I started crying too when, the moment before, I’d been in shock. I never expected to get married and have children either, but the fact that Sonia wouldn’t seemed unspeakably sad. But what Dr. Caldicott had said about the end of civilization, the end of literature, that was what broke my heart.
No Turgenev. No Tolstoy. No Chekhov.
Sonia: “For me it’s the children. The children who’ll never be born and who’ll die so horribly.”
I asked her what we could do.
“We’ve got to talk to people, Jane. Tell them the truth. All over the world it’s happening. People are saying no. They’re saying these weapons aren’t making us safer. The opposite!”
The house was dark when we got back. Hector was asleep in the living room and Pete and Dieter were out. Sonia brought me to the kitchen. I felt for the light switch but when I turned it on, she immediately snapped it off and, letting go of my hand, shuffled away in the dark. I heard a click. Gradually my eyes readjusted and I saw the shape of her waiting at the stove, hands clasped like she was praying to it. The coil blushed and, as the colour deepened, I could make out her face in the glow. She was grimacing.
“This is what I do,” she told me, letting her hand hover above the burner. “This is how I’m getting ready for the burns.”
Many times that weekend I started a letter to my parents, both to warn them and assure them that, contrary to the impression I might have given over the last few years, I loved them very much. Unable to find the words that truly expressed our predicament, I tore the letters up. I thought of my father at the bus depot in Edmonton telling me that if anything bad ever happened to me he’d buy a horse, a dog, and a gun and ride away and no one would ever hear from him again.
“What will you call the horse?” I’d asked, like I used to when I was little.
“Casimir.”
“And the dog?”
“Patches.”
“The gun?”
“Black Beauty.”
There wouldn’t be a horse. There wouldn’t be a dog or a gun.
I decided to tell them when I went home for Christmas. If it hadn’t already happened.
I’d handed in my shoe paper the week before. Now I was supposed to come up with a discussion topic, but when I looked to my venerable bookcase, I could think only of the incinerated libraries and the books that would disappear forever. I mourned them all, but mostly the Russian ones.
Finally, I opened the first page of “The Duel.”
The stout, red-faced, flabby Samoylenko, with his large, close-cropped head, big nose, black, bushy eyebrows, grey side whiskers, and no neck to speak of, with a hoarse soldier’s voice as well, struck all newcomers as an unpleasant army upstart. But about two or three days after the first meeting his face began to strike them as exceptionally kind, amiable, handsome even. Although a rude-mannered, clumsy person, he was docile, infinitely kind, good-humoured and obliging. He called everybody by their Christian names, lent money to everyone, gave medical treatment to all, patched up quarrels and organized picnics, where he grilled kebabs and made a very tasty grey mullet soup.
I couldn’t imagine a world without Dr. Samoylenko! These characters were realer than most real people, more important to me than the students in my seminar where we discussed them. That was why I was learning Russian. So I could know them better. Kitty and Levin, the Nihilist Bazarov, old man Kirsanov with his cello and his tears—after my parents, they were the people I cared about most, as well as, and especially, Chekhov’s characters. That slippered fool Ivan Layevsky, Alexei Laptev, the Hamlet of Moscow, even poor, bewhiskered Staff-Captain Ryabovitch in “The Kiss”—they had all endeared themselves to me with their foibles and struggles and depressions. Heroically, or unheroically, they endured the boredom of provincial life, the disappointments of love. I loved them. I loved their galoshes and felt boots and smoky icon lamps, their black bread and tea with jam, the old men in slippers sleeping on the stove. I loved the mud and the vodka, the wasted days, the gambling, the flies. I loved that dog named Syntax. It was easy to imagine them perishing, not just the books they lived in. The people in the film were Japanese, but who could tell, they were so badly burned. They were human beings. Only human beings, like Anna Sergeyevna and Alexei Laptev and Dr. Samoylenko, burned and blinded and dying of grief.
I stayed in my room the whole of Saturday, and when I came down for supper Sonia jumped up from the table and hugged me. At that moment I passionately did not want to die. I thought I would cry again, but didn’t, because of the men. Our embrace aroused enough curiosity that they paused with their forks in mid-air. After a few minutes Hector remarked, “The ladies are very quiet tonight.”
Dieter said something in Spanish.
“Excuse me. I had just been told there are no ladies present here. Only two very quiet women.”
“Jane is upset,” Sonia explained. She sounded oddly triumphant.
Concern flashed across the little round lenses of Hector’s glasses. It glinted off his tooth. “You are sad, Jane? Why?”
“Have you seen If You Love This Planet, Hector?” Sonia asked him.
“This is the movie you invited me to last night? Then I’m glad I didn’t go. The world is full of cruelness and injustice, but Friday night is not for suffering.”
“Has your life changed, Zed?” Pete asked.
Sonia: “Don’t tease her.”
“I’m not teasing her. I’m asking her a question.”
They all looked at me. “I feel horrible,” I said.
“As you should,” said Dieter. “The bombs could start raining down at any moment. Quick! Go to the window! Check! Are they falling yet?” He grinned when, predictably, Sonia wailed and had to be comforted. Stiffening against his chest, she struggled free.
Pete had finished eating but instead of going for his second course of bread and margarine, he folded his arms on the table and addressed me. “This is what’s going to happen, Zed. First you’ll feel frightened. Then you’ll feel depressed. This is normal given the circumstances. You’ve just learned that you might die at any moment.”
Hector: “Anybody might die at any moment. It is a fact of life.”
Dieter: “This is more than death, Hector. This is annihilation. The entire planet.”
Sonia resumed picking at her dismantled burrito. “Is there meat in this, Hector?”
“After the fear, after the depression,” Uncle Peter went on, “you’ll begin to get angry. This is good because when you’re angry enough, when you’re sufficiently pissed off, then change can happen. You’ll say, ‘This is not right. This is unacceptable to me.’ At that point you’ll commit to action.”
“First mourn, then work for change,” Sonia said and Dieter nodded.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
Sonia: “We could let her in NAG!”
“No, we couldn’t,” said Dieter. “We would need consensus. Have you heard of SPND? It’s a group on campus. Students for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament.”
“Nu-clee-ar,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s pronounced ‘nuclee-ar’ not ‘nucular.’”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is.”
Pete: “Whoa. This is premature. Let’s wait till Zed gets mad. I’ve seen her mad. She showed promise.”
On Sunday morning I brought the sacred yellow telephone to my room and called my aunt. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You are upset about something. I can hear it in your voice.”
“I can’t talk about it.” The dread was rising in my throat, acidic, like reflux. “I’ll come next week. Not tonight.” I hung up before the tears started. How could I confide in a person for whom the worst thing in the world was constipation?
Sirens kept going off. The fire hall was a few blocks away on Balaclava Street. I’d always tuned out the shriek of the trucks, but I heard them now and every time thought of the newsreel schoolchildren in If You Love This Planet donning gas masks and c
rouching futilely under their wooden desks. Finally I opened my Chekhov again and got to work. Just before the duel between Layevsky and von Koren, I underlined two sentences. Layevsky experienced the weariness and awkwardness of a man who perhaps was soon to die. And this: It was the first time in his life he had seen the sunrise.
The meeting was still going on downstairs when I finished preparing for the next day’s discussion. I wrote another note to Sonia, the same thing as before, Are you all right? but this time I snuck down and put it in her clog. And I wrote it in Russian, so she would know it was from me.
The next day she brought it to me so I could read it to her. “It says Vsyo normalno?”
“Jane,” she said, staring at me, twisting her little cross in agitation. “I’m not normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everybody goes around like—like everything is fine. But it’s not. I know you understand. I know you feel like I do. Don’t you?”
I told her, “Yes.”
2004
Their faces in the newspaper. It all came back, everything that happened that spring. The spring those pictures were taken. I decided to skip my first day of work. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate anyway. I’d go out somewhere. Where? And if the paper was still on the table when I got home, if Maria hadn’t put it in the recycling, then. Then I would read what it said.
Was it Maria’s day? She comes every second week to clean for us and vex us. For example, our most needed utensils? She deliberately hides them, I’m sure of it, yet when I ask her politely and respectfully and without a hint of criticism to put things back where she finds them, she merely informs me that I put them in the wrong places. “Jane, do it the way I do. Because it’s better.” She’s Slovakian, short and muscular with a yellow bob and chapped hands. Joe Jr. claims she pays inordinate attention to his underwear drawer, that his briefs are always meticulously folded and stacked and, occasionally, on some Slovakian whim, transferred to a different drawer. “It freaks me out,” he says.
“Yet this same woman,” Joe Sr. says with a finger in the air, “this same woman will not dust.”
Maria would make the newspaper vanish. She would say that we had our chance to read it and we lost that chance. She’s done it before. But it was Monday, I remembered then. Tuesday is Maria’s day.
I went to wake Joe Jr. for school. He’s fifteen so this can be a challenge, though, surprisingly, he was already awake. I heard sounds before I knocked. “Come in,” he said.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxers with the cello between his bare splayed legs. Instead of the bow, a bamboo backscratcher. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said.
“I don’t mind being woken by the cello.”
“I’m not that good yet. Listen.” And he played a little silence for me.
I was supposed to begin copyediting a manuscript, the first job I’d accepted all year, but even before I could feel guilty about playing truant (I hadn’t checked my e-mail to see if it had arrived yet), even before I had decided where to pass my truancy, the phone rang and I left Joe Jr.’s room to answer it. It was the editor phoning from Toronto to say there had been a delay. I cleared the gladness from my throat. “Oh well.”
“I apologize,” she said.
I like this woman, Morna Crane, whom I’ve worked for before though never met in person. She does things like this—phone instead of e-mail, then take the trouble to prolong the conversation to a friendly length, which she did by asking, “What’s the weather like out there?”
Though I’ve never been to Toronto in the early spring, I had a snowbound childhood and remember the season’s fetid start—the dirty snow receding, the sordid revelations: candy wrappers, plastic bags, dog shit. “Do you really want to know?” I asked as Joe Jr. finally emerged from the bathroom, handsome despite all the holes he’s punched in himself, hair gelled into glistening tufts (an operation so time-consuming breakfast must be taken on the run). He stood in the open door of the fridge swigging milk from the bottle. I’d set out the day’s provisions—bun wrapped in wax paper (breakfast), five-dollar bill (lunch). He took them, kissed me on the phone still held to my ear, and left for school, dragging the cello down the hall.
“Tell me everything, Jane,” Morna said. “Don’t spare me.”
“Our magnolia is blooming. The cherries too.”
She sighed. “I saw on the news that it’s snowing in Calgary. That comforts me a little.”
And I got an idea. I’ll go look at the beautiful trees, I thought.
On the crest of the hill, at the four-way stop just before the descent to Arbutus Street, there’s a bit of a view northward toward the mountains, over other cotton-candied streets. Two varieties of flowering trees were in bloom, one a darker and one a lighter shade of pink. I drove through the frothy tunnel of 33rd Avenue, past the bright armies of daffodils amassing in the mansion gardens of Shaughnessy. All these carnival colours. All this spring cheer. It’s a bit much, I thought.
The radio brought the story up again while I was driving. I could have switched it off but was better prepared now after an hour of consciously avoiding thinking about it. It was over in a few sentences anyway. Sonia Parker, one of the “masterminds” of a 1984 bomb plot gone awry, had been released yesterday. Peter English would be released in 2009. The next item, in keeping with the terrorist theme, was about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
When I reached the parking lot, I sat in the car for a few minutes until I was breathing normally again.
Queen Elizabeth Park is the highest point in the city proper. I hadn’t been up there for years. On the plaza in front of the geodesic dome, a contingent of senior citizens was Catching the Monkey’s Tail as they Tai Chi-ed in perfect unison. I made my way past them, feeling clumsy, and headed for the lookout where three life-sized bronze people stand waiting for their picture to be taken. According to the nearby plaque, they’ve been posing there since 1984. The view behind them is entirely obscured by trees now, which seems fitting since the present skyline would have been unrecognizable in 1984. We couldn’t have imagined how the city would grow and change, upward and outward, its concrete leavened. Because we didn’t believe it would still be here. Only the mountains would be left standing. Or so we thought.
I headed through the Quarry Garden, over the Japanese bridge, down to where I’d seen the largest group of trees as I drove in. Walking under their collective canopy was like entering a cloud. I remembered bringing Joe Jr. here when he was about five, him in his baseball cap standing under a tree like the one I was standing under now, letting his head fall back as he gazed up through the ruffled branches. The cap tumbled off his head. “Mom,” he said, sounding like he hated to be the one to disabuse me. “They’re not really real, you know.”
I sat on the damp grass under the tree. Then I lay down. How wonderful and sublime, the scent of the blossoms. I only noticed when I closed my eyes. Naturally, I thought of Chekhov, Chekhov on his deathbed and how the doctor gave him champagne. Chekhov sat up, smiled, and said to his wife: “It’s been a long time since I drank champagne!” He drank it, then he lay back down and died.
I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when my purse rang under my head and startled me upright. It was Joe calling from work. Of course I expected the worst. What else? “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Did the book arrive?”
“No. There was some kind of delay. Tomorrow maybe. Shouldn’t you be working? Isn’t somebody dying over there?”
“Not at the moment. Ma for dinner? That all right?”
“Fine.”
“Maybe we’ll play a few songs for her. You remember Simon’s coming?”
“I didn’t, but it’s okay.”
“It’s not too much?”
“It’s fine.” I wondered if Joe had seen the paper, if that was what the call was really about. There was a pause full of hospital sounds—nurses being bossy, carts rattling
by.
Joe: “I wanted to ask your opinion. The Streptococci?”
“The what? Oh. I like The Joes better.”
“Won’t Simon feel left out?”
“You’re kind. And literal. Were The Ramones all named Ramone?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Really?” I was stunned. “The Ramones were brothers?”
“Well, not from birth.”
I walked around the park. I had lunch in the café next to the organic grocery store, then stopped in to buy more food, grocery shopping being sort of a second job these days, part-time and volunteer. I was stalling, though I wouldn’t have if I’d known Joe’s mother was already sitting patiently on our porch with a casserole dish in her lap. When I pulled up later that afternoon, Rachel called out, “I’m early!”
I came up the steps and hugged her, thinking, as usual, that every time I do she’s smaller while every time Joe Jr. is bigger. The hug went on a little too long. One of us wasn’t letting go. Who? The one with the heavy dish in her hand, or me? Finally, we separated and I turned to unlock the door.
“I still find this mat rude,” she said. “Go Away.”
“It’s not meant for you.”
“Are you sure?”
Then I remembered the newspaper lying on the mat that morning, the reason I’d stayed out most of the day. It was on the kitchen table now. I didn’t want Rachel to see it so, while she dealt with her shoes and coat, I hurried ahead to get rid of it. When I got to the kitchen, though, the paper was gone.
Rachel set the casserole dish on the counter. “That’s apple crumble.”
“I’ll get the groceries,” I said, slinking off, perplexed. I brought in the first set of bags from the car and Rachel asked if she should put them away. “I’ll do it,” I said. “There’s more.”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” she said.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 25