“What is the movie about?” Sebastian leans in from the window and coughs. Tamai’s black hair ruffles in the wind.
“Well, it’s about a deaf woman locked away from everyone as punishment for letting too many accidents happen around her. The idea is, I don’t know, ever since her childhood she has a curse or something. Terrible things happen around her, but she doesn’t know. Because she can’t hear,” he gestures at his ear with one hand. “People scream for help around her. But she never looks up, never sees any of the disasters that draggle behind her one long life. Children drown while she bathes. Dogs are run over while she arranges fruit in a basket. Trains derail as she reads poetry in the station, and my mother never sees, never knows why she has been locked up in this house. She sits in the old man’s kitchen chair for months, waiting for the person who left her there to come and retrieve her. At the end of the film she drifts asleep, just as the world is going to war. Cannons roll over desert dunes, airplanes shed missiles over cities already on fire, water boils in the oceans, and my mother sleeps in the kitchen, with her head tilting toward her shoulder.”
“How long was she an actress?”
“She wasn’t an actress. She was in movies made by the neighbor. He had a camera shop in Sabor. He recorded most of the scenes with a VCR off the television.” The driver shrugs. “Nobody is an actress here.”
“How long until we reach Sabor?” Barbus interrupts.
“We’re almost there.”
After a few minutes of silence Tamai clears his throat and looks into the backseat. “Why don’t you talk?” he prompts Sebastian. “Tell me something about you. Tell me your five favorite places, the five most beautiful places on the Earth,” Tamai shouts as a truck passes their car on the left side and the car tilts as they slip onto the shoulder.
“Countries or cities?” Sebastian asks.
“Anything. Places — like a city, or a room, or a bed, whatever is a place and also beautiful to you.”
Sebastian licks his lips tenderly. His tongue is dry. His voice sounds coarse.
“Okay. Porte Saint-Denis,” he says. “Where I grew up. The violet wallpaper in the cafés. Port Hope — where Julie used to live. Lying in my shorts in the wild grass, watching the water locks open and close,” he sniffs. “The clear smell of the water as it rises and falls. My kitchen at home: when the sunlight floods the counters, Julie sits on a stool by the island and wraps her brown feet around the stool legs and reads the paper. Where else? The window seat in an expensive restaurant in Toronto, the highway, watching the stream of lights, red lights on one side, white lights on the other . . .”
“He’s very sentimental,” Barbus says.
“What about you, Tamai?” Sebastian asks.
“It’s Sabor. It’s just in the past.”
The car hits another hole in the road. Sebastian grasps the frame of the window.
“There was a field outside the city,” Tamai starts, “where the wind scattered lilac petals from the trees across the grass, and the air was perfumed like a bordello. Boys walked home for dinner with fists full of lilac stalks for their mothers. I had a little dog named Talia, after a girl that I wanted, and we ran together in circles kicking up clouds of purple petals. There was a café on the V-shaped corner of a dead-end street, and the fumes from the cars gathered there, but the waitress always wore dresses, and the cakes were sweet and warm. There was a banya, a bathhouse, where I met my friends and we splashed each other and swam naked in the warm pool. There were benches along the road where old men sat in rows and argued, or sometimes recalled their youth and joined in a rain dance with their arms around each other.”
“What else?” Barbus asks. He is writing in his notebook, sticking the tip of his thumb into the end of the metal spiral at the top. Sebastian reluctantly retrieves a square of folded paper from his jeans pocket and gropes himself, searching for a pencil.
“There were long white lines of laundry in all the yards. There was a house with an orange roof that my mother always wanted, so we walked past it every day. There were schoolyard jungles filled with bullies and pretty girls and athletes and bookish children. There was the camera shop where Salman Bibolt made photograms of coins and lace, and concocted scripts for home movies starring the lovely, married Asya Chermoev. There was a hospital where I had stitches in my forehead from falling off my bicycle. There was a window where I saw a naked woman, pulling down the blinds. There was a room in the preschool where I found my numbered steel pot in the circle of steel pots and sat with all the other children to be toilet-trained at nine o’clock. Yes, Sabor held all the most beautiful places on earth. Here we are.”
The brakes complain as the heavy car slows. Sebastian looks outside and blinks with shock. The green, the scrub and bushes, the soldiers and cigarettes, the dead matches, the hills and trees are gone. The car halts and the sound of the car doors opening and closing explode the quiet.
The air smells strange, smells dusky like the smoke of ordinary objects burned up in the human atmosphere. Sebastian swallows a stone of saliva. The birch trees are shattered. Every brick on the ground is broken. The horizon is unobstructed, empty. The entire city has broken down into the tiniest fragments and scattered like a trail, warning: don’t come this way.
“Here?”
“Yes.” Tamai stands stiff with his arms at his side and his chin braced against the sunlight. “Sabor,” he says, “is Russian for cathedral. But now the city is just rust. While I was driving, it really seemed as if I could arrive here as it was. Like I was on my way to visit someone, because I had forgotten their death.”
Tamai scrapes a line in the dust with his heel. “I stand here, and the sky turns to powder above me. All the past, the crying after beatings, the laughing after swimming, the snoring, and the sighing, all of it, dissolves into a bell in my brain that sings: it’s over, it’s over, it’s over. I wanted to be the one to bring you here because I knew that, if you found it at all, you would never believe it was a city.
“Over there, men with tempers played cards at night. And there, men with sunburned shoulders dug ditches. Lovers ate nothing all day from distraction. Children carried home bundles of sticks and called, ‘comrade, comrade.’ And the odor of the leaves —” Tamai inhales.
Sebastian scans the horizon and sees a narrow band of sepia air rising in the distance. Pieces of metal glint in the furrows of dirt. The sky lies flat and indifferent over their heads.
“The odor of the leaves,” Tamai whispers, “in the fall, was like the glow in your testicles after love. To remember it is obscene. It’s ruthless. It’s like lighting the church afire with prayer candles.”
My Birth
OUR TOWN AND WORLD DURING My First Year (in my mother’s handwriting): Montreal, Mr. Gross who was kidnapped was found the day after I was born, he had been captured and held by the Quebec freedom movement. They had already murdered Pierre Laporte, a French cabinet minister. The city of Montreal had been placed under martial law and 5,000 federal troops were patrolling the streets.
I WAS EARLY AND THAT became usual. My mother kneeled on the floor in their living room, sorting out the gold and silver tree ornaments. The evergreen in the bay windows cast a conical shadow across the walls. My father stood, testing the strands of Christmas lights. Sirens interrupted music straining from the radio in the kitchen. My mother gasped and my father paused.
“It’s too early,” she said.
“It’s all right,” he reassured her. “A lot of people put up their trees after the first snowfall.”
Then there was pain and blood. A frantic drive in a cramped Volkswagen followed by the sudden ambivalence of an ordinary-sized infant. After rushing to arrive I hesitated at the entryway until the doctor yanked me into the room with a set of tongs not unlike the kind that hang beside a barbecue.
The doctors left. It was almost midnight. My father was still in the waiting room, win
ning at cards. Left alone with a protesting infant lying across her heaving chest my mother started to cry.
“Sir,” the nurse said. “Sir, your wife needs you.”
“If you ask me, and I know I’m the foreigner, but the FLQ are just the IRA with pastries — is she, with the baby?”
“Yes. You have a lovely baby girl."
My parents stared at me as if I was a stranger to them. The look of a baby shocked them. My fingers seemed too small for my hands. My limbs seemed elephantine, and my head was misshapen. Outside in the surrounding streets, rain dissolved the snow. The RCMP officers pulled plastic hoods over their helmets. Horses blinked away the drops of rain. Snipers crouched on the roof of the hospital, and the tanks marched down the streets like proud beetles.
This Is the Story of How We Met
THIS IS THE STORY OF how we met. I know the story of how we met. That doesn’t matter. It was a Wednesday or a Tuesday and it was raining. You were standing outside the art gallery in the rain and I asked why. You said I like the feeling of it; some people do. So I left you and went to find my friend. The wine was very cheap so the bartender poured small glasses until I made fun of him and he poured white wine until it ran over my hand. I saw you come in and I tried to make you talk to me. All the music was by bands I didn’t recognize. The art was photographs of people in crowds in Toronto where I am from on the streets walking around and looking at things but not at each other. I was wearing silver shoes with little flowers embroidered on the toes. In my shoes I was the same height as you and I could see you everywhere in the room until you were behind me. So why did you stay so near me and not speak to me? I was being careful. I thought you were quiet, very quiet and serious, but you’re not at all, are you? Sometimes I am, but I like to talk. We had all the same friends that night and so we walked together to a bar after the gallery. My friend said that she would like to have a shrine built for her. I said I would rather have a cottage. We wanted you to build the shrine and the cottage for us because you once built churches in Mexico. I can speak a little Spanish, but I have never been to Mexico. There was an empty chair beside me at the bar. You sat down right after I thought: I want him to sit down in this chair and talk to me. I bought you a cider and you told the table how once your car caught fire when your sister threw her cigarette out the window and it blew into the backseat. I thought I laughed too long at that story; it was too obvious. I kept drinking long after I was drunk because you were still there. After last call I asked the bartender if there were any mints and he said he would give me peppermint schnapps, but I laughed and came back over to the whittled group. You said I have Jack Daniel’s in the trunk of my car, but I said I have to go home. I kissed everyone goodbye and said will you walk me out? On the stairs we said our friend who was sad was actually lucky. You said he has a beautiful woman who is coming home to live with him. Outside the streets were very empty, but still the taxis filled up before they reached me. I said it is a little scary out here at night and you nodded as if it made sense now why you were there. I was hoping you would kiss me, but instead you said this one is yours and hailed a yellow taxi and put me inside. Then I went away for a week for a family birthday. My grandmother was turning ninety-five. After her party I went to her bedroom and lay on the bed with her. She was tipsy and laughing. I said what advice do you have for me now that you are ninety-five? She said find a man who is intelligent and kind and has a strong sex drive. Find him and fall in love with him and give him everything. I said did granddad have a strong sex drive? She said yes, we used to go to parties and he would guide me into a room and kiss me and I was afraid someone would come in and see us having sex on their coat. I still miss him she said. I thought about you while I was away. I thought I think I miss him. When I came back I sent you an email, but for days you didn’t answer. When you answered you were really formal and I felt crushed. Why did you do that? I was being careful because I knew I would be leaving for Japan. I would be gone for years and I didn’t want to hurt you. It hurt me anyway. It will hurt when you go, but I don’t care. I don’t care if it hurts. When you said the other day this is going to hurt, isn’t it? I thought please be like me, please don’t care. But what I was saying before was when I came back I thought why is he resisting me, I think he likes me. When we are together it seems as if he likes me. The next time that I saw you it was at the same gallery for a party. And you were walking away from me all the time. After the party we went with all our mutual friends to a dance club. It was dark except for the moving colored lights and the screens on the walls showing old television shows. Everyone was happy. You bought me a drink and we danced in a group. The music was more that I didn’t know. It always is that way. I don’t know many songs. I was hot after dancing. My hair was wet from sweat and I sat down at a table by myself. You came over with two more drinks. I said is that for me? And you nodded, you didn’t say yes. We had a conversation. After a while I took a breath and I made myself say so do you actually like me or do you just like me liking you? You said I like you very much. You sounded serious. I don’t remember the conversation after that only that my cheeks hurt from smiling until I said when are you going to kiss me? That’s not what you said. What did I say? You said do you like me enough to kiss me? I said do you like me enough to kiss me, but you didn’t say anything so I said no? You said I do, I will, or I am. I don’t really know what you said and we kissed and we kissed for three hours with all the music disappearing and our friends watching and strangers. And I knew that you were going to make my life better. That is the story of how we met. You’re wrong, we met months before that. No that was only being around each other. People can be around each other for a long, long time and never meet. In another scenario you stayed careful and I thought you liked someone else. We were around each other a handful of times for a few more months and then I went back to Toronto and you went to Japan and we never met. Sometimes I think that is what really happened. It’s that simple. We never met and this is just a story I tell myself when things are hard and I think about you.
Crickets
HI SWEETHEART,
WE WERE TALKING ABOUT YOU last night at a dinner party. Dad and I were invited to eat with one of the CEOs that he plays golf with. The man was bragging about his son who wants to write a book. Apparently the son is the vice president of ICC (Important Computer Company!) but he has always wanted to be a poet. I gave out your phone number because I thought you could give him some advice and help him get published. I know you got mad the last time I did that, but I did it anyway!
As to your question what is the central grievance in my life — are you going to write about this? I’m not sure I like the things I say being passed around to strangers. I mean how would you like it if I wrote down somewhere that when you were little you used to walk in your sleep? We found you all around the house in the morning, sleeping on the floor in the kitchen in a closet or at the foot of the stairs. And once our neighbors, the Anstys, called us to say that you were standing in their vegetable garden staring at the cherry tomatoes as if hypnotized. Your dad went to get you: you were like a little zombie in your nightgown and bare feet. He said, Natasha, go back to bed and you walked home beside him, held his hand and walked upstairs and got under the covers without saying anything. The next day we changed the drop locks to key locks and hung a wind chime on your doorknob. You can write that down.
I guess there are a lot of things I would change if I could edit my life. I would get more education. I would have been more ambitious and had an interesting job. But the central grievance in my life? I guess I miss my family. Not my sister. I don’t miss Wales. I do miss my mother. But I miss my father in a more painful way not only because he’s dead, but also because I can’t remember him very well.
Dad’s full name was Peredur David Richard Stuart Campbell Jones Jones. He was a romantic figure in the family because he was always nearby, but so impossible to know. When he met Mum they both lived in Cardiff. He was known f
or racing motorcycles and she had come to watch the races with friends. She was engaged to another boy when they met, but Dad proposed to her that first night at a party. They were drinking beer and leaning into each other, but not touching. He was leaving to fight the Germans in a week. They spent the whole night talking together. Like two crickets singing in tune they understood each other perfectly. She stayed with him and the party rolled into the morning. In Cardiff in the days before the young men left to fight, parents became strangely permissive — acting against their own Victorian impulses as fascism rushed across the rest of Europe. Perhaps they were thinking of themselves and the nights they lay alone and frightened during the first war, vulnerable in untested flesh.
I think Perry must have exhausted all the words he knew at once that night. No one ever heard him speak at length again. He told young Gwen that she had legs like a grand piano and hips like a mountain pony. I think it made her excited to hear a young man talk about her legs and hips even though what he said wasn’t nice. I’m engaged, she said, at last, afraid to see his face twist with anger.
When are you getting married? he asked.
In a month, she whispered. I’m getting married in a month to a boy I met in school. His name is Harvey, he’s sick tonight. I think he’ll make a lovely husband. I mean to say I love him.
How I Came to Haunt My Parents Page 4