by Dennis Bock
I felt the nose of the car dip. My father clambering up onto the hood. I could have touched his leg if it weren’t for the windshield. I watched as he got his balance. His open jacket flapped madly in the wind. He leaned forward into the storm and, in a gesture of welcome, opened his arms and shook his head in wonder. Against the winds his body snapped forward and back in quick, rhythmic waves, like a dancer’s. The winds continued buffeting the car. He held his arms out from his sides and formed a cross with his body and then, slowly closing his arms around himself, he embraced the storm. His head rolled loosely on his neck and a gust of wind jerked back his hips. I blinked and felt the hood of the car jump up. When I opened my eyes again he was gone. He’d disappeared. Will Keller, I thought. I looked at the funnel spinning past us and for a moment I imagined him in there, cut to pieces by the tons of debris it was carrying. But I knew that wasn’t possible. The tornado hadn’t come close enough. I’d be in there, too. I opened the door and ran around to the front of the car.
“Peter,” he yelled. The roar of the freight train speeded by.
He was lying on the ground, face up, smiling. “Decided to come out for some fresh air?”
He wasn’t hurt. He’d only been knocked over by the wind. He was laughing to himself. But he also seemed embarrassed. “Wasn’t that something!” he kept saying. “Wasn’t that something!”
The tornado went northeast from there. He talked a mile a minute all the way home. “Did you see that? An F-5. Can you believe it! That was a real F-5.” Fire trucks and ambulances raced past us in the other direction. The roads were strewn with debris. “The whole country’s going to hear about this one,” he said. “You can be sure F-5s make it to national news.” At Cookstown we turned onto 89 and then headed south on 27. “You can be sure she sucked up a cow or two. Literally swept me off my feet,” and he laughed again and rubbed his thigh with his right hand.
We saw the broken window almost two hours later when we pulled into the driveway. Glass was scattered over our front porch. Broken from inside the house. I walked through the door ahead of my father and almost tripped over the coatrack in the foyer. The love seat had been thrown to the middle of the living room, its stuffing billowing through cuts in the fabric like a cluster of cumulonimbus clouds. My father sat down at his desk, a cupped hand over his mouth. Silently I walked through the house. Glasses and plates and Tupperware containers littered the kitchen floor. The letter my mother had left behind was lying on the floor in the sunroom beside an overturned vase of dried cattails. I didn’t open it. I went back to the living room and placed the sealed envelope in front of my father. He looked blankly through the front window. I walked out to the swimming pool, took my shoes and socks off, and hung my feet over the edge into the water. I watched the afternoon light shift, shadows disappearing from the lawn, and wondered at this passion for wind, so long in Ruby’s veins, carried up through three generations, how it had scattered us so far away from ourselves.
Back in Chicago, a month after my return, I discovered Will Keller’s name in the writings of the Austrian weather theorist and theologian, Konrad Solovine. That afternoon I looked out my attic window and watched a grey wind carry a swirl of autumn leaves north along Palmerston, then scuttle them on the spokes of a bike chained to a young oak across the street. I turned back to the Solovine book, opened to a short chapter called “Vortex Inertia.” It was a new theory he was trumpeting: the state achieved, he argued, when colliding winds and chaotic motion are replaced by a perfect harmony of wind speed and direction, air pressure and temperature, effectively creating a calm in the eye of a tornado. As a result of this inertia, somebody held in the eye of a tornado might believe himself to be at perfect rest, for his position will be static relative to the objects immediately present. When this inertia breaks down, however, an individual caught in the tornado will either be cut to pieces or ejected from the vortex. It is plausible, concludes Solovine, that Will Keller might not have fully understood that his life was in danger until he was cast out of the storm, and that the countless people who have lost their lives in tornadoes over the broad sweep of time enjoyed, for at least a fleeting moment before the end came, the sensation of relative calm.
VI
Before the age of thirty she was already a master of the killer’s art. Two-time world champion fencer and not once had she drawn the blood of an opponent. This, the sisters thought, was the aesthetics and mastery of death. They’d heard when she moved it seemed as if nothing could touch her. The strategies for killing seemed as theoretical as chess. Helen Mayer was the only Jew there that year to serve on the German team, and this at the insistence of the Americans, who’d threatened to boycott. The two sisters spoke of the fencer with a mix of admiration and disgust. They were both seamstresses, stitching their way out of the Berlin ghetto. They spoke of the fencer as they made their way back from the market, shopping carts in tow behind them. Greta waved to a neighbour sitting in his doorway, out to smell the rain-freshened afternoon, this July turn of day. He told them that the fencer had saluted Hitler from the podium that afternoon, then quickly left for America.
Spain
One Saturday, in the middle of summer, Suzanne came into the bar finally, almost an hour late, and told me her Spanish love story. It happened in a small town where she lived for two years when she was in her mid-twenties and I was still in Chicago. At the time I had my own ideas about what it would be like to live over there, in Spain, or somewhere else in Europe, like where my parents had come from. I remember glancing up to the TV in the far corner of the bar while she talked. It was balanced on a small shelf above some empty beer cases, the sound down, tuned to two fencers crossing swords in Seoul. I watched the thrust and jab, thrust and parry ten thousand miles away, moving my eyes between Suzanne’s and the TV.
Anna used to have her special kids on Saturdays. Summer school for the gifted. That’s when I’d take the Bathurst streetcar down to meet Suzanne at the Greeks, a café in Kensington Market peopled by those who seemed closer in spirit to what I was living then, in 1988, two years back from university, that desperate feeling of a place you recognize but no longer understand. In the six years I’d been away I’d learned Spanish. After graduating, I couldn’t find anything in meteorology; but the second language had helped land a job working with a new generation of war babies that was arriving to this country. I started working with people who reminded me of my parents, grateful and often bitter and always heavy with nostalgia. Now they came from Santo Domingo, Guatemala City, the high reaches of the Andes. They came from different places than the places my parents and their people had been forced to leave mid-century. But they came just the same, men and women and children, all wandering the globe, always with thoughts of the people they’d left behind.
Suzanne and I would meet at the Greeks before going upstairs to her friend’s apartment. She was usually late. So I’d wait there alone, watching the regulars still as statues, sipping beer. I watched the men who reminded me of my uncle from Germany, the fish eyes, shifting hands. The men who’d waited silently in the day-to-day rush of family, patiently waited for the right moment to reveal the dark secret that left them here, brotherless among their kind. I believed they all had their secrets. I rolled my own over my tongue as I watched and waited, picturing grim stories of war and deceit and ruin.
In the Spain story, Suzanne lived in an ancient three-storey building, dead centre in the middle of the old city—picture perfect, she said that day after she finally came. Everything was very old. Not like here. On her street there was a building so time-worn that it could no longer stand under its own weight and had to be supported with fat wooden beams. She remembered getting off the train, she said, grimy and tired after sixteen hours from Paris, feeling her heart drop when she saw the town for the first time. She found her way from the station and took a room in a pension close to where she ended up living that first year. That night she found a seat at a brightly lit coffee ba
r and watched the crowds go by until two in the morning.
“It makes me cringe to think how stupid I was,” she said with an exaggerated look in her eyes. “I didn’t speak a word of Spanish.” Over her right shoulder men in white face masks touched swords.
The first thing she did when she moved into the apartment was her laundry. After she finished hanging it out to dry in the sun on the iron railing of the balcony, a man with great circles under his eyes and nicotine stains dripping from his moustache came to her door and started yelling at her. When he realized Suzanne didn’t understand him, he pointed to the clothes on the iron railing and waved his finger in the air, making a clicking sound with his tongue. Tut, tut, tut.
“I found out later they don’t let you hang out your laundry in the older parts of the cities,” she said. “It’s bad for tourism because it wrecks the scenery.”
She told me about the writing on the walls of the buildings in the old city there, places like the university or either of the two cathedrals, sometimes even on private houses. They used to write names on the porous sandstone with a mixture of bulls’ blood and olive oil. “If you were important enough, that is.” Today you can still read the names of famous scholars and politicians soaked into the side of a lecture hall or library, although the colour may be a bit faded by now. She sipped from her beer. I imagined the slash of metal ringing between the swords. “Big red flowing letters,” she said. “The size of your arm.”
I worked at the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Adults on College Street then, above a hardware store in the middle of Little Italy. My job was to familiarize new immigrants with the mysteries of Canada and help families settle into a new life. A job that didn’t really exist when my parents came over. I spent my days talking to immigration lawyers, landlords, clerks in the OHIP office, potential employers. Sitting at my desk, talking on the telephone or interviewing new arrivals, I could hear the sound of five English classes in progress through the light cork walls of my office.
Anna worked up in Forest Hill at a small alternative school that catered to liberal-thinking parents with lots of money. She used to teach all subjects, though she was really only qualified in the visual arts. She’d been working at the Adrian Parks School for barely four months. By the time Suzanne told me her Spain story, Anna was already fed up. She hated her regular kids, she said. They were all spoiled rotten. She was thinking about looking for another job. But the special kids that summer were something different.
That summer there were always lots of work-related things to do after we shut down the centre for the night. There were Latin dancers and fundraisers, some sort of function at least once a week. Though she didn’t speak any Spanish, Anna would usually come along. She said she liked the parties because they were interesting. She said she liked to hear me speak Spanish. “Exotic” was the word she used when she talked with her friends.
We spent our evenings at home between fundraisers thinking about what sort of future we saw for ourselves. We were always talking about the future. I’d pick up some fresh pasta after work from one of the Italian food shops near the centre. Then after getting cleaned up at home we’d walk down to Bloor if we needed anything. After supper we’d take walks through the treed backstreets of the Annex, pausing under the big maples and spruce, fooling ourselves into believing that we were in a small town in a foreign country. Spain or Mexico, maybe. Maybe one of those places that was sending all those new war babies.
Suzanne lived just a few blocks north of us, where the houses were bigger and older, like the trees. We’d taken to passing her house on our late-night walks. I knew Suzanne spent her days there—for the last year, anyway, since I’d known her—working as a freelance editor. Anna would look at all the houses along the way as we walked, shadows living and dying beneath the street lamps, briefly illuminated homes for searching blind June bugs. Anna stepped carefully as she contemplated a house we were passing, sitting there in its cocoon of dark vines. Its fine lattice-work, carved gabling, the beige, shadow-painted brick half-covered with creeping octopal ivy. She spoke of the houses along the way as if each contained a secret of its own, something to discover and hope for. I’d watch our shadows push and pull between the street lamps, not as careful about the bugs crawling on the sidewalk through circles of light, and think about my Saturdays with Suzanne. When we passed her house I’d look up and see the glow from her attic window out of the corner of my eye. Careful not to turn my head. Careful not to throw myself off balance. Just the blur was enough to send my imagination running, to imagine her sitting at her desk, twirling her hair like she did. I’d remember something about her, the way she smelled the first night at one of those Latin dances where we first met. The dab of vanilla she wore on her shoulders.
The danger of being so close to her house with Anna next to me holding my hand would send a sensation up through the back of my neck, something tingling and unknown. I’d think about Suzanne suddenly appearing in front of us on her way home from a bar or a movie. I’d wonder if she’d know enough to walk by. Would she be a stranger to me? By then she knew Anna and I were living together. Or would she want to challenge my loyalty, to see how far I would bend for her?
I used to try not to call during the week. I’d learned my lesson about trying to arrange for something sooner. I’d tried more than once. She’d told me only Saturdays were possible—and then only sometimes. Some days, like the day she told me the Spain story, I’d wait at the café below her friend’s apartment for an hour and more and watch the dried-fruit vendor across the street through the front window and think about how the war must have changed my mother. She’d told me about that train ride east that she and her mother and her brother Günter had endured for weeks after the end of the war. She remembered riding a cattle car east through unknown country over great tracts of flat, snow-blown plains, along the shores of frozen iron-grey lakes, until finally the train stopped at a small road that cut over the tracks at the edge of the sea that they suspected was the Baltic Sea. They had little food. She said sometimes years later out of nowhere the smell of the open toilets steaming in the far corner of the wagon would come back to her and she’d have to wash her hands to make it go away. When the boxcar finally stopped, two drunk soldiers pulled open the door and started searching for the least starved among them. They found my grandmother and pulled her away from her children and they proceeded in the middle of the floor, her neck and legs exposed to the frozen air. The other men and women in the freight car, many of them from the same town, cast down their eyes. My mother’s brother looked out the open door at the snow falling over the frozen sea. My mother raised her hand and covered his eyes. Then an officer stepped up into the wagon and grabbed a fistful of the first man’s hair and unholstered his side arm. He pulled back the head and fired once into the temple. An old woman stepped out from among the silenced after the last of the soldiers left the train. She rolled the dead man onto the floor and covered my grandmother with her coat. When the train started to move again, two men came forward and rolled the body from the boxcar into the snow.
That was the type of story my mother told. Now, another type of story, this one youthful and romantic. I watched Suzanne’s face, then looked up and saw the Olympics playing out on the TV in the far corner of the bar. I wondered how much I’d changed since Ruby had died. I didn’t know anymore. I’d lost track of myself. But I knew, at twenty-nine, I’d become someone she wouldn’t have recognized. As my mother, in her way, had been changed by the war so many years before.
By the time Suzanne found her apartment in Spain and had settled in, she’d met the two old sisters who ran the corner store three doors down from her where she bought her wine and bread every day. At first the women were suspicious of her, such a young woman travelling alone. It was asking for trouble. But within a week Suzanne’s hunger for the language that came to them so easily won the women over.
Before her Spanish classes began in early O
ctober, when the old women were the only people she knew, Suzanne would go for long walks around the neighbourhood to fill her days. She spent her first three weeks feeling homesick and wondering why she’d come to such a small backwater town. She considered leaving for Madrid or Barcelona or Bilbao where she thought she’d be able to find more people like herself.
Across from the sisters’ shop there was a small bar that catered to the university students in the area. This is where they came to blow off some steam after class. They sat around small wooden tables shelling sunflower seeds in one swift motion with their front teeth and right hand, drinking cold beer from brown litre bottles with the other. She went into the bar the day she moved into her apartment. It was dark and full of smoke, although the sky was clear and the door to the street was open. She managed to order what everyone else was having. But when she tried to eat her sunflower seeds as gracefully as they did, she ended up feeling awkward and left before finishing her beer and never returned.