by Ann Walmsley
8
FRANK AND GRAHAM’S BOOK CLUB
BARELY A WEEK after Carol opened Graham’s letter during the ferry ride to Amherst Island, she and I met with Graham and Frank to discuss the launch of their very own book club. I knew that Beaver Creek Institution would look different from Collins Bay because inmates called it “camp” and described it as the most comfortable minimum-security facility in Ontario. But I was unprepared for how different. Located two hours north of Toronto, in a summer-cottage area of dark lakes and pine forests, Beaver Creek was just a cluster of buildings on a country campus without a perimeter wall or barbed wire. Instead of occupying cells, the men lived in two-storey bunkhouses with their own cooking facilities. The inmates could just walk away, and some did, though the consequences were a return to a higher-security prison. Families could bring in food when they visited. And some inmate work details involved off-site work, including harvesting cranberries in a nearby bog. Even the name Beaver Creek suggested a family campground, not a correctional facility. Carol later regretted that we hadn’t brought a picnic for the men and a gift of olive oil for Frank.
We were ushered into the prison’s administrative boardroom and within a few minutes, Graham and Frank appeared in the doorway smiling broadly. I had a sense they were going to hug us, which I knew was against regulations. Sure enough, they wrapped their arms around us. My first hugs from inmates. Accepting an embrace from Graham’s six-feet-four frame was awkward for me at five feet five. My head sort of ended up on his chest. “I’ve been looking so forward to seeing you guys,” he said. They were both so excited that they talked over each other. Carol told Graham that he looked tanned and slimmer than he had at Collins Bay. “Frankie takes most of my food, right,” he teased. “And I trained really hard. Frankie has me on a rigid schedule.”
We only had an hour to hammer out a plan for the book club before Count. Already the pair had recruited nine other interested guys, many of whom were quite sophisticated readers, they told us. The prison warden himself had been wonderfully supportive of the idea. But there was a problem. Donna, their liaison person in the administration, was so keen on the book club that she wanted to join it and had independently been pitching it to some of the inmates. “What I don’t want to do is scare away some guys who are gonna say that it’s the warden’s pet project,” Graham said.
At that point we invited Donna to join the meeting. With Carol backing them up, Graham and Frank politely explained to Donna that, for the idea to work, it had to be seen as an inmate-run book club, that only Graham and Frank should undertake recruitment, and that, while Donna was welcome to join the book club, she might have to withdraw if the members grew uncomfortable. Donna was surprisingly amenable to their recommendations and offered them the boardroom in the programs building for their monthly meetings. That was a bonus, because meeting in the chapel was always a harder sell among inmates who were averse to religion. Then Graham turned to Carol and said that instead of her plan to have Frank and him choose the books that day, he’d rather convene a meeting of the members and let them decide. Like Donna, Carol conceded, which surprised me even more. Everyone saw the value of what Frank and Graham were trying to accomplish.
But the pair had to choose the club’s first book that day, because the inaugural book club meeting was just six weeks away. “For the first book,” suggested Graham, “something medium-sized and catchy that these guys will all relate to.” Carol had just pitched them on nearly a dozen books from my selection committee’s lists.
“How about The Cellist of Sarajevo?” she asked. It was a novel that Frank had read with the Collins Bay Book Club before Graham joined.
“That was a good book,” said Frank. “I wouldn’t mind repeating it.” Graham agreed.
We said goodbye in a flurry of good wishes and they were gone in a sudden repeat of the hugs. When the men were out of sight, Donna pointed out that hugging wasn’t okay between volunteers and inmates. We told her we were aware, and that it wouldn’t happen again. They just seemed so overjoyed to see us.
Six weeks later, it was introductions time at the inaugural meeting of Graham and Frank’s Beaver Creek Book Club, with Carol and me in attendance. We were sitting in plush boardroom chairs around a long table in the building that housed the prison library and programs classrooms—much cushier than the circle of metal chairs at Collins Bay. I sensed immediately that this was a different crowd from the book club at Collins Bay: fewer visible tattoos, more white-collar criminals and, ironically, more lifers. While I’d heard from Carol that one of the members had killed his parents and siblings when he was a teenager, I had no idea which fellow it was, or whether the men would reveal their crimes as they went around the table.
“I’ve always wanted to join a book club but never ran with that kind of crowd,” said a dark-haired man in his early thirties whose name tag read DALLAS. Snorts of laughter followed from around the room.
“Well, you’re runnin’ with a book club crowd now,” said a gravel-edged voice from across the table—a middle-aged guy named Earl.
One man admitted he’d quit school at age twelve and said his favourite book was Don Quixote, which he’d read at age seventeen.
An inmate with a T-shirt that read Rock ’n Roll identified himself as Bookman, the prison librarian. The prison librarian was an inmate? Bookman said he couldn’t sleep when he first came to jail and reading had helped him doze off. He declared his number one book to be “from the nineteenth century, by Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.”
As the remaining eight men introduced themselves, I took particular note of Doc, a ginger-haired man with freckled skin and wire-rimmed glasses, who looked like he had just popped in from his country club in his V-neck pullover, and Tom, a reader of fantasy and sci-fi, who had shoulder-length hair and unusually long nails. Tom copped to making money in high school by “writing original stories for people in creative writing classes.” I figured he’d done something worse than that to land in a federal prison.
Graham and Frank knew everyone already, but they introduced themselves all the same. I wanted to see what they would say to other inmates about themselves. Frank told the others he had been in and out of jail since 1965. I noticed for the first time how much balder he seemed than a few months ago. “I got through by doing a lot of reading,” he said. “But if you have no one to share it with, it fades.” So true.
“Frankie is the reason I originally came to the book club at Collins Bay,” said Graham, easily the biggest guy in the room, with the most booming voice. “I fought and argued with him that I wasn’t going because they were holding the meetings in the chapel and I thought they were trying to convert me. But Frankie joked that that didn’t happen until at least the second meeting.”
When it was my turn, I explained that I couldn’t miss seeing Graham and Frank start their own book club at Beaver Creek and asked the members if they would let me sit in for a few months. No one objected. Perhaps that was because Graham and Frank had sat me between them in a proprietorial way. If anyone had said no to me, they would have had to answer to Graham.
It seemed to me that the greatest risk to Graham and Frank’s book club was the presence of prison staff at the meeting. Unlike at Collins Bay, where Carol’s book club volunteers came from outside the prison, the volunteer facilitators at Beaver Creek were two off-duty Beaver Creek employees. Phoebe, the lead facilitator, was considered cool and not part of the penal mainstream because she was the popular young English teacher. But her co-facilitator worked in the department that administered the prison’s correctional programs: a serious-minded and sensitive woman named Meg. Typically the presence of someone from the corrections team makes inmates clam up because staffers usually file reports on inmate behaviour. Also at the table was Donna, the prison official who was instrumental in helping Frank and Graham start the group, but who was a stickler for rules, as I knew from my meeting with her the previous month. Wiry and dark-haired, Donna seemed tense and hyper-alert,
a human radar for lies and wrongdoing. Whenever her eyes settled on me, I felt she was reading my conscience, causing me to wonder if I had done something wrong. Donna and Graham had had a frank conversation prior to the meeting and they agreed that if any of the book club members objected to her presence, she would bow out. As it turned out none of the men balked. They seemed prepared to give the “volunteers” a chance.
Given the many solid readers in attendance, Carol abbreviated her usual speech about how the book club worked. There was no briefing about civil discourse or polite listening, no warnings about showing up to future meetings without the book. “Half of the enjoyment is this private thing that you do: reading,” she said in a warm confessional tone. “The other half is coming together and discussing it. It enriches your whole understanding. Books become your friends.
“You’re not going to like all of the books,” she told them. Confronting this truth up front is critical for any book group, even my women’s book clubs. “But I’ve been in book clubs for years and years and I try really hard to get to the end of books I don’t like because I’m part of the discussion and I’m part of something that happens communally. And very often when I get to the end I say, ‘You know, that book had a lot to tell me.’” Then she offered the carrot: “If you are a good attendee there’s a certificate that goes in your file.” Several of the men smiled.
Every inmate at the table had his copy of that month’s book: Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo. Set in the 1992– 1996 siege of the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the novel draws on the true story of Sarajevo cellist Vedran Smailovic´, whose response to a brutal mortar shelling that killed twenty-two citizens lining up for bread was to risk his life playing Albinoni’s moving lament, Adagio in G Minor, every day for twenty-two days in the city’s ruins, one day in honour of each of the victims. In life and in the novel, the musician was a symbol of hope, humanity and courage. Galloway’s story imagines a protagonist who is a female counter-sniper, code-named Arrow, hired to protect the cellist from Bosnian Serb snipers. The other two main characters are civilians struggling to survive in the besieged city: Kenan, head of a young family, and Dragan, a middle-aged baker. The action veers between claustrophobic scenes of citizens inching through the city as they dodge snipers’ bullets, and detailed passages of sniper tradecraft as Arrow sets her trap. The themes for discussion are rich: identity, courage and morality, and the power of the arts to bridge hostility and hatred. It was, as one reviewer described it, “catnip” for book clubs. For those reasons, it was the book Carol often chose for a new prison book club’s first meeting.
To set the scene, Carol distributed images of Smailovic´ playing his cello in the ruined city and of citizens crouching in fear. Then she played a recording of Albinoni’s cello piece. The expression of grief in the music never failed to produce a hole in the centre of my chest, an unwept sob. The members fell silent to listen. For the first time, I detected a waltz rhythm in the pacing, like some wailing funeral dance. The strains seemed to evoke deep feelings among the inmates as well. Several men listened with their eyes closed, including Doc, who swung his finger as if conducting with a baton.
As the music came to a close, Carol said, with emotion constricting her voice: “He must have played his heart out—just played his heart out.”
Tom opened the discussion about the cellist with a spot-on insight. “The cellist is a secondary character,” he said. “Other than the one chapter specifically about him, we don’t get his point of view.” I’d never considered that until he mentioned it. Why does Galloway drop the cellist’s point of view after the first chapter? Tom made the point that the cellist played the adagio partly to erase the war in his own mind. As he said this, I looked again at his fingers and realized that only the nails of his thumbs and first fingers were pointy. They were long enough to be weapons and inmates have been known to file their nails for that purpose. Tom was a lot to take in—an intellect with a hint of the macabre.
“I think the cellist responded to a major act of inhumanity by trying to bring humanity back for other people,” said Dallas.
“Yes,” said Carol and I simultaneously.
The theme of humanity caught on. We talked about another character who seemed already dead—a sour, ungrateful elderly woman who’d lost sight of what Sarajevo had once been.
“She’s the focal point for other people analyzing their own humanity,” said Tom.
But no one was willing to agree with Carol that Dragan had evolved from looking after his own skin to helping others as he crossed sniper-patrolled streets to get to work at the bakery. When the book club members looked doubtful, Carol reminded them that Dragan had risked his life to drag a corpse from the road before a cameraman could film it. I flipped to the page in my book to jog my memory and found that he was inspired by the selflessness of a female friend who was hit by sniper fire while trying to bring medicine to her mother. Carol made the case that Dragan was trying to keep alive his memory of Sarajevo before the war, as a place of kindness.
“I have to ultimately disagree with that so strongly,” replied Tom. “I don’t believe Dragan made a choice to become a brave person. He was numb.” Nor did he agree with her argument that the characters viewed Sarajevo as a kinder place before the war. He dug in his heels, which prevented Carol from proceeding in her usual vein: inviting the men to see the value of helping others in their own lives.
“Anyone else on this point?” she said, searching faces.
Finally Richard, a middle-aged inmate with thick-lensed black plastic glasses and a madras plaid shirt, who’d earlier said that reading had kept him sane during his many years in prison, introduced a new angle on the humanity question. He asked if anyone had seen the documentary on PBS the previous night about the atrocities committed against women during the siege and about the war crimes tribunals. “I wanted to shout out to the book club members!” he said. “I thought it was interesting the way Galloway’s novel totally avoided the conflict between Muslims and Christians in the region. The documentary showed how they began as neighbours and friends, even intermarrying. But within weeks they were mortal enemies.” I studied Richard’s face, intrigued that he was watching PBS on his TV, because I understood that at Collins Bay, reality TV and movie channels were preferred viewing.
Dallas suggested to Richard that the novelist couldn’t have “painted” religion into the novel because it would have made the story “too political.” “He’s avoiding that and painting it in human terms,” he said. Several of the guys around the table nodded and indicated to Graham that they’d like to speak. He acknowledged them and made a note.
Graham said he hadn’t seen the PBS documentary but he’d heard that the leaders of the Bosnian Serb Army, Radovan Karadzic´ and Ratko Mladic´, who were still at large according to Galloway’s afterword, had been arrested since the novel was published. “Interestingly enough, both of them have been caught now,” he said.
To give the book club members a bit of background on the confusing geopolitics of the siege, Graham had asked Earl to prepare some material on the subject because he had once been a member of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Cyprus. But when Earl had to leave during the adagio, perhaps to meet a visitor, Graham improvised the history lesson himself. “When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence, the Serbs within Bosnia and Herzegovina, if I’m remembering correctly, rose up, with a little backing from their Serb friends next door, and decided that they didn’t want to separate,” said Graham. “And my understanding is they surrounded the city of Sarajevo and basically they shelled the city from the outskirts, from the hills. It went on for four years.They basically devastated the city. And then, if I remember correctly, they split the state in half didn’t they, as part of the settlement?”
“Graham, that’s great!” said Carol, confessing that she had never been able to fully sort out the roots of the conflict. “And it was the longest siege in modern history, surpassing the sieges
of both Stalingrad and Leningrad.”
Graham gave the floor to Richard again. “I wrote something down that Dragan, the baker, said, that I thought was the essence of the book,” said Richard. It was on page 237 of the novel. He read it aloud, a passage that talked about how the city wouldn’t die until its occupants were complacent with the idea of death.
I reflected on siege mentality and how it could change people. It could make you numb, it could make you heartless, or it could make you selfless. It is all about how we choose to live our lives. Richard’s passage was an arresting moment. No one said it directly, but Sarajevo was a prison for those four years. How central that thought must be to the men with long prison terms—not letting the situation define you, not being branded a bad guy forever but someone who was paying his “debt to society” and could redefine himself.
“The heart of the novel,” I said.
What makes The Cellist of Sarajevo so magnetic for book clubs is its many unresolved questions. Even though this was my second time reading the book, I was still confused about why Arrow, the counter-sniper protagonist, would kill the sniper not when he is about to assassinate the cellist, but rather when he is leaning back and smiling, eyes closed, listening to the music. She kills him at a moment when he is expressing his own humanity. Given Galloway’s subtle wording, I wasn’t even sure if it was Arrow who shot him. Carol was equally unsure. We needed other readers to help us sort it out.
Likewise, we needed a good book club debate to sort out who is good and who is bad toward the end of the novel. The men applauded Arrow for refusing to carry out instructions from her new handlers, who want her to randomly assassinate innocent civilians. As Graham said, she reclaimed her humanity in doing so. But even the inmates found it hard to fathom why Arrow, so skilled and well armed, allows those same operatives who had killed her previous handler to target her in the final scene. Was she, as Richard’s passage had said, content to accept death and weary of the fight?