“Not if you don’t smoke very often.” This was a grey area and I left quickly, heading out of the resort to the nearby gas station, which I knew was open in the evening. They sold only cigarettes.
“Amour, amore,” sang out a pair of modestly dressed young prostitutes. At night the hookers congregated on the available benches along the broken-down road, wearing eye-watering perfume.
“No, gracias.”
A rail-thin woman with old eyes and a bright red dress approached me and grabbed my hand.
I shook her off and said, “I’m only looking for cigars.”
“You want box, I have a friend. Twenty-five dollars.”
“No, I only want a few.”
“You on vacacione, heh,” she leered, exposing several missing teeth, and struggling to keep up with me. “Sucky sucky, fucky fucky, sex on the beach, twenty pesos.”
“No, gracias señora.” Repulsed and wanting to get rid of her, I gave her a couple of pesos, probably enough to buy a hand job. A gaudily dressed man had followed close behind her, likely a pimp, which put him in the same job often filled by the most enterprising and aggressive former orphanage boys in Ukraine. I looked at my watch and began running back to the resort. I should never have come out there.
Back in our room I kissed the boys on their foreheads and they both did a double take at my unusual display of affection.
The next morning I solved my cigar problem in the simplest possible way, by buying three premium cigars at the tobacco store in the resort. The package had a barcode and a government seal.
We said goodbye to the beach and the pool, and Peter cried silently. After dinner I cut the boys off soft drinks and we checked out of our room, leaving our luggage in the lobby. Our checkout time left us six hours to kill before the airport bus arrived. Keeping the boys awake and cheerful would be difficult.
Our flight home was the red-eye. Peter read and dozed, Bohdan watched a Shrek sequel and, after trying unsuccessfully to read, I watched Unstoppable, in which Denzel Washington prevents an apocalyptic train crash. Despite the formulaic setup, and probably because of my exhaustion, I found myself filled with weepy longing for Denzel’s heroic fatherhood, his tender, uncomplicated relationship with his children, two daughters who worked at Hooters and worshipped him. Denzel wasted no time thinking about the past — he jumped from a speeding train to a speeding truck and back again, saving innocent lives every few seconds. He was handsome cardboard with no messy past. He was the anti-Hamlet. And still I wept.
Bohdan held off sleep until the last credits rolled on his movie just before sunrise. Then he removed his headphones and asked me to wake him up for breakfast. I solemnly promised. He fell immediately into a trance-like sleep.
When Peter set aside his book and fell into deep sleep too, I stared at him for a while, unused to seeing his body in stasis, his face untroubled as water behind a reef. Peter’s constant vulnerability wore me out even though my skin rivalled his for thinness, because I wanted him to know that just having genitals that hang outside your body makes you vulnerable enough, without opening yourself any further, without a lot of damn talking. Still asleep, Peter leaned into me hard with his bony shoulder and I put my arm around him and kissed his forehead for the second time in twenty-four hours. Fatherhood was not a single day’s rescue mission. Everything Denzel’s movie hero knew about being a father was bullshit. Everything I knew about being a father was bullshit too. It didn’t matter. I wanted a clean page and an open heart for my sons.
HOME AGAIN
Peter squatted on our front yard cocking a hammer above the sidewalk. On the concrete lay a twisted piece of metal, a computer hard disk. Three more hard disks splayed out from his legs. The computer parts came from Betsy’s brother in Illinois, who stipulated that the drives must be destroyed; they were filled with the digital dregs of confidential information.
Peter brought the hammer down on one disk after another, as hard as he could. Tiny machine screws and bits of green circuit board flew into the air around him until he got through the metal casing and began smashing the actual disk. That was where the computer’s memory lived, I’d told him, in magnetized bits and bytes on that polished orb.
“Look Dad,” he said, “I’m erasing the memory!”
He moved the hammer over to the other drives and soon more fragments of plastic and metal whirred in the air like mechanical hummingbirds. Peter laughed in delight.
On the sidewalk in front of our house Bohdan took exaggerated steps while clutching a black plastic ninja sword in each hand. With each pose he gave a bloodcurdling tae kwon do howl.
I was on the porch watching them, ignoring the book in my hands, a scholarly edition of Milton’s Paradise Regained, which I’d wanted to read out of some notion of literary self-improvement. Peter’s hammer pulverized another hard disk. I didn’t give a damn about Milton’s getting paradise back. Paradise Lost has always excited me more, the fall into pain and lust and death, the impossibility of justifying God’s unattractive ways. I scanned the opening lines just as my youngest son climbed onto my lap:
I, who erewhile the happy Garden sung,
By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing
Recovered Paradise to all mankind….
Bohdan interrupted my reading when he plunked himself down. His butt was the boniest, sharpest, most uncomfortable in the world. Peter dropped his hammer and ran toward us, gesturing at the street, and I closed the book. We all waved to Betsy. She smiled at us as she walked home in her long strides from the bus stop.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Much gratitude to my wife, Elizabeth Troutt. Words fail. Thank you to my sons, Jeremy Clemens-Mierau, Peter Mierau, and Bohdan Mierau, who’ve tolerated the intrusion of this book into their lives. And thanks to: my parents, Eric and Velma Mierau, for answering my nosy questions and even, perhaps foolishly, lending me their diaries; my aunt Lil Bargen for telling me about the war and her early life with such candour and eloquence; my great-uncle Dietrich (Dick) Wiebe for telling me about the family’s escape from East Germany; my great-uncle the late Heinrich (Henry) Wiebe for trying — and failing — to tell me his story.
I must thank my friends and colleagues who read this book in manuscript, sometimes before anyone should have seen it: Jim Anderson, David Bergen, Sandra Birdsell, Nicole Boudreau, Warren Cariou, Chad Colburn, Victor Enns, Heidi Harms, Sally Ito, Carl Matheson, Shane Neilson, Merrell-Ann Phare, John K. Samson, Gregg Shilliday, Melissa Steele, and Joan Thomas (who read it twice and never let me give up).
Institutional support for this project came from the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio, the Canada Council, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Winnipeg Arts Council. At Banff, Michael Crummey and Daphne Marlatt were enormously helpful.
Pages 55–58 of this book appeared in Rhubarb magazine in an earlier version. The poem “Soldiers” on p. 116 was published in my book Ending with Music (Brick, 2002).
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010) gave me nightmares and context. Some details in the section “Back in the USSR” come from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, translated by Thomas P. Whitney (Harper & Row, 1973), and also from Anne Applebaum’s chapter on the Great Terror in her book Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 2003). The lines from Fernando Pessoa’s “Autopsychography” in the opening section are from Fernando Pessoa & Co., edited and translated by Richard Zenith, Grove/Atlantic, 1998.
Thank you to Barbara Scott, an amazing editor. All the errors, distortions, and assorted failures are mine. Thanks as well to Kelsey Attard at Freehand, who makes everything happen.
MAURICE MIERAU is the author of several books of poetry, including Fear Not, which won the ReLit Award in 2009. He was born in Indiana, and grew up in Nigeria, Manitoba, Jamaica, Kansas, and Saskatchewan. He now lives in Winnipeg with his family.
Please note that this is an electronic version of the printed book. In the conversion process, some third party content m
ay have been removed due to electronic rights restrictions. Editorial review, however, has determined that such minimal changes have not affected the integrity of the text. Please visit www.broadviewpress.com for detailed information about Broadview titles and available formats.
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