To have his child.
Alone again, he has returned to the Canadian Embassy several times pushing for permission to emigrate. To join Beth. Telling her of Christina but not of the child. Will she take him back?
He learns three months later that he is a father. Of a child he will never see. A little boy he will not be able to name.
The next day, his visa to Canada is approved. He will see Beth again.
Through Father William, the congregation in Rome offers him the plane ticket for Canada. A United Nations agency lends him three hundred dollars. The Nigerian Embassy gives him another two hundred dollars as a gift. He has saved four hundred more. How far will his money stretch in Canada? He has no idea.
But the puppet master yanking the cords of his fate is also a trickster artist whose deft, quick brushstrokes can fill in a bright life on a huge canvas, where nothing bad happens.
Beth knows from the Canadian government that she must be his official sponsor. She tells him that she has signed the papers. Everything is waiting for him.
He sits alongside Father William and a few friends for a farewell dinner. Ravenously, he eats his way towards a new life. At meal’s end, with the tang of bittersweet limoncello on his lips, he has consumed all the reasons to leave.
Dreaming sweet dreams of snow and mountains, cowboy hats and Indian feathers, red-coated police on horseback, a nameless baby boy.
Beth.
Robert.
Oh Canada.
7. CANADA
A WINDLESS DAY. JULY. 1987. Two rescue workers poke timidly around the twisted metal of a wrecked car. In a field, nearly a mile away from the nearest mountain road.
Devastation in clear light.
“How does a big old Ford, the size of a small tank, get squashed flat as a bug like this,” asks one of the men, in dazed denial of the destruction that was a tornado. He wants not to know the dreadful details his eyes are delivering.
“It’s like something just picked it up and squeezed the life out of it, vacuumed out all the life,” says the other.
“I think I’ve found a body.”
They walk over and stare down. Exchange hushed horror. “He’s completely purple. Every blood vessel must be broken.”
They move closer. Peer into the face of a black man.
“Is he alive?”
“Don’t think so.” A slight moan. A wheeze. Almost a rattle.
“He is still alive. Get on the two-way. We need an ambulance here quickly. Say it’s urgent.”
The call is made. Then they find another body nearby. A woman. Nearly naked. The clothes ripped from her body. Also unconscious but breathing. Clutching a purse. Open.
“I guess the two of them were at it,” says the first man. “Or else it was a hell of a storm.”
“It was a hell of a storm. Worst tornado in the Rockies for four years.”
“Look in her bag. Maybe there’s ID.” They pick at the contents. Find her driver’s licence.
“Angela. Her name is Angela. Looks oriental.”
“Angela, can you hear me? Angela?”
“She’s going to need all the angels she can get to save her.”
The ambulance arrives. She might make it. The prognosis is not so good for him.
For Charles.
Not so good.
“Unknown black male,” the ambulance records say.
Dreaming of angels.
“Angel Lady and The Miracle Man” reads the Edmonton newspaper headline next day. “Two Survive Tornado in Critical Condition.”
But Miracle Man is still in a coma. Lost. Floating through images only he sees. Disconnected. An exhibit on view before anonymous spectators. Behind glass. Exposed to the curious gaze of medical onlookers who read the label on his bed: “Tornado Victim No. 6: No Name.”
In dream he is still a soccer player — dribbling the ball with flashing feet, nimble as a top, flying free and scoring for his team. It is the version of himself he needs.
Slowly, he begins to wake. To speak. But he cannot remember who he is.
“Your name. What is your name?”
“Kampala … Pele….”
Days pass. Moments of semi-consciousness. Hours of confusion. And as Charles starts to wake from this dream, the pain sets in. Intense pain. Excruciating pain. He cannot feel parts of himself.
Doctors intrude on his awareness.
Has he lost his fingers? No feeling. His legs?
He remembers. His sister sliced his finger. He shouts in his head that it was Debra.
Can anyone hear?
He explains the tale of Renga Moi. Then he explains the plot of Amarykiti. But they are not listening. They are circling around him. Ignoring him.
“Can you hear me?” comes the whisper.
Someone’s voice. A woman’s voice. He loves her.
But his wife is Christina, not Beth.
Why can he not speak? Why can he only dream? His wife is Christina. Not Beth.
Edmonton journalists inquire about him regularly. They dub him “Tornado Man,” and “Miracle Man.” Theirs is a morbid, nagging insistence, demanding photos, visual proof that he has survived. Like doubting apostles with fingers in the wounds of some crucified black Christ who has been sliced from neck to navel.
They know he has defied death and want to explore his secret.
He lapses back into coma. And out.
Charles, “Who stands for the Lord,” lies unconscious in a hospital bed.
More than two months pass. During this time he dreams his own legend. A world-class dancer and director of the restored Abafumi Theatre Company. Telling their powerful stories around the globe — of a new Uganda, Africa’s enlightened republic, its political and artistic leader.
Slowly awakening, he gradually sees, can follow simple commands, can hear but he cannot easily move. Nor can he easily recognize people.
An unknown population wanders continuously in and out of his room — rehabilitators of various kinds, occupational therapists, physiotherapists. He lies still in his bed waiting for some moment of recognition that does not come.
He drifts on the soothing sound of voices calling him home.
He hears words now. Coma. Amnesia.
Beth sits vigil beside him, moving when the doctors insist, as they test and re-test a body hung in suspended animation, rigged with tubes and sacks, sucking out and forcing in, collecting. His left leg and right arm hoisted in casts. Head injuries seep.
She watches his beard grow — a heavy black sprouting fed by morphine. She watches her lithe dancing partner swell with body fluids.
“Remember, Charles. Remember the great adventures we had?” she whispers, trying to coax him out of his dream world.
His mind skips easily back in time. Arriving in Canada. Excited. New beginnings.
“Passports please.” Canadian officials in Montreal are polite and efficient. They seem determined to ask the same question over and over. Repetition does not amuse him. Eventually his passport is stamped.
In Canada at last. In the middle of winter.
Charles is travelling with a dozen sponsored refugees on the long flight from Rome. Mostly Africans and Asians, all are bound for Edmonton. Rome to Paris to Montreal. Sixteen hours. They arrive exhausted but exhilarated.
He follows his group onto a bus. Overnight in downtown Montreal and then another plane to Edmonton — four hours further to the west — in the morning.
The bus chugs through the city. Charles is amused at how fluently the driver curses in both French and English. The volubility of life on the streets — the amicable congestion so typical of a port city jostling in high-spirited commercialism — reminds Charles of Mombasa, the noise of market and crate, watery light and movement.
They are deposited at a Holiday Inn. That sounds right. He needs a vacation
and Canada is kindly accommodating him. The group is told that because their stay is on the government, they can charge coffee shop meals to their rooms. They are also allowed one phone call anywhere in Canada using a special telephone code. Charles phones Beth in Edmonton.
Beth is pleased to hear that he has at last arrived. But the distance between them has also translated into strangeness. Their voices barely know each other after so long apart. They have lost their intimacy in this new world.
Restless in his room, too tired to sleep, he watches television all night, willing himself into this other life. He finds Three’s Company, a show he has seen in Rome in clumsily dubbed Italian. The crispness of the program’s humour in its native English wakes him up to its real comedy, the hero’s stunned ineptitude, living with two female roommates and pretending to be some sort of homosexual. Jack is always in trouble but he merely needs to smile and people instantly forgive him.
Soon, thinks Charles cynically, there will be nothing left of him but the smile.
The next morning, in the harsh echoing light of the airport, Charles walks past a black man sweeping the floor. He tries to speak to him but the cleaner knows only French. Drawing down an accustomed cloak of invisibility, the sweeper turns away from this inquiring intruder and resumes his task.
He reads Hollywood gossip headlines in the bookshop. Women and sex scandals. Men and betrayals. He reads that John Wayne has died. His image of the rough, gun-slinging hero. How can John Wayne be dead? He is America.
“Where are you from?” asks the white man seated next to him on the plane bound to Edmonton.
“Uganda.”
A blank response.
“And when did you arrive in Canada?”
“Yesterday. I came from Rome. I am moving to Edmonton. My wife is waiting for me there.”
“Welcome to Canada,” says the man. “I hope it’s not going to be too cold for you. But it’s all part of God’s country.”
God’s country. A strange concept. Uganda was God’s country. Rome was God’s permanent residence. Canada too? Or perhaps God occasionally leaves his home countries, settling where he is needed. God now is apparently resident in western Canada.
His self-appointed welcoming committee buys Charles a beer from the stewardess.
“Tell me about the cold,” he asks.
“You’ll get used to it,” comes the reply.
“I don’t think so,” Charles says with genuine trepidation. “But at least there is no dictator here, no bombs, no torture. And no war.”
Lunch comes, prompting Charles to add, “You know, the food is better than on most of the other airlines.”
He watches a Hollywood comedy on the screen to pass the hours. When it is time to land and he begins to feel the plane level down through the atmosphere, he pushes up his window shade and peers out incredulously. They are flying through swirling snow.
“How is this possible?” he asks, full of awe and alarm. “How can we land in snow? I thought March was spring.”
“Ah, but it is also Alberta,” chuckles his travelling companion through a beery haze. “This is a land of endless winter.”
“Charles. Charles. Here. Here I am.” Beth’s voice greets him as he skips through the gate swinging his luggage and grinning. He peers into the crowd, not recognizing her at first. She is bundled up in a puffy green coat, still furred with snow.
“Welcome to Canada,” she smiles, politely extending her hand.
This is not the Beth he protected in Rome, the girl child who snuggled in bed with him like a quivering new chick through one disaster after another, whose eyes widened like black moons over every grand glory and hidden pleasure of the eternal city.
This is the protective Beth who first led him through the amazing toy town of Amsterdam. He thought he had grown up since then. And this is the scolding Beth, furious with him after his fiasco in Sweden.
He takes her hand and then hugs her very tightly.
Beth kisses him in sisterly fashion, both of them aware of change — invisible as the wind yet palpable. She also knows exactly what to do in this massive airport and where to go. She has become part of this practical, efficient place with its pleasant people who all seem to play their roles, thinks Charles, in some huge unwritten script they carry around in their heads. No one looks lost. Or angry. Or scared. No one seems to be complaining. Not seriously. Everyone has something to do. Things function smoothly.
“Do you like it here?” he asks her, as they wheel the baggage cart past counters of rental cars and hotel kiosks, out into the chill white air.
“It is good here, Charles. You will see. It is safe.”
“Let’s take a limo,” he suggests as they stand shivering at the airport bus stop. “I have money to pay for it.”
“Save your money. You will need it.”
As they board the airport bus and pull out onto the highway, Charles scans the frozen horizon, stares up through the falling snow, feeling as though he might vanish right into it. “It comes down so quietly,” he says. “And the road is so flat,”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s flat around here. But you can get into the mountains pretty quickly. The Rocky Mountains are not far.
“The Rocky Mountains,” he repeats, thinking of what they must look like. After a long and sometimes awkward while, he asks her if she has discovered where the theatre is in Edmonton.
“No,” she says simply. “I have not paid any attention to theatre here. But I hear on the radio about a folk music festival that has free events. There is also a ski festival but I can barely imagine what that involves.”
“We can start a theatre group here,” he says. “We can perform in the summer here and tour in the winter to warmer places. We can make a lot of money.”
“First we should learn to ski,” she tells him. “That may be more useful.”
It is a physical place, he realizes, thinking how Robert might have jogged them through a white freezing wilderness every day, tuning their bodies for performance. “But in the winter, if you want to stay warm, you just have to stay in the underground shopping malls.”
“Oh, that’s very good,” he jokes, giving her a little squeeze. Not sure if she is kidding. And then, as though needing reassurance against the dizzying snow, he says in a serious tone, “Beth, you have changed.”
“I promised I would help you in Canada, Charles, and I will. I am not the same person you knew in Rome. I am not star struck anymore. I work as a cashier now. I am not an actress. That is all in the past. My life is different now. You need to understand that.”
The bus pulls to a stop in front of a huge hotel near the Provincial Legislature. He gazes at buildings perfectly frozen in architectural time, so different from those in Rome, where the new is polished to a high shine and the old is left to crumble and show character. It is dusk now and Edmonton’s buildings glow in amber light. Fields of snow in front of them glittering green and yellow and red from the tiny coloured bulbs wound like ribbon around the sharp needles of pointed fir trees.
They take a taxi to Beth’s apartment, bouncing together on seats that slope toward the centre with the heater at full blast. Charles puts his arm around her. At the first bump, she releases herself casually. The taxi makes an abrupt right from avenue to street and Charles is against her once again.
She looks at him. “Please, Charles. Don’t.”
He moves away.
The taxi stops at 95th Street.
“A very imaginative name,” he says as he struggles out.
It is a squat, square building, neutral grey in the speckling snow, a blurred outline under blank sky. They climb steel stairs to the fourth floor and stop before beige doors.
They enter her small sitting room containing only a sofa and two chrome chairs. Charles sees the door to the bathroom, looks at a corner of the space that could barely contain
the two of them, noticing how slyly it slides into what she calls a kitchenette. Then he spots a tiny hallway leading to the bedroom with its single bed. On the walls, Beth has placed a weaving of long-horned Ankole cattle stooping to drink under hills and clouds beside men in big brimmed hats with tall staffs who tend them.
“You can sleep on the sofa,” she says.
“I thought…”
“No, Charles,” she says
He looks out the window, feels mountains massing against them at the far edge of the land, rumbling up from a wild west coast. They are part of a frightened city huddled close for warmth and visibility in a vast empty landscape.
He has never been able to see so far. Nor felt so blind.
Then he spies the small, still screen. “Oh, you have TV.”
“Not working.”
“Then I will get it fixed.”
They talk into the night. Charles falls asleep on the sofa.
The next morning, Beth is off to work before he wakes. She leaves him instant coffee and a spicy soup. When he wakes, he studies every item in the apartment. An African mask that she has bought in Edmonton. A creaky stove. Refrigerator. Her bed. The small table.
He eats, takes the key she has left him and heads out, the heavy broken television in his arms. She has told him to take it to a store called The Brick where she bought it. He walks out onto the wide, windswept street and hails a taxi. “The Brick,” he says with authority.
“Only one block away,” the Russian accented driver says in a thick deep voice. “Better to walk.”
“I cannot walk in the freezing cold with this.” The taxi driver shakes his head and tells him to get in.
Charles sits in the back seat hugging the set. He cannot believe how cold it is in spring. The cabbie drives the block and refuses the money Charles offers him.
“I was an immigrant too. You need your money more than me. So save up and maybe next time, you call a limo.”
In the store, he is directed to a repair section. Someone checks it and tells him that there is nothing wrong with it.
“The wiring must have been connected wrong in the house.” He is shown which wire goes into the cable outlet and which into the back of the television. In minutes, again without charge, he heads back out into the cold air. This time he walks back to the apartment stoically carrying his newly guaranteed appliance.
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