Requiem

by Frances Itani

  Basil, now certain of an upset in routine, is executing tight circles in the front hall. There’s a blur of shades on his haunches as he hurls himself at the door every time I go outside with a load.

  “Hang on, Basil, hang on,” I call out, but he continues to half-whine, half-bark until he hears the words Get in the car, Basil, at which he bolts off the steps, stands panting beside the car until the trunk is open and launches himself from a standing start, up and into the back.

  Because of his odd body shape, it always seems that he won’t get off the ground, but he ends up inside first try. Low and heavy, three feet long, nose to tail, is my hound with the grand name and the heavy paws. He’ll continue to turn circles in the confined space of the car and won’t stop until we’re past the turnoff to the kennels, a road the two of us know well.

  The back has been flattened to give him plenty of room. I’ve thrown in a worn piece of mat, a couple of ragged towels, a bag of dog food, pouches of meat, leash, hide chews, his Kong, a sealed container of water. Most of this is stacked on the floor behind the front seats. There’s more baggage for Basil than there is for me.

  I slide into the car and take a last look at the house. And there is Lena at the front door, her face expressionless. One hand rests against the edge of the door as if she can’t wait to push it shut, the other is at her waist. I know the stance; we were married twenty-six years. Didn’t she say, somewhat mysteriously, that the trip had been put off long enough? When? When did she say that? The trip was postponed so many times. But postponements didn’t stop the subject from coming up. It was clear all along that Lena wanted me to go back. Back meaning farther than Alberta, farther than the homes of my sister and brother in Edmonton, where we have always come to a full stop. Back meaning all the way back, through the Rockies and as far as the inland camp on the Fraser River. Or maybe farther still, to the West Coast and the Pacific, where my own journey began.

  None of this was surprising, given Lena’s penchant for gathering history. She taught the subject at the University of Ottawa and, in her spare time, filled an entire upstairs closet with the genealogical history of her own family—photos and documents of generations that preceded her. Maybe, if asked, Greg will deal with those covered containers someday. But not now. What twenty-year-old is interested in his parents’ family history? All in good time, Lena used to say. Greg might even decide to turn the task over to Lena’s sister and brother. Let them sort it out.

  Of course, it is not Lena at the front door. How could she have had a stroke at the age of forty-nine? It’s difficult not to keep asking the question. How could anyone who is not yet fifty have a stroke? What didn’t we know? Why didn’t she tell me what was going on?

  The front door is firmly closed and locked, the spare key given to Miss Carrie, who, with her diminutive frame, now emerges from her own house next door and stands at the top of her veranda step. She offers a regal wave in farewell. She has thrown some sort of greatcoat over her back, and its weight tips her forward more than usual. She has one hand on her walker and tilts her eyes upwards as if to acknowledge a neck too fragile to support her head and its thickness of white hair. She has declared, in the past, that she is the same age as the stone house she lives in, though she’s never divulged how many years that is. Ninety-something, no further details. The house was inherited from her late father, a General of the Great War, whom she looked after in his old age. Although he’s been dead for decades, his presence fills the house and she still refers to him as “Daddy.” “Mommy” died ten years before “Daddy.” All of this happened before we moved into the neighbourhood. Miss Carrie doesn’t seem to have much ready income apart from her pension, but she is surrounded by ancient furniture and memorabilia. During the seventies, when we bought our house, she adopted us as family and later became an honorary, close-at-hand grandma to Greg when he was born. Now she’s the only “grandmother” he has. When I phoned last night to tell her I was heading west on a sudden trip, she offered to bring in the mail and keep an eye on things, as she usually does.

  “I’m nearly blind,” she’s been saying for two decades. “Blind as an underground mole.” But there isn’t much Miss Carrie doesn’t see. And she insists that she’s capable of checking my house, casting out junk mail, watering indoor plants. She’ll do that with love and care, in the same way she goes outside with a small wooden bucket on summer evenings to water a scraggly maple, which, against odds, has pushed up through cement on city property in front of her house. “Poor tree,” she mutters while she pours water to its roots. “Someone has to help you stay alive.”

  I wave to her now and start to back out of the driveway, feeling that I’m the one who has the eyesight of an underground mole. And it’s impossible not to hear Lena beside me, steering me along.

  “What do you want?” I ask the air inside the car. I even turn my head to the right. Somehow, Basil knows I’m not addressing him. It wouldn’t be the first time the hound reads the human mind.

  What do you? the silence replies.

  Once on the street, my foot drops heavily to the pedal, though it’s not my intention to depart in a roar. Too late. Miss Carrie has seen my lips move before I pull away. She’s caught me talking to myself. Not that she doesn’t do the same. She speaks her thoughts aloud, laughs as she does, makes no apologies.

  She’ll think I’m talking to Basil. Still, I’m distracted. By the belief, momentary as it was, that Lena really was there. First at the door, and then beside me. As vivid and real as she was in my early-morning dream.

  Music blasts from the car radio and I’m on my way. What I hear is a burst of chaos. The middle of something I can’t immediately identify.

  A violent clash of sounds. Notes brought together against their will. Dissonance. And then, I recognize Eroica, first movement. The chaotic climax is reached, followed by pulsing, shrugging, withering steps. I know the symphony in its entirety thanks to Okuma-san, who, for so many years, tried to teach me about grand themes.

  I turn the corner at the end of the street, relieved that Miss Carrie’s house and my own can no longer be seen in the rear-view. Leave it behind. Leave it all behind. Lena’s voice in my head. I’ve read that soon after a loved one dies, the person’s voice will no longer be remembered. But this hasn’t happened to me, not at all. Not even after five months have passed.

  As Eroica continues, I think of Beethoven, who must have known a great deal about chaos and suffering and grand themes. He died in his fifty-seventh year, younger than I am now. What did he know of the human condition to be able to write the last movement of the Ninth Symphony? What did he believe—believe in—when he chose the poetry of Schiller, whose work he so much admired? He declared Schiller to be an “immortal” and worth the trouble of setting his words to music. Oh, you millions! … above the canopy of stars … a loving Father surely must dwell.

  It’s all so bloody complicated. The persistent attempts to put something meaningful on canvas—or into music, or on the page.

  “Sex and death,” Otto said during one of our early meetings to discuss the river project. “Eros, Thanatos. Think of it, Bin. Every book I publish is ultimately about sex and death.”

  But he hasn’t said that since Lena’s funeral. And he’s never mentioned the word love.

  I stop at a light, do my best to shove everything sideways out of mind: my sister’s phone call, First Father asking to see me, the last of the river drawings—due and overdue.

  At my most recent meeting with Otto and Nathan, Otto said, “Could we settle on the middle of June at the latest, Bin? For a final deadline? For the sake of the catalogue? It’ll be stretching things with the show in November, but we can do it—if we all agree. Of course, the last bits and pieces have to be tidied up.”

  Otto, Nathan, myself nodding silently. The solid handshakes that followed. The perpetual need to tidy up.

  Again, I try to clear my head, to focus on the drive ahead, to imagine a destination. But the thought of destina
tion, the word, the sound of it, makes me wonder what my real destination is: The camp? First Father? Final drawings for the show?

  Why am I leaving?

  You’re trying to force things to matter.

  I want to work.

  Which means? A hope that your life will change?

  I have the distinct sensation that despite the wheels of the car rotating as they should, I’m suspended in a kind of punishing no man’s land. I narrow a slit in my mind, try to block everything but the continuing music of Eroica. Grand themes. I’ve lived enough for a lifetime and I’m not an old man yet. But because I’m making an effort not to, I think of Lena again. It’s the Beethoven. One of my favourite pieces is his Leonore Overture III, which reminds me of Lena and not only because of the name. It’s the opening. The extended note. The descending scale that levels in a thickening of darkness. And then, a flute entering from far away, leading up into the light as if announcing its arrival through a long tunnel. Joy rising from an underground spring, that’s the way I hear it. Far and near, far and near. Whatever it was that Beethoven intended, he understood about life setting up patterns. Even so, Leonore transcends pattern, so woven is it with rivers and peaks. Always something hidden and receding. Always the flute, beckoning and bringing a glimmer of light. After that, turmoil, frenzied and exuberant. The breaking of pattern. And then, the notes ascend again. That would be Lena, all of those things. I am the receding part.

  I think of Okuma-san, who shared his knowledge of Beethoven with me. It was his singular passion. Okuma-san, whom I once believed to be old. But anyone over thirty would have appeared old to a child. How could I have known, when I first met him, that he was only in his mid-forties? Numbers meant nothing. Hiroshi and Keiko and I referred to him as the old man who arrived in camp without a family. The man who’d been hiding out in Vancouver, looking after a sick wife. When she died, he came out of hiding and was promptly arrested a block from Powell Street in Japtown, as it was then called. Now, more kindly, more politely known—historically, for the tourists at least—as Japantown. Childless, Okuma-san arrived at our place of internment above the banks of the Fraser two years after everyone else. I could not have understood this at the time, but he must have appeared older than he was because of sadness and grief.

  I shift gears, nose the car up an incline and down again. Realize, with no surprise, that I’ve pointed the car towards the Ottawa River. A detour across the bridge and into nearby Quebec, to an oasis both quiet and turbulent, a place I discovered years ago and to which I often return alone. Not always alone; Lena came with me on several occasions.

  “You always bring me to water,” she once said. “No matter what else you invite me to do or where we do it, we end up walking trails beside a river. Or crossing a bridge and staring down at one.”

  “Maybe,” I replied. I was weighing this as a new idea, wondering if it was true.

  “Remember the Enz?” she said. “When we took Greg to the Black Forest?”

  “I do,” I said. “The tiny river with the large roar.” I was remembering ice formations, horseshoe shapes that clung upside down to branches along the banks. In my mind I saw frosted white against the steel-hard blue of rushing water.

  “And what about wading the length of a river? Being knee-deep in the Nerepis, surrounded by eels?” She shuddered as she brought the memory forward.

  I hadn’t thought about the eels for a long time, thick brown bodies of spawning eels that had come in from the sea and camouflaged the bottom of the shallow Nerepis. When we disturbed them, not knowing they were there—but they were, by the thousands—they reared their heads in rapid, wide-fanned splashes. There was something monstrous, something truly horrifying about the scene. But we had already waded some distance and couldn’t get out of the water for another quarter mile because of the tangle of scrub that had grown to the edges of the riverbank. There was no trail to climb to and no turning back. How could either of us ever forget?

  “There were better places,” said Lena. “The Adirondacks.”

  “The upside-down mountains in the Au Sable. Morning air like polished silver.”

  “Or brooding across a dark surface in the evening,” she said.

  And I thought of shadow. Of shadow and light.

  Now, the sight of the Ottawa River up close brings a surge of old energy. It will be easy to recross and join the main road again before I head for the Trans-Canada Highway. I might do a quick sketch before I officially depart for the West. Make an attempt to capture the spring rage of gathering waters.

  First day out and, already, I want to draw. But this is not about sex and death. Or do I deceive myself? If Otto were present, he would look away, sagely, cautiously. Otto, who has found Miki and who is searching for answers in things Japanese.

  Basil has settled down, knowing we’re safely past the road that leads to the kennels. I glance in the mirror and an exchange takes place—his cheerful, shaggy face greeting my own. The hound’s permanent expression is one of enthusiasm, of being pleased with himself, though he can alter this at will. I’m convinced that he hears sadness, smells detachment, knows grief. Reading my mind again, he sniffs and lowers himself out of sight behind my seat.

  Basil has always preferred Lena’s company to mine—I was born in the year of the dog, she used to say. That has to count for something. Right, Basil? But Basil loves a trip, and he won’t complain about my company. I’ve arranged to drop him off at Kay’s, in any case, once we reach Edmonton, five or six days from now. From there, I’ll travel alone and pick him up on the way back. Kay has a snappy little dog, Diva, who will keep him in line. Diva is half his size, but wicked.

  I turn off the radio. Eroica is over but I don’t know when I stopped paying attention, or whether a subconscious part of me completed the piece. Did I switch to Leonore in my head? I park the car on a dirt road beside a thin stand of poplars. No one is around. Patches of snow have begun to melt into last year’s wild grasses beside the road. Along shore, jagged pieces of ice have been shoved up onto layered shale. I lock the car, zip my jacket and look out over an expanse of river that is both solid and free-flowing at the same time. It’s been a long winter and part of the river is still frozen, even this late in spring. Stray bits and pieces of ice are floating past on the current. Farther upstream, where the river is wider, the surface looks static, the dullest of greys. Close at hand, the smaller floes hold a tint of the palest blue. There must be cracks in the large sheet upstream. I know how fast the current can be. It’s a dark, continuous force, an unending murmur under ice, rushing towards open water.

  I begin to walk in the direction of the current, downriver, towards an elevation of land. There’s an open stretch and I hear the roar of rapids in the distance. The river never freezes over white water there, no matter how cold the winter. Gulls wheel overhead. Basil, immensely pleased at being out of the car so soon, has found enough melting snow to roll in. His long back, his short legs and huge feet make me think of a hairy weight sinking through earth. He’ll follow when he’s ready, good hound that he is. We’ll take our chances on ice balls building up between his pads.

  I walk for ten minutes under low cloud. Follow the path worn down centuries ago by Native Algonquins as they brought their furs to scattered trading posts. The portage was established long before the arrival of the voyageurs, who sought furs and adventure as they headed west, in the opposite direction. I climb the slope that looks out over fast water and ragged shore. At the highest point along the bank, I turn and look back.

  In the short time since I parked the car, the huge grey mass upriver has begun to rotate. After being so tightly lodged all winter, it has made a distinct but sluggish shift, as if the river itself is threatening to turn sideways. Freed at the edges, caught by the current and with nothing to impede it, this vast floe is already picking up speed. I consider running back to the car to get the camera or my sketch pad, one or the other. But if I do, I’ll miss the spectacle that’s about to unfold.
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  I scramble to lower ground and wait. The river is impossibly narrow here, too narrow. The approaching ice will not have enough space to manoeuvre and will have to grind itself against shore. As it approaches, the sound is one of a persistent, slurring mush. Basil has caught up and pauses beside me, alert. He hears it, too.

  First, there is sound. This is the order of things.

  The sheet is wide, its farthest edges a blur. The ground shudders and ice crashes simultaneously through current and against shore, piling up layer after layer of harsh, metallic silt. What first appeared to be slush has become a chain of high, grating hills. Never again will I witness the purity of this shade of blue.

  The immense portion of ice that remains in the water now flows swiftly by, but everything has happened so quickly I have difficulty separating detail. When I step back, I realize how cold I am, and pull up the hood of my jacket. I dig at a heap of newly stacked ice with the heel of my hiking boot and watch the mass explode into hundreds of candled segments, the result of days of sun preparing the melt over the river. Crystals scatter like spears from dismembered chandeliers. One form becomes another and another.

  I know how impossible it would be to try to capture what has just taken place. A light rain is beginning—I can hear and feel the patter of drops on my hood. Gulls fly drunkenly into the wind. Some have begun to lift off the shore in groups of twos and threes, and are about to settle on chunks of ice that have broken away from the main floe and now trail in its wake. Each chunk is no more than a foot or two in breadth; each appears to be specially carved for riding out the waves with a bird on top. And this, before my eyes, is what the gulls now begin to do. They are hitching rides. They even seem to be selecting the best shapes. All for the purpose of partaking in some adolescent feathered rite.