Barely three weeks before I’d felt exactly the same way. I knew the threat was there but somehow it lacked imperative. It was hard to understand now how I could have been so blasé about my own annihilation. If someone had held a gun to my head, I would have run screaming, but twenty thousand guns had had no effect. Were we all hypnotized? Was there something in the water? Yet if not for Sonia and Dr. Caldicott, I would still be carrying on like my mother was. “Don’t you get it?” I said. “Holidays don’t matter any more! There might never be another Christmas!”
The way she looked at me I wondered if I’d actually gotten through to her.
On Christmas Eve we played Scrabble. My father joined us in a game and, according to tradition, stormed off in a huff when we laughed at his spelling. Later he always crept back asking, “Who’s the smartest girl on Earth?” Being smart wasn’t enough now. I would need to be brave. I thought of Sonia practising bravery at the stove; so would I, in my own way. Mummied in outerwear, I went out to run a hurried loop around our cul-desac. The street lights cast their sequins on the shovelled driveways and the fresh snow crackled under my boots. In Russian the vocabulary for winter is immense. There are three words for blizzard, two for a hole in the ice. Single words that mean a thin layer of slippery ice, or newly fallen snow, or a frozen snow crust. It was minus thirty-one degrees and every painful breath I took asked me if I seriously wished to live. Yes, I exhaled. Yes!
Two days later, at the bus depot, my father gave his spiel. The horse, the dog, the gun. My mother cried and so did I.
I was sure I’d never see them again.
I thought I would have the house to myself when I returned, but as it happened Dieter had come back early from Saskatchewan to fill the sink with unwashed dishes and the compost bowl with rotting matter. Reagan hung flaccidly from his eye socket, face to the wall, disgusted by the sight. I knew Dieter was responsible because when I went upstairs I heard him laughing with a girl behind his closed bedroom door. Given his tireless pursuit of Sonia, I decided he was more of a Marxist-pacifist-hypocrite than anything else he claimed to be.
I hadn’t slept a minute of the overnight bus trip so, as soon as I got in, I went to bed for the rest of the day. When I woke, it was to darkness and voices and music downstairs. I would have preferred to avoid Dieter and his paramour, but hunger made our meeting inevitable.
Only the girl was there when I went down, looking through the cupboards, a patterned scarf turbaned around her head. The music was Pete’s, CCR. It was his boom box, too, on the counter. The girl gasped when she saw me. “Where did you come from?”
“Upstairs,” I said.
“Have you been here all along?”
I nodded, pulling a bag of perogies from the freezer. She opened another cupboard and spoke hollowly into it. “I’m making a stir-fry. Do you want to eat with us?”
“No thanks.”
“Don’t you remember me? We met at the film.” I turned and the pale blue guilt in her eyes washed over me. “Ruth,” she said.
At that moment Pete walked in from the deck. After not seeing him for a week, I was freshly struck by the oxymoron. He was a commanding anarchist. “Zed! You’re back!”
“She’s been here all along,” Ruth said.
“Where’s Dieter?” I asked, though it was obvious now that he was still in Saskatchewan.
“How should I know?” Pete turned to Ruth. “Bye-bye.”
“I’m making a stir-fry,” Ruth said.
“No, no. Time to go. Zed’s here now.”
“Don’t mind me,” I said.
“I bought all the stuff,” Ruth said, moistening.
“Take it with you.”
Pete opened the fridge and started shoving bags at her. It took some cajoling to get her out of the house; she was sobbing by the time she left. Meanwhile, I cooked my perogies and sat down to eat them in the kitchen, unable to get to my room because of the drama playing out in the hall. Before Pete closed the front door, I heard Ruth ask, “Are you doing it with her too?” I couldn’t believe it. As if I would fall in love with someone like Pete. I’d never fall in love, period.
“What’s for supper?” he asked, coming into the kitchen.
“Stir-fry, I hear.”
“Zed, is this really you? You didn’t talk like this before.” He checked the fridge—“Oh look. She left something”—and sat down across from me, tossing his long hair back. I wasn’t going to say a word about him betraying Belinda, but I felt sorry for Ruth. I told him he was mean.
He bit into the forgotten pepper, shook the seeds into his palm, and pressed them with his tongue. “Why?”
“You hurt her feelings.”
“I did not. I’m not in charge of how she feels. I didn’t make her come here. She came of her own free will.”
“Does Dieter know you used his room?”
“You’re not going to get started on that, are you?”
“You said you were going home.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I asked you if you were going home for Christmas and you said yes.”
“You asked where I was spending Christmas. I live here, Zed. This is my home. Here. With you.” He waited for me to redden before adding, “And the others.” Then he tossed the stem of the pepper across the room, basketting the compost perfectly.
I continued eating, watched by Pete, until I couldn’t stand his canine gaze another minute. “Get a plate then,” I said. “If you can find a clean one.”
After supper I went out to buy more food. I checked the kitty while Pete was at the sink singing along to his boom box, well into the dishes, for which I was unreasonably grateful. Pennies. I didn’t want to ask him to contribute. I didn’t want to give him the impression that I was prepared to eat with him every night.
Later, when I returned from the store, not only had he finished the dishes, he’d emptied the compost. I went up to my room and, as I was passing the bathroom, Pete called to me. “Zed?” I stopped in the doorway. He was lying in the tub, reclining in its clawfoot embrace, a veil of steam hanging around him, concealing nothing. “What?” I quavered.
“Bring my boom box up from the kitchen?”
I did that for him. I went downstairs, unplugged it, and brought it up.
“Great. Can you plug it in?” A long, dripping arm pointed to the outlet. I sidled in, keeping my back to him.
“Do you want me to turn it on?”
“Can you get another tape? In my room. There’s a box.”
I crossed the hall. His books were still homeless, walls bare, sleeping bag balled up on his foamie, the cassettes in yet another milk crate. “Which one?” I called.
“I don’t know. Read them to me.”
They were all dubs with handwritten labels, mostly music from the sixties and early seventies. He was always lamenting he’d been born too late, that his prime was wasted on the eighties. The surprise was that he had Mozart. He settled on Hendrix.
“Jimi lived here, did you know that?”
“No.” I fed the cassette to the machine, snapped closed its plastic mouth.
“His father was born here. Imagine. A black person in Vancouver.”
“There are Chinese,” I said in defence of my adopted city.
“Fuck the Chinese. I’m moving to Seattle when I graduate.”
Crouched over the box, my back turned, I awaited further instructions. “Should I turn it on?”
“What do you know about Kropotkin?”
I glanced over my shoulder.
“I take that to mean nothing. You’re studying Russian and they don’t teach you about Peter Kropotkin? What about Bakunin? He was Russian too. What? No Bakunin either?” Pete slid down the sloped back of the tub and disappeared from view. While he was underwater releasing his intermittent glubs, I could have escaped, but I felt compelled to stay and see what he would do next, which was burst through the surface, gasping, the smooth planes of his face streaming. He tossed his head, splattering droplet
s across the wall. “UBC sucks. Sit down.”
If I stayed low on the floor, he’d be higher and all I would see of him would be his head and arms and shoulders above the tub’s rim. I could pretend he wasn’t naked. What did I even know about anarchism, he asked. I’d read what he’d written on the origami cranes. I knew, though roughly (Slavonic Studies 105 had been a survey course), that anarchists were scurrying around nineteenth-century Russia with all those nihilists and revolutionaries. It was a time of social upheaval, of government repression, revolutionary cells, and political assassinations.
Pete said, “That bomb stuff is such a stereotype. Genuine anarchism is peaceful. It’s about community.”
“But there aren’t any rules, right?”
“In the sense that I’m not going to tell you how to act, that’s correct.”
“But if everybody just acts however he wants?”
“What business is it of anybody else’s how I act? I’m accountable to my personal conscience, that’s all.”
It struck me that he might be talking about Ruth, and I blushed. “What if a person doesn’t have a conscience?” I asked.
He ran a disdainful hand down his face, as though he expected a more sophisticated argument from me. “Obviously that’s not going to work. You have to constantly balance your own desires with the good of the community. That’s just common sense. More than common sense. It’s survival. Kropotkin had a theory. Social animals engaging in mutual protection, not competition, maintain the species. What are humans? Social animals. What does this say about us? That we are doomed unless we organize ourselves into harmonious, decentralized, voluntary associations. In other words, anarchism is our natural state and we are fallen creatures, Zed.”
“Were you named after him?”
“Who?”
“Kropotkin. You said his name was Peter.”
He looked truly shocked. “Oh, sure. My father thought, ‘After whom shall I name my first-born son? I know. An anarchist.’”
He spoke so venomously I had to ask what his father did. “He rapes the earth,” Pete said. Then he just sat there in the water staring straight ahead for a full minute before he thought to ask what mine did.
“He fixes appliances.”
“That’s noble.”
Pete lay back. A pink foot rose out of the water and started snuffling blindly for the faucet. I made a move to leave but he held up a hand until he had shut the water off. I couldn’t help thinking of a chimpanzee or a raccoon—other social animals that perform tasks with their feet.
“You’re nice to talk to, Zed.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s a compliment. Most people are full of shit.”
I went to the university to study the next day. We’d received a surprise visitation by the sun that week and, though I was tempted to stay above ground and enjoy it, I descended to the stacks where I felt safe. If the bomb fell and I survived (unlikely, but anyway), at least I’d have something to read. At lunch I resurfaced to eat my sandwich in the pruned-back rose garden and, as happened when I occasionally lifted my face out from behind a book, I was startled to find myself in so beautiful a place—Bowen Island, West Vancouver, the North Shore Mountains laid out before me in so breathtaking a panorama I imagined some deity arranging landforms over breakfast, the way you might toy with the salt and pepper shakers and the sugar bowl. Along came Kopanyev, probably on his way from his office in Buchanan Tower to the Faculty Club for lunch, wearing a trench coat and a hat, maybe even a fedora. I wasn’t sure. I just liked the word. I hoped he wouldn’t see me, but as I was the only one around, he did. He came right over and, standing hugely before me, asked, “What do you think? Do I look like KGB agent?”
I was hideously shy in his presence though when I wrote a paper I actually pictured him reading it. I wrote it to him, like a letter, a pismo, hoping for his approval. Now he threw himself down on the bench beside me. “Look!” The view sat in the palm of his outstretched hand. “That makes it all worthwhile, ya? Rain. Grey. Depression. Poof! I read your paper.”
I blushed.
“Were you implying he had fetish?”
“No!”
“I didn’t think so. I actually never noticed these feet references, but you are quite right. In ‘Duel’ it’s practically reason they fight.”
I quoted von Koren’s scathing summary of Layevsky’s “moral framework.” “. . . slippers, bathing and coffee early in the morning, then slippers, exercise and conversation; at two, slippers, lunch and booze . . .”
Kopanyev laughed and laughed.
“And von Koren wears yellow shoes!” I said. “I think that’s worse.”
“I do too! I am completely in accord! I would shoot any man first for wearing yellow shoes, second for wearing slippers in street. Then in ‘Three Years,’ like you said, it is heartbreaking, devastating, that he imagines Julia limping on foot he’s kissed. But sometimes it’s just detail. I’m not convinced galoshes have special significance. Half year Russia’s covered in snow, other half in mud.”
“In ‘Man in a Case’ Belikov’s ‘great claim to fame’ was going around in galoshes.”
“Yes.” He stroked his beard. “Anyway, I enjoyed reading it very much.” He bowed forward to peer at my new runners, then lifted his own foot clad in an expensive-looking dress shoe. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say about it so I said nothing.
“How’s Russian coming along?”
“It’s hard.”
“Stick out your tongue.”
“What?”
“Stick out your tongue. Just little. Come on.”
I poked the tip out and retracted it.
“As I thought. It’s much easier if it’s forked.”
When I returned home later in the afternoon, I saw that the next-door neighbour had replaced the stolen statue of the black servant with a vaguely malevolent gnome. When it had actually appeared, I couldn’t say, but this was the first time I’d noticed his red-hatted presence, his pursed, painted lips, and—unbelievable!—yellow shoes. Pete’s car was gone. He didn’t come home that night. Sonia wasn’t coming back until New Year’s Day. While I certainly didn’t miss Dieter, it was depressing to be alone in the house with a menacing plaster figure lurking on the lawn next door.
The Chekhov story I read that night seemed strangely coincidental. “My Life—A Provincial’s Story” is about a young man in conflict with his father over his way of life. The son of a prominent, corrupt architect in a corrupt provincial town, Misail refuses to take the path dictated by his rank. He explains: “The strong should not enslave the weak, the minority must not be parasites on the majority, or leeches forever sucking their blood.” His father despises him for working as a common labourer. Eventually Misail marries the rich daughter of a former employer, and together they move to the country, joining the back-to-the-land-type movement going on in Russia at the time. They set up as farmers but soon the farm and marriage fail. When Misail’s sister, a consumptive whose whole life has been devoted to their tyrannical father, has an affair and becomes pregnant, she too is disowned. Yet Misail goes to see his father and, despite everything, tells him, “I love you and can’t say how sorry I am that we’re so far apart.” The story ends with Misail steadfast in his convictions, raising his orphaned niece alone.
Sad (10), sadly (1), sadness (1); dissatisfied (1); unhappy (1); morose (1), morosely (1); depressed (3), depression (1); despondent (1); miserable (1); gloom (1), gloomy (3); sorrow (2); suffer (1), suffering (2); woe (4); lonely (4), loneliness (1); bore (1), boring (5), boredom (1), bored (6); monotony (1).
Pete showed up the next night and, without explaining his absence, offered to cook me supper. Though I declined (I’d already eaten), I made an effort to sound friendly. I felt I understood him a little better. (Like Misail, he’d gagged on his silver spoon.) I felt I knew something about him. (He secretly loved his father.) It occurred to me, too, that perhaps he didn’t even know this secret thing about himself. Fro
m my desk, new that day—a foldable card table—I could hear his noisy preparations. He even cooked like an anarchist. Banging, chopping, crashing, then smoke from the inevitable bomb of burning garlic.
Half an hour later he stomped up the stairs. “Come out with me, Zed,” he called through the door.
I got up and opened it. “Where?”
“I’ve got to do something. Right now. I promise it’ll be fun. Can you drive?”
“Yes.”
“Really? You’re full of surprises, Zed. Here.” He tossed the keys.
I had learned the previous summer, but hadn’t been behind a wheel since. Pete got in the passenger side and helped me move the bench seat forward. I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs. “Where are we going?”
“We’ll stick close to home tonight.”
“Why can’t you drive?”
“It’ll be easier if you do. I’m going to keep hopping out.” He began unloading things from his backpack onto the dashboard—Ronald Reagan mask, snaggled towel, a piece of manilla tag with letters cut out.
“You should drive,” I said.
Pete pointed to Kropotkin in his dress dangling from the rear-view mirror, as though that might bolster me. We both laughed and, strangely, I did feel braver. I started the car, turned on the wipers to clear the windshield. I shoulder-checked. Each of these steps I named and ticked off in my mind. Behind us, the wet street shone under the street lights, all our neighbours home, their curtains open, the light from their televisions blueing their living rooms. No sooner had I pulled from the curb when I braked, startled by the feel of the vehicle obeying me. We were tossed forward, and Pete, tucking his hair up under the rubber mask, struck the dashboard.
Then I was driving straight down the middle of the street, slower than a jog. From the corner of my eye I saw him remove an aerosol can from his pack. The little ball rattled as he shook it. “Are you going to deface something?”
His voice came out rubbery. “Zed. What a nasty mind you have.”
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