This Is All a Lie

by Thomas Trofimuk

  “Parents love their children the same everywhere, Monsieur Garamond. I cannot imagine it being other than this.”

  Garamond nods approvingly. “And yet we applaud as our young men pick up arms and march to war,” he says. “We talk about courage and honour, and we applaud. Do you not find this to be an absurdity, Madame?”

  “With God on our side, we can withstand anything, conquer any army,” she says.

  “Ah, yes. God. Do you think perhaps our enemies believe exactly the same thing? Do you think that is a possibility, Madame?”

  “But Monsieur, God is on our side.”

  “Is the English God different than ours?”

  “The English God speaks English, Monsieur. Everyone knows this. And this God is a Protestant. This is not the true God.”

  “Spain and Italy?”

  “The Spanish God! The Italian God!” She is exasperated.

  “But regardless of the language spoken, are not all Christian Gods the same God?”

  Natalii shakes her head. “No, no, no. God stands with France,” she says. “God speaks French, Monsieur. It has always been so.”

  He looks at her and realizes she believes this. She believes God is on the side of France and with God there, France cannot fail. He wants to tell her that God does not line up and go into battle. God does not risk his life. God does not die horribly. But to what end? This is Gauguin’s wife. She is the vintner’s wife and she is lovely in her own way.

  Garamond thanks her, and carries six bottles in a canvas sack slung over his shoulder as he walks toward the river crossing. The seventh bottle is shoved deep into his jacket pocket. Occasionally, the bottles in the sack clink together – a sharp and delicate sound that pleases him. He limps a little as he walks – a reminder of a broken leg when he was ten. The leg never healed properly and his limp kept him from the military. He opens the seventh bottle and drinks from it once he is across the river.

  * * *

  There are sixty-four occurrences of the word “wine” in this book. That’s a lot. Too much wine, perhaps. Way too many references for some. It’s as if all anybody does in this book is drink wine. Here’s an interesting tidbit: In the 1500s, the people of France drank a heck of a lot of wine. In France, wine was more popular than water. Why? Because wine was safer. That’s right; Christian Europe emerged from the Middle Ages and staggered into the Renaissance as a heavy-drinking culture that was afraid of what diseases might be in their water.

  At the end of the day – and apparently early in the day, and in the middle of the day, as well – if you could afford wine, or beer, that was what you drank instead of water.

  Chapter 18

  Tulah at 17

  Tulah’s Snow Journal

  Wednesday, December 2, 1992 #34

  This is a dusty snow. As if the snow has been cranked through a flour sifter. Looking across the city, it’s as if there’s smoke in the air. The snow on the ground is powdery as it accumulates. Grandma Frannie told me once that the Inuit had hundreds of names for snow, a hundred ways of looking at snow. I looked it up. Most credible sources say it’s no more than a dozen or so, but one of the articles I found said the Inuit word for a fine snow is “kanevvluk” and that the Inuit dialect has at least fifty-three, including “matsaaruti,” for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh’s runners, and “pukak,” for the crystalline powder snow that looks like salt. I like the lie better than the reality. I love the lie that there are hundreds of Inuit terms for snow. Why not? Why wouldn’t there be hundreds of ways to look at snow? Hundreds of ways to name it? They lived with snow and their lives depended on defining it. It’s logical. Maybe this is why the rumours exist.

  Tulah and her sister are staying with their dad, at his condo, which is downtown. Alesha has gone to a movie and Tulah has been listening to Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You, over and over. It’s a boy named Colten, at school and she believes he doesn’t know she exists. She knows about him though. She talked with him once in grade 9, and she has written his name down on numerous sheets of paper, on the inside covers of binders, and once, on her arm.

  Her dad knocks, softly, and comes into her room. His hair is sticking up at an odd angle at the back and his shirt is only half-tucked in. His hair never sticks up. It’s always just so. She wonders what he’s been doing. “I’ve got some bad news,” he says. “Grandma Frannie died. I just got off the phone.” His voice is cracked and uncontained, and at the same time, it’s soft, as if this softness will make the message less awful.

  “What? She died?”

  “She was sick for the past few years, and tonight she passed away.”

  “But I just talked with her on Saturday. I talked with her two days ago… she was fine. She was fine.”

  “I’m sorry, Tulah. She had a massive heart attack and they couldn’t...” He sits on the bed with her and she slips her hand into his.

  Save her, Tulah thinks. They couldn’t save her.

  Tulah does not think about the fact her father has lost his mother. She is trying to reconcile her grandma’s voice just days ago with the idea that today this voice is gone forever. She leans into her father’s chest and wraps her arms around him. They sit for a long time and let the silence fill the room without questioning it.

  “I feel sad,” Tulah says. “But I don’t know what else to feel. I don’t understand how she can be gone now, when I just talked to her.”

  “You can feel whatever you want,” her dad says. “You can take all the time you want to sort this out. No school for you tomorrow, unless you really want to go.”

  Tulah can see the snow falling past her bedroom window and she wants to go out in it. She wants to say goodbye to her grandmother in the snow.

  The funeral is delayed because there are people coming from Zurich, and a sister from London. Sorrow lurks in them and around them. It becomes a liquid they have to push through in order to do anything and it slows them down. Tulah’s mom is coming to the funeral. The designations of divorce are placed aside for death. Tulah and her sister like it that they will be a whole family for the funeral.

  She does not go to school for the remainder of the week and because of her absence, Colten calls. He wonders if she’s okay and she tells him the truth – she is not okay about her grandmother – but she is happy he called. Colten tries to cheer her up by telling her about one of their classmates, Brendan, who lost his trunks in the pool at a swim meet. They came off when he made a turn-around, but he kept swimming. He won the race and had to stay in the water until his coach brought him a towel. Colten thought it was hilarious. Tulah thought it was courageous.

  * * *

  When Tulah was ten, she used to spend weekends with her grandmother, in her house near the river. Everyone in the family called her Grandma Frannie. On one of these weekends, they made a fire in the downstairs fireplace, steeped some tea and watched the snow. “People are always complaining about the snow,” her grandmother said. “And with good reason – it makes it difficult to drive, slower for sure, and people have to shovel it, and it’s usually cold when it snows. But snow can always make you feel better. Snow has a magic but you have to invite it. You have to make room for snow inside of you.”

  “How do you do that?” Tulah said, thinking Grandma Frannie had made up a new game and they were about to play it.

  “You touch it as it’s falling. Or you let it touch you. You open yourself to it and only then can you understand the magic.”

  Then it is a Saturday afternoon in February and they are standing in the back yard of her Grandma Frannie’s house with the snow falling like feathers. They see the deer – three hazy ghosts, standing at the edge of her property, toward the river. Tulah and Frannie have made a deal with each other to be silent until they are back in the house and tea has been made. They are just going to look at things and not say anything. Frannie has been watching the deer for a while
, but she lets Tulah nudge her and point at them – so the deer become her granddaughter’s discovery.

  At the river’s edge they find the path and after twenty minutes, Tulah is cold. They are not moving fast enough to generate their own warmth. They stop at a place where a dog, or coyote, has crossed the trail and its tracks cut into the new snow. Chickadees are chirping in the pines and far back in the woods a raven is scratching the air with its caw. Tulah looks up at her grandmother, who nods and beckons with her head to go home.

  Tulah breathes her tea – a spicy chai with milk and honey. She takes a sip. “Do you think the deer thought we were ghosts?”

  The grandmother recognizes the question as a penetrating one. Her granddaughter did not have to say the deer looked like ghosts through the snow. She was already down a layer, wondering what they may have looked like to the deer. This makes her happy.

  * * *

  The last time Tulah saw her grandmother there was the persistent cough. She coughed, a lot. She said it was a cold, and Tulah had believed her. They’d gone to see the movie Unforgiven, and the elevators in the theatre were being repaired. Her grandmother had struggled with the climb – she’d stopped twice to catch her breath.

  “It’s this damned cold,” she said. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  Tulah puts this together after midnight, after talking with her sister about it. Grandma Frannie kept her illness to herself.

  * * *

  A few months after the funeral, Tulah’s dad tells her he’s dating someone in his building.

  “The woman in 31-A,” he says. “She’s a doctor.” Her father acts like it’s a big deal, as if two years after the divorce, he’s not allowed to have a normal life and so he treads carefully.

  “Good,” Tulah says. “Is she coming for dinner tomorrow?”

  Her father steps back, astonished. He’s holding a head of lettuce. “I, I hadn’t thought about inviting her. You’re okay with that?”

  “Dad. You deserve to be happy. Mom’s dated like ten guys since you divorced.”

  * * *

  Two years later, the doctor from 31-A and Tulah’s father are in France on vacation and decide to get married. With a week’s warning, they want Tulah and Alesha to come but Alesha is at a yoga retreat on Vancouver Island, so it’s just Tulah. She does not hesitate and her dad arranges a first-class ticket to Paris. There are a dozen people from all parts of the planet gathered in a cathedral in Mâcon, near the river. The ceremony includes the mass, and the dinner afterwards is rustic but delightful. They are in a café somewhere near the river and it is stifling hot, even at 10 p.m., it is hot. Tulah is moved by the ceremony, and by the simplicity of the reception. Her father and the doctor dance to The Way You Look Tonight and there is a joyful lightness to the evening that makes Tulah smile pretty much all night. Two days later, she is back at school and it all feels like a dream. Her dad and his new wife decide to split their time between Mâcon and a modest place in Phoenix, Arizona.

  Chapter 17

  Enough

  “You needn’t be afraid of a barking dog,

  but you should be afraid of a silent dog”

  – Zhanna Petya

  Right now, Nancy would like one of her mother’s angels to come and rescue her. She needs a sensible, no-bullshit kind of angel, an angel who will tell her the truth, no matter how much it hurts. Because she can’t see it right now. Her mother would know which angel would be the appropriate one for hopelessness, for someone who needs to hear the truth.

  Nancy wishes for her mother’s kitchen, the wooden table, scratched and dented. The smell of cabbage soup. The warmth. She wants her mother’s voice. She wants the twins, with their talk of school and books, and coming assignments, and boys, and girls, and friends. She wants to hear about their teachers. And she wants her mother to finally talk about Mr. Petrov, the man who runs the bookstore across from Killfish Discount Bar on St. Petersburg Street. He is a widower and there is no question in Nancy’s mind that her mother is smitten. She visits the bookstore every Thursday and buys books, with Mr. Petrov’s assistance.

  She knows she wants a lot of things, but she would settle for an angel or two.

  When she was younger, she wrote a poem about the archangel Michael. Writing poems was one of her ways of dealing with her excess of energy. When she was in her frenetic, happy highs, she had more energy than she could use, and in order to not go mad, she worked on her poems. Her plan was to create a suite of poems. Nancy’s poem about the archangel Michael was epic length. It rambled on for close to forty pages. In it, she explored a love affair between the angel Michael and a woman named Nathalie. They argued over soup. They fought about sex, because the angel Michael had no genitals and Nathalie believed it was by choice. She thought the angel could have genitals if he really wanted them. When Nancy goes back and starts to read this poem, she cringes. It’s such young writing.

  Perhaps someday she will write about an angel standing on the balcony with her. The angel will have all this grey sky behind it. “Hang up the phone,” she will say. Nancy almost always imagines angels as female, or at least as effeminate males. She thinks all Buddhas, except the laughing Buddhas, are female too.

  “But I need this final conversation. I need…”

  “Hang up the fucking phone,” the angel says. “End the call. Drop the phone in the toilet. Take a hammer and smash it. Disconnect.”

  “Okay,” she says. She holds the phone out in front of her with her finger hovering above the red button. But she can’t press the button. Her hand starts to shake and she gently places the phone on the kitchen table. She looks at the angel with tears in her eyes. “Why?’ she says.

  The angel smiles. “Why do you want to continue?”

  “So I know in my heart, and my gut, and my brain that it’s over.”

  “Okay,” the angel says. “And what combination of words would help you to know this?”

  The angel is right, of course. There are only uttered words and sentences remaining. She is beyond the truth of action. “I don’t think I like you very much,” Nancy says.

  “I’m not here to be liked. In fact, I’m not here to be seen or heard. I don’t know how you can see me, or hear me.” The angel will begin to flap its enormous wings. It will create such a wind that anything without significant weight will move. The corner of one of the rugs lifts. A lampshade twists away from the volume of the wind. The angel appears to have more than two wings. It’s beating the air so crazily it seems as if it has multiple sets of wings. For Nancy, the sound is the thing that is disconcerting. The fwah, fwah, fwah sound of the wings is so intensely close and loud. And this flapping seems panicky, as if this angel is frightened. As if it truly does not want to be there on the deck with her. As if it is torn between staying put and flying away.

  The angel calms down and Nancy smiles at her. “This is nothing,” she says. “I’ve heard the sound of wings all my life.”

  * * *

  Nancy is leaning over the railing, looking down. His car is a tiny blue toy on the street, and Ray is an ant leaning against the car. ‘Tiny Blue Car’ would be a good title for one of her poems, she thinks. “You can leave, Ray,” she says. “You owe me nothing. You can get in your car and drive away, and never look back.”

  He could go home and that would be it. The news doesn’t report suicides, unless you’re famous. Jump or no jump, it’s over. He walks around the back of his car, opens the car door and slips inside. He places his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel and squeezes. But callous is not who he is. Self-centred, shallow, unfaithful, and lying, but not callous. He needs to know she is fine before he drives away. He wants to hold the delusion that she is okay – like a good black cat purring in his lap.

  “What are you doing, Ray?”

  “I’m plugging my phone in. I’m almost out of battery. I thought you said I could drive away.” His battery is at sixty-th
ree percent. He does not need to plug his phone in.

  “You can. I just don’t want you to.”

  “I’m not going to.”

  “Good.”

  They are silent. He listens as she takes a drink of something.

  “Are you still drinking scotch?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m drinking your scotch.”

  “It’s not my scotch.”

  “No,” she says. “It’s not yours anymore.”

  “It was sweet of you to buy it,” he says.

  “Scotch cuts through the shit doesn’t it, Ray? I mean, maybe this is my last drink…”

  “…stop it or I’m coming up…”

  “…No. You’re not. I don’t want you here. You don’t belong here anymore. I don’t want to have to explain this to you again. Honestly, you’re like a fucking child.”

  “So what are we talking about?”

  “Me. My unhappiness. I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but I’m depressed, Ray. And even though you weren’t mine, you were entertaining. You were distracting. And now I don’t have you.”

  “It doesn’t have to be the end. We can talk every now and then.”

  “Like friends? Really? You think we can go there?”

  “We can try.”

  “No, it will never be enough. Not for me, and not for you. It has to be everything. It has to be all.”

  “But it was never ‘all’.”

  “No, but it was enough. For a while, it was enough.”

  * * *

  “That’s enough.” Ray is shouting at the man in the cab of the backhoe. He points at the gaping hole beside the elm. “That’s deep enough. Stop!”