Passages: Welcome Home to Canada

by Michael Ignatieff

  Since the Iron Curtain was parted, I have returned for visits. In some ways I have tried to reclaim a past and a history I had once imagined filled the world.

  I travelled to my grandfather’s birthplace in Bácska, now part of Yugoslavia, or Serbia, close to Hungary’s southern border. I placed flowers on his parents’ graves and sat in the white church where he had first encountered the Transylvanian dragon. I climbed the steep hill to Hunyadvar, the ancient seat of the Hunyadi princes, where my ancestors fought to defend their lord. We had been warrior folk, given to sword fights, fast horses and white-faced women with long brownish tresses. We had always treated dragons with respect.

  I went to Tövis, now in Romania, where we thrived for some four hundred years, and tried to find traces of our once fertile lands.

  In Budapest, I wandered along the Danube, following my grandfather’s footsteps, skirting the Castle, across the bridges from Buda to Pest and back again. I sat in Vörösmarty Square and ate ice cream and chestnut purée in the Gerbaud café. I saluted the Anonymous statue on Margaret Island and studied the blood-coloured portraits of heroic ancestors in the National Gallery. I danced in the middle of Heroes’ Square and flirted with the grim faces of the Millennium Monument’s seven tribal leaders.

  I climbed to the third floor of our old rat-infested apartment building on Rákoczi Street and almost met myself leaping down the wide-angled stairs. I followed myself down to the basement, where there are still woodpiles and coal mounds, but the man whose fingernails had been yanked out doesn’t speak to me any more. When I see him in my dreams, his hands are covered by darkness. He no longer frightens me.

  In Toronto there are no political prisoners whose nails are extracted, and very few people are beaten to death by the police. When someone dies in custody, there are investigations, newspaper reports, tribunals, and sometimes policemen are sent to jail. In Hungary, when someone went to jail, it was best not to mention that person again. It was safest to pretend he or she had never existed. We lived in a Communist dictatorship. When my mother was in jail, we said she was working on the prairies. When my grandfather was jailed, no one asked about him.

  After he had served his time at hard labour, the government allowed him to leave his beloved Hungary. He had agreed to go because he knew he could not remain silent about the regime of terror that ruled the country, and the price one paid for speaking up was to be jailed. He died in exile in New Zealand.

  I grew up in New Zealand.

  It’s one of the world’s most beautiful countries, with mountains and pastures, endless ocean vistas, noisy, colourful birds, hot springs and icefields. I think of it as verdant and terrifying in a way Hungary wasn’t. In New Zealand, I was scared of being alone. I was alone most of the time. I didn’t adapt well to the change. Nor did I ever feel welcome or wanted. New Zealand, though it may be the most beautiful place in the world, is not hospitable for exiles.

  When I go back now, I meet myself swinging down the street in Christchurch, and think about the person I might be, had I stayed and kept trying to fit in. I would most certainly own a good bicycle. I used to ride an old, paint-peeling, bent-handlebarred bike from Ainsley Terrace on the river Avon. I had to stand on the pedals to brake. Once, I was arrested for borrowing another bike—well, I suppose it did seem like theft—and I was charged and fingerprinted. The police sergeant thought I would be frightened by the procedure. “Have you ever been inside a jail before?” he asked me portentously. “Have you ever been in an interrogation room?” I shook my head. No sense in telling him the truth.

  Early mornings, I used to pedal to the Princess Margaret Hospital to clean toilets and walls. I would be up at four and out the door in half an hour, dreading the long bike ride along the Avon. I remember keeping to the middle of the half-lit street, away from the shadows cast by the weaving willows. I hated my light green uniform because a Hungarian soothsayer gypsy woman had warned me once to stay away from green. She had insisted that green was my unlucky colour.

  I had become rather fond of one of the old ladies on the “mental ward.” Most days she would take my face between her dry-fingered hands and tell me what she could see. “There is a scar that starts just here, under your hairline, and it runs across your nose and down to your mouth, catches the corner. It’s hard for you to smile, isn’t it, dear? Such an angry red scar.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” I would tell her, but she knew better. She smiled her sad, lopsided smile. She had a scar too, and she didn’t think there was time for it to heal. She was too old; her skin had lost its resilience. “You have time, though,” she reassured me. I was eighteen years old. I was studying English literature. I had discovered Milton, Shakespeare, Auden, T.S. Eliot, Shelley, Keats and Blake. That may have been what took me to England.

  I had really wanted to love London. When I arrived, broke and anxious for work, I thought London put Budapest to shame: this was a great city. I fed pigeons in Trafalgar Square, checked out the stores on King’s Road, walked both sides of the Thames, stood in line for student tickets at the galleries, climbed the narrow staircases of the Tower, read history, ate Wimpy burgers, drank G & T’s and warm beer in pubs. I read Dickens, Smollett, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Thackeray, Hardy, E.M. Forster, Henry James, Christopher Isherwood. I saw my first Shakespeare play and finally understood why Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy and Measure for Measure is not.

  Determined not to wash toilets any more, I lied my way into a job at Cassell. There was just enough pay for a fifth of a basement flat, but at least I was in publishing, and I knew my grandfather would approve. The flat was shared by Kiwis (as New Zealanders called themselves) and Aussies. We took turns in the bathtub, each person’s water becoming progressively colder. We couldn’t afford more than one tubful of hot water each day.

  London was an adventure, not a home. Though I had grown to love their literature, I felt hopelessly foreign amongst the English. When I read George Mikes’s How to Be an Alien, I knew why.

  Visiting London now, I can see myself walking up Kensington Church Street to Notting Hill tube station. By now, I imagine, I have a brown speckled umbrella, and it’s opened. I wear a brown mac and have a rolled newspaper under my arm. I gaze at my reflection in the shop windows along Oxford Street; I am still trying to fit in. I catch sight of myself, too, in the Red Lion pub near Marble Arch, where I used to hang out with the salespeople from Collier Macmillan. I am trying to sound English, dyeing my hair purple and wearing black vinyl boots or button-down cardigans and scratchy brown hose, thinking of becoming a writer but travelling too much to write.

  When I lived in London, I was always travelling, coming back ready for the next trip. I think even then I was looking for a place where I could stay. I saw most of Scotland, as well as every university town in England, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. I talked with the ghostly friar in Trondheim cathedral, fed the goldfish in the pond of Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, fished off a houseboat along the coast, near Lund and got drunk on Polish vodka at the Majestic in Helsinki. I doubt I would have married—never there long enough to get to know anybody.

  After London I tried Peru, but the poverty was so intense I couldn’t sleep nights, and I almost died of typhus. There was something about the cool marble floors of the mansion in Miraflores that made me homesick for the bug-infested home I had shared with my grandparents and my mother in Budapest. A woman in rags near Machu Picchu offered me her baby, and I was afraid to touch it because it was covered in oozing sores. In the end, I felt so guilty about neither dying of hunger nor being able to stop anyone else from doing so that I had no regrets left over for the lovely man I had gone to visit.

  I arrived in Canada at the beginning of winter. I was carrying a New Zealand passport, a British work permit, an American publisher’s guarantee of work, a letter of introduction to a Canadian journalist from a British character actor who had distinguished himself playing a Dalek on Doctor Who, a blue suitcase with everything I owned, and a sens
e of foreboding. I checked into the Royal York Hotel in Toronto and studied the wallpaper overnight. A series of green and yellow hunting scenes. Some blue sky. The operator crackled with delight when I asked her to “knock me up in the morning.” She’d heard the British expression before, but it hadn’t ceased to amuse her.

  At 7 A.M. there was no blue sky over Toronto. The trees along Front Street were bare, there was a jagged, gusty wind the doorman said came off the lake, scrunched newspapers flew along the sidewalk. Everything seemed grey. In a small park, on a bench, a man wearing a green army greatcoat offered to share his sandwich with me. “You’re gonna be mighty cold in that short dress, young lady.”

  An Indian woman in a drugstore near University Avenue told me where to buy something to cover my head. “This wind,” she said, “is cold enough to make you deaf.” She admired my white boots and guessed I had come from England. “You should have come last year for Expo. What an adventure. We had millions of visitors. My parents came all the way from Delhi.”

  The first person I met in the publisher’s office helped me find the apartments-to-share ads in The Toronto Star and gave me two pillows, a mattress and sheets. My new boss took me on a bar crawl that included a big old place way up Yonge Street, the Brunswick House on Bloor Street East and, at mid-town, the Barmaid’s Arms. “Not enough pubs here for what you’re used to, but the bars are grand.” He was in his fifties, sturdy, blue-eyed, had been in the navy, played piano, sang ballads and old navy songs. I knew all the words to “Farewell to Nova Scotia” before I found out where Nova Scotia was.

  My roommate had been born in Toronto, but her parents were English. She longed to visit “the old country” and loved what she thought was my puffy English accent. “That’s a bit of New Zealand twang now and then, isn’t it?” I hadn’t mentioned I was Hungarian. In Christchurch, Hungarian meant lousy foreigner; in London, bloody alien, with the hint that one was breathing air meant for the English. I hadn’t yet worked out what it meant in Canada.

  My letter of introduction produced a sumptuous meal at a King Street eatery and an English journalist who told me he would never live anywhere else but here. He talked about Pierre Trudeau, who was about to become prime minister, and the people at Toronto city hall who were going to give new meaning to “participatory democracy.” They planned to stop development at the core of Toronto; they knew what made for a great city, and it wasn’t expressways, it was people.

  Long before it was summer I had decided this place was warm enough to stay a while. By then I was working for Jack McClelland, Canadian publishing legend, lover of fine writing and Scotch whisky, rakish World War II hero, self-deprecating boy-man with all the charm and enthusiasm of Rhett Butler in his finest moments. He thought I should learn about Canada by reading Canadian writers. Besides, he pointed out, his company was called “The Canadian Publishers,” and how the hell would I manage in the editorial department if I knew nothing about the country? “It’s the price of admission,” he claimed.

  I began with Gabrielle Roy, whose strong, isolated heroines spoke of loneliness and betrayal. I went on to Lucy Maud Montgomery and the Anne of Green Gables books, so much less challenging than Roy but pleasant enough, and I determined to go to Prince Edward Island right after I had breathed in the scent of the tall grass on Roy’s Prairies. Stephen Leacock proved to be a cheerful if often acerbic companion through the next couple of evenings, then I took off for the Arctic with Farley Mowat and Halifax with Thomas Raddall. I struggled through Frederick Philip Grove, and told Jack I found him plodding and difficult. He suggested I abandon the effort and read Margaret Laurence instead. I had already read A Jest of God in England but hadn’t known she was Canadian. I stayed up nights reading everything else she had written. Then it was Earle Birney, from “David” to the newest Selected Poems, and Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Brian Moore, Peter Newman, Pierre Berton.

  I discovered Yorkville in its late sixties folk music glory, and Kensington Market, where a Hungarian delicatessen sold Debreceni sausages next to Chinese fruit stores and used clothing boutiques. I hiked the ravines and explored the lakeshore near the Scarborough Bluffs.

  Around this time, McClelland and Stewart’s editorial department was ghosting a textbook on Canadian history by a well-liked teacher. We had been promised a province-wide book purchase if we submitted the manuscript within two weeks. The problem was, the teacher couldn’t write. There were four of us working on creating a manuscript from notes he had produced. My chapters owed considerable credit (unacknowledged to this day) to Pierre Berton, Peter Newman and the most recent addition to my nighttime Canadiana reading, Donald Creighton. “The real Dean of Canadian history,” Jack had called him, but I enjoyed Berton’s stories much more than Creighton’s.

  The first Pierre Berton manuscript I read was The National Dream. Then I worked backwards through Klondike and The Smug Minority. In person Berton was intimidating, too large, too solid; he proclaimed rather than talked. But he was thunderously enthusiastic about stories—all-Canadian tales with quirky, wild-eyed heroes and men who believed that just about anything could be done if you put your mind to it.

  Then I graduated to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and The Incomparable Atuk. I fell in love with Mordecai Richler. I laughed through most of those novels. “Jack, you didn’t tell me Canadian writers were funny!”

  “Funny? Wait till you read Cocksure—you’ve just been in London, right?”

  In person, Richler was rumpled and grumpy, but I learnt how to sit quietly with him in the Roof Bar of the Park Plaza Hotel, trying to match him drink for drink until he began to talk to me. “Are you sure you want to be in publishing?” he asked. “Can’t see why.” But when his manuscript for St. Urbain’s Horseman landed at McClelland and Stewart, he actually asked me what I thought.

  I read Margaret Atwood’s poetry and her first fiction manuscript, The Edible Woman. When I met her, I was amazed at how small and fragile she was for a woman with such a powerful and uncompromising voice. She wore a long skirt made of some thin material and a shawl over her head against the cold. Her editor, Pamela Fry, told me Atwood might read my palm. In a small coffee shop on Yorkville she looked at my hand, but it was too dark to see, she said. Maybe another time. I was quite sure she had seen nothing remarkable and decided to spare me. I was beginning to think that most Canadians were kinder than other people I had met on my travels.

  Earle Birney was in his late sixties when he loped into the office demanding to see the young woman Jack McClelland had dared put in charge of his newest book of poems. He was tall, thin, almost gaunt, with sparse white hair, a beard that left his chin naked, and long, strong-fingered hands that grabbed the edge of the desk as he examined my face for signs of trepidation. The truth is I could not be frightened by a man who had written poems (“I call them pomes,” he said. “Poetry is pretentious.”) that ran in circles and squares, that leapt off the edge of the page, formed chairs, buildings, even the Alaska Passage. “It is meant to be spoken. Maybe sung.” Pomes shouldn’t lie dead on the paper.

  Earle had seen the whole country. He spoke of False Creek and the lights over Vancouver, the High Rockies, Newfoundland, Winnipeg and Nova Scotia, and even, lovingly, of Toronto. He talked of Louis Dudek, A.M. Klein, Paul Hiebert (he thought Sarah Binks was fine), Robertson Davies, Ralph Gustafson, Eric Nicol, George Woodcock, and the drunken binges that almost destroyed Under the Volcano. He had travelled the world, written about the Delhi Road, Cuzco, Cartagena, Kyoto, Greece, met Trotsky, survived the war as a rebellious good soldier and turned the experience into his hilarious Turvey. “He reminds me,” I told Earle, “of the good soldier Schweik.” “And so he should,” he said. Turvey, Schweik and, later, Hawkeye were cut from the same cloth.

  Irving Layton, exuberant, leonine, booming his prophetic warnings at an ever-appreciative world, told me he was born circumcised and might, in time, turn out to be the real Messiah. It was 1970, and he was in love with Aviva and in love with life. H
e wrote poems he believed would change the world. “Poets err or they lie. / Poems do not give us the truth but / Reveal like lightning the / forked road that leads us to it.” My grandfather had said that only poets know the truth; that dictators, if they are smart, imprison poets first because they are the ones who know and can tell.

  Irving was the picture-perfect poet. He could see through man-made fog and detect what people really believed. His erotic love poems shocked the prudish. He raged against injustice, anti-Semites, Communists who jailed writers, the Russian empire that had silenced Osip Mandelshtahm, the narrow-minded, the pitiless, the self-righteous, the categorical, the “rat-faced cunning mercers,” men whose worlds were built entirely of money, hypocrites, and those who had never read a poem.

  He gave me “For Anna,” in a restaurant on Yorkville:

  You wanted the perfect setting

  for your old-world beauty, post-war Hungarian:

  a downtown Toronto bar sleazy

  with young whores pimps small-time racketeers

  Remembering boyhood Xmases in Elmira

  plus one poet pissed to the gills

  by turns raving like an acidhead

  then suddenly silent like the inside of a glass.

  I debated with Farley Mowat about his book on Siberia and the true nature of Russian communism, about Stalin’s heritage. His Never Cry Wolf had become such a trail blazing best-seller in the Soviet Union, he was convinced the system would work, given time and trust. I wasn’t. I was afraid to tell him about the young Russian soldier I had watched die in Budapest, and didn’t mention my experiments with firing a machine gun. The sun was too bright that day in Port Hope, and he was too ecstatic about the Russians he had met.