by Edeet Ravel
She nodded and I avoided her eyes, the sad eyes that all this time I’d seen and not seen.
In the car Patrick said, “We used to talk about what if. What if you went blind, would you kill yourself? What if you had to choose between killing yourself and killing an innocent person? And then about how we’d do it, if we had no choice, if there was a nuclear war and it was better to die fast.”
He rubbed his eyes with his left hand as he drove, the way men do, without thinking, without tears. A mime of misery.
It was dark by the time we reached the town. Everything was closed, and the nursery lot was fenced in by wire netting, but in the light of a streetlamp we could make out large bags of earth and a row of potted firs near the wall. The gate was unlocked; it was only a question of tracking down the owner. Go dig my grave, make it wide and deep—
Patrick stopped someone on the street and asked him who owned the nursery and where they lived. We followed the man’s directions to a farmhouse. In front of the house, like oversized lawn ornaments, a scattering of tractors were being their usual tractory selves, and it didn’t matter that Icarus had fallen into the sea. À louer, the sign said. Patrick rang the front doorbell and asked whether he could pay for the bags of earth and one of the fir trees. They didn’t ask why we needed them, they didn’t seem curious or baffled. Who knew what hippies from the city did, or why? We returned to the nursery and loaded the car. We brought the bags to the cottage and then we made a second trip.
On the way back with the second load I asked Patrick to stop the car. “I’m going to be sick,” I said. I rolled down the window and waited for the nausea to pass.
“Fucking bastard,” Patrick said. “He brought the gun with him, he planned everything. Fuck him.”
Rosie was sitting on the steps of the front porch, like a child waiting for her parents. I didn’t ask her if she was all right.
We ripped open the bags and poured earth on the grave. There was always less than we thought once we poured it on the ground. But the grave was deep enough now, with the new earth lying heavily on top of it. We planted the fir tree in the centre and we covered the space around the tree with heavy rocks, a last precaution against predators.
“It looks like a grave,” I said. “Marcel will know.”
Patrick said, “No, it would never occur to him.”
I said, “What if your mother comes up here?”
He said, “She never comes here. And if she did, she’d think we planted a tree. It looks like a tree, that’s all it looks like.”
Patrick said, “We should have a service—something.”
We went inside, to the bookshelf, and took down anthologies, searched for a paragraph or a poem to read at Anthony’s grave. I suggested Housman, but Patrick said, “All that angst,” and Rosie suggested “Dover Beach,” but we both said, “All that angst,” and Patrick suggested “No Man Is An Island” and I said, “Too pedantic,” and in the end we settled on “Fern Hill.”
Patrick read the poem and his voice broke several times. We tried not to cry so that he wouldn’t cry, because we knew he didn’t want to. Then he left to sell Anthony’s jeep.
We were covered with dirt. “I need a shower,” Rosie said.
“Go ahead. I’ll wash in the lake,” I told her.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No,” I said. “No, I want to go by myself.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, not knowing at all. “I need some time to think too. It’s so sad.”
But she wasn’t sad at all. She was exulting in the manifold delights of requited love. Anthony’s death was nothing but a temporary inconvenience, like fog on a rainy day. And now the fog had lifted and she could get on with her new life.
It was very dark by the lake. I stripped and washed the earth off my arms and legs. Then I submerged my jeans and shirt in the water, washed them too.
If I were Karen, I thought, there would not have been suicide, and if someone died because of an accident or because they were sick, there would be a funeral and mourning and forgiveness and recovery. There wouldn’t be deception. If I were Karen, I would have given myself to Anthony and loved him the way he wanted to be loved. That’s what I thought then. But now I know that I was mistaken about that, too, because no one is immune, not Karen and not anyone else, and what I assumed other people had—a simple life—no one has.
I hugged my knees and buried my head in my arms and cried, furiously. Nothing would ever be the same, and I didn’t want it to be the same. They were both wrong about my dream, Vera and Anthony. I was gutted out—that was what the dream meant. I was watching myself lying on a table, my insides removed, and I didn’t much care. And it would be that way from now on.
. . .
Patrick still hadn’t returned by sunrise. Rosie slept downstairs on the sofa, and I climbed into the bed Anthony had crashed on the night he arrived. I wanted to go back in time; I wanted to breathe in all that was left of him. Rosie had caught on—how could she not—and she didn’t try to talk to me, not even to ask what ignorant sin she’d committed. She thought I was upset, and that soon everything would be as it was before; soon she’d be kissing me hello and goodbye and I’d tell her everything and love her fiercely.
And Glenn would understand that I was her best friend, and he’d be happy for her, because you can be devoted to more than one person.
But a mountain of crushed glass had risen between us. As I watched her sleeping on the sofa, I knew I’d refuse to see her again, once we were back in the city, and I told myself she wouldn’t mind, because I’d never been important, I was only another fan, another hanger-on. And she’d been waiting all along for the prince, and the prince had come.
Patrick crept in some time in the morning, but only came as far as the front porch, and neither of us heard him. He left us a note on the porch floor, next to a tin: There’s money for you in the coffee tin. I’ve notified Marcel that we’re leaving. Take a taxi home. Marcel will close the house.
I opened the tin and counted two thousand dollars. I knew by the time I’d finished counting that Patrick was buying us off—that he, too, was going away and not coming back.
Rosie didn’t want the money. “He left it for you, Maya,” she said. She wanted to even things out; she wanted us each to have a gift, and though it wasn’t even, because money is only money, at least it was something. She tried to hug me, but with the expertise that comes of years of practice, I eluded her.
She asked me if she could call Glenn, if that was okay with me, and I said yes, of course. “I’ll never tell him,” she promised. “I’ll keep the secret, even from him.” It was a sacrifice I was in no mood to appreciate. Oh, the blunders of our sad, stupid souls!
We walked to the gas station and phoned him. We told him that Patrick had been called back to town because of a death in the family, and Glenn said he was on his way. We waited by the flea market, our backs pressed against the hot metal. Glenn arrived ten minutes later in the little white car with the four red crescents. He’d told his aunt, Jean-Pierre’s mother, about the emergency, and she insisted he bring us over to their place.
When we stopped at Vera’s cottage to collect our things, Rosie and Glenn moved in a pas de deux, their hands touching whenever they passed each other, a festive mating dance. I couldn’t find anything of Anthony’s, apart from his tie and the drugs. I’d forgotten about the drugs. I dumped them in the trash and draped the tie around my neck. I wanted to bring back some of Vera’s books. No one would read those books here, no one would come back for them. But I didn’t have the heart for it. We dumped our things in the car and drove off, with Glenn at the wheel.
Hunched in the back seat, I considered Patrick’s bequest. I’d be able to move out now. I’d go to Cégep, which was free, and work in the evenings. Start a new life.
The cool layout of plans sustained me all the way home. But when I walked through the doorway of our duplex, everything in it bore down on me—the sallow carpet and br
ittle furniture and dejected canals trapped in hideous gold frames—and above all my mother, my mad mother, who was propelling herself towards me with her usual gasping and wheezing and thrashing.
I turned on her. “It’s your fault, it’s all your fault—you’ve ruined my life!” My voice was shrill, hateful. Her eyes glazed over, her body went limp. I didn’t care—on the contrary, this was exactly what I was trying to say, that she tricked me always out of my life, and even now was trying to trick me out of my moment of reprisal. “You ruined everything, and now look at me, look at what’s happened! I hate you, hate you, hate you!” I wondered, as I lost control, what would hold me back, and why. I wanted to strike her.
Instead, I fled to my room, slammed the door, threw myself on my bed—Anthony’s bed—and sobbed. Between bouts of weeping I was aware of a great deal of movement and clattering outside my room, mostly in the kitchen. When I came out some time later to make myself coffee, I saw that Bubby and my mother had prepared, in an urgent, intimidated hush, all my favourite dishes.
Mourning drains you. I sat down at the table and let my mother pile food on my plate.
—has your heart been broken in love mamaleh—
One might as well be good to one’s parents, I thought. Nothing comes of hurting them except more reasons to feel remorse, unbearable remorse. We were all stuck inside the city of refuge—not just me.
“Yes,” I said. “My heart has been broken in love.”
—poor mamaleh—she muttered, stroking my hair—such a world such a world we live in—
The next day I set out in search of a place to live. Plateau houses were not yet attracting the affluent professionals who have since claimed the neighbourhood, and within hours of apartment-hunting I’d found a beautiful, inexpensive flat—a raft in the midst of calamity.
I longed for beauty. Anthony’s suicide didn’t prevent me from yielding to passion; I wasn’t planning to reduce myself to an automaton. On the contrary, I wanted more than ever to plunge myself into the world of pure, seductive aesthetics—dance and theatre, museums and music, objects and books. Here were finished products with endless possibilities, here were the embowered tapestries the poets liked to imagine when they wrote about art. There she weaves by night and day—I would remain in that bower, not weaving but watching, and there I’d be safe from the unconsummated work-in-progress, the appalling muddle that intimacy turned out to be.
Only my mother wasn’t impressed by the Plateau apartment. She stood on the balcony and shook her head. Who were my neighbours? What if they were delinquents, drunks, criminals? Who would hear me if I cried for help? And the plumbing—the electric wiring—the toilet would overflow, the sockets were unsafe. But Bubby approved, and when we came home after signing the lease, she chose the best linen and blankets for me, the best towels, and stacked them on my bed.
We hired someone’s cousin to move my things: the sleigh bed, my desk, two chairs, a lamp, dishes, books. My mother’s card-playing friends donated other odds and ends: an old sofa, a bridge table, more lamps, and, as if I were not only moving but also losing access to the usual resources, bags of useless clothes.
My mother helped me unpack and subjected every available surface to her soapy sponges. But her efforts were symbolic, for the Greek family who’d lived in the flat before me had scoured it from top to bottom. They’d even left me a tiny cross in the kitchen drawer, for good luck.
I managed, eventually, to send my mother home. I walked her to the bus stop and promised to phone that evening and go over for supper in three or four days. After she left, I took a long bath in the deep claw-foot bathtub. Then I lay in my bed in the strange, lonely flat. Its empty rooms felt as foreign as another language, the prowling remnants of someone else’s story. Between the cool ironed sheets, amidst the smell of apples and soap, I was free to reinvent Anthony’s exit. In my fantasy I turned away from Rosie, asked him why he was carrying a cement bag. I went with him to the forest, talked to him, stroked his arm, hugged him, told him all would be well. You can have love and light here, I said. I made him open his knapsack and fling the gun into the lake. He’d be back in L.A. by now, and Rosie would knock on the door of my new place and come in, and I’d make her tea in a glass. She’d tell me about Glenn and I’d tell her about my plans and we’d hang out.
. . .
It was a good deed, and a bad one. I’m not sorry. We saved Vera, and also Gerald, anguish. But at a cost to ourselves, or to myself, at any rate. Because Rosie could take cover in her newfound love and Patrick could take cover in his intransigence, but I was naked in the icy wind.
—but this is all wrong! Rosie was as windswept, as alone as I was, and I punished her for things that were not her fault. The truth is that I didn’t want that part of myself any more, the part that had loved Rosie and been loved in return, because if not for me, Anthony would be alive.
THE EIGHTH YEAR OF
THE NEW MILLENNIUM,
COMMON ERA
These days my mother lives with Gustav, her former suitor and present husband, in an apartment complex in Côte St. Luc. Squat, brutal, stubbled with concrete balconies, these cement monstrosities appear to have been inspired by an H.G. Wells dystopia—human dwellings for when machines take over. But as soon as one enters the apartments themselves, a magic transformation takes place, and the Fort Knox doors that line the tenebrous halls give way to small oases of comfort and light.
I visit once a week. Gustav and Fanya both greet me with enthusiasm, help me take off my coat, usher me in. An addict of low-volume television, Gustav was a limousine driver in his preretirement days, but his passion was the moonlighting he did, and still does, at The Workmen’s Circle. He’s a slight, tidy, swarthy man with accommodating eyes and a steady disposition. I’ve never seen him eat anything other than Mandelbrot—a relative of biscotti—dipped in tea. Though he’s never been interviewed, he is, remarkably, one of the few children from Korczak’s orphanage who survived the extermination camps.
The minute I enter the little sanctuary, a profound lethargy spreads through me. I sink down on the plush sofa, and my mother enumerates all the items on the Levitsky menu. I nod submissively. At some point during the procession of dishes, I fall into a limp, dreamless sleep. When I wake, I take the elevator down to the pool to swim laps. Sometimes I’m joined by Max, a hollow-chested man who before going into the water dons, with the shamelessness of the elderly, a white spandex bathing cap and state-of-the-art scuba gear. Then I head back upstairs for another carbohydrate-enriched meal, while on the television the mysteries of woodwork are unlocked by a man we can’t exactly hear but who inspires confidence. My mother continues to recount stories of sedition on the part of manufacturers—she calls them corporations, these days—and her victories over them. But Gustav has succeeded in shifting her base of operations, and her narratives are now confined to the present. She no longer mentions the war.
Everyone else mentions the war; the silence has been lifted, replaced by a flood of memory and monuments. A search for information on the Internet yields millions of sites.
I’m interested, now, in my mother’s past, but having trodden those merciless waters for so many years, she’s better off on shore, and I let the past be. Instead, I tell her and Gustav about my life—the sort of people I meet at Sororité, the dramas I watch from the sidelines or hear about at my table. I’m considered a good listener, a safe repository for confessions of harboured resentments or infatuations. “I’m the on-site Mother Superior,” I say, and they chuckle. They chuckle at all my stories; I make them funny. Since I’m not involved in any of them, it’s no effort to take a lighter view. But about Tyen I haven’t breathed a word. I don’t know yet where, among the dramatis personae of this mystery play, she’ll be cast.
In the evening, I return to my place. I bought this triplex with the war reparations that for years had been arriving regularly from Germany. My mother never touched those payments; she thought they were a trick, and that if she with
drew so much as a dollar, uniformed Nazis might spring from behind the counter at the Bank of Montreal and take her away. But a few years after I moved into the flat, the building went up for sale, and I persuaded my mother to release the money for two down payments: the triplex for me, a condo unit for her and Bubby.
Fanya resisted at first, but the Bedford Street neighbourhood had deteriorated, and one evening hoodlums snatched her famous alligator purse. Mrs. Blustein came to my mother’s rescue once more; there was an apartment for sale in the Côte St. Luc building where she lived. Pleased with its immediate availability, the security features, and the idea of a friend close by, my mother overcame her fear of moving house. She gave me custody of her account and asked me to go ahead with both purchases. When the last papers had been signed, Gustav insisted on treating us to a meal at Ruby Foo’s, famous for Cantonese egg rolls, boisterous celebrity diners, and the beautiful silk-clad woman who sold cigarettes on a tray. Bubby, as always, preferred to stay at home, but she was happy about the move, and while we were at the restaurant she baked us an apple cake. That evening we all gathered around the kitchen table in the Bedford Street flat for the last time.
Bubby is gone, of course. If she were alive, she’d be well over a hundred. She was sick for a week, unable to swallow or eat. I came to Intensive Care and said her name, held her smooth, round hand, now shiny and slightly waxy. If she felt my hand on hers or knew I was there, she didn’t respond. An hour later the nurse told me it was over; she’d stopped breathing.
I remembered a story my mother used to tell me. I’d lost the story inside the maelstrom of my mother’s memories and my resistance to those memories, but it resurfaced now. When my father was a baby, my grandmother had taken him with her to visit friends in the country. She left him in the garden, under a tree in bloom. My father lay on his back in his baby carriage, looking up at the white and pink blossoms. Miriam was indoors, having tea, biting into a cookie, when all of a sudden she cried out, He can’t breathe. She ran out to the pram and saw that two petals had fallen on my father’s nose and mouth, and she was right, he couldn’t breathe, he was suffocating.