In the Skin of a Lion

by Michael Ondaatje

  He is always surprised at Alice’s body. She seems physically frail, as if a jostle will break her, but she is agile, a dancer as much as an actress moving fluidly through rooms. She thinks the twentieth century’s greatest invention is the jitterbug. She can almost forgive capitalism for that. She is in love with Fats Waller. Patrick has seen her sit at the piano in the Balkan Café and sing

  “Needed no star

  Wanted no moon

  Always thought it too dumb …

  Then all at once

  Up jumped you

  With love.”

  Clara, she would say later, was the classical one, she could play the piano like a queen stepping across mud. I play the way I think. And heartbreaking romance is all I want in music.

  But Alice’s tenderest speech to him, as she sat on his belly looking down, concerned her missing of Clara. “I love Clara,” she said to him, the lover of Clara. “I miss her. She made me sane for all those years. That was important for what I am now.”

  She could move like … she could sing as low as.… Why is it that I am now trying to uncover every facet of Alice’s nature for myself?

  He wants everything of Alice to be with him here in this room as if she is not dead. As if he can be given that gift, to relive those days when Alice was with him and Hana, which in literature is the real gift. He turns the page backwards. Once more there is the image of them struggling and tickling Alice until she releases her grip on her shirt and it comes off with a flourish, and Hana jumps up, waving it like a rebel’s flag in the small green-painted room. All these fragments of memory … so we can retreat from the grand story and stumble accidently upon a luxury, one of those underground pools where we can sit still. Those moments, those few pages in a book we go back and forth over.

  Nicholas Temelcoff’s fingers sink into a ball of dough and pull it apart, then they reassemble it and fling it down onto the table. He looks up and sees Patrick enter the Geranium Bakery, awkwardly look around, and then approach him. Patrick pulls out the photograph and places it in front of Temelcoff.

  Behind them the pulleys and rollers move hundreds of loaves into the ovens, pause, then continue out. Temelcoff in his grey clothes talks with Patrick about the bridge and the nun – reminded of the exact date which his memory had lost – and pleasure and wonder fill him. He stands in the centre of the bakery thinking, throwing a small ball of dough up and catching it, unaware of this gesture for so long that Patrick, a yard from him, cannot reach him. Temelcoff is somewhere else, the eyes magnified behind the spectacles, the ball of dough falling surely back into the hand, the arm that caught her in the air and pulled her back into life. “Talk, you must talk,” and so mockingly she took a parrot’s name. Alicia.

  Nicholas Temelcoff never looks back. He will drive the bakery van over the bridge with his wife and children and only casually mention his work there. He is a citizen here, in the present, successful with his own bakery. His bread and rolls and cakes and pastries reach the multitudes in the city. He is a man who is comfortable among ovens, the smell of things rising, the metamorphosis of food. But he pauses now, reminded about the details of the incident on the bridge.

  He stands exactly where Patrick left him, thinking, as those would who believe that to continue a good dream you must lie down the next night in exactly the same position you awakened in, where the body parted from its images. Nicholas is aware of himself standing there within the pleasure of recall. It is something new to him. This is what history means. He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light. Energy poured through him. That was all he had time for in those years. Language, customs, family, salaries. Patrick’s gift, that arrow into the past, shows him the wealth in himself, how he has been sewn into history. Now he will begin to tell stories. He is a tentative man, even with his family. That night in bed shyly he tells his wife the story of the nun.

  Cato would always arrive late, Alice remembers, his bicycle clanging to the pavement outside her window. She would climb onto the handlebars and they’d weave down to the lake laid out like crinoline. They’d lie against the railway embankment a few yards from Lake Ontario. The branches in winter were encased in ice and she would lean her head back, exposing her white neck, and take twig and icicle in her mouth and snap it off with the pressure of her tongue.

  But at other times she was glad she didn’t live with him permanently, to be pulled continually by his planet. If you were close to Cato you had to be a representative of his world, his friends, his plans for the week. Strangers, old lovers, ambled up to him on the street and embraced him and they had to join the group. It was impossible to go two blocks on a bicycle with him without running into someone who needed help to find a friend or move a cabinet. “Just one day, Cato,” she’d say. “Even four hours!”

  And so he became the man who was Thursday to her. They disappeared into the ravines, the woods north of the city, or her favourite place – against the thick stones of the railway embankment, the willow bending over clothed in ice, loving each other along with the sound of the spring breakup. Kissing each other with stones in their mouths. The freeze still over the March lake, she would lie on her stomach, his hand under her, the shudder of the passing train, the Apalachicola boxcars, reaching through his palm to her breast.

  So Thursday jumped out of the week like a fold-out bed. But there were no beds for them ever. By the time Hana was born he was dead.

  Patrick lay his head on her stomach watching the secret lift of her skin at each heartbeat. Talking on the nights they could afford to stay up late. “He was born up north, you know, quite near where he died.” Her hand brushed against his chest. “His father moved here from Finland as a logger. Here his family no longer had to bow to priests or dignitaries and they were soon involved in the unions. Cato was born here. His father skated three miles for the doctor the night he was born. He skated across the lake holding up cattails on fire.” Patrick stopped her hand moving.

  – So they were Finns.

  – What?

  – Finns. When I was a kid …

  Now in his thirties he finally had a name for that group of men he witnessed as a child.

  She looked at Patrick, who was smiling as if a riddle old and tiresome had been solved, a burr plucked from his brain. In the green room the moon showed her face clearly. A moon returning from when he was eleven. He loved the power of coincidence, the pleasure of strangeness. Hello Finland!

  – Come into me.

  And who was she? And where was she from? His hands on her shoulders, his arms straight, so their upper torsos were separate, their faces apart. The brain and eyes interpreting pleasure in the other, these textures that brushed and gripped. He pivoted on her hands against his belly, moving deeper, moving back, and was still. Not a movement of the eye. He knew now he was the sum of all he had been in his life since he was that boy in the snow woods, her hands collapsing to hold him against her harder. Fingernail at his spine. His cheek against her turquoise eye.

  He lay in bed looking at the light of the moon in the bones of the fire escape. The light of the electric clock advertising Cabinet Cigars. Out there the beautiful grey of the Victory Flour Mills at midnight, its clean curves over the lake. Any decade you wished.

  – God I love your face …

  She has delivered him out of nothing. This woman who jumps onto him laughing in mid-air and growls at his neck and pulls him like a wheel over her.

  How can she who had torn his heart open at the waterworks with her art lie now like a human in his arms? Or stand catatonic in front of bananas on Eastern Avenue deciding which bunch to buy. Does this make her more magical? As if a fabulous heron in flight has fallen dead at his feet and he sees the further wonder of its meticulous construction. How did someone conceive of putting this structure of bones and feathers together, deciding on the weight of beak and skull, and give it the ability to fly?

  His love of the theatre was that of an ama
teur. He picked up gossip, mementoes, handbills. He loved technique, to walk backstage and see Ophelia with her mad face half rubbed off. This was humanity in theatre, the scar – the old actor famous for playing whimsical judges, who rode the Queen streetcar east of the city and ate his dinner alone before joining his sleeping wife. Patrick liked that. He wanted to be fooled by the person he felt could not fool him, who stopped three yards past the side curtain and became somebody else.

  But with Alice, after the episode at the waterworks and in other performances, he can never conceive how she leaps from her true self to her other true self. It is a flight he knows nothing about. He cannot put the two people together. Did the actor – holding her on stage, reciting wondrous language, holding his painted face inches away from her painted face, kissing her ear in drawing-room comedies – know the person she had stepped from to be there?

  In the midst of his love for Alice, in the midst of lovemaking even, he watches her face waiting for her to be translated into this war bride or that queen or shopgirl, half expecting metamorphosis as they kiss. Annunciation. The eye would go first, and as he draws back he will be in another country, another century, his arms around a stranger.

  There had been an earring missing beside the bed or at the sink in the kitchen. He had watched her move around the room half-naked, dressing, bending down to a pile of clothes in his room without furniture, a long time ago, saying Can’t find my earring, does it matter? As if another woman would find it. Alice departing with one ear undressed. If we meet again we can say hello, we can say goodbye.

  Dear Alice –

  The only heat in this bunkhouse is from a small drum stove. In the evenings air is thick from the damp clothes in the rafters above the fire and from tobacco smoke. To avoid suffocating, the men in the upper bunks push out the moss chinking between logs.

  Patrick reads slowly, knowing he will be given the letter only once, on this summer night under the one lightbulb of the room, far from winter weather. Hana sits on the bed and watches him. For what? He thinks as he reads what his face should express to the letter-writer’s daughter. He holds the grade-school notebook which the words fill. She has removed it from the suitcase and presented it to him. Dear Alice, scrawled, the handwriting large and hurried but the information detailed as if Cato was trying to hold everything he saw, at the lumber camp near Onion Lake, during his final days.

  I write at a table hammered permanently into the floor. The log bunks are nailed into the walls. Fires die out at night and men wake with hair frozen to damp icicles on the wall. “In the bleak mid-winter – Frosty wind made moan – Earth stood hard as iron – Water like a stone.” That was the first hymn I learned in English, written by someone in an English village.

  And it describes this place better than anything else.

  Patrick sees Cato writing by tallow light … sealing the letter, passing the package to someone leaving the camp the next morning. When Alice opens the package five weeks later she pulls the exercise book to her face and smells whatever she can of him, for he has been dead a month. She smells the candle-wax, she imagines the odour of the hut, the cold pencil he has sharpened before beginning to write his unsigned letters about camp conditions and strike conditions. Cato sits dead centre, at the food table, the pipe smoke moves live and grey around him. His hair smells of it, it has entered deep into his shirt and sweater, it hangs against his stubbled beard.

  None of the camp bosses knows who he is or of his connection to the planned strike. But they soon discover this. He slips out of the lumber camp on foot and goes into open snow country. The nearest town is Port Arthur, over a hundred and twenty miles away, and he aims himself towards it.

  Four men on horseback attempt to capture Cato over the next week. But Cato knows snow country; he was born into it. He can, it seems, disappear under the surface of it. He avoids the familiar route, sleeps in trees, even risks crawling on all fours over thin-iced lakes – hearing the surface crack and groan under him. Now and then he sees flares belonging to his hunters. At each camp he writes into a notebook, jams it into a tin, and buries the tin deep under the snow or ties it onto a high branch. Meanwhile his package of letters is travelling, passed from hand to hand before it nestles in a bag next to a rolled-up swede saw on a logger’s back on the final leg of the journey.

  While he is cutting a hole in the ice at Onion Lake, Cato sees the men. They ride out of the trees and execute him. They find no messages or identification on him. They try burning the body but he will not ignite. There have been union men before him and there will be union men after him. The man with the swede saw posts his bundle of letters in Algoma unaware that the sender is dead, shot to death, buried in the ice of a shallow river.

  They lose two days a month because of wet weather. Travelling eats up $10 a season; mitts $6; shoes and stockings $25; working clothes $35. Being forced to buy their supplies in camps means 30 per cent tagged onto city prices …

  Patrick reads, aware that the smell of smoke is no longer on the porous paper. The words on the page form a rune – flint-hard and unemotional in the midst of the inferno of Cato’s situation.

  And who is he to touch the lover of this man, to eat meals with his daughter, to stand dazed under a lightbulb and read his last letter?

  He remains standing alone in the room Hana has now left. She had seen him hypnotized, as if the letter stared back at him. He realizes what he is doing, that he has become a searcher again with this family. As if he had leaned forward to the woman he had just met in Paris Plains and said, Who is your lover? Tell me the most painful thing that has happened to you. For he has over the years learned the answers. He holds now the last ten minutes of Cato’s language. In his mind he sees Alice pick up the package which death has made impossible – after the murder, the discovery of the body in ice, his burial, and the acquittal of the bosses at the inquiry.

  Patrick has clung like moss to strangers, to the nooks and fissures of their situations. He has always been alien, the third person in the picture. He is the one born in this country who knows nothing of the place. The Finns of his childhood used the river, even knew it by night, the men of burning rushes delirious in the darkness. This he had never done. He was a watcher, a corrector. He could no more have skated along the darkness of a river than been the hero of one of these stories. Alice had once described a play to him in which several actresses shared the role of the heroine. After half an hour the powerful matriarch removed her large coat from which animal pelts dangled and she passed it, along with her strength, to one of the minor characters. In this way even a silent daughter could put on the cloak and be able to break through her chrysalis into language. Each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story.

  Clara and Ambrose and Alice and Temelcoff and Cato – this cluster made up a drama without him. And he himself was nothing but a prism that refracted their lives. He searched out things, he collected things. He was an abashed man, an inheritance from his father. Born in Abashed, Ontario. What did the word mean? Something that suggested there was a terrible horizon in him beyond which he couldn’t leap. Something hollow, so when alone, when not aligned with another – whether it was Ambrose or Clara or Alice – he could hear the rattle within that suggested a space between him and community. A gap of love.

  He had lived in this country all of his life. But it was only now that he learned of the union battles up north where Cato was murdered some time in the winter of 1921, and found under the ice of a shallow creek near Onion Lake a week after he had written his last letter. The facts of the story had surrounded Hana since birth, it was a part of her. And all of his life Patrick had been oblivious to it, a searcher gazing into the darkness of his own country, a blind man dressing the heroine.

  Every Sunday they still congregated at the waterworks. They walked over grills under which foam rushed, they opened doorways to waterfalls. The building, now three-quarters finished, spread ceremon
ial over the rise just south of Queen Street, looking onto the lake. Because of its structure the main pumping station could be filled with lamps and no light would be betrayed to the outside world. The sound of pumps churning drowned out the noise of their meetings.

  On Sundays, as darkness fell, the various groups walked up to the building from the lakeshore where they would not be seen. There was food, entertainment, political speeches. A man who mimicked the King of England stepped forward with a monologue summarizing the news of the past week. Numerous communities and nationalities spoke and performed in their own languages. When they finished, the halls were cleaned up, the floors swept.

  Patrick and Alice walked home along Queen Street. The girl was asleep in Patrick’s arms, so at some point, tired from her weight, they would sit on a bench and lay Hana out, her head on Alice’s lap. He loved this part of the city, the evening streets an extension of his limbs.

  – I want to look after Hana.

  – You already do.

  – More formally. If that will help.

  – She knows you love her.

  A July night. On what summer night was it that she spoke of Clara and how she missed her? All these incidents and emotions to cover and the story like a tired child tugging us on, not letting us converse with ease, sleeping on our shoulder so it is difficult to embrace the person we love. He loved Alice. He leaned against her and he could feel her hair still wet from the sweat of the performance.

  – You will catch a cold.

  – Ah yes.