The Mazovia Legacy

by Michael E. Rose

  The red flashers on their van had pulsed endlessly into the house through all the windows that overlooked the street. The lights had also pulsed blood-red onto the snow and onto the shoulders of the few neighbours who peered out from their chilly verandahs to see what could possibly have happened at Number 12.

  But the police had not been the first there, as Natalia had been. They had not been first to see the frail old body face down in the water, in the ghastly blood-reddened water. They had not seen one old weathered foot askew over the edge of the tub.

  They had not waited as the men from the morgue, in cheap business suits and rubber galoshes, loaded Uncle Stanislaw’s body into a zippered plastic bag and into their discreetly marked silvergrey van to be taken away somewhere far from his home. They could not feel what she felt, sitting afterward in the silence of her dead uncle’s house, silent except for the ticking of his beloved old clock. There was nothing in her psychologist’s training or her personal history to prepare her for this.

  Psychologists are good at enduring other people’s pain. Despite her having been the child of immigrants who had suffered in the war, she herself had not had to face down much grief in her lifetime. Once only, one other tragedy before this — when her parents had died in an accident. But she had been still only a girl when that tragedy happened. She experienced grief then, of course, but it was a child’s grief and over the years it had transformed itself into a compact burden that she now simply carried with her everywhere. That burden of grief did not interfere with her life anymore, not her conscious life in any case.

  And that time there had been Uncle Stanislaw and Aunt Margot to run to. They soaked up her girl’s tears and grief and helped her through to the other side. This time, that little surrogate family was gone. Now she was left with only her own psychic resources to deal with the shock of what she had seen. She knew that this would take her, as all things psychic took her, a very long time. So now she merely sat quietly in her uncle’s favourite chair doing nothing, to let her mind examine all the images she had just been forced to witness, to think all the thoughts that went rushing through, and to feel all the feelings that erupted from somewhere deep.

  Perhaps most troubling for her, as she sat trying to collect herself, was the intense, persistent intuition that her uncle had been murdered.

  She knew that this was irrational. She believed that nothing in Stanislaw’s personal story, nothing in his recent personal story in any case, would make this thought an appropriate response to what the police had assured her was an all too common accident for old people living alone. The intuition came from somewhere else and was also, she suspected, a result of things her conscious mind had perceived, but which her unconscious was only now putting together into different, alarming, patterns.

  The complexity of the intuition built slowly as she sat there. It continued to build as she later sleepwalked through the waking world’s requirements for funeral arrangements, administrative arrangements, and financial arrangements. It continued as she resumed her work, tried to pick up her caseload once again at the clinic, tried to listen to tales of other people’s pain and confusion. But she found herself unable to give that work her full attention. Her capacity for empathy had been diminished.

  Fragments of thoughts about the scene in that Chesterfield Street bathroom began as early as the first night to assail her as somehow, subtly, wrong. She saw in her mind’s eye, for example, the pile of clothes tossed beside the bath, their extremely rumpled condition, the scattered socks and slippers.

  He never threw his clothes on the floor like that, she thought. He was too tidy and proud a man for that. She thought: He never listened to the short wave while he was in the bath. Never. She thought: How could he fall face down into the bath like that? She thought: Why was there blood in the water?

  Of course, the police, when she contacted them later to ask about such matters, had convenient and, on one level, perfectly sensible answers to such questions. They were even willing after the funeral to send two detectives out to her apartment to discuss her concerns — Detective Mario Tremblay and Detective Jean-François Létourneau of the Montreal Urban Community Police Department Homicide Unit. They wore identical clothes, bought, apparently, from identical suppliers of detectives’ suits, overcoats, and scarves. They were a team, their clothes and demeanour said, and this team had seen, madame, some very distressing things in this city over the years.

  Ah oui, c’est vrai, madame, la ville n’est pas comme autrefois, c’est maintenant exactement comme une ville américaine. But madame, they insisted, you must not jump to conclusions about your uncle’s unfortunate death. He was a good man, he lived a long and blameless life, and he slipped and fell one night while getting into his bath.

  Why, then, the blood? she wondered. The two detectives looked at each other sagely as they reassured her. Well, madame, it is something most people never see, blood. But we have seen many such cases and when people fall in the bathtub they often hit their heads as they fall and it is this blood that you saw in the water that night. And, they added, as they folded their notebooks and adjusted their splendid silk scarves, the coroner’s report and the autopsy report said that there was nothing at all louche, nothing unusual, nothing that was inconsistent with an unfortunate household accident. The old gentleman had indeed had some cuts and bruises on his head, but consistent with such a fall. And besides, madame, who would have wanted to kill Monsieur Janovski in any case?

  She watched them through the window as they carefully made their way down her slippery staircase and got into a shiny, oversized, unmarked car that even to her untrained eye was a ludicrously obvious police vehicle. They had looked expectantly around as they got into their car in the snowy street, perhaps behaviour learned from too many years of hoping to be photographed for the Montreal crime tabloids. But this case, they knew, would not be one to attract les journalistes.

  Natalia knew, however, as she watched them drive away that they were wrong. How can they ever know what happened to him that night? she thought. How can they know what madness may have resulted in a murderer entering his house?

  Other intuitions came to her as the days progressed. Nothing has been stolen, madame, you are quite sure? the police had asked. But then one night she sat bolt upright in bed, not long after the funeral, and thought: his address book. It was not beside the telephone where he always kept it. She had dressed and taken a taxi back to the dark, chilly, and too-empty house and searched madly through his papers and his clothes drawers, everywhere, until she was satisfied that it was gone.

  Perdu perhaps, madame, the police had said. Lost. Perhaps Monsieur Janovski was getting forgetful at his age.

  And then there was the phone message, which she listened to over and over again, so many times that she began to worry in the psychologist’s part of her brain that she was displaying compulsive behaviour, that the grief and anxiety were manifesting themselves as obsessional symptoms. But still she listened to it, again and again, even going to the trouble of buying another blank tape for her machine to avoid the risk of this one being erased by mistake.

  “Ah, Natalia. Your famous answering machine,” Stanislaw’s voice said. “You know how much I despise these machines. But this time I will leave you a message. At last you will be happy.”

  How could I be happy, she thought as she listened yet again. How could I ever be happy now?

  “I am sorry you are still away.There is something very important I need to speak to you about when you return. I wanted to tell you there is something, so you would know as soon as you get back.” But what? What did you want to say so badly that you could not have waited until I get back? Why did you not just say what it was?

  “I have been worrying about some important matters these past months and you yourself remarked on this, I know, before you left.” Yes, poor Uncle, yes, you did seem worried about something and I didn’t insist enough that
you tell me what it was. I was too busy thinking about the worries of others rather than of you.

  “So perhaps we could speak just as soon as you get in, please, if that is all right. Could you call me immediately?” He never would say I should call him immediately. Never. That is a word for emergencies.

  “There are matters you should now perhaps know a little about.” What matters? What? What secrets did his heart hold after all those years of life? she wondered. What are these things that I should know a little about? How seldom did I ask him to tell me his story.

  And then there was the most distressing part of all, the part that pierced her to the depths of her soul.

  “And, yes, I should also say, even though you know this, that I love you very much, Natalia, my dear. But you know that, I suppose. I do hope I have never hurt you with my foolish bad temper or my old-fashioned way.” Poor, poor old man, she thought. Poor dear old man. Alone, and speaking into machines instead of to someone he loved and could trust.

  “So good-bye, darling. Stanislaw.” Good-bye, darling Stanislaw. Good-bye.

  *

  The funeral helped her to say good-bye, but the scene itself was full of sorrow and metaphors of sorrow. No funeral in Montreal in midwinter can ever be anything else. The light on the snow was brilliant, but the trees were black and leafless. Lifeless. The headstones at Côte des Neiges Cemetery were dark and the roadways were dark and the coats and hats of the people were dark. And it was very, very cold.

  Puffs of frozen breath came from the mouths of the few mourners who attended. Most of them were from the CBC, some neighbours, and a few old émigré faces she did not readily recognize. The earth from the frozen gravesite had come away in rock-hard brown and black clods, and these were piled beside the black rectangle in the snow where her uncle’s body was to go.

  The priest, in black cassock and overcoat and a pair of black rubber boots that showed below the hems, said the service in French. After the coffin had been lowered, it was impossible to find a few loose grains of earth to toss into the grave, and no one wanted to throw frozen clods noisily against the coffin lid. This is not done at midwinter funerals in Montreal. So the few mourners walked with some difficulty through the snow in their dress-up shoes and boots and stood beside the black cars idling on the roadway. Great plumes of steam trailed out behind the limousines into the clear cold air.

  Natalia had said good-bye to Stanislaw at the funeral, had been glad of the ritual, but she had not said good-bye to her growing certainty that there was more to this death than anyone might ever know.

  Some days after the funeral, she had a dream that confirmed this to her in the way only a Jungian and an introvert can accept that an intuition is correct. It was this dream that convinced her that she must take steps to discover the truth of the matter, the daylight truth as well as the psychic truth.

  She is running alone in a snow-covered field somewhere in rural Quebec. She is not sure whether she is running urgently to find something or running away from some danger. It is possibly both at once, as is the case in dreams of this nature. The sky is grey, the snow is wet and deep, and the scene is colourless, black and white, as winter days in Quebec can appear to be. She reaches the exact centre of the field and the centre is marked formally, symbolically, by a small rock cairn. She knows that the secret of Stanislaw’s life and of his death lie under that small pile of rocks, but before she begins to dismantle it to see what is underneath, she feels a pressure building in her head, a strangely intense pressure which, she fears as she sleeps and dreams this dream, might cause her head to explode. She links her hands over her head, pressing hard against the skull and squeezing her eyes shut, and she feels the cool strands of her hair against her ungloved palms. And in the dream she thinks: I already know what this is about. I have always known what this is about.

  When she woke up she was shivering, badly chilled by the sweat cooling on her skin. Even the extra blanket she pulled over herself before going back to sleep had not taken away that chill when morning came.

  Chapter 3

  In the end, it was the beginning that was important. And the beginning for Francis Delaney came on a damp February day in Montreal in the form of an unexpected telephone call from Natalia Janovski. It would be fair to say that a call from Natalia Janovski was among the last things he was expecting at that stage of his life. Not that there had been no connection between them in the past. His unease when she called was in the forced recollection that there had been any connection between them in the first place, and that he had been the one to seek it.

  Delaney leaned back in his swivel chair after he hung up the telephone and put his feet up on the giant uncluttered desk where he had been doing far too little real work of late. He looked out through the sheet of plate glass that was all that separated him from the ice fog that had covered Montreal for the past several days. Normally, the view from the apartment on the twenty-sixth floor of the stark highrise where he made his home and his office would have been spectacular: sweeping from the slope near McGill University south to the St. Lawrence River and across flat Quebec farmland almost, it seemed, to the U.S. border. Today there was no such view to distract him.

  More than two years after he had made what for him was an astonishingly uncharacteristic move to seek Natalia Janovski’s professional services, she was for some reason now telephoning him. Delaney still felt that his decision to indulge ever so briefly in what Natalia had insisted then on calling an “exploration” of his troubled sleep and his intense, chaotic dreams was simply a bit of mid-life foolishness, best forgotten. But now, as he sat thinking about her telephone call, all of the feelings from that time came flooding back.

  The truth of the matter was that Delaney still felt embarrassed by his decision to cast aside for a time the public persona of no-nonsense investigative journalist and seek the services of a psychologist, and a Jungian at that.

  Something urgent to discuss, Natalia had said, in the ever so slight accent of a daughter of European immigrants. Nothing whatever to do with their previous professional relationship. Could they perhaps meet soon? Her reticence reminded him a little of how he had sounded when he first called her. Wondering if he might come in to see her, to talk over a few things. Aware of her reputation, highly recommended. Had always had an intellectual interest in Jung, in that sort of psychology. Could they perhaps meet soon?

  He had stopped short, at the time, of staking out the journalist’s best-loved escape route — that of making contact under the pretext of preparing an article, or seeking background information. The fact of the matter was that he had wanted to talk to her as a therapist and he didn’t try to conceal that from her in their first conversation.

  His choice of a Jungian had seemed natural, given the unlikely premise that he would seek out a psychologist at all. He had, even though he did not play this journalist’s card in his first call to Natalia, done some feature stories many years before, when he was still in the mainstream of daily journalism, about competing schools of psychology and the therapy industry in Montreal. He had found Jung’s ideas attractive, for reasons perhaps best known only to his unconscious.

  The articles he had eventually produced, however, did not betray that aspect of himself. His stories in that period rarely did. They were typical of the sorts of short, sharp stories that ambitious young feature writers early in their careers might put together. Thankfully, all that angling for big play in the newspapers, the scrambling for position in the media game, was no longer required. Delaney was assured now of prominent play no matter what he wrote, and for the subjects of his own choosing. He was no longer making a name for himself.That work was done.

  Jungian psychology had also come up occasionally in his days, an even longer time ago, at Loyola College. It seemed a natural thing for some of the younger lecturers and the hip Jesuits at the universi ty in those days at the very end of the 1960s to be reading such work and to be sh
aring their excitement about this Swiss psychologist who had taken religion and the spirit and their manifestation in dreams so seriously.They had found Jung’s notion of the Shadow archetype particularly useful, it seemed, in imagining causes for the evil that Catholics worried about so often.

  Any interest in matters of the spirit and in things irrational, however, had been quickly beaten from Delaney’s consciousness by the work he started to do after leaving the university and that he still did, some twenty years later. But as he turned forty and found himself in the state of psychic confusion that plagues so many men at that unfortunate age, he allowed himself to slip ever so briefly back into the openness for such things which pre-dated the intensely extraverted work he had done on the streets of Montreal as a police reporter, then as a feature writer, then covering the intricacies of Quebec, Canadian, and eventually international politics.

  His career had built itself, in Delaney’s view. He took no credit for what he saw as accidental successes in his political reporting, or as a war correspondent, or, most recently, as a so-called investigative journalist. Exposer of secrets, so-called. Writer of weighty, worldly books on corruption and political intrigue. So-called. He was not deluded by such labels.

  In the course of his work the opportunities for introversion had slowly but steadily receded. Hard, he thought as he sat and considered Natalia’s call and all that it had stirred up, to be an introvert while trying to avoid Contra bullets in Nicaragua or dodging mortar fire in Grenada. Still, that fortieth birthday had forced introversion and doubt and depression upon him and, in what was not quite panic but perhaps its precursor, he had contacted the talented and highly recommended and, as it turned out, the strikingly beautiful Dr. Janovski.