“I’m sorry,” Dieter said, red-faced. “I didn’t mean what I said. Pascal can have the living room. I don’t care.” He cupped his nose. “Sometimes I feel like nobody—” Then he threw up his hands. “Never mind!”
Pete looked right at his former housemate. It was the first time I’d heard him use a gentle tone with Dieter. “Forget it, man. You were absolutely right. Pete was acting like a hypocrite. He wasn’t living by his own principles. You showed him that.”
I found a note hanging from the string on the grate. Pulled through the fretwork and unscrolled, it was a newspaper article. Sick Boy Still Missing.
What was I thinking? Why didn’t I do more to get him home? He’d talked about his parents, shown us drawings of them, but I never thought of trying to contact them. I never considered the hell they were going through. I wish I could blame Sonia, but I blame myself, my half-heartedness. I was neopre-delennaya. (In Russian there are eight words for vague.) Already Pascal’s cancer had started to feel unreal to me, even though I had really felt it with my own hand, skin to skin. This was probably what had happened to Pascal, too, what would have happened to me a few days after seeing If You Love This Planet except that I had Sonia there constantly stoking my dread. Everyone was going to die this horrible death, probably very soon, and we all knew it, but everyone carried on as usual. It was as easy for most people to forget about the missiles as it was for me to forget there was anything the matter with Pascal. He didn’t seem sick. On the contrary, he was the liveliest person in the house.
That day on Wreck Beach Sonia abandoned her exams so she could devote herself to the problem of getting Pascal home. Having seen her in action many times, knowing how persuasive she could be, I had no doubt she would succeed in convincing him to go. And so I abdicated. I abdicated all responsibility for him.
Pete moved into the garage and Pascal became his gofer, a boy to bring him what he needed from the house. Pete needed books, Bakunin and Kropotkin, The Anarchist Handbook, his engineering texts. He needed the two garden statues without which the hearth looked bare and the living room unironic. The Ronald Reagan mask, too, went missing from the nail on the kitchen wall. Sonia brought him food because Pete wouldn’t eat with us. But Pete was still in NAG! and he turned up for our practices every few nights (Dieter too), unnerving everyone by the way he kept referring to himself by name, in the third person.
That week we held our meeting around the fire pit Pete had constructed. The issue for him was electricity. This was why he wouldn’t come into the house. He told us, “Pete will not live with state-supplied light. Pete will no longer be bought out by the forces of government.”
Hunched by the fire, erratically illuminated by its flames, Pete looked weird, spooky, passing around a five-fingered bag of marshmallows. Surprisingly, the practices were going well and the decisions we made that night came easily too, perhaps from having to keep our voices low. (The neighbours were more concerned about the smoke from Pete’s fire than the ultimate conflagration we hoped to save them from.) Our forced whispers and half-tones precluded argument, or the marshmallows sweetened our words, or we were just too freaked out by Pete. We settled on a date for the action—the last Sunday in April, traditionally the day of the Walk for Peace, the peace movement’s Christmas, the highlight of the year. Estimates for that year’s walk broke all records: one hundred thousand people. But we in NAG!, we Naggers, disdained the walk for being merely symbolic, hardly more than a parade. On April 29, 1984, eight months before the world was scheduled to end, rather than be usurped by Trots as we tramped across the Burrard Street Bridge shouldering our papier mâché cruise missiles, we would be acting to save the world, not just singing songs about it.
Then Pete’s proposal to include non-Naggers in the action was accepted without a murmur. We were in need of one or two extra people. They wouldn’t be joining the group per se, because an affinity group by nature must be small. It was a kind of cell, a cell for peace. “Pete’s suggestion is that we invite these people in with the understanding that after the action we help them form a group themselves—something we’ve been talking about for a long time anyway, right?”
“I think that’s a great idea, Pete,” said Sonia and she named Pascal, since he had already been at the practices and knew everything that was going on. We threw other names around, including Ruth’s, then Dieter said, “I’m not trying to filibuster or anything, but—how about we stick with Pascal? It’ll be a whole lot less complicated.”
Afterward we all went inside, except Pete, and I made tea. Dieter and Sonia headed upstairs, Dieter to study, Sonia to tell Pascal what we’d decided. We could hear the music from Pete’s old room, where Pascal was apparently listening his way through every one of Pete’s tapes. It was strange to hear Mozart in the house.
Downstairs, Isis snugged a nylon stocking over Timo’s face. Napyalivat: to put on a tight garment with a certain amount of effort. Instantly, his placid features were erased and in his place sat this faceless giant. She plucked at the fabric over one eye, snipped the tip off with scissors. It sprang back, revealing a blinking hazel orb. She did the same with the other eye and the mouth, then removed the stocking so she could seal the edges of each hole with nail polish.
The nights were still chilly. I warmed my hands on the pot as the tea steeped, picturing Pete doing the same outside over the dying embers of the fire, nails packed with grime, face roughened with stubble, hair perfumed with smoke. I couldn’t actually see him, but he would be able to see us if he stood in the door of the garage. We would look bright and comfortable under those sixty hypocritical watts, framed in the window like a diorama, discussing him.
“He stinks,” Carla said. “He needs a bath.”
“You need water for that.”
“He’s got to drink. What’s he drinking?”
He’d left bowls out, but it hadn’t rained in over a week. I kept my mouth shut about the tap and told them instead about the dew-catcher he’d made from stones, a pot, and a plastic bag.
“He can do anything,” Isis said, blowing on the nail polish. “I tell you, he’s a genius.”
I wondered why Sonia was taking so long with Pascal. Should I pour her tea or would it just get cold?
Isis turned to me. “Is Pete okay? I feel terrible. Should I talk to him?”
Carla said, “No. That’s why he’s doing it.”
“It’s creepy,” Isis said, “how he says Pete this and Pete that.” “He’s trying to guilt you out. Right, Timo?”
“I don’t know,” Timo said. “I hope it isn’t dissociation.”
Isis shivered and laid her forehead on the table so the bronze ropes of her hair spread across her back. “The stress is killing me. Exams. Pete acting crazy. The action.”
“Nuclear war,” I added.
Carla got up to massage her shoulders. “Exams are done,” she said.
Isis: “I think my head’s going to explode. We’ve got to do something fun. Soon.”
Timo had been sitting patiently, waiting for Isis to need him again. She was making each of us a mask, a second skin across which she was going to conjure horribly realistic burns. Now he looked at me and asked the question no one had dared bring up. “So Jane. Where’s he ppppooping then?”
I had left the matter of the dying, runaway child we were harbouring in Sonia’s small, capable hands so that I could concentrate on studying. It never occurred to me that this was a stupid, selfish course, just as it never occurred to me to be jealous of a sixteen-year-old boy until he and Sonia came in the door with petals in their hair. When I saw them, I thought of confetti, then the Russian word for candy, konfyeta, and I broke into a sweat over my exam, my very last, scheduled sadistically on the very last week, almost the last day, as though to prolong my misery, the agony of learning Russian, that sado-masochistic language. Because, unlike Sonia, I couldn’t not study. It wasn’t in my nature. I had to keep at it until the ordeal was done. I would still be studying when I took the bus to
the university on Thursday, muttering conjugations and declensions. I would be studying even as I huddled outside the examination room, my back to the wall, hugging my knees. Every noun in Russian had twelve forms! All this zealotry even though I knew I wasn’t going to continue in Slavonic Studies, even though I would never get the chance to use the Russian that I’d learned.
They came into the house together like a bride and groom, triggering in me a spasm of hindsight. Pascal was always trying to get near Sonia, even touch her, and she was always slithering from his grasp or physically unhanding herself when he now and then actually got her in his brazen teenage clutches. But at the NAG! meeting the night before this hadn’t happened. Pascal had sat on his hands and trained his idiot smile on her from across the fire, which forced me to conclude now, with a martyrizing pang, that the touching was happening elsewhere. Suddenly I knew how Alexei Laptev really felt in “Three Years” suffering the shame and humiliation of someone who had been rejected, who wasn’t loved, who was thought unattractive, repulsive and perhaps even hateful, and whom everyone avoided . . . and Staff-Captain Ryabovitch in “The Kiss,” that short, stooping officer, the most modest and most insignificant officer in the brigade, whose unremarkable appearance the ladies deem vague, who, after the kiss, goes to sleep at night imagining someone caressing him and making him happy, even while recognizing that these caresses are absurd. Now I wanted to be Kitty, because when Kitty was in love with Varenka, her love was returned.
They’d been holding hands, but let go as soon as they saw me. I hurried up the stairs. “Jane,” Sonia called.
She followed me. Pascal was right behind her. I heard a chiding whisper, then Pete’s door closing and the music coming on. Sonia knocked. “I’m busy,” I said from my desk, but she came in anyway and lay down on my futon. I pretended to be reading. Ya chitayu. I’m reading. In Russian, there are twenty-six prefixes for that particular verb.
“I did it,” she said.
I turned in my chair and saw her stretched out on my futon with her hair fanned out around her. All spring I had longed to see her lying there like that. “He’s going back,” she said. Then she rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow where I laid my head every night thinking about her.
“He’s really going?”
She nodded. I heard her sob. Then I was crying too, from relief. I’d been mistaken. She didn’t love him that way. She loved him the way she loved everyone, including me. That was the best I could do. And it was fine. Really. As long as he was leaving.
I came over and sat beside her on the futon. She pushed herself up and we embraced. After a minute, she asked, “Why are you crying, Jane?”
“I’m happy.” I blotted my eyes on the sheet.
“Jane? Will you help me?”
“Of course. What?”
“Because—” She looked flushed and I couldn’t tell if it was out of embarrassment or excitement. “I couldn’t have a baby. I couldn’t.”
And I felt so stupid. I felt betrayed.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Please, Jane.”
“Don’t do it, Sonia. Don’t.” I thought to add, “Not unless you want to.”
She swelled with indignation. “I don’t want to. I’m not like that. Not at all. But if I do, he’ll go back home and cooperate with everyone. Jane, I’ve tried everything.”
“What about the police?”
“No.” She took her head in her hands.
“But how can you? You’re not in love with him.” I didn’t have to say anything about her being Catholic. She was already fiddling with her cross, twisting it in her guilty little fingers.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not getting married. I’ve made up my mind, whether you help me or not. It’s the only chance I’ll ever have.”
“Chance for what?”
“To save someone.” She held out her hands with their gnawed nails, pleading. “He’s sixteen. They won’t give him anything.”
I stared at her.
“I can’t walk into a store and ask for condoms, Jane. I’d die.”
“I would too!” I cried.
“I know. Come with me. That’s all I’m asking. Come with me. Be my support.”
She was willing to be arrested, to go to jail even, but she couldn’t walk into a drugstore and ask for birth control. I understood exactly how she felt because I’d been brought up the same way. Sex was the unutterable word. It was almost evil, worse than Communism even. Occasionally my father would rant about Communists, but he would never talk about sex, not to me and probably not to my mother either. I looked in Sonia’s blotchy face, desperate and ashamed—yet triumphant too, that she had found a way to help him. Pascal would go home and I would still be here, the person who had helped her, the person who really loved her. We would do the Boeing action and maybe it would be the one that tipped the scales. Maybe peace would break out everywhere and we would live in it together and not die that awful death.
We walked up to Fourth Avenue in silence. I plodded the aisles of the drugstore with her, but I wouldn’t help her look. When she went up to the cashier, I slipped outside and waited until, minutes later, she burst out with a paper bag under her arm. “Thank you, Jane!” she gasped.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
She kissed me in the same place as before.
“Do you?” I asked.
Trutch house talked in its sleep. Every creak sounded like Sonia coming up the stairs or Pascal going down. I kept getting up, going for a drink of water, going to the bathroom. Dread. Why had I helped her buy the condoms? Why? I read for a little while, waiting for Sonia’s light. It never came on, yet my room seemed so bright. When I got up and looked out the window, the moon was nearly full, ringed by blazing moondogs. Below, a paler light flickered in the garage.
A sweet tang masked the other garage odours, which may have been why Pete didn’t seem particularly surprised to have a visitor in the middle of the night. “Zed,” he said, wriggling an arm out of the sleeping bag and flourishing it in welcome. “Pull up a milk crate.”
It was the only place to sit. I made myself small on it and asked him how he was.
“Pete’s okay. He’s hunky-dory. How about you?”
“I can’t sleep. I was reading and saw your light.”
“What were you reading?”
“‘Three Years.’ It’s about this guy, Alexei Laptev. The woman he loves doesn’t love him back. So he’s always having these conversations with friends. About the possibility of life without love. About passion being a psychosis. About love not existing at all, being just a physical attraction.”
I saw that Pete was shaking his head, letting it roll this way and that on the foamie, and that his stubble was starting to thicken into a beard. “What?” I asked.
“With everything that’s going on in the world, Zed? You read stories?” He might have said nursery rhymes.
“It’s Chekhov.”
His look said, So?
“You read my paper. I love his stories. I love the people in them. How they strive. They have these hopes for the future, but the future seems—like it will never come. They’re guilty and idealistic and jaded—all at the same time. And always there’s this mood. I’m not explaining it very well. It’s just that he writes the way I feel.”
The candle, fixed onto a paint can, licked at the night. We both watched it. Then a line came to me and I recited it. “My heart felt heavy within me and I kept thinking how wonderful it would be if I could only rip it out of my breast somehow.”
“That’s how you feel?” he asked.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“Pete’s feelings are irrelevant,” he said.
“That’s the problem with you,” I said, exasperated. “You act like we’re all creatures. It’s not going to make you less of an anarchist, admitting you actually love somebody.” Then, to my horror, I did cry, covering my face with my hands, wishing it all felt irrelevant to me. Pete did nothing to co
mfort me, but after I had dried my face on my sleeve, he offered to sleep with me.
“Pete wanted to at Christmas, but you didn’t seem into it.”
“No,” I said.
He arched his back in the bag, a stretch or a shrug. He thrashed around. “Zed, come here,” he said and when I froze on the crate, he laughed. “Fear not. Pete won’t jump you.”
So I came and sat beside him, wary until he turned his back to me. “Scratch?”
Between his shoulder blades, up and down his spine with its pretty, decorative knobs. “Harder,” he said and I scratched it harder.
The unbearable itch that had taken over his life.
The weather turned the next day. Having grown smug with spring, we were shocked to wake to a moleskin sky, to wind. Worse, rain was predicted for Sunday when no one could remember a rainy Walk for Peace. For what it would do to the papier mâché alone, it signified disaster, though for us personally only discomfort, our fake blood thinning, the chains slippery and more difficult to handle. Nevertheless, we couldn’t help seeing an omen in the forecast.
I had thought my anxiety would evaporate as soon as I finished my exam, indeed, before I finished it, as soon as I read the questions. Instead, I discovered that the exam had been a distraction and now the real worrying began. We were going to cross the border. Some of us were going to be arrested. Not me, I was support, but what if something went wrong?
Isis had promised fun and what she brought over were five identical booklets from the library, five copies of The Cherry Orchard, and a jug of oily-looking plonk. She gathered us on the porch where we sat along the wide wooden ledge and on the flowered chesterfield, feeling its metal skeleton through the emaciated cushions. I avoided Sonia’s eye.
Since there were sixteen characters and only seven of us, excluding Pete, Isis assigned some of us multiple roles. She herself took on all the minor characters as well as the two female leads, Ania and Liuba, mother and daughter. “Pete was supposed to be Trofimov.” Piotr Trofimov, the idealistic student. “He is Trofimov,” she said, meaning more than that they had the same name. She looked at the three males and decided Pascal would be Pete’s understudy in addition to playing Yasha, the preening valet. “This is for you, Jane,” she said, pulling a cucumber from her bag. “You’re Charlotta. Because you’re so funny.”
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 41