Expulsion

by Marina Sonkina

  “What happened to Amy’s father?” I asked in desperation.

  “After he was killed in the crash, Amy told her mother what I’d said to her. The mother suspected me of some evil and called the school. I was called to the principal’s office. He said he would investigate. That’s what he said, investigate. He looked strange. I couldn’t grasp it right away; something was intruding, blocking me, some shapeless mass shifting all the time. And then I sensed what it was: cancer had spread from his stomach to his liver. I said to him: ‘You shouldn’t be worrying about any investigations right now. You have only six months to live. If you can, it would be better for you to avoid anything unpleasant.’”

  “Did the principal die?”

  “He expelled me from the school, so I never saw him again. But our prophecies always come true. Later I learned that they had a new principal, so I think, yes, the old one must have died. How could it have been otherwise?”

  Should I have turned it into a joke or have pretended that I took it all at face value? I went over to the window and then turned around, putting my hands on the back of her chair.

  “Well, my dear, tell me how you’re able to do all this! Your prophesies, that it.”

  “You don’t believe me, Matthew?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “I knew you would!” She sighed like a little child and reached up to caress my cheek. “Do you mind? You’re the first person in my whole life to say that. I’ll tell you how it’s done. We, Erytheans, take a leaf, and on each one we write a word.”

  “What word exactly?” Did I insist on precision to show that I completely accepted her nonsense?

  “Sickness, Betrayal, Financial Ruin, Poverty, Death, Slavery of all kinds. Or sometimes, Good Luck, Love, Mercy. I sit in the tree with my bag of leaves. When the wind starts to blow, I let the leaves out. The seekers of hidden knowledge catch them. What’s written on the leaves comes to pass.”

  “But how do you know who gets what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But what if they, those . . . um . . . seekers, make a mistake? The one who’s going to go bankrupt might, for example, catch a death sentence instead. Is the poor wretch still going to die?”

  “Whoever’s going to lose his fortune will lose it. And whoever’s going to die will do so.”

  “Can you prevent the disasters you foretell?”

  “No, that isn’t within our powers.”

  “Let me ask you another question,” I said, feeling a strong urge to change the subject. “I saw you once in a synagogue praying. Are you a Jew or a Ukrainian Catholic? I’m pretty sure you’re not a Muslim.”

  “You won’t laugh at me, will you?”

  “Have I ever?”

  As it turned out, Erin had as a child been passed among several foster parents, all of whom, according to her, had treated her with kindness. One couple were religious Jews and took her to a synagogue on high holidays and taught her some of the Torah. She made it a rule to pray in a synagogue for them several times a year. There were also two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a husband and wife, who travelled from province to province with a trailer, delivering God’s word from door to door. She enjoyed the sight of the highway slicing through fields of golden wheat all the way to the horizon. And then after that there were atheists, another husband and wife, owners of a small restaurant, where Erin worked as a waitress until . . . I never found out what happened after that. The events of the evening had worn out my Scheherazade, and she fell asleep in the armchair in mid-sentence.

  I lifted her almost weightless body and carried her to the small guest bedroom next to my own. I lit a candle on a chest of drawers in case she needed to get up at night and also left the door ajar.

  15

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I got myself a beer but it was warm and I put it back in a non-working fridge. The night confirmed in its concentrated stillness what I had already concluded: Erin was seriously ill. Inventing stories is one thing, but acting them out is quite another. Was it well-entrenched schizophrenia or a temporary psychosis? Knowing very little about such things, I certainly couldn’t tell which. But that she suffered from a dangerous self-delusion was obvious. Suffered? Suffering implies a certain passivity, a condition imposed and accepted. But doesn’t part of us always want to be deluded, always want to negate the world, spitting in the face of the obvious? Erin’s case seemed to have taken that impulse to the extreme. And yet for all the incoherence of her beliefs, there was great courage in her.

  She had been born with a deformed face. Her parents had rejected her at birth. She was tossed from one foster family to another. Her classmates hated her, and as she grew up society kept rejecting her. But she was defiant. She invented a new identity. The deformed face would now be hidden behind a veil. But, as it turned out, the veil didn’t provide the hoped-for shelter, and she remained an outcast. A fake Muslim trying to sit down between two chairs, someone who belonged nowhere. And still she didn’t give up.

  With amazing ingenuity she created another, unique identity, at last reversing roles with the world. She wasn’t striving to belong anymore. She had found her place: she was an oracle. Now people sought her out. Her success gave her power. With that power came confidence and freedom from humiliation. But the stakes were high. She had to be able to deliver something for her daring. And she did. From time to time her prophesies came true and she believed them herself. Her faith convinced others. People have always been credulous. What did it take to convince Julius Caesar to embark on or avoid a battle? The entrails of slaughtered chickens! Have things changed very much since then? Not really. Under a veneer of science, there’s the same fear of the unknown.

  To my surprise, the explanation I concocted didn’t help at all. What I really needed was to regain my state of innocence when her face had been a mystery and I could invent and love my own vision of her — even if I had now forgotten how uneasy and anxious that love was! I felt deeply sorry for myself and for her. I wanted to find a way, somehow, to salvage my fantasies. Well, then, do something for her! a voice inside me said. Something simple but real, as if you were still in love. But I couldn’t pretend. I didn’t love her any more. Yet she needed medical help. Perhaps I could find a good psychiatrist for her? What did they charge? $150 a session? How many sessions would it take? It didn’t matter. I would simply have to come up with the money. But would she be cured? Don’t question, just act, the voice within me said. Your future theatre might be a creative outlet for the sick girl! There was no doubt she was talented (the mentally ill often are). To maintain that persona took imagination, thought, and courage. And the things she invented as easily as breathing: God writing on leaves, seekers deciphering their futures. Where had she picked up those bits and pieces of Greek mythology? Waiting on tables in an atheists’ restaurant? She had a higher calling than sewing costumes. She could be a fine actress who would make her name in the new play I would write for her. In my new theatre, with its contemporary fare. A re-enactment of her own life, for example. All its doubts and struggles, and then, in an incredible denouement, a triumph of will and a cure! And then, who knows? If she became famous, I would bring her parents from their Selkirk sanctuary and make them watch her and repent! Oh, wouldn’t they regret, bitterly regret, what they did to her!

  I was breathing heavily from that foretaste of revenge. But wait! Was that all I could imagine for Erin? Revenge? No, there had to be something more. I had to grab the lost time by its tail and finally right all the wrongs. I could start with her face. I would fix her looks and her hearing. And return her to the world, and the world to her.

  For a moment I felt an upsurge of energy. Nothing was impossible! It was only a question of money. Now I needed it more than ever: for her and for my theatre, the two things now interwoven. But where to get it? My father? A million would put hardly a dent in his fortune. Didn’t he say he would help me whenever I neede
d it?

  Excited, I jumped up from the chair, shook off my shoes, and tiptoed into Erin’s room. Her blanket had slipped half-way down onto the floor, and the light silky gown she had on exposed her birdlike collarbone. Her body was slender and of exquisite proportions. I touched a mole near her cleavage, then traced my finger down. Her skin felt smooth, and of uneven temperature: cooler near her neck, warmer down below.

  Erin’s head was turned towards the window. To my relief, blond strands almost totally covered her face, leaving only her left ear exposed. To let her breathe better, I parted her hair around her nose, but leaving her eyes and cheeks covered. Then, obeying a sudden impulse, I got onto bed with her. The bed was narrow and I lay on its edge. I lay there for a long time, afraid to move. Then, gently, so it wouldn’t press down on her, I put my arm around her. I became aware of the fragrance of her body, a touch of lavender, the familiar aroma of forest shadows and moss wet with rain. She murmured something in her sleep, then pressed her body against mine, putting her leg over my hip. I stiffened. She must have done it unconsciously, without waking. We lay together and I gently caressed her hair, then her back and her thigh. Her breath didn’t change, but she pressed her body even closer, nestling her head against my chest.

  I’ll never know if she was aware of my presence or had just moved unconsciously in her sleep, but I would love to think that somehow she did, and that we did have one night together, the night of my acceptance and love free of expectation and fear.

  I awoke quite suddenly. The blackness beyond the window had turned a milky hue. I blew out the candles and tiptoed out of the room. I lay down in my own bed and immediately fell into a dreamless slumber.

  When several hours later I got up, the sun was already blazing in the window and Erin had left. On the coffee table I found a strange note: “Save our alder. If it dies, I’ll die too, and the city will disappear. I love you, Erythia.”

  16

  I spent the rest of the day in the foulest of moods. To shake off my unhappiness I made a point of meeting with several theatre people, occupying myself with that until late afternoon. Then I invited myself to a family gathering at the Shangri-La penthouse. I suppose I was looking for vague support from relatives with whom I no longer had very much in common. Nobody had even expected me to show up for my nephew Bobby’s fourth birthday party. While my sister and my mother were having a visit, their backs erect against the sterile white-leather sofa facing the strait in the distance, I went over the unpleasant task of asking my father for a million dollars to finance my dream. Since I wouldn’t be doing it only for myself now, a voice inside me chirped, but for a cause, my chances should be good. (Oh, the logic of the needy!). And then my gaze fell on a tennis ball, one of Bobby’s toys left by him under a chair. As I watched it, it began a slow, deliberate, accelerating movement across the expanse of the parquet floor towards the grey, convex wilderness of ocean beyond the glass wall. Perplexed, I looked around. Nobody else had seen the ball’s odd movement. I picked it up and went to another room to see it if would do it again. Twice the ball repeated the movement, gaining momentum as it approached the western wall. And then I remembered something Erin had said, even though it was just too preposterous to believe at the time, about the tower’s starting to tilt and that it would collapse.

  As I was sitting down with my family in the three-star restaurant on the building’s ground floor (my mother never touched anything in her space-age kitchen), I thought about the two things I wanted to say: the strange behaviour of the tennis ball, though they probably wouldn’t pay it much heed, and, most important for me, the money I needed to ask for. Which one should I mention first? I stared at the two pork medallions with grilled asparagus on my plate and decided it would be the money.

  “There’s no way she’ll ever approve, no way,” my father whispered in my ear while looking across the table at my mother.

  He patted the beads of sweat on his bald pate with his napkin. “You’re already working at a theatre, right? I don’t know anything about it, but who goes to the theatre nowadays? It will be too easy to lose it all. Keep your job, son, and if you’re short on cash, I can always help you out. But let’s not upset your mother. Promise me you won’t mention it to her.”

  17

  At what point did I realize that I would have to sell my house, my forest gnome? Initially, I rejected the idea, but the harder I fought against it, the more deeply rooted it became, until I knew unequivocally that there was no other option but to sell. Money for Erin’s treatment was my new priority, and the theatre was no longer just a private dream but Erin’s pass to a new life: her new spiritual as well as a physical home, at least temporarily — a place to live (two storage rooms in the building could be used for the purpose) until things sorted themselves out.

  But how would I break the news to her? That we were going to leave the house: the alder, the swing, the bushes, the flowers, the birds? That it was necessary, but that she didn’t need to worry, that she wouldn’t be abandoned, and that we would eventually find something even better? Hmm . . . What if she found out that I was the real owner of the house? What would she think of me then? She wouldn’t have to find out: I could sell it quietly. Only that wasn’t the point. The point was . . . I watched a spider drop from the ceiling onto my shoe. Brushing it away, I suddenly had an idea. Why not look for a buyer who would purchase the house as an investment? Forty percent of the real estate in Vancouver is owned by buyers in China. They rent it while remaining in China. Erin and I wouldn’t even have to move. In that scenario, she wouldn’t need to know about the sale. And when my little theatre became a big success (and I had no doubt that it would), I could buy my gnome back!

  In hindsight I marvel at the depth of my naïveté. How did I manage to convince myself of anything so foolish? To take a wish for a reality just because I so badly wanted it? Almost a week passed before I saw Erin again. After the night of her revelation, we had instinctively avoided each other. “I wonder if she knows that I was in bed with her?” was my first thought when she knocked on the kitchen door one early morning.

  “Matthew, have you seen?” she said in obvious agitation. “There’s a sign in the front yard. It says the house is for sale.”

  Oh, nothing to worry about, I assured her, while attempting a hug that she gently avoided. “It’s just a change of the ownership. That’s why I didn’t mention it. Because it won’t really matter . . . For you, or I mean for us as tenants. They’re apparently looking for a buyer interested in keeping the place as a rental property. At least that’s what the owner told me.” And as I said that, I firmly decided I would only sell the house to someone who would in fact allow us to stay there.

  The Vancouver real estate market is the hottest in Canada. Eight Mercedes arrived at my gnome, vying for space at the curb. The owner of one, Mr. Yui, a man in his early thirties, offered the highest bid: $1.7 million, cash, with no conditions. He took little interest in the house itself, although he did carefully examine the back and front yards.

  “I pay now, tomorrow go China,” he said. “I have business China.”

  “I’m only interested in a buyer who wants to keep the tenants,” I explained. Mr. Yui didn’t seem to understand. After his realtor translated for him, he nodded several times. We shook hands. The deal was closed.

  I signed a two year-lease on the theatre building and began renovation of its interior. Delighted with my progress, I hired actors, an artistic director, a set designer, and a crew of stage technicians. I also started to look for a plastic surgeon for Erin, even though I decided that it would be most prudent for her to see a psychiatrist first, and only then go ahead with any surgeries.

  It was in the midst of the theatre renovations that I received a letter from Mr. Yui’s attorney instructing me to vacate the house in three months. In keeping with the law, the last month would be rent free. “Clearly, there’s been some misunderstanding,” I said to the att
orney over the phone while barely controlling my anger. “Our agreement was that I’d be able to stay on as a tenant.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” the attorney’s suddenly indifferent voice replied, “but I’ll ask Mr. Yui.”

  The next day, the realtor informed me that Mr. Yui knew nothing about any such agreement, and that nothing could be done, since the property now belonged to him and those were his instructions.

  “I don’t care!” I shouted. “He made a promise!”

  “But there’s nothing in writing,” the attorney said.

  “Is Mr. Yui going to move in?”

  “Move in? Are you serious? He’s going to tear the house down, build a new one, and put the property back on the market.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Not in so many words, but isn’t it obvious?”

  “Then why didn’t he say so in the first place?!”

  “It takes months to get a permit to build a new house. My guess is that he just wanted the rental income in the meantime. But didn’t you sell the place for the price you wanted?”

  Rage, helpless rage, gripped me. I ran out the back door and almost stumbled over a raccoon that had got in the habit of coming to the backyard from the woods nearby. I shooed it away and watched it disappear through the ivy-covered back fence. Beside the fence, I noticed a wooden surveyor’s stake in the ground. I looked around. There were four, each marking a corner of the property — a sure sign of impending demolition.

  18

  When I told Erin we had to move, she listened to me in silence, then took off her headscarf and veil and sunglasses. “Look at my face, Matthew,” she said calmly. “I have nothing to hide from you. Why are you hiding the truth from me?”