After the vomiting, the screaming, the blows against the wall and the convulsions, it takes hours for them to start speaking again. “I love you,” they say in the same flat voice. Then Ariel pulls on his coat and goes out into the winter that crunches like a thousand bones.
They had wanted a small, private wedding, but, of course, the proprieties, etiquette, and the countless relations of their respective families forced them to revise their invitation list. All told, two hundred and ten people gathered together to watch them exchange their promises in the most beautiful garden of La Belle Province, at the foot of a weeping willow ringed around by wild roses. Everything went wrong, from the storm that broke a few minutes before the ceremony began, to the indigestion that Ariel miraculously contained when he made his vows, not to mention the door that had slammed shut on Marie’s hand that same morning. By the time he put the wedding band on her ring finger, the nail had turned completely black. And yet they took none of these unfortunate incidents to be a bad omen. They were so elated at getting married that on seeing the wedding pictures later on they would have to look closely to recall that it had rained, that they had been ill and injured, that the train of Marie’s gown had caught fire during the first dance, that a stray dog had burst in and stolen the spit-roasted lamb shank. The mishaps made them laugh. The more disastrous the wedding, the happier the marriage, they kept repeating.
In the small hours, they slipped away from the tent where some drunken dancers kept on swaying. The sky had cleared and was now suffused with an unreal moonlight. They followed a little winding path to the lake. They joked about the monster inhabiting its waters and commanded it to show itself. They lay down on the wharf, and the love they made was so exquisitely joyous they thought they heard music, an untuned guitar. The morning found them sleeping on the old, furry wood, both of them swathed in the myriad folds of her layer-cake wedding gown. It was, they believed, the start of an eternity.
“Who else knows?”
“No one.”
“The people you contacted? To find the paper trails?”
“Two different agencies. Yours, as you know, exclusively handled adoptions of Jewish—or supposedly Jewish—children. Mine was run by reformist Christians and covered the entire continent. No one will make the connection.”
“And the government? They have files, archives…”
“Of course. But someone would have to do some very specific research to be able to discover the link.”
“Which is certainly likely to happen over the four years of my mandate.”
“I don’t know what to say. I…”
“Don’t apologize, Marie. It would have come out sooner or later.”
Their conversation dissolves into nothing but sobs. In any case, words have become worthless. Expressing their love for each other is forbidden now, and pretending to feel nothing, impossible. Voicing their disgust is unthinkable. They have called each other every day since the night of December 24, at first to say nothing, to hear the other breathing, to get used to what this dizzying symmetry involves. Then they tried—though not in so many words—to consider what to do next. De facto separation; a semblance of marriage. Later, the public announcement. They’ll wait a few months for that. First they must succeed in grasping it themselves. Until then, whenever they find themselves overwhelmed by panic, they can still hang on to a tissue of illusion. Nothing has happened. They are still married.
Marie asks for sick leave. For weeks she trails after Wretch, who, even in January, finds a way to bring back bloody carcasses she does not have the strength to dispose of. She sleeps, cries, grows thinner, prostrated in front of a screen that, like the cat, manages to deliver the daily carnage of the outside world. The southwest of the country is buried in snow; in Toronto, it reaches to the second floor of buildings. Eight people die of asphyxiation. Army helicopters hover continuously, on the lookout for residents in distress, yet every day two or three victims vanish, swallowed up by the winter. In the West, the cities are paralyzed by protesting Christian fundamentalists. Using burnished crosses, the Protestants smash store windows and car windshields. They are opposed to the reintroduction of biology courses in the high-school curriculum, an election promise that Ariel has just fulfilled. It seems to Marie that she sees him in every thirty-second clip. She imagines the decisions he must make, his hesitations, his sweaty hands at 11 p.m. and the magnificent lines that crease his forehead in moments of conflict. At times she goes so far as to offer advice, as if he were there, sharing his concerns. They are not made to be apart. That is the frightening conclusion she has drawn from the disclosure of their origins.
Ariel, meanwhile, can’t sleep. His nights are populated by monsters, prehistoric birds that devour his liver. To escape them he throws himself into his work, keeping tabs on the rescue operations in Toronto. He addresses the evangelist protestors on a daily basis. He feverishly prepares for the new parliamentary session and insists on tracking the progress of every ministerial issue. He overdoes it, but this is ascribed to beginner’s zeal. No one suspects that a head of state’s workaholism conceals a personal calamity.
A week before the opening of Parliament, an outburst of violence in Quebec makes it imperative to hold an emergency meeting. In Montreal, automobiles are being blown up. The pattern is always the same: unemployed youths from regions outside the big city target non-francophone institutions. In reaction to these attacks, neo-Loyalist organizations issue countervailing threats. Street fighting proliferates. Within the Labour cabinet there is no lack of good ideas to calm things down.
“Goldstein, I think a tour of Quebec is needed.”
“It’s time for you and your lovely wife to launch a charm offensive to douse the torches of our perennial angry hicks.”
“With language like that, we’re sure to charm them,” Ariel snaps back.
“You may want to start in Marie’s native region. To show that you’re a local boy by marriage. What do you think?”
“A few photos with the in-laws would be even better! Nothing beats a schmooze with separatists when it comes to outsmarting the mad dogs.”
“I’m sure the Leclercs will be delighted.”
Ariel’s half-hearted sarcasm is lost on his advisers, who go away pleased with their leader’s cooperation. As soon as his office door closes behind them, Ariel collapses. Marc is completely taken aback.
“Come on! You knew very well things would be dicey in Quebec!”
Ariel shakes his head.
“There’s something I have to tell you. I need your help and your absolute discretion. We could lose everything.”
Marie is distressed by the explosions. At this rate, politicians will be targeted next. A few days after the second bombing of the new year, her sister shows up, intending to take her out of the big city and harm’s way.
“You’re on sick leave? Come to Saint-Roch to recuperate. You’re not going to get better with all the bombs going off. What’s the matter, anyway?”
Marie sighs. She hasn’t the slightest wish to leave her home, whose every corner reminds her of Ariel. She can spend hours stretched out in a closet, sniffing the clothes he’ll no longer wear, brushing against the walls he’s leaned on and through which their love came to life. Dusting is out of the question. Every particle contains a little of him, of his DNA, so close to her own. If she can’t see him, she wants at least to wallow in his dust, to coat herself with what’s left of him.
Rachel frowns as she contemplates Marie’s pallor. She is aware of just three remedies for existential woes: exercise, a T-bone steak, and good night’s sleep. This is the treatment she sets out to inflict, in that order, on her neurasthenic sister over the six days she has decided to spend in the chaos of the city. Marie wobbles when they take a walk, vomits at the mere sight of red meat, and paces back and forth at night, but Rachel remains unfazed. Until the morning she finds her sister unconscious on the
bathroom floor, with an empty bottle of pills beside her.
In her imagination, the colour of death’s door was white; what she discovers is just the opposite. For forty-eight hours, she feels as though she’s being attacked by a Jackson Pollock painting. A network of agitated veins tightens around her, torments her arms and legs as if to drown her, as if to smother the part of her that still wants to live and damn the part trying to die. That is why she decides to fight. She would like to end it all, but not like this, not like the last beluga caught in a filthy net.
She wakes up in her bed, with Rachel to her right and a doctor to her left. Their first words amount to amorphous mumbling. Her answers are hardly any clearer. Words and ambient sounds come to her like gently lapping water, as though her head were submerged. The doctor stammers a few words of advice before giving her an injection. This time she plunges into a sea of molten gold. For hours, it seems to her she’s swimming in honey, waving her limbs about with a heavy, delicious slowness and finding comfort in that movement. She will not die. Her life does not end here.
When she resurfaces the morning light is like a benevolent blanket that someone has thrown over the house, as when a piece of furniture needs to be protected during a long period of disuse. Rachel, her face twitching, is asleep beside her, deep in conversation with someone in her dream.
“Where is Ariel?” Marie manages to utter.
Her sister rouses and, true to her habit, is instantly awake, clear-minded and ready for action.
“I haven’t called him. He’s not aware of what happened. I haven’t told anyone, actually, except the doctor.”
Dismayed, Marie turns her head away. Her tongue feels coated. She reaches for a glass of water standing on the night table, but her arms flop down like a sail gone slack. Rachel helps her take a sip, then she stands up and pulls a sheaf of papers from the drawer. The documents, the damned files. Eva Volant. A surge of blood revives Marie’s limbs and she straightens up.
“While you were unconscious, I found this. I’ve decided to keep your suicide attempt under wraps for the time being. So as not to bring all the journalists running. Ariel’s family. Our family.”
There is no way of telling whether her tone of voice is disgusted, accusatory, or indulgent. Or none of the above. When confronted with tragedies or moral dilemmas, Rachel generally stays neutral. Cool headed. Torn between resentment at her sister’s prying and gratitude for her presence of mind, Marie says nothing. Except:
“I think I’d like some red meat now.”
In February, a man sneaks onto the grounds of the official residence in the middle of the night and starts firing bullets at the windows. The bodyguards shoot him down just as the fifth windowpane shatters. Ariel, who was taking a shower, is not even aware of the attack. The assailant is identified as Rachad Maliki, a man beset with psychiatric problems. Security at 24 Sussex Drive is tightened as well as the surveillance of white supremacist militias, which see the incident as additional justification for stalking any man whose face is darker than theirs. But the episode acts as a spur on Ariel, just as Marie’s suicide attempt brings her back to the world of the living. She resumes her impassioned advocacy of intergenerational justice; Ariel is able to sleep, eat, and function like a man and not just a statesman. They manage to appear together at official events. To look at them, there is nothing amiss. The tremor inside them is undetectable. They say very little to each other, do not touch, hardly look at each other. Too dangerous. Like Tristan and Iseult, they need a sword, a blade to keep them from falling on one another like the particles of a collapsing star.
Early one Sunday morning, a neighbour comes knocking at the door of their Montreal home looking ill at ease.
“I’m sorry, Marie, but have you been out of the house today?”
Marie shakes her head and steps out onto the porch, her feet clad in no more than a pair of pilled socks. Someone has written on the wall in green letters: Marie Leclerc, chienne de Goldstein. Rase-toi la tête, pute des Juifs. In short: Shave your head, bitch. Whore to the Jews.
The neighbour scarcely has time to offer a hand in repainting the wall. She shuts and locks the door, paces around the telephone, and finally dials Ariel’s number. They stopped communicating directly in January. Any contact between them goes through Marc, who efficiently and discreetly arranges their public appearances. Marie has written a thousand letters to Ariel but never sent them. She stores them in the sleeves of her husband’s bathrobe, which otherwise is a flat and mournful article of clothing, an empty skin. Over time, it has filled out thanks to the accumulated layers of paper.
“Is that you?” Ariel answers after one ring.
“It’s me. I don’t know what to do.”
She relays the message tattooed on the house. Of course, she knows what should be done: take pictures and then cover the writing while waiting for the police. That is not the reason she hesitates. What’s gnawing at her is the urge to climb a skyscraper, a mountain, or some other promontory and kiss her husband with the whole country looking on, to respond to the attack by causing a sensation. This affront, more than anything else, has eroded the wall so painfully erected between them. But she doesn’t know how to say this to Ariel. In any case, it would do no good.
“Don’t worry. I’ll handle it.”
She hangs up, shaken by the few sentences they exchanged. It takes so little. She sinks to the floor like a puddle of water. Planted in front of her, Wretch the cat looks at her with contempt. If he had opposable thumbs, she could swear he was to blame.
She waits all day for the government people to arrive, the ones that Ariel presumably will have sent to take care of the situation before the media arrive. To no avail. Around eight p.m., she hears a commotion outside. Believing the vandals have returned, she grabs her can of pepper spray, the holy water of solitary, nervous women. But a few seconds before opening the door, she drops her weapon. The person on the other side is Ariel; of this she is suddenly and absolutely certain.
She finds him in a ski jacket, gloveless, and shivering as he tries to pop open a container of paint with a dry branch while his two bodyguards prowl around the house.
“‘Spiced azure,’ wasn’t that it, the colour?”
Unable to do otherwise, Marie opens her arms to him.
After disclosing the terrible secret to Marc, Ariel had to solemnly swear to never again find himself alone with Marie. On that condition, his right-hand man succeeded in erasing all bureaucratic traces of the blood ties between the prime minister and his wife. As for Marie, she made the same promise to Rachel. Still, they do not feel they are cheating. They are the real victims, duped by reality, destined since birth to be ambushed, an unavoidable trap they did not deserve.
They make love all night, transported by a flood tide that lifts them above shame and biology; they climax each in turn, oblivious, their bodies nimble, their skins washed. They reiterate the only possible mode of existence for them—being together. Ariel traces with his finger the features of his wife’s face etched beneath the damp sheet.
“I never found that we looked alike,” he declares sadly.
“Yet that’s what others told us.”
“They say that about all lovers. When two people love each other they end up sharing a family likeness.”
“Lovers are all twins at the outset. Parts of a being believed to have been split in two. Plato described it as a body with four legs and four arms that Zeus is said to have sliced in two, fearing its power. The halves are condemned to search each other out.”
A blast of wind shakes the frame of the house, which sends a torrent of words of love spilling into the room. The language of wood. This house understands them.
They are awoken by repeated calls. It takes them a moment to untangle their naked limbs. The ringing of the telephone is a jarring din around their nucleus, where nothing retains its meaning, a magnetic field that overtur
ns the laws of physics. They rise, neither happy nor sad but simply sated, filled with the same certainty that sustains migratory birds. After a few teetering paces in the cottony morning, Ariel finds his bathrobe stuffed with letters, which pour out of the sleeves when he steps into it. Marie floats down to the ground floor, hunts up a bag of frozen bagels and lights the oven. The heat spreads quickly. Ariel dawdles amid the familiar scents, calling the cat, which did not come home the night before.
“You have to go back to Ottawa right away?”
“Depends on the news,” Ariel answers as he switches on the TV.
A bizarre déjà vu takes shape on the screen. Their house. The empty swing pinned down by the weight of the snow. On the porch, the can of paint left behind the day before, the coat of blue half-concealing the green insults. At the bottom of the frame, a headline scrolls past. Another scandal for the Labour Party of Canada. The words trickle out with agonizing slowness. Marie gently parts the curtains and then turns around looking drained.
“They’re here,” she confirms.
The news ticker unfurls implacably. The Prime Minister… Ariel reads. The camera lens scans the grounds. Branches brought down by the ice appear on the screen… married… the text continues. The camera sweeps over the official car, where the bodyguards stand waiting impassively… to his sister, the TV concludes. At exactly that instant, Ariel and Marie simultaneously make the same unspoken wish: to never again leave this house.
The Stairway
(Monette and Angie)
Angie has regained her composure. The calming effect that walking has on her—something she can’t explain—rises from her legs to her head in the same way the cold does when she goes out barefoot in the evening. She is a little ashamed now of having lost her temper, of letting Monette witness her anger against the birds, her useless, sentimental actions. Animals die every day in the wild, Mam says, and one ought not grieve over it any more than one rejoices at the birth of their offspring. Monette turns around a few times trying to spot the crows. Angie doesn’t ask her if they’ve returned.
The Party Wall Page 8