weren’t the type you could tell to old ladies. So I told her the one about the frog with the big mouth that goes to the photographer’s. There’s no point repeating it here, you know it already. It was Suzuki who told us it. Magda thought it was very funny.

  “I love animal jokes, don’t you, Kapriel?”

  Then she told me she’d been born in Königsberg in 1920 and had grown up in Berlin. She’s a very interesting woman, the kind who doesn’t think twice about opening a second bottle of Riesling. She asked me all about my life and about Canada, too. Magda is, like many Germans, very curious. Unlike the French, who always seem to have an answer to the questions they haven’t even asked yet, the Germans are full of wann? wie? wo? warum? wer? and don’t live in fear of one day having to admit: “I don’t know.” She positively devours books and listens to nothing but classical music. I think that’s what I like most about Germans, particularly East Germans: their almost childlike curiosity for all things foreign. Ever since the wall came down, Magda has been visiting ruins all across Europe.

  “Ruins don’t change. They always stay the same. Look, this is a photograph of me in Athens last summer. How wonderful to be able to travel at last! You know, East Germans weren’t allowed to travel before the wall came down. We could go to Poland or Romania, but I’m only interested in Greco-Roman ruins, so, Bucharest and Cracow, well, they’re not for me . . .”

  I wondered how a seventy-nine-year-old pensioner could afford to fly. (The downstairs neighbors later told me that Magda would regularly borrow small sums of money and never pay them back. Since they’d known her for a long time and there was something akin to friendship between them, they agreed to lend her the money, knowing full well they’d probably seen the last of it.) She also showed me some lovely photos of herself. They were from during the war, back in Königsberg in East Prussia. She’d had her photo taken in a zoo with a group of children in front of the zebra pen. In another picture, she was on the beach at the Baltic Sea with two or three of the same kids in their swimsuits. In those old sepia photos, Magda wasn’t at all fat. She reminded me of one of the sixteen-year-old boys at Holy Canadian Martyrs.

  “That’s me in Cranz on the Baltic Sea. And there in Königsberg, with the zebras at the zoo. Are you familiar with Ostpreußen? It was still Germany back then . . .”

  She fell silent for a moment, almost as a sign of respect. Have you ever heard of East Prussia, Michel? I knew there was Prussia, but not East Prussia. At any rate, Magda went there during the war and had her photo taken. We went on drinking and talking about books we’d read.

  She promised to show me around Potsdam, which she knows like the back of her hand. Next Sunday, she wants to bring me for a walk through the Schrebergärten near here. I don’t know what the word means, but it seems there’s a Biergarten there, where Berliners like to spend their summer afternoons. I left Magda’s apartment at midnight, a little drunk. I hardly ever drink, so I pretty much passed out. This afternoon, I took the S-Bahn to write to you. What else can I say about Magda other than I feel as though I’ve always known her? When I’m with her, it’s almost enough to make me forget that Claudia’s been gone from Berlin for close to six weeks.

  She asked if I liked opera, so of course I had to tell her about you. Her eyes lit up when she heard my brother was an opera singer. I didn’t dare tell her Tosca wasn’t at all my scene. She explained to me the meaning behind “Tosca’s black eyes.” I must admit I’d completely forgotten. I hadn’t exactly been paying attention, mind you. The first time, in 1980, I fell asleep. The second time, I was too busy reading the subtitles. In Act I, Magda reminded me, Tosca walks into the church, where her lover Cavaradossi is painting a portrait of Mary Magdalene. He’s using a blue-eyed woman he saw praying in the church as a model. Tosca, who has black eyes, recognizes the woman and flies into a jealous rage. She can’t bear to see Cavaradossi painting another woman. On her way out of the church, she makes him promise to paint Mary Magdalene’s eyes black. Such a jealous woman! Can you believe it! And all over a portrait.

  Even though I saw Claudia every other Sunday for three years, I kept on flitting from one woman to another while I was in Toronto. There were a few substitute teachers, then the parent-teacher evenings, where the moms always outnumber the dads four to one. At the parent-teacher evening in October 1996, there was a long line in front of my desk, mostly moms come to see with their own eyes the man their daughters had told them all about. Mrs. Thanatopoulos was there, too. She’d eased up on her daughter’s training sessions to force her to concentrate on music instead. Stella had already lost fifteen kilos.

  “Another ten and she’ll be ready,” Mrs. Thanatopoulos said.

  On her singing teacher’s advice, Stella had also stopped performing at school mass, much to the despair of Mrs. Delvecchio, who loved her rendition of Ave Maria. Stella was as shy and reserved as ever with me. She was only fifteen when I came to Holy Canadian Martyrs. They’d had her skip a year of elementary school. She’d been just too smart—and Mrs. Thanatopoulos had apparently made a generous contribution to the school’s coffers, which meant that Stella had started high school a year before the other girls her age. But a year can make a big difference in phys ed class. Not only was she younger than her classmates, she was obese, shy, and short-sighted, too. Little Stella would need her peers to go easy on her if she was to survive. It would be wrong to say they bullied her; let’s just say she frightened them, and their gibes were a sort of defense mechanism against the authority they felt she represented. I think I’m safe in saying we were all a little afraid of her, afraid of running into her in the hallway. A little like you might be afraid of seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary, something that would force you
to change the course of your existence, to start building a cathedral or converting heretics or something. In other words, to no longer be in control of your own life. To no longer belong to yourself. To be like Mom and her restaurants. I still have trouble explaining the almost religious impact that Stella had on everyone she met.

  First, she displayed a degree of piety that bordered on the grotesque, even for a school like Holy Canadian Martyrs. On top of the prayers she read to the entire school every morning, Stella also played an active part in every religious ceremony at the school, first as a singer, then as an altar girl. She fasted for Advent and Lent and was regularly absent on the Orthodox saints’ days, which fell a few days after the Catholic holy days. Sure she was harmless enough and wouldn’t have hurt a fly, but Stella still earned all kinds of unflattering nicknames, from Saint Stella and The Immaculate Conception to Mary Mother of the Poor, and, least flattering of all, The Nun. Regularly—and by that I mean at least once a month—Stella would ask the staff and other students to donate to whatever charity tickled her fancy. In June 1995, for example, she organized a fundraiser for children in Haiti. Armed with a little plastic bucket like the ones kids take to the beach, she went around every classroom and the staff room where the teachers were holed up. Stella stuck to her guns. For instance, in December 1996, by which time I was no longer her secret personal trainer, she walked in on one of my classes. I’d just finished drawing a uterus and two ovaries as an introduction to a class on sexually transmitted infections. Stella knocked discreetly.

  She stood in front of the giant uterus complete with pelvic opening on the blackboard, holding up her little green plastic bucket. The Fallopian tubes seemed to be coming out of her ears.

  “It’s for the Hospital for Sick Children!” she said, her face beatific.

  The others had a good laugh at the sight of Poor Stella with Uterus. Despite my best efforts, she’d still managed to put back on half of the weight I’d helped her lose, ever since her mom had put an end to our meetings. The students produced a handful of coins from their pockets. Stella was radiant.

  “And what about you, Mr. Lamontagne?”

  I took my wallet out of my pocket and slipped the last five dollars it contained into her little bucket. She was still staring at me with the wide eyes of a spaced-out nanny goat. She gave the bucket a little shake, to indicate that it wasn’t enough.

  “It’s for sick children, sir,” she repeated, stressing the word as though I hadn’t understood her pitch.

  It seemed sick children were a cause close to her heart. I apologized and promised to give her more money at lunchtime. I’d have to borrow from Jodi or Zira, but there was no point trying to explain the notion of liquidity shortfall to her. My gifts as a teacher had their limits.

  “Mrs. Robinson gave me ten dollars,” she prodded, trying to get me to double my contribution.

  She walked out of the classroom as quietly as she’d come in. The other students sighed with relief.

  “She’s so annoying, sir,” said Candice, who’d had enough of the braided saint taking her pocket money.

  “I know it’s irritating,” I said, “but she’s doing it to help others.”

  “So she can just bug the hell out of us because she’s trying to help people?”

  “Candice, watch your language! Yes, as it happens I think it’s sometimes okay to bend the rules if it’s for the good of others.”

  “Really? Which rules?”

  “The rules of common courtesy.”

  “I’m going to take you at your word, Mr. Lamontagne.”

  And so Stella went about rattling her bucket for all kinds of causes no one could possibly be against: sick children, poverty in Haiti, and all the hard times people fall on in spite of themselves. It would never have crossed Stella’s mind to ask for money for a sports team or a cause of more dubious morality like AIDS. Each of her causes had to be entirely beyond reproach; absolutely impossible to refuse, at the risk of looking like a heartless brute. I borrowed five dollars from Jodi at lunchtime in the staff room and handed them over to poor Stella with a smile.

  “Oh! Thank you, Mr. Lamontagne! That’s so generous of you!”

  It was that day that a crack opened in the wall of saintliness surrounding young Stella. I was in the room beside the secretary’s office, where Zira and Mrs. Robinson were jabbering away, waiting for the bell to ring. Mrs. Robinson was complaining at once again having to face Stella and her little plastic bucket. Zira agreed, admitting that she’d given a dollar to get rid of her.

  “I didn’t give her a cent this time,” came the reply. “She can go ask her mother, so she can!”

  Mrs. Robinson wasn’t the type of woman to lie or go around making a show of her own nastiness. She no doubt hadn’t given Stella a cent, and then Stella had lied to me in front of the other students to get me to cough up. The incident amused me and brought me no small amount of comfort. So Stella Thanatopoulos wasn’t a saint after all; she was able to lie and manipulate with the best of them.

  Stella’s thirst for philanthropy didn’t start at Holy Canadian Martyrs. She had already showed interest in worthy causes as a child. But of all the tales of good deeds and charity work, the Eaton Centre story takes some beating. Jodi the librarian told me all about it. She’d even kept the press cuttings: Stella’s stunt made every Toronto daily.

  It happened a year before I arrived at Holy Canadian Martyrs. No one talks about it anymore; it seems that all there was to say about it was said in the days following the incident. If you ask me, I think Stella’s antics were a pivotal moment for her future, a foreshadowing of what might become of her. Jodi told me the story while rolling a joint in her Annex apartment after supper. It’s a good one, you’ll see. Just picture a slightly tipsy librarian smoking weed as she tells you a cockamamie story of epic proportions.

  It was the fall of 1993, and Stella had found a new cause to obsess over: animal rights. She was raising money for a cat shelter, handing out leaflets exposing the treatment of lab animals, and haranguing teachers who wore makeup:

  “Do you know whether your lipstick was tested on animals, Madame Poisson?”

  “I . . . uh . . . I don’t think so, Stella.”

  “You don’t think so or you don’t know?”

  “Well, I hope not. I’ll look into it.”

  You get the picture, right? So anyway, one fall day in 1993, Mrs. Thanatopoulos decides to go spend a small fortune at the Eaton Centre, on the floor where the chic fashion boutiques are. Our Stella goes along with a Greek friend to the mall’s huge pet store, where she badgers the staff about the animals’ living conditions. Why do they keep them in such tiny cages? Why do they clip the parrots’ wings? Picture the scene: it’s an enormous store, as big as any supermarket. It has anything you could ever want: poodles, Siamese cats, cockatoos, tarantulas, rabbits, ferrets, and everything you’d need to look after them. Big business, American-style. A hulking great Noah’s Ark. The employees end up tuning her out and she eventually leaves—but it proves to be no more than a strategic withdrawal! The following weekend, she tells her mother she’s sleeping over at a friend’s, a poor girl she’s brainwashed with all her nonsense. So the two little nutbars take the subway downtown, all alone one Saturday afternoon—they’re only fourteen, remember—while the friend’s parents think they’re playing in her room. They both show up at the Eaton Centre, their faces covered by black scarves, and slip quietly in behind a cat litter display fifteen minutes before closing time, where they patiently wait for the employees to go home. Once the Eaton Centre is deserted and the security guard’s footsteps fall silent, they open the cages one by one! The store is soon crawling with snakes, rats, lizards, dogs . . . hundreds of them. They even free the cockroaches that were to be fed to the reptiles, which were apparently all on special that day. As you might imagine, none of the animals were used to being able to move around as they pleased and so they panicked. There were dogs running about with dead hamsters in their mouths, c
ats ripping lizards to shreds. It was a bloodbath. The two girls took fright at the carnage, but were still too daft to understand there was no way out of the jungle. Terrified by the screeching birds, howling dogs, and the high-pitched shrieks of a ferret being disembowelled by a particularly aggressive cat, the panicked girls banged on the doors for all they were worth. They were out of luck: the security guard was on a different floor and didn’t hear the ruckus. They finally took their courage—and a cash register—in both hands and smashed one of the glass doors. They scrambled out, the animals in hot pursuit, to the deafening sound of the alarm they had set off in the process. The Toronto police were first on the scene. Then came the journalists. Since the girls were both minors, the media weren’t allowed to reveal their identities or disclose the names of their parents. Every newspaper picked up on the story. It was on TV and radio; it even led the six o’clock news on CBC. The journalists dubbed them, appropriately enough, the Pet Shop Girls.

  Most of the bigger animals were rounded up the next day from all four corners of the Eaton Centre. But for a good month after the break-in, the pet store employees and people working in the other shops were still finding tarantulas, lizards, and snakes, both dead and alive, in the mall. They never knew when they would stumble across a cadaverous chameleon, a lifeless finch, or—worse—a very much alive snake. Of course, Mrs. Thanatopoulos had to hire a lawyer to defend her daughter. And a psychologist, too, for a while, at least until she’d gotten over the trauma. The subject was best avoided at school, Jodi said.

  “It might get you into trouble. Nobody talks about it anymore.”

  So everyone at Holy Canadian Martyrs knew the real identity of the Pet Shop Girls. Isn’t that terrible? Do you see now why I keep mentioning Stella? You end up forgetting the names of most of the students who pass through your class, you know. But how could I ever forget Stella Thanatopoulos? Her name is forever etched in my memory.

  Three years went by at Holy Canadian Martyrs. My shelf picked up a new book or two every week, although I still hadn’t managed to get my hands on one of Claudia’s. One Sunday in August 1998, she told me her contract at the Toronto Goethe-Institut wasn’t being renewed. She’d have to return to Germany that September. She told me this just before the Lutheran service began. It felt like a funeral. The pastor spoke of the Lord’s miracles that day. I prayed that Claudia would opt to stay in Toronto. I asked her later what future she saw for us. This led to a slight misunderstanding.