Expulsion

by Marina Sonkina

  “They tricked me, Erin . . . The buyer told me . . . I mean, he told the owner of the house that he was going to let us stay.”

  “They’re going to tear down the house, then?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “And chop down the alder? Tell me the truth.”

  “Of course not. Nobody would touch such a spectacular tree.”

  “Matthew!” She grabbed my hand, and brought her face close to mine. Her large asymmetrical eyes like those of some deep-sea creature expressed such raw, undiluted terror that I instinctively pulled my face back.

  “Promise that you’ll protect our alder!”

  What makes her think I have that power to do that, I thought. No, she doesn’t realize that I was the owner, she just doesn’t.

  “I’ll do my best, Chickadee, I promise. The alder’s unique. A perfect air conditioner right in their back yard. They’re not stupid, these people. They know its value. You can build any house you like, but you can’t just grow a tree like that. It would take 80 years!”

  That night I couldn’t sleep. You don’t sleep easily on empty promises. I gazed at my books, at my Japanese masks, looking menacing in the dark, and at my lithographs. There was La Scala at the beginning of its construction, and there was the Staatsoper in Vienna in the process of rebuilding after the Allied bombardment of 1945 set it on fire. That world of mine would be gone, replaced in an instant by a “grey mausoleum” or a “pink crematorium,” as an architect friend of mine called the new Chinese developments. And while they were at it, they would remove from the property every tree, bush, and blade of grass. Pavement instead of a front lawn. A three-car garage instead of my unruly tulips, peonies, trilliums, rhododendrons, and roses. A cinder-block wall instead of a living hedge. But why such disrespect for everything that lives and breathes? I got out of bed and took down a little book called Feng Shui in Ten Simple Lessons, a cheap, do-it-yourself paperback I had picked up at a garage sale out of sheer curiosity.

  “A basement full of junk,” it said, “interferes with spiritual growth. It will cause you to suffer a loss of power personally and professionally.”

  A promising beginning! I continued to leaf through the book. The front of a house, called the “Mouth of Chi,” should have a vast imposing entrance, with wide doors to let the energy of Chi in. The Phoenix, the energy of fire, lives in the entrance. So as not to impede its flow, nothing should obstruct the facade: no bushes, no trees. If you have ivy, cut it down. Ivy represents clinging, stagnate energy. The space behind the house is dominated by Tortoise energy, which provides protection and support for the home’s residents. A tall brick wall enclosing the backyard is best, but another building shielding the rear of the house is also good. The house retains the spirits even after its inhabitants are gone. To move into such a house is a bad omen.

  I put the book down. How much of it was already being put to use? And how did I know that Mr. Yui was even a follower of Feng Shui?

  Feeling even more distressed than before, I got dressed and went out to look at the alder. The tree stood powerfully alive against the moonlit sky. I felt its dark brooding strength. There was no breeze, but its leaves seemed to gently move, as if responding to imperceptible currents in the dark air. The light from the house illuminated its lower branches but left its top in darkness. If the tree had been rooted half a meter or so to the side, it would have belonged to the city and been in no danger. By law, owners are allowed to cut down one large tree per year on their property (small trees don’t count). I looked around. Mr. Yui could get rid of every tree on the property in two years if he wished. And if anyone objected, the worst that could happen would be a $200 fine. Would a man who had just bought a property for almost two million be intimidated by a $200 fine? I walked over to the alder and put my arms around it, as if trying to measure its girth. It would take two more men linking their hands together to completely encircle its trunk. As I patted the smooth, cool bark, it occurred to me that I had just given it a last, farewell embrace.

  19

  Erin moved into a small room in the back of the theatre. I took a storage room next to hers. During the day our plywood walls shook from the hammering and construction for the stage, and at night sirens and other street noises filled the air. We were in the downtown centre surrounded by thousands of people in high-rise office and apartment buildings, their opaque glass cubicles suspended high above our heads.

  Erin had changed. She seemed frozen, defeated. Despair had taken the silver from her voice. Day in and day out she wore the same jeans, black top, and black head cover and veil. I noticed that she had stopped eating. I brought her groceries from Choices, a fancy glass and steel organic store across the street from us, but she didn’t touch any of it.

  She rebuffed all my attempts to talk to her. Once I saw her standing in the middle of the sidewalk two blocks from our building. She didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Doing my best to seem cheerful, I went up to her and put my arm around her shoulder. “What’s up, Chickadee?”

  “They have hardened their hearts and withheld the tithe. The earth will be a shadow and I who toil will toil no more,” she said, both scaring and annoying me with her old nonsense in the dull monotone that had became her voice. “Leave me alone, let me be.”

  I did as she asked. I left her alone in her room. I came to regret that bitterly in the days to come.

  I read about what happened next in the newspaper. She somehow managed to chain herself to the trunk. The workers pleaded with the girl to get out of the way, but she refused. Finally, they called the police. When the police tried to cut the chain, the girl (it was Erin, of course) resisted. They managed to remove the chain, however, but in doing so injured her wrists. Although the injuries weren’t serious, she was hospitalized. And that’s where I found her, at St. Paul’s downtown.

  On my first visit Erin was slightly delirious and didn’t know who had put the chrysanthemums in a glass on her bed table. The doctor was helpless to explain the delirium as certainly the light wrist wounds couldn’t have caused it. The nurse put fresh dressing on her wrists in my presence but the blood continued to seep through the bandages.

  I tried to get a diagnosis from the young female psychiatrist, who turned out to be in charge of Erin’s case, but she was unresponsive. “That’s confidential information. We can disclose it only to relatives. Are you a member of her family?”

  “Well, I’m as close as anyone. There’s no one closer.”

  At that moment Erin opened her eyes. “This is my fiancé. We’re going to be married when I get better,” she said softly before nodding off again.

  The psychiatrist asked me to follow her to her office. I wasn’t especially worried about Erin just then, since I’d already seen enough odd behaviour from her, including the so-called erythania that left her unconscious. Although I had no intention of sharing any of that with the doctor.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked directly. “She doesn’t appear to have any serious injuries, but she seems to be withering away.”

  “Her injuries aren’t physical but mental,” the woman said while staring at the computer screen in front of her. She didn’t turn in my direction even once. She wore long artificial nails with shiny polish. One of the nails was broken.

  “Your fiancée went through a psychological shock caused by a feeling of guilt. After all, she was breaking the law, trespassing on private property and resisting any reasoning. Very erratic behaviour, you’d agree. Police had to be called as the last resort . . . And now of course, she doesn’t want to confront her own behaviour; hence the spells of unconsciousness.”

  When I came back the next day, I found Erin paler but more alert.

  “I’m going to die,” she whispered, looking not at me but over her shoulder, as if somebody might overhear and rebuke her. I touched her uncovered forehead. She was burning with fever.

 
“Don’t say that. Remember, you and I have things to do. I’m going to write a play for you, and you’ll be telling your stories from the stage. The kind you write on leaves. Remember?”

  Why on earth had I mentioned the damn leaves?

  She grabbed my wrist with unusual strength, pulled herself up, and brought her face level with mine.

  “Have they cut down the alder already? Tell me the truth.”

  I winced at the sight of fresh red stains on her bandages.

  “They’re not going to. I told you that, Chickadee.”

  “You’ve seen it? Seen it yourself?”

  “If you want me to, I’ll go look.”

  “Come back quickly! Maybe there’s still a chance for me.” Her voice was flat, without any inflection at all.

  I couldn’t lie to Erin anymore, so I went.

  20

  I was just going to drive by the house. But as I approached it, I slowed down. Nothing had changed. My gnome was still there. Only the windowpanes of my study facing the street seemed to be shivering, as if they too had a fever. Astonished, I got out of the car. The windowpanes obliquely reflected the sunlight, and the air was still. The shivering was coming from within, or, judging by the noise, from behind. I went around to the rear. A backhoe was at work. What I had taken for a standing house was nothing more than a façade like a theatrical set, with the back and the left walls already demolished. What chance had brought me to my house just moments before it was reduced to rubble? From the side I could see one of the fireplaces with its chimney sticking up from where the living room had been, now no longer connected to anything except my memories of sitting beside it with Erin. The backhoe paused briefly, took aim, and then sank the sharp teeth of its shovel into what was left of the roof, pushing it sideways until the shakes slid off and it sagged and exploded, crashing down and covering the fireplace and producing an enormous cloud of dust, which was immediately hosed down by one of the workers. The backhoe then took another run, rolling over a tall rhododendron and crushing it. Soon there was nothing left of the yard. The hedges and shrubs that had marked the boundaries were gone. The butchered cypresses were stacked in what looked like funereal pyres. Where the alder had proudly stood there was now a void on the other side of which utility poles were visible, along with the neighbour’s garage and his garbage cans and a broken tricycle. What had once filled the air with robust life now lay on the ground in a tangled mass. The limbs that had already been sawn off were piled separately a few feet away. Tears of resin were visible on the exposed yellowish wood.

  I turned and went back to my car. Perhaps the alder didn’t know, didn’t have time to know what was happening to it. It was the end of November and it was already asleep. Anesthetized by the cold, it didn’t go mad with fear, didn’t choke in an agony of pain from the chainsaw’s teeth. And if it didn’t know that it would never wake up the next spring to call upon the wind to help it clear away its dry twigs before displaying the furry caterpillars of catkins on each branch — if it didn’t know any of that, then perhaps its death didn’t matter. For isn’t to be unaware of one’s own dying to achieve a kind of immortality? If the alder missed its own execution, then perhaps it never happened. But then its life never happened either. The alder neither lived nor died. Chickadees never built their nests high up in its crown and never sang their hearts out to greet the first rays of the morning sun.

  Whether the crocuses survived wouldn’t be known until spring. In March, their pale-ivory bulbs would soften inside and push up shoots too small to break through the pavement laid over their heads. How many times would they try before realizing that they were trapped, were entombed alive beneath the cement?

  It had started to rain. I felt cold stabs on my cheeks through my three-day stubble. I got back into my car intending to return to the hospital. Soon it began to rain in earnest. Great sheets of water flowed across the road, curling up and back like ocean surf and narrowing the surface to a strip of glistening grey.

  At the crest of the hill near the house the road opens onto a spectacular panorama of the city framed by mountain peaks. By the time I reached that elevated point, the streets were already swollen with water and the houses and trees dissolved in greenish haze. Here and there fires were blazing like torches and running from one house to another with what seemed like merry winks. The flames were oddly beautiful and enlivened the bleakness of the city under the torrents of rain. Directly ahead in my line of sight the spiked dome of BC Place was burning. And then, silently, it exploded into a ball of fire before collapsing before my eyes. Horrified yet strangely fascinated, I drove down to the Burrard Bridge and across it to the city centre. The small fires behind me had fortunately failed to reach the bridge. But the heavy rain made it more and more difficult to drive as the high water resisted the wheels and made a hissing sound. It felt as if I were driving through a mass of seaweed. And then I realized that the water was coming not only from above but also from below. The bay was rising. The cars ahead of me had slowed and then come to a stop as the water submerged their wheels as they exited the bridge. I still wasn’t as alarmed as I might have been: in the intervals between the sweeps of the windshield wiper, I saw the usual crowd of pedestrians strung out along the sea wall, even if in some places already knee-high in water. Strangely, they didn’t seem to be concerned either, nor were their dogs, which happily jumped around in the water and then caught up with their masters. Yet it was obvious that the water was rapidly rising. I couldn’t understand why it was higher near the bridge than it seemed to be at the beaches to the west. But there was no time to think about that. Two or three cars in front of me had slid off the bridge, breaking though its railing and disappearing into the surging water below. A nearby boat came over to help, but its mast suddenly snapped and then it too disappeared into the abyss. Trying not to panic, I hit the accelerator of my little Prius and was momentarily airborne. Half-flying, half-gliding over the rising waters, I reached the middle of the bridge. There the water level was lower, and I was relieved to hear the whisper of the tires on asphalt again. I slowed down and looked toward the sky. Outlined against the blackness of the mountains, the needle of the Harbour Centre Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the city, was rocking back and forth. The ring near its top with a rotating restaurant had tipped sideways. Immediately to its left, I saw Living Shangri-La start to lean forward. I gasped but was unable to take my eyes off it. I had barely grasped what the movement meant when there was a tremendous explosion and the tower crashed down onto the buildings below.

  When I reached the hospital, the vestibule was already flooded and the elevators had stopped working. I ran up the stairs to the third floor and Erin’s room. She was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling with her eyes wide open. Her wrists were free of their bandages and showed no traces at all of her injuries.

  “The Shangri-La Tower just collapsed! My parents lived there!” I shouted and then started to sob while kneeling beside her bed. “Erythia, I beg you! Make the waters recede! Save the city! Do it for me, do it just once!”

  But there was no response. I stood up and embraced her body. It was cold. I looked at her face and was struck by its perfect alabaster beauty. There was no deformation at all. The hint of a smile was fixed on her lips, and her green eyes stared at the ceiling. No, she can’t be dead! I thought. She must have fainted or had one of her seizures, that disease she invented for herself! And what a beautiful, lovely face at last, at last!

  I heard the sound of hissing again: water was rushing into the room. I ran to the door and managed to close it and then went back to Erin’s bed. But as I was about to lift her up and run with her to safety, wherever that might be, my hands touched a pile of rotted leaves. Horrified, I yanked them away. There was no body, just leaves. One of them stuck to my palm. On it were inscribed incomprehensible words: “. . . for now you see face to face.”

  Brushing the leaf from my hand, I ran out of th
e room.

  THE HAND

  In my eyes there are no days. The shelves

  stand very high, beyond the reach of my years ...

  Who can keep me from dreaming that there was a time

  when I deciphered wisdom

  and lettered characters with a careful hand?

  — (From “The Keeper of the Books” by J. Borges)

  I’M LOOKING AT the photograph of Borges’ hand. It is the hand of an old man, having absorbed time the way stone and cedar and earth absorb time. Its skin is fragile. Like an ancient papyrus it, too, holds the imprints of words.

  There’s nothing aristocratic about this hand. Joints bloated by arthritis, it looks too wide for the slender body of its owner. It has the roughness of a root. It’s not photogenic, nor does it pose for the camera — it has always had other preoccupations.

  Resting on a stone wall covered with hieroglyphs, it explores but doesn’t reveal. The palm is probing the shapes of the carved inscriptions — perhaps a haiku — as if trying to read them, while itself eluding being read. Like the hidden side of the moon, the palm’s deep channels are concealed from the observer. Does the Line of the Heart run its course through the mountain of Venus and Mars, crossing the paths of love, pain and loss? Or does it stop short, overtaken suddenly by the line of the Mind?

  The back of the hand is traversed by wrinkles. They run vertically from the basis of the fingers in the North, all the way down to the South, stopping in the harbour of the wrist. Deep folds of skin resemble drooping sails that lost their breath on a windless day. Ulysses stands between them, his longing pointed in two opposite directions: towards his homeland and for the lands yet undiscovered. It is an old Ulysses on his last voyage: he has left Penelope for good to prowl the unknown. Together with a handful of men, like himself worn by age, Ulysses finally crosses the seas and reaches the mountain of Purgatory forbidden to mortals. At the foot of this mountain they all drown.