by Dennis Bock
“You can’t change things now,” I hear him say softly through the bedroom wall the night after the arson. “You’ve got to let him go. Let’s go to Valencia. There’s still time. I’ll learn how to say ‘I love you’ in Spanish.” I imagine him on the other side of the bedroom, down on one knee, holding my mother’s hand.
The next day Ulla comes into the kitchen with news of the fire, charred bones in a black swath of grass. My mother’s peeling potatoes, her wedding band removed and placed safely off to one side of the sink. Later she translates Ulla’s story for me, laughing. It’s part of farm life, she says. Everyone here has their own stories. She tells me Ulla thinks there are aliens around these parts that come zipping down from the sky in the dark. One landed behind the barn last night or the night before. No, she didn’t see it but there’s a big round black spot in the pasture where it touched down to do experiments on the cows.
At least one of us is looking ahead, I think, imagining to the time we get off this planet.
“There’s another legend here,” my mother tells me, still half-smiling with thoughts of aliens in Bavaria. “They say a golem wanders the mountains, up higher than we went on Tuesday. Do you know what a golem is?”
“No,” I say. “Like monster?”
She tells of a man of mud and clay made by a rabbi to protect his people from persecution. He had special powers. But something went wrong and he turned on his people after saving them many times and the peasants forced him out of their town. Now he wanders alone up past the last trails, eating rabbits and crying himself to sleep at night.
“Anything strange they find up there, they blame the golem. Aliens are starting to get dumped on too.”
When Ulla rushes back into the kitchen five minutes later and says she needs help, my mother unties her apron, slips the ring back on her finger, and leaves with her through the side door. I follow close behind, down the hill to the site of our cremation, and find my mother kneeling in front of Willy, wiping his face with a handkerchief. Ulla’s standing a few feet off to the side. He’s sitting in one of the fold-up chairs, his legs stretched out in front of him. He’s dug up his old uniform from somewhere. He’s got on the paraphernalia I was looking for when I found the jars in the basement—the helmet tilted back on his head, puttees wound around his calves and ankles. A small damp spot of urine grows down the side of his leg. He’s just sitting there, staring down at the fire pit, his booted feet crossed lightly at the edge of a circle of tiny bones.
Next morning, when my father opens our bedroom door and says my name, I know it’s to say we’re leaving. No one talks while we pack up the car. We’ve wolfed down our breakfast and watched Willy take his medicine for the last time. My father’s convinced us of the necessity of salt water. We’re going to rent a sailboat near Valencia and sail with those packs of dolphins. In a better world, the one of aliens and sea lions on Pluto, my sister would speak with these animals for us, ask them where we can find the prettiest coral at the bottom of the sea. What do you do in those vast fields of watery space? she would ask. But we don’t speak their language and I don’t speak Willy’s language and the old man doesn’t know the only world I know back home. We are all isolated, cut off from each other despite my mother’s attempts to bring us together, to meld our three generations. My father’s not being bull-headed. He’s trying to hold us together, to save us.
They’re all standing around the Opel. I emerge from the barn with a pocketful of old Reichsmark, blinking in the morning sun. I’ve already packed away some of Willy’s jars. Souvenirs of my summer back in the Old World. The car doors hang open. Ruby’s quiet, too, like my mother, thinking about the day ahead of us and our parents’ silence and the click of the knitting needles to come.
My father extends his hand to Willy and I watch his body played cruelly like a marionette and the arm rise slowly to meet my father’s hand. They shake twice, my father’s grip more powerful, decisive. Then he kisses Ulla on the cheek and, patting his stomach, says something about cakes and they both laugh sadly. My mother’s determined not to cry. She hugs Willy and they stand motionless for a good minute until my sister calls out.
“Come on,” she says, annoyed now by this grown-up solemnity. “We’ve got to look for deers.” She’s already said her goodbyes. She’s standing in the open door. I shake Ulla’s hand and step sideways to Willy, hold out my hand and wait for the drifting gesture of his wound, this last touch. I feel the sun on my forehead. But his hand disappears into his pocket. He seems to carve out something in there, gently manoeuvring, searching within the deep warm cave of his baggy pants. My mother shifts, Ulla crosses her arms over her breasts. My father looks across the laneway that will lead us out of here. Then Ruby climbs into the back seat and watches this happen through the rear window, like she’s glimpsing a deer at the side of a highway perform some impossible human gesture, something closer to compassion and forgiveness than the woods have ever known. But we all see this. We all watch as the dying uncle brings out for me a small living animal, a barn swallow. He holds it in his thin, clawed fingers against my face. I feel it, the brush of beak and feather, small heart racing.
IV
Lottie stood at the lip of the ten-metre platform. She saw the dive in her mind one last time, a second self launch into air, assuming the pike position, one and a half rolls and straightening again like a spear to enter water. Silke waited in the stands with her camera at the ready. She watched her friend shift on the platform above her. She watched her open her arms, then gently rise up onto her toes. A wind carried clouds across the sun. There was the sound of the churning water below. The two women concentrated silently, unaware of the poorly dressed German sailor just down from where Silke sat ready with her camera. By the time Lottie entered water he had imagined their life together through to the end.
Ruby
When She Flew
One day in May of 1978 while I trained, face down in the warm chlorinated water of Centennial Public Pool, I remembered the history of my sister’s illness and her constant need to fly. Ruby was the charity of my choice. She had been in remission now for almost a year. In a week’s time I would attempt to remain in water without touching the sides or bottom of the pool longer than anyone had ever done before me. All donations would go to cancer research. Drown proofing was not new to me. I’d taught myself after the summer I nearly drowned at Kelso. In the event of an emergency, it was a more efficient use of energy than treading water. Ruby and I called it Dead Man’s Float. That day, a week before my record attempt, I slowed down my breathing to a point where I felt light-headed. Swimmers splashed around me. Face down, half in dream, I remembered Ruby’s desire to leave the world behind and touch the clouds.
I imagined her held aloft to the light for inspection immediately after her birth, opening her arms in the anticipation of flight, hands and fingers arched. Cocked for ascent. Days later in the car on the way home from hospital, I imagined her cupping her hands against the movement of air blowing in through the open window. What this was and how it moved objects she must have already known somewhere deep inside her. All this, maybe from our grandmother, Lottie, the Olympic diver. The first of the family to take to the clouds.
As an infant Ruby would lie in her crib under a floating mobile of snowflakes cut from paper napkins, their sharp corners sagging with August heat, reaching. Outside, chickadees gamed among the maples. On a cloudless day of her first summer, she moved her arms, beat against the mattress, kicked her legs. She craned her neck until tears fanned across her cheek. Her small body complied, rose in flight, and she tasted one of those snowflakes on her tongue, suspended five feet above her crib, spinning lazily. Later, she swore it to me like this. Barely three months in this world, she felt air breathe beneath the small of her back as she rose. I flew that day, she said to me, I know because that snowflake was cold!
There were many stories like that. In 1970 I was the older brother who
listened to Ruby tell her stories of levitation and flight. She was convinced. But she had nothing to back up her claim other than the stories my mother recounted at breakfast over our favourite cereal. At Loblaws yesterday I left Ruby sitting snug in the shopping cart, staring up at the cereal on the top shelf. When I got back a second later the cart was full of Fruitloops. It was overflowing. No one else around to help her up there. And Ruby, smiling then, pushing her bowl to the centre of the table for more. Or the story of the elastic-powered balsa wood propeller plane that my grandmother gave me. One morning, after it got stuck in the branches of the highest maple on our street, I ran back to the house to fetch our father. When we returned, the ladder clanking between us, we found Ruby holding the plane in her teeth, still moving her arms like a butterfly.
I had no reason not to believe. I had already performed my own small miracle. In the tub one day, after cleaning my knees of grass stains, my ears of wax, I lay back in the water and focused my eyes on the soapy horizon, observing the small rising coast of my body breathe against the lapping tide. I went under and stayed like that until I felt myself breathe. Underwater, my chest rose and fell, even down there. I believed gills formed on my neck, just below my ears. Looking up through the surface of the water, I wondered at the foreign world of air above, the place my sister inhabited.
We believed we were a gifted family. We were Olympians. No miracle seemed misplaced on us. By that summer, I knew that normal people did not fly, could not breathe underwater. But we did. I believed we were evolving. At night I read to Ruby all the dinosaur books I could find at the Centennial Public Library. We pored over artists’ interpretations of the first creatures to take to dry land. Pictures of foraging dinosaurs and the slow erection of man on the evolutionary chart, from monkey-dog to Homo sapien. Beside the last figure, we drew ourselves: a winged angel and a web-footed frogman. Television helped. Captain Kirk, though still able to bleed blood red, floated like a bird through airless seas. He was the triumph of evolution, a reunion of flyer and amphibian. What he was we were quickly moving towards.
The gifts our family possessed were endless then it seemed. My father’s sailing ships never sank—never so much as sprang a leak. The clothing my mother sewed for us with fine-boned hands protected us from all weather, including the tornadoes my father and I ventured into. We were always warm and dry, even on the coldest, dampest days. Our grandparents delivered the bushels of ripe fruit they’d plucked from orchards north of Kingston. My father’s father cobbled shoes and told Ruby and me you could know a lot about a man from what he wore on his feet. What sort of ground he liked to walk on, where he’d been, where he was likely to go. But we were leaving the earth behind. Already then.
Where they’d been was far away. Germany was an Olympic country. Later we discovered it was a great criminal to be reckoned with, a dumb beast still fumbling in a pool of prehistoric muck. Grateful for the distance between it and ourselves, Ruby and I refused its language. Even when we could not help but understand, we turned blank stares to our mother and father when they spoke to us in German. Was willst du, Junge? Bist du müde? The simplest interrogative, the most necessary offer of food, we met with hungry, staring eyes. We were obstinate. After years, they relented. Even our grandparents saw that their efforts were in vain, realized this new language we used between ourselves was air and light. In the end they spoke to us and the new world around them in the strong hard-edged accents of Hollywood-movie villains.
Our first trip to the museum, we watched the evolution of the world. In glass cases we observed bubbling tar pits swallow our ancestors. Uncle Günter, my mother’s brother from Germany, came along that day. Ruby and I ran ahead to the next display, the adults, already tired of this visit, walking behind slowly through dark corridors. They’d reverted to their old language. Between my uncle’s weak mumblings, the taped cries of pterosaurs echoed from speakers hidden under plastic ferns and hatching plaster-of-Paris eggs. This was Ruby’s domain. At the flight exhibit, she reached down into the pen for a fallen albatross feather and placed it in her hair. Our uncle thought she was playing Indian. He said in his broken English, “I am Cowboy,” and pretended to ride his horse between a group of Japanese. Sneering, Ruby turned back to the albatross and measured its wingspan against her outstretched arms.
I sought traces of marine life: ichthyosaur and gryodus, creatures bearing a greater resemblance to my family history than this strange uncle from Germany. Their skeletons swam against a wall of rock, bathed in shimmering light that represented a wind played on prehistoric seas. I did not fight the illusion. I imagined diving down there among my predecessors, long-toothed and free. My hands had once resembled the fins of a dolphin.
Already I saw the great distance forming between my sister and me. We were evolving, but in different directions. Everyone else stood still. That day, she ran back to the flight exhibit after seeing the mummy in the Egypt room. I knew the possibility of death had unhinged her. No one had seen her sneak off. “Back this way,” my father said, guessing. We followed him to the second floor and found her sitting on the back of the albatross, suspended ten feet in the air by gleaming wires, the feather in her hair, riding the bird as if it were a winged horse.
That was an Olympic summer. Ruby was nine. She’d already seen Olga Korbut reach for the ceiling in Munich. She thought it was all perfectly normal. But as Ruby’s talents soared, the gifts my family possessed began to fade. The summer before, my grandmother had died. Now my grandfather was alone in Kingston. The following spring, my father was informed that one of the sailboats he’d designed went down off the southern coast of St. Lucia. I was growing faster than our mother could sew. There was no choice but to wear clothing bought from a store. I was cold and damp the whole winter of 1972.
Ruby started training three days a week at the gym with a part-time gymnastics coach named Sarah. Before long she was competing. That was when my mother started talking about losing a daughter for all the time she spent swinging from the uneven bars, away at meets around the province, sometimes in Quebec and New York and Michigan. In the spring of 1973, Ruby cleaned up at the provincials and got the attention of Boris Bajin, the coach of the national team. He said she had a rare talent. She hung longer in the air than anyone he’d ever coached. A rare ability, he said. There was still time to make her into a world-class gymnast. I went to the gym with her after school and watched her train. Boris stood to one side of the mat she was working over, wringing his hands together, and yelled harder, clapped once and arched his back as she let go of the bar. “We’re going to have to raise the roof if you go any higher,” he said that day.
Then later. “There’s talent there,” he said sitting at the kitchen table, cutting into the cake that my mother had placed in front of him. “Tremendous talent.” My father told him about the Olympic blood in our veins. He showed him pictures of my grandmother and grandfather standing together in Berlin, one of those red-and-black flags and a man in jackboots caught in the background. And his own pictures of Rome.
“Josef,” Boris said. He put down his fork and took the Berlin photograph in his hand. “What are we going to do? You know something like this requires commitment.”
“Elizabeth?” my father said. My mother was at the sink, rinsing out the coffee filter. Her wedding ring sat on the countertop, a safe distance away from the drain. She turned around, hands still dripping.
“I’m not prepared to lose my daughter to someone else’s lost dream.”
Boris and my father looked at each other across the table. I knew my father. Give it time, his face said, then winked a knowing eye. Boris understood. He gave the picture back to my father and silently returned to his cake.
A week later, my mother took Ruby aside. She held her small calloused palms in her hands and looked at them sadly. “Is this what you want? Leather hands. The hands of a sixty-year-old woman before you’re a teenager.”
“I
want to fly,” she answered, and my mother got up from the edge of my sister’s bed and left the room in tears. That’s what did it for my mother, I think, this turning away from her to something she did not understand. She was not an Olympian. Evolution was not hers. Most of her family had died, been killed in the war, or left to languish among the ruins only to visit here with memories of what she had left behind. But Ruby’s was a flight forward, all of us but our mother could see that.
That summer my father and I chased storms more than ever. Like my sister, he also knew the power of wind. There was something practical in how he understood air and wind. I saw it in the way he yearned for tangible results. The uprooting of telephone poles, the movement of forty-foot yachts over weather-chopped water, leaning, bowing to the wind. Nothing thrilled him more than a house expanding and shuddering under the pressure of high winds, or a waterspout dancing over the dark waters of Lake Simcoe, my hand in his, sweating, trying to pull away.
We monitored the Ontario Weather Centre, always on the lookout for severe weather. Tornadoes were our jackpot. Sometimes we’d be gone entire weekends looking for storms. My father took off work when word came in that something was brewing on the horizon. Sometimes we’d drop Ruby off at the gym in Burlington on our way out to the storms. From the car the three of us would wave to my mother on the doorstep as we pulled out of the driveway, the look of sadness and confusion already marked across her forehead, and she would wave back and stand with her arm in the air until we turned at Lakeshore Road and headed west and we could see her no longer.