‘Why are you afraid of Julia?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid of everyone,’ said Clara, fixing me with her weather-station eyes. ‘But Julia has more reason to shut me up, to control and silence me, than you do. She witnessed what was done to me and does not want to remember. I used to feel sorry for her. I wanted to protect her. But now I understand that her desire to forget makes her dangerous. To remember would be like falling out a window, for her. She might not recover.’
Clara straightened her skirt and adjusted her scarf, then asked me, ‘Knowing me as you do now, are you still willing to publish my book?’
Maurice
I returned her call immediately. I’m sure that she heard the nervousness in my voice.
‘Dr. Burns? Dr. Burns?’ I said her name twice.
‘Hello, Maurice. I’d rather you call me Fiona, if you don’t mind.’
‘Hello, Fiona.’
‘Thank you. I have a favour to ask of you.’ Her tone became even quieter, more firm. ‘Would you take me for a ride in your ultralight?’
The answer I gave included the words pleasure and maximum stillness. That much I know. I’ve accepted to take her up into the air on a windless afternoon. Bruce is against it. He’s searching the Torah at this very moment, scouring the text for a quotation that might dissuade me from carrying out Dr. Burns’s plan.
‘I want you to fly me over the farm and land exactly as you did on the day my mother died. She saw you coming toward her. She mistook you for my father. As soon as you’ve brought us down, and our front wheels are touching the edge of her garden, I’ll get out and go into the house. I’ll wait in the living room, at the window, while you fly back up and repeat the landing. That’s my wish. It’s a lot to ask, I realize.’
Once Dr. Burns is strapped into her seat and wearing her helmet, up we’ll go. Tomorrow at three in the afternoon, weather permitting, we’ll roll across the stubble, then rise into the air.
Julia
The others appeared to be working, heads bent in concentration. I felt my eyes close then open. On the screen hung my incomplete response to an email enquiry from a hopeful artist. I’d slept poorly the night before and now it was late afternoon. I was accomplishing nothing. I opened my desk drawer and lifted out the book of votive paintings given to me by Clara. A man was tumbling through the creamy air, a sixth-storey window open above him. He was clutching a wooden shutter and wore a look of disbelief on his face. On the following page, two children were plummeting headfirst, side by side, having fallen from the spiral staircase of an Italian villa. Though I examined them closely, the children were too small for me to make out the expressions on their faces.
Notes and Acknowledgments
A series of fictional votive paintings by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin inspired this novel, as did Alexander Pilis’s installation Architecture Prallax: Through the Looking Glass (Koffler Gallery, 2015), followed by a fall from a bicycle, and the viewing online of true votive paintings from Genoa. The two Syrian folk tales retold by F. H. Homsi in If Clara were collected in the streets of Aleppo by Samir Tahhan, translated into English by Andrea Rugh, and can be found in Folktales from Syria, published by the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2004. I thank Peggy Gough of the University of Texas Press and Dena Afrasiabi of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, for their generous assistance.
I thank Greg Sharp, Eva H. D., Emma Moss Brender, Sarah Mangle, Mariella Bertelli, Anne Egger, Kate Cayley, Joanne Schwartz, and Guy Ewing for reading this novel at various stages, for expressing faith in it, and for seeing what I could not see.
Thank you to my most understanding agent, Samantha Haywood, who has stuck with me these many years. Thank you to my wise and wonderful editor, Alana Wilcox, who can hear a mouse scurrying under snow and whose head, I suspect, can revolve 360 degrees. Thanks to everyone at Coach House. Thank you to David Gressot, my editor at Actes Sud, for his insights. Boundless thanks to my family: Mary Jane, Jonno, Emma, and Christina.
Martha Baillie’s previous novel, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel, was an O magazine Editors’ pick, and was published in France by Actes Sud. Her 2009 novel, The Incident Report, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her poetry has been featured in the Iowa Review and her nonfiction in Brick magazine and Longreads. She has written about contemporary visual art for the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Koffler Gallery. Her multimedia project, The Schlogel Archive, shown at the Koffler Gallery in 2015, was selected by NOW magazine as a Contact Festival ‘Must See,’ and can be visited at www.schlogel.ca. Martha was born in Toronto, has lived in Scotland and France, has hiked in the Arctic, and has travelled extensively in Asia. She now lives and works in Toronto.
Typeset in Whitman
Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design by Ingrid Paulson
Coach House Books
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If Clara Page 14