Meals for Martha were to be included in the arrangement that she and Madame Bernard had agreed upon, but on her arrival nothing was provided and no mention of an alternative plan made. She walked by the fruit stands on market days, her eyes lingering on the apples and bananas and pears; but never once did she afford herself the luxury of purchasing anything. One Thursday, however, before leaving for the market, she worked up the courage to request a little extra money, with which she might buy a few items of her own. Madame was positioned comfortably in her favourite chair, reading in the dark, as she always did in the late afternoon. (It never failed to surprise Martha to come across her that way: in the near blackness, a book open on her knee.)
Madame did not look up as Martha approached—nor as, in elliptical sentences that looped back on themselves and led ultimately nowhere, she commenced her stumbling appeal. Not once did Madame interrupt, or offer anything—some predicate, some verb—into the silences that sometimes ensued. (It was within these silences that Martha seemed almost to live in those days, as though she imagined that the words she did not yet know dwelt there, too, and so there she hunted for them—lucklessly.)
At last, when in a final and lingering hesitation Madame understood that Martha’s request was complete, she removed her finger from the page, laid the book aside, and shuffled to the kitchen without a word—her rolled-up trousers rustling at the knee. Reaching up to the high shelf above the stove, she chose from among the other crowded objects a bowl of waxen fruit, which she offered to Martha, evidently pleased to honour her request. The fruit glinted, still shiny in places, in the light of the kitchen’s single bulb. Martha’s French was indeed so poor in those days that she would have found it nearly impossible to refuse—or to clarify her request in any way—so she accepted the fruit graciously, with a nod and a smile.
Especially in moments such as these, and with Madame there were many, Martha’s progress in the language struck her as frustratingly slow. She was unable to concentrate on the verb charts and vocabulary words that she had posted on her bedroom walls, and so rarely studied them at all. Instead, she drifted off into a disturbed sleep, where her dreams, laboriously translated from the English, exhausted her and she woke up tired.
IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE third month of her stay, long after the incident with the fruit, that she realized suddenly, and with what seemed like no progression toward it, that she understood; she hardly needed to concentrate anymore. She was relieved, but at the same time—and this she never would have anticipated—a little disappointed, too. It was a different sort of Paris that she’d lived in when she’d understood so little. It had been like an object. Something she could put on, or examine, or hold. Only once that was gone did she realize how easy it was, even in Paris, to slip into the ordinary, to begin the inevitable depreciation of things.
She would long remember the last—great—misunderstanding, however. It took place during her sixth week in the apartment, when Madame told Martha about the death of her son. The details would always remain distorted and vague, just in the way that Martha had first received them. She found herself afterward wondering about him not infrequently, sometimes horrified by small things—a desk, a globe, a knife—fearing they might have come into play somehow in a story that she had so thoroughly failed to understand.
Later, Martha would tell Ginny of the event: “I thought I had it right. You know, you can’t just nod and smile with Madame, like with everyone else. I had to figure it out, you see. Where all the funny bits were, and laugh. And then, when the story got sad, I had to know that it did. And I did. I said ‘aah’ and ‘oh’ in all the right places, I’m sure of it! But”—and here Martha rang her hand down flat on the table, making Ginny (who for some time already had sensed the punch line) smile—“I could have sworn,” Martha said, “that we were well out of the sad bits.” She paused. “It’s true, all stories have got to have both, but it just isn’t fair when you aren’t clear about which one is which.”
“And so?” Ginny said, still grinning. “What happened?”
“I laughed,” Martha said. “Right there, at the saddest part of the story.”
This was just the punchline that Ginny had expected, and she herself laughed uproariously, which pleased Martha because she and Ginny had only just met, and it’s nice to make someone you’ve just met laugh. Also, this was a few weeks after she’d first met Charlie, and she would have been hard pressed, then, to believe that there was really anything sad about life after all.
MADAME DID HAVE THE curious habit of pausing after she’d told a good joke, as though testing Martha to see how much—if anything—she’d understood; and Martha had learned, or thought she had, to identify those moments—to fill them in—even when she had, indeed, understood very little. On the occasion in question Madame had paused in just this way, and it was into that pause that Martha had (after a troubling moment of uncertainty) laughed. She knew in an instant that it was wrong, but—and for a reason that afterward she could not explain to either Ginny or herself—she did not stop laughing right away. Perhaps she hoped to suggest, in continuing to laugh, a more complete and impenetrable misunderstanding.
When she did stop, she saw that Madame’s face was stricken and sad, but not knowing what else to do—how to go backward and undo anything that had now been done—she only apologized, throwing up her hands. Then—unable to express anything in the past tense, and so refer to the misunderstanding in particular—she said, “I never understand anything,” and quickly exited the room.
Nothing else passed between them until the next morning, when Martha, as usual, brought Madame her coffee in bed. As she entered the room, Madame gestured to a picture on the nightstand of a young man, then put her hand to her open mouth, pointing her forefinger to the back of her throat like the barrel of a gun, and fired.
This, Martha understood. She stopped, frozen, with the tray in her hands and did not move until Madame, who seemed afterward her usual self, plumped up her pillow and asked for her coffee, because it had not come.
IT WAS TRUE: if Martha at that time believed anything at all, it was that life, though sad in moments, sad in parts, was not—in sum—sad at all, and that the sad parts served in the end only to strengthen the overall story. Still, until she moved away from the Left Bank and into Charlie’s apartment in the Eleventh, leaving Madame and Madame’s son forever behind, she came to avoid certain objects, certain corners of the house. Sometimes she would find herself thinking bitterly of Madame because of the manner in which she had introduced her son—that other, perpetually doomed presence—into the house, as if he, too, were a necessary element in an otherwise essentially agreeable system of which Martha had been part. (Wagner in the mornings, cheese at noon, a mutual understanding of the perfect falsity of language.) Until, that is, Martha discovered Charlie’s French doors and moved across the river and began—slowly at first—her own depreciation.
Perhaps that was the real purpose of Martha’s stay with Madame Bernard. Not to provide the one luxury Madame afforded herself, the morning coffee in bed, but rather to abet a distribution of the terrible, untranslatable loneliness of that house—to share in the weight of it, and even take a little with her when she went away.
Later, she couldn’t help wondering if the boy had really done it like that (Madame’s forefinger, aimed at her throat), or if perhaps it had been performed somewhat differently, or even not at all, but that Madame could think—at that time—of only one foolproof method by which so great a sadness might be explained, or conveyed.
THIS WILL BE DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN
For Monika
AN OFFICER, IN THE very early morning, came to our door. We couldn’t sleep, and so we crowded on the stairs. We listened to our parents’ voices: rising.
Then the officer went away, but still we didn’t sleep.
My mother took the dog out to the yard. He howled and would not stop. It was dawn; the dew was on the grass. I could see it on the edges of each blade, from the
door.
The officer was a small man. No bigger than my thumb. When I sat with my brother at the top of the stairs, I could, with the tip of it, conceal him entirely. I showed my brother. He laughed. Then came the shot. I covered his ears.
WHEN THE SUN CAME in it was like the moon that we were waking upon. Where was the bed? Where, finally—had I slept—I would have drifted to sleep. Everything was bare. The whole house was bare. Not one stick of furniture was left in the house.
Inside my body, I was as bare. My brother cried. I hit him. I said: Don’t you cry. We’re the men of this house.
He said: Where’s Nino? Which was the dog. I took him to look. He was stretched on the lawn. The dew was in small and perfect beads that still clung to the grass.
There must have been, after all, some hours in which I’d slept, because in that time the world had changed and I wasn’t aware of its changing.
I did not think, though, that I slept. I could have—each minute—accounted for its passing. I’d shut my eyes. I’d opened them. It was as if it were the moon that I’d opened them upon.
Perhaps I didn’t sleep at all. Perhaps I’ve not slept my whole life since.
My mother brought one hand to her chest, and touched her heart, and held it there: We must keep still, she said. We must make very little noise. My brother’s mouth she covered with the back-side of her hand.
WHEN MY FATHER’S DRUNK three beer, this is the story that he tells. My aunt Emira rolls her eyes and makes a sound through her nose. She says, waving her hand in my father’s direction but speaking to us: “You know your oma.”
Then she looks across the table, directly. To my brother, and to me, and ignores my father, who, again, begins the story. “In the very early morning …” my father says.
“She couldn’t hurt a fly.”
We are eating Christmas dinner. It is March.
My father’s insistent, but Aunt Emira shakes her head.
“She could not have shot the dog,” she says. “Listen, I was older.”
When my father’s drunk four beer he talks like Emira—like a German. Ordinarily, his accent’s unpronounced, and he can speak in flat Canadian, and no one can tell. But after four beer. “I showed our brother,” he says. “I took him to the yard. There was dew on the ground. We didn’t have shoes.”
By the time my father’s drunk six beer, his accent is thick. “I remember Nino,” he says. “It was, for him, as if it were a lazy afternoon. The way he stretched out on the lawn, as though resting.”
Ten beer and my father lets some German words slip in. “I remember it exactly,” he says. “Irre! I could—each moment—account for its passing.”
Aunt Emira looks at the ceiling. My father continues: “Inside,” he says, “the house was empty. A shell. Our mother put her hand up to our little brother’s face, and covered it entirely.”
“You fool,” my aunt says. “You lunatic—fool.” She gets up from her seat and slaps my father’s head so it falls forward to the table and stays down.
“‘Not a stick of furniture in the house,’ the man says. Does that sound right?” She stands, now, above my father—above the slope of his bent neck—and glares down that grade, to the level of the board. “That they took every stick, while we slept? What use would they have had,” she asks, throwing her hands in the air, “of our cheap little things?”
At twelve beer, my father’s voice, again, shifts. This time to an accent that was—until my aunt came to stay with my father—unidentifiable to my brother and me. We thought it was his own invention. A strange dialect that preceded a thirteen-hour sleep. But then my aunt said once: “Sasa, now you sound like our father. You sound like a Croat. How do you do that? You were too young, and didn’t even speak properly then.”
My father said, “So now you must believe me. That I remember things.”
“You’re a drunk,” my aunt said. “You’re a fool. You’ve turned yourself into a baby again. That’s how come you remember so well.”
MY GRANDFATHER BUILT bridges for the SS in the war. He was not a German. “They took your father,” my aunt says, and laughs sometimes when she says it, though she does not sound glad. “You drunk bastard,” she says. “They took your father and you say, ‘They took the bed.’ They shot your uncle, and you say, ‘My mother went and shot our little dog.’”
When they came again, my father’s father went.
SOMETIMES MY FATHER sings us songs in German. He sings and sings until my aunt beats him with a spoon that she takes from a drawer.
It is always the same, the spoon that she chooses. I couldn’t say why.
ONE DAY MY FATHER took us for a ride. He was drunk. It was my brother in the back seat and me in the front. These were the back roads around Red Deer, where we lived. Now my mother and brother and I live in town.
My father was building a hotel on our property. He said that once it was built we’d be rich. People would come, he said, from all over the world to stay in a place that was built, so carefully, by hand.
That day he said, “Come on, I’ll show you where the hotel’s gonna be.” We said: “The hotel’s in our backyard.”
“Nope,” said my father. “Not anymore. There’s a problem with this place. It’s on the flats. We’ll bring it up higher. There’ll be a view,” my father told us. “Then people will stay.”
We drove forty minutes out of town and turned up a rutted dirt track with a sign on a post by the road saying, For Sale, For Lease. The truck bumped and stuck. My father gunned the engine and swore, in German. Already he was mixing his German words in. My brother gave me a shove on the back of my neck from behind. “We’ll walk,” my father said, so we got out of the truck and walked up the road, which stopped short in a thicket of trees. “Here it is,” he said, and spun in a circle with his arms stretched out and his hands flat.
“There’s no view,” my brother said. He was tired, and angry at my father for already mixing his German words in.
“Not yet,” my father said. “You have to imagine. It will be like—we’ll cut down the trees.”
There was a T-shirt stuck on the upper branch of one of the aspens by the road, as though it had once been a balloon, and then burst, and then dropped.
“How do you know there’ll be a view?” I said to my father. He laughed. Like I was a stupid kid to have asked. Then he got angry. He smashed the bottle he was carrying down.
“Why don’t you just be happy,” he said. “This is a hill.” It was a very slight hill. I was not out of breath. “A hill means a view. A view means good business.”
He turned and walked quickly down, in the direction of the truck. He did not call for us to join him, and for a moment I thought I might be stubborn and wait there in the woods till I was asked. But then I grabbed my brother’s hand and we ran after.
My father put me in the driver’s seat and told me what pedal I should push. He and my brother shoved the truck back, and over the rut. I saw my father through the glass of the windshield. My brother was too small to see. It should have been me out there pushing and him at the wheel, because I was older. I think I was stronger.
On the main road, my father began to sing. It was a funny German song he liked. Not one of the ones that, later, would cause my aunt to hit him with a spoon. It was one about a lady with a bun stand on the highway.
When we got near home, houses began to appear on the sides of the road. A white shape floated in front of us for half of an instant and then there was a bump and a smash.
“Fuck me,” my father said, “what was that.” I started to cry, and then my brother did too. “Be quiet, you kids,” my father said, “we hit something.”
He got out of the truck and went around to the back and got his gun from the rack. “Did you see him run?” he said. “Which direction?” My brother and I shook our heads. We didn’t see it run; it happened fast. “If it was a deer, we’ll have some meat this season.”
“It wasn’t a deer, it was a dog,” my brother sai
d.
“How can you be sure?” my father asked. “You can’t see from way back there.”
He got the gun ready. “I’ll put him out of misery, whatever it is. It’s better that way.”
We waited in the cab for half an hour. Then my father returned and dropped something heavy into the bed of the truck. He put his gun on the rack and got in beside me. “You were right,” he told my brother, “it was a dog, but I got him. It’s better that way. I hit him quite hard.”
We drove the rest of the way home and no one said a word. My father’s favourite country music station played. Then we got out and saw that a small dog’s white head and part of his shoulders were stuck to the grille of the truck.
“This will be difficult to explain,” my father said.
MY FATHER HAD TAKEN a can of orange spray paint and numbered the logs of the half-built hotel. “I’ll build it exactly the same,” he said, “on the hill.”
My brother and I, on weekends, got paid fifty cents an hour to help my father in the yard. When we did not do much, he said, “I don’t know if you earned this,” but he always handed over exactly what we were due.
When all the logs had been disassembled and lay, in small piles, out in the yard, several years had gone by. I was almost in high school when the Caterpillar arrived. My mother said, “Make the most of it, Sasa, these are our final days. We’re leaving you.” But we stayed on all winter, and through most of the spring. My father went back and forth to the hill lot, and took his chainsaw with him. Each time he went he cut down a few trees and flattened the ground.
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Page 5