The Party Wall

by Catherine Leroux

  No criminal investigation was needed for them to understand that the blaze was the work of an arsonist. During his stay in the capital, Ariel had been informed that a slew of letters had flooded his office in recent weeks. He had opened a few of them at random. One of them depicted its author as a sexual libertarian and offered Marie and Ariel a “haven of peace and tolerance where they could live their forbidden love and share it with a community of like-minded people.” Most of the others saw themselves as agents of divine wrath and condemnation to the fires of hell. It was hard to guess which of the fallen prime minister’s thousand foes might have burned down his house.

  The day after the fire, Ariel and Marie treaded around the smoking ruins of their home trying to recognize its wrecked forms, to identify the living room, the staircase, the kitchen wall, the remains of what had been no more than a temporary structure, an ephemeral order they had believed in for so long. A few blackened objects peeked out here and there like little corpses rising to the surface of dark waters after being submerged in the depths: a toothbrush, a juicer, a Montblanc pen, a flashlight. The cat’s body could not be found. Unseen since the scandal had erupted, the animal had no doubt been dematerialized just like the rest of their world.

  They had been circling around their former life for what seemed like hours when Marc arrived out of breath.

  “Thank God you’re safe and sound!”

  He paused beside them to contemplate the black pit where a fine snow was doing its best to settle.

  “Witch,” he hissed between his teeth.

  Ariel and Marie looked up at the former military man.

  “Emmanuelle. It’s all her fault,” Marc explained.

  Just as the house was going up in flames, Marc—by ­tugging on the many lines he had cast—learned that the person responsible for the leak was his own wife. Emmanuelle, rooting through her husband’s affairs, had found out. She was the one who had sent the journalists the anonymous message, which Marc’s men eventually traced back to her.

  “She left even before I could confront her. I can’t believe she did this to us.”

  The snowflakes covered their coats and their hair turned frizzy by a night without hope, but expired in contact with the seething rubble of the house. Nothing of this broken life could ever be washed clean again. Marie turned to Marc with a glazed look in her eyes.

  “We want to disappear. Together. Can you help us?”

  In Marie’s class a few children stand out, colourful faces in a room too often black-and-white. Little Marco with his second generation Italian accent, who curls the few French words he learned with an altogether Latin theatricality. His mother comes to fetch him every night and sometimes presents Marie with arancinis, murmuring, “For my boy’s favourite teacher.” Then there’s Sophia, with ponytails that defy gravity, law, and order, who keeps her hand permanently raised, even when she does not know the answer or has nothing to say. And, finally, Angel, whose classmates are all at least a head taller than her; her gaze is piercing and her French pronunciation perfect. Every Friday Angel tearfully presses Marie’s hand before running off to the weather-beaten yellow bus.

  At the end of the fall term, Marie takes advantage of the parent-teacher meeting to apprise Angel’s mother of these incidents.

  “My husband is in the army,” the mother explains. “We’ve changed cities four times since Angel was born. Even though we think we’ll be here for some time, she’s constantly afraid of moving again. Whenever she says goodbye to people she’s fond of, she has the feeling it’s the last time.”

  “I see. Your husband works on a military base?”

  “Yes, he gives combat training to recruits.”

  “Mine teaches them politics.”

  “Oh, Albert Morsehead! Richard often talks about him. They get along well, I think. You should come over for a meal!”

  After accepting the invitation Marie asks about Angel’s remarkable aptitude for French. The mother smiles.

  “I don’t know who she takes after. Certainly not me, and her father even less. In the neighbourhood where I was born in Savannah, French was as rare and exotic as Pakistani is here.”

  “You’re from Georgia? How did you end up here?”

  “When you grow up near a military base you fall in love with soldiers. When I met Richard he was in training near where I lived. I was smitten.”

  When she returns home, Marie recounts her meeting to Ariel.

  “Richard Vernon? Yes, I know him. He’s a bruiser. Gives the recruits a rough time.”

  “His wife invited us for dinner.”

  “Well, find a way to beg off. He’s the last person I’d want to socialize with.”

  Looking out over the empty plain that surrounds them, Marie sighs. Their life seems so spare. There’s no room even for friendship. Ariel gently squeezes her shoulder.

  “That’s not true,” he says. “It just takes longer when you start from scratch.”

  As Ariel expected, he found Emmanuelle in a vast loft perched on the top floor of an abandoned factory, the kind of place that bolstered the image of the impoverished artist but which only the wealthy could afford. Despite the large windows, the room appeared dim. Pewter mobiles floated a few metres above the floor like swords. Curled up in a red leather armchair, Emmanuelle was dreamily contemplating her works of art. She started when Ariel walked in.

  “They’ve burnt down our house.”

  Stretching her legs, she turned toward him, the defiance already showing in her eyes.

  “Fire is cathartic.”

  “It was all we had left, Emmanuelle.”

  She stood up, walked over to a table littered with empty glasses, and poured herself a purple liquid.

  “Antioxidant?” she offered.

  Ariel shook his head. Her lips moistened with purple juice made her look like a vampire.

  “We’re leaving tomorrow, Marie and I. Oddly enough, you’re the only person I wanted to see before going.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions. I’ve come to call you to account.”

  Swinging her endless mane of hair, Emmanuelle turned her back to Ariel and stepped toward a window. Hochelaga—the livid reptile, the many-headed snake—uncoiled at her feet. Montreal had already begun to fade in Ariel’s mind, like the world of Peter Pan, its outline dissolving as one stops believing in it. Emmanuelle kept silent; Ariel pressed the point.

  “You couldn’t stand having to share Marc? To see him devote himself to a cause bigger than you?”

  “You all think I’m so jealous and possessive. You just don’t get it.”

  Setting her glass down on an empty pedestal, she approached Ariel with measured steps.

  “It was an artistic gesture, Ariel. That’s all. When I learned you were brother and sister, I immediately grasped the beauty of your story. The grace of loving striving to reconstitute itself by any means, like water cutting a path through solid rock.”

  “How poetic. Couldn’t you have just kept your metaphors to yourself?”

  “I wanted to create an event. Today’s art resides precisely in such performances. Reality and the actions that disfigure it. To place one’s finger on an object teetering on the edge of the abyss. Delivering that message was so easy, a flick of the finger, really. And the face of the country was changed.”

  “For the worse.”

  “It’s inappropriate to assign a moral label to this work.”

  Ariel exploded.

  “Stop talking about it like a piece of art,” he bellowed. “You’ve ruined our lives!”

  He would have liked to slap her, to point the mouth of a giant canon at her skinny body and blast a hole through it, and then blow up her appalling sculptures one by one. Unimpressed by Ariel’s rage, Emmanuelle gave him a smug half-smile.

  “No, your lives
were already ruined. I gave you a chance to live as you choose. If the secret had stayed hidden, you would have spent the rest of your miserable existence loving each other secretly, repressing that love. But now you are going away together. What will you do? Disappear? Change your identities? You’ll grow old side by side. It’s more than you could have dreamed of if you had hung on to your position as prime minister.”

  An ominous grating sound went out from the far end of the loft, and as if by magic one of the more substantial mobiles overhanging the loft came loose. It twisted in mid-air before crashing down on the cement floor in a metallic clang and a shower of sparks. Emmanuelle took a few steps toward the mobile and stopped short, perplexed, as though wondering what was left of her piece. When she turned to come back to Ariel he was already gone.

  No agriculture worthy of the name has existed on the plains for the past ten years. People still sow seeds and keep little kitchen gardens as a matter of form, but autumn usually yields just a few shrivelled potatoes, peas as hard as gravel, and ghosts of tomatoes. The proudest—or richest—farmers equipped their operations with complex irrigation systems only to throw in the towel a few years later, as exhausted as their fields. These days, the towns just barely scrape by with populations that skim over the topography more than they inhabit it. The places where ancient traditions connected people to the land have become transient landscapes that remind Ariel of American desert towns where nothing ever seems to put down roots.

  This means stores with boarded-up windows. Hospitals shut down and doctors you need to drive for hours to see. Families that leave without bothering to sell their now worthless properties. People without work, and dreams either crushed or forgotten in a corner. Only the military base keeps on providing employment and sustenance to a part of the town, which nevertheless continues to empty as steadily as an hourglass.

  One winter morning, the daily routine on the plain is upset by a rumour. While people are prepping for another year of exasperating extremes, the word goes out that a biomass conversion plant may be built in Rockfield. This fast-growing industry is apparently looking for a central location where it could process all of the province’s waste.

  Though impossible to confirm, the rumour races through the military base, the school, the shopping mall and the church—the cardinal points of the town’s social life.

  This is the moment when something that was slumbering in Ariel awakes. His sense of community, his instinct for crowds. His urge to hold the reins. The electronic devices in the house gradually come to life again; the news rings out every hour in the kitchen, research files linger on the computer. Ariel comes back into the world.

  Together with two other residents, he organizes a public meeting to which he invites industry spokespeople. Taking on the impromptu role of moderator, he welcomes them on behalf of the people of Rockfield, gives them an overview of the community, and questions them. Then, after getting hold of documents specifying the conditions that need to be met for the plant to be built, he sets up a citizens committee to ensure that the city fulfills every condition. Locations must be proposed, road repairs demanded, water drainage problems solved. The town’s elected officers, delighted by this unhoped-for help, encourage these initiatives. Soon, volunteer work is being organized on a colossal scale in an atmosphere of contagious enthusiasm. A handful of townspeople travel to Regina to petition for their cause and ask for investments. After a few weeks, the entire town is mobilizing around a single objective: to revive a moribund region.

  From day to day, Ariel grows more effervescent, more radiant. His best efforts to preserve the extra weight that serves as his disguise are unsuccessful. The excitement melts away the kilos. His voice regains its previous timbre. He is vibrant. And increasingly recognizable despite his altered face. With every passing day his beard looks more and more like a ridiculous postiche on the face of the man who seduced the nation; Marie is afraid to see him unmasked yet cannot bring herself to clip his wings. She would prefer to start her life over again a hundred times rather than confine the man she loves to the desolate trance of exile. There is no taking the Ariel out of Ariel. No matter how many pseudonyms are affixed to him, he remains the one who leads. He will always find a mission, even in the midst of nothing.

  Little by little the house fills up. Meetings are held there, neighbours stop by to leave cookies or a spray of flowers, borrow books or just chat. Out of shyness and a wish to protect the little privacy that belonged to her, Marie had jealously kept the doors of their former home shut, thus depriving herself of the joys she is now discovering—a kitchen full of friends, loud voices, shoes heaped up in the hallway, and the kind of solidarity that people at the top are not entitled to. Children roll around in the cruddy snow of their yard. A neighbour shares the fish she caught under the ice. The local lush comes to drain their bottles and spin a few yarns. Quite unexpectedly, life is rekindled.

  Oddly enough, Ariel has trouble sleeping not when he is distraught but when he feels hopeful again. His intense involvement in the community not only mitigates his grief at having lost his place among the governing elite, but also brings him solace for his political disillusionment. His new project keeps him up late into the night; it is a vital hub foiling his regrets. As the long wakeful hours tick past, he misses his cat Wretch. He pores over the international magazines and watches the daily news reports to the point of nausea. When his head is too full of the noise of the world, he turns to more rustic occupations. He reads novels, discovers old records abandoned by the former residents, cleans the attic, does a few bodybuilding exercises. Then, in the depths of the night, he drifts toward Marie.

  He stands in front of her room to listen to her breathing. The breath humans produce when they sleep is prodigious. It dives into the deepest reaches of their being and, upon exhalation, raises the treasures and monsters buried under accumulated crusts of civilization. Dense, troubled, insightful, Marie’s breathing is a masterpiece. To come nearer to it is the only moment of purity available to Ariel from now on. Their physical proximity is always steeped in pain; every surge of desire is accompanied by disgust. Rare and difficult, sex has become the site of a self-loathing equal to their mutual love. But when he looks at her silky arms lying on the sheet, discerning her breast and pubis under the muslin, he is unable to feel regret about anything. One life would not be enough for him to turn Marie into simply a sister.

  On other nights he just sits down at his wife’s desk. He holds the pencils between his fingers, leafs through her books, most of them textbooks, a few of them collections of poetry in a dying language; he whiffs the pages that her pointed forefinger has ranged over. Then he rests his cheek on the back of the chair that welcomes Marie’s thoughts day after day. This is how he likes to love her—in her absence, in the imprint that her existence leaves on the night.

  In the course of one of these little rituals, he discovers a file folder bearing an accursed name: Eva Volant. For several minutes, Ariel remains stock-still, unable to contain his anger. He was too devastated by the events to say anything when Marie went on her trip to the southern United States. But he continues to disapprove of all efforts aimed at finding their mother. For him, surviving means keeping her out of the picture. How could their so very fragile daily life overcome this strident reminder of their biology? It is already dangerous enough to maintain their love without which they would both be lost; chasing after Eva Volant amounts to juggling with knives.

  In the end, he opens the folder and pulls out a sheaf of documents whose cloying smell puts him in mind of the fall floods. He finds the adoption papers, the fateful lines that overturned their lives an eternity ago, it seems to him. Then there are letters and forms testifying to Marie’s investigation, all dated before their move to the Prairies. A considerable sum of work, Ariel sadly acknowledges. Marie was truly determined to resolve the question of their origins.

  Under the forms he stumbles on a sheaf of blackened s
heets of paper. He brushes his hand over them, leaving his fingers stained with fine soot. Portraits—all different but all alike—in which he recognizes here Marie’s mouth, there her chin, both their eyes, the hair of one of them, the cheekbone of the other, their nose, their forehead, a sharp wrinkle that he might recognize reluctantly, an earlobe suggesting a familiar texture. With small, uncertain touches or broad, desperate strokes, Marie has tried to reconstitute their mother’s face, conjugating all possible combinations. Ariel cannot help thinking that this visual genealogy lacks one essential component: the face of the father. But the thought is too dizzying and he drives it away just as Marie must have with a stroke of charcoal.

  He silently returns the papers to their original place in the folder, but not without first pilfering one of the sketches, the simplest one, the one in which Marie dared to put a smile on Eva’s face, an embarrassed smile or possibly the sneer of those who dice with destiny. He folds the portrait and unthinkingly slips it into his wallet, then he picks up his guitar and plays a tune so old it might be telling their story, their mother’s story, the story of all who one day doubted their humanity.

  They go to church. It’s impossible to avoid this monument to consensus built during the reform period and therefore afflicted with an architectural style at once unbridled and conventional, somewhere between a temple and a shopping mall—the mandatory style of contemporary believers. They would have preferred to stay neutral with respect to religion, but Marc advised them to swell the Christian ranks and not turn up their noses. In small Prairie communities, suspicion starts with impiety.

  They therefore show up each Sunday at the church square and join the assembly of neighbours and colleagues, young soldiers eager for absolution, students and their stubby-nosed, thick-legged parents. Ariel and Marie sit in the back like dunces. The church is the only place where they once again have the feeling they are making an exhibition of themselves. True, they are constantly playing a part, but the part is confined to an alias and a disguise. The rest is far from being as scripted as their life in Montreal and Ottawa. Only in church do they still act in ways that remind them of politics. The right answer at the right moment, standing up and sitting down at the same time as the others, nodding one’s head, giving the appropriate look. As she plays the game and sees Ariel making an effort to remember how to cross himself properly, Marie realizes how intolerable it was for her to play the Prime Minister’s wife.