“I suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of a Zeppelin immediately overhead. This was followed by a large bang. A bomb had been dropped at the end of our street, directly over the baker’s house. Poof! The baker was gone! Clouds of flour rose to the sky. People raced to the scene to attempt rescue, but the baker could not be saved. Instead, they rummaged in the ruins for salvage. The rummaging continued the next day, and the day after that. The looters kept what they found.”
The three of us considered. Each, perhaps, visualizing a different scene. I wondered if Lena was thinking of Madame Hortense in Zorba. Or if she was thinking, as I was, of my mother’s sewing machine, or even of Missisu’s piano, which had been hoisted with much effort on the part of the looting men.
Later, after I’d escorted Miss Carrie and her rickety walker home, Lena remarked, “Don’t you sense Daddy in her house somewhere? It’s as if he’s still lurking. His wines are stored in the basement; his humidor adorns the walnut buffet, cigars inside. His stale tobacco is tucked into the leather pouch. And the hellhole—well, maybe that’s the way she exerts defiance, now that both parents are dead. She can finally do what she wants to do. It’s obvious that she managed the household after Mommy died. Probably the reason she never married—that and the fact that the young men of her generation were killed off. Has she shown you her early photos? She was petite, blonde, beautiful. There’s mischief and humour in every photo. The same humour she hasn’t lost, thank heavens. And—wait for this—she loves Benny Goodman! She told me that during the thirties, she danced to his band at Billy Rose’s in New York. Her Benny records are stacked in a box in her basement. Along with the jazz greats. Can you believe it? Unfortunately, her record player doesn’t work.”
But I still hadn’t caught up. I was thinking of the looting scene in the film. I was thinking of my parents, of my sister and brother. Where did the anger go? Did it find its own swallowed place to reside and brood within us, along with the shock and helplessness we felt at the time? Why weren’t the parents—and the children, too—why weren’t we all shouting and yelling from the railings of the Princess Maquinna?
We did not protest. We stood, soundless, as if we were also invisible, while the boat took us away.
I suppose it is somewhat strange that ever since that winter morning, it is the image of Missisu’s piano I most easily call to mind. I have always imagined that heavy piece of furniture being pushed and pulled through time. Shoved around restlessly, continuously, within some faceless person’s house. Or perhaps at a final standstill after all, collecting dust in a living room in which I will never be welcome.
CHAPTER 7
The day after we watched Zorba together, Miss Carrie placed a bottle of wine between our front doors. It must have taken considerable effort to transport it from her house to ours. Perhaps she let it roll around the seat of her walker. Or perhaps she shuffled to our place with the aid of her cane. A note was tied to the neck of the bottle.
There has been a rise in the price of single malt. The man who came to cut overhanging branches from the sorry old oak in my backyard frequents the liquor store and has so informed me. The wine is from Daddy’s wine cellar and is meant to thank you for the film. I know it’s not Scotch, which Bin prefers, but he might enjoy an ancient red. Do come and have sherry with me some evening next week, perhaps Sunday. I serve it the old way, with a fistful of croutons. I toast the croutons myself, in the oven.
A bottle of Laphroaig is with me now, so far unopened. I shove in a Beethoven tape, the Fifth Symphony, exactly right for a landscape where rock is a force, the dominant force. No escaping the fact of this since first approaching the northern part of the province. I’ve been travelling for hours over marsh and crag, over road blasted through solid walls of rock, in a landscape where only stunted growth survives. This is how I would depict the old, old earth in its pared-back state. Patches and furrows of salmon pink, feldspar in granite. Roots and pods, struggling to survive.
Basil raises his head at the click of the tape and Beethoven’s four-note motif. What does Basil hear—apart from my thoughts? What does any dog hear? Wah-wah-wah-wah. He sniffs the air and settles again. I hear him gnawing at his Kong. He’s content while we’re moving and lets me know that he’s immune to the music. Not that there’s anything wrong with his hearing. At home, he hears the mail before it hits the slot and then tries to scare off the postman. Or he bounds to the kitchen from any room of the house at the sound of a yogurt top being torn off, hoping to lick its foil underside.
The music continues, three plus one, same pitch for three, the fourth pitch down a third: Da Da Da Dum. The theme repeats itself in insistent ways. Fate knocking at the door. Where did that come from? From the great man himself, who created an entire symphony around four notes. He unified themes; that was his genius. The power in the music builds and builds, never releasing the listener. Beethoven had energy and beauty inside him, and determination. Enough that he could pluck the first note from his mind and plant it to a staff, the lines of which he had drawn in one of his copious notebooks. If he’d contained the symphony unexpressed, within him, it could have destroyed him. And life wasn’t easy before he wrote the Fifth. To which I could listen for days—and have. With Okuma-san when I was a boy, years after the war, when he purchased a second-hand record player. On a lumpy mattress in a long-ago student apartment on rue Bishop in Montreal. In a concert hall in Berlin. In a bedsit in London, teetering on a lopsided stool that had a splintered leg.
Beethoven once wrote to his friend Wegeler that it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives. But if given a second life, or a third, would his ears be able to hear? He was closed to the outer sound of his own music, but his inner life, his adversity, must have pushed his genius. Listen, Okuma-san told me. Listen to the tapping on wood. Listen to it rhythmically. It is the music of Beethoven. His greatest works were written after he was totally deaf.
Light is dropping from the sky. The sun has overtaken the car and I’m driving directly into afternoon glare. I’ve been on the road for two days and I’m still in Ontario, forced to acknowledge the immensity of one province. If I were in northern Europe, I’d have passed through half a dozen countries by late afternoon. But here I am, and I can’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen a motel sign. Still, the drive over the Canadian Shield is one of my favourites, and used to be one of Lena’s, too. We never hurried when approaching the north shore of Lake Superior, travelling west towards the Lakehead. Lena loved hiking in the provincial parks and scrambling over bald pates of granite. To her, physical landscape was one more dimension of history. She had a deep desire to understand the makeup of the earth beneath her feet. Every time we travelled—before and after Greg was born—cobbles, pebbles, smooth stones, stones that sparkled and were studded with quartz, mica, feldspar, rattled around the floor of the car. The more sparkle, the more striations, the more pleased Lena would be.
“This is igneous,” she explained to Greg when he was a tiny boy and stood beside her in his green overalls. “This is sedimentary—do you see the difference? And this one is metamorphic.”
Three tiny samples in a plastic case fitted his palm perfectly. He snapped the lid shut and opened it again. Snap. Click.
We both enjoyed teaching Greg, and he was quick to learn. It was Lena who suggested his name the day after he was born. She was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, her legs dangling, and she was leafing through name books while our new son hiccuped in a bassinet that had been wheeled to the room. “Vigilant,” she said. “That’s what Gregory means. I would like a child of ours to be vigilant.”
The stones that she, and then the two of them, brought home and washed and dried and arranged on a shelf were called their wondrous stones. Greg moved on to volcanoes and dinosaurs before he got to whales, dolphins and other sea mammals—and remained there—but Lena continued to collect rocks and fossils, many of which are still in the spare room. Those were her smalls. Still undisturbed, because I’ve
been in the room only a few times since November. It doubled as Lena’s home office—and is one more area waiting to be sorted out. Maybe, maybe I’ll do this when I get home.
The sun has lowered itself close to the curve of Earth, and less than an hour’s light remains in the sky. I didn’t hear Basil stand up behind me but a glance in the mirror shows that he’s watching me, his long purple tongue hanging out.
“Okay, okay,” I tell him. “I don’t want to sleep in the car any more than you do.”
At which he begins to turn circles in the back. A sure sign of dismay.
Last night, our first night out, we stayed in a derelict, half-empty motel that permitted dogs. I was too tired to drive any farther, and Basil slept by the door facing out, as if expecting an intruder, and then he ground his teeth for hours.
Just as I’m wondering if I should have paid more attention to the map, I see a sign at the side of the highway: OVERNIGHT CABINS. I swerve, too rapidly, and Basil lurches in the back and barks his complaint. I find myself on a lumpy gravel road and make my way up a wooded hill, following a series of dusky arrows painted on boards that have been nailed to tree trunks. A plethora of signs that makes me think of Hansel and Gretel, greedy or desperate for a place to break bread and lay their heads. Basil is making noises that I take to mean he mistrusts my judgment. From his repertoire of sounds he calls up one of his favourites, and coughs like a choking horse.
After a few minutes, the gravel narrows to become a dirt track that leads through more woods and then into a clearing at the top of the hill. I stop the car before an open space that appears to be—in this unlikely place—an old lodge, clearly on the edge of ruin. Steps of flaking concrete, a fence that leans inwards, the tips of the pointed boards teetering against a mound of dirt in the yard. At the right, a path leads to two side-by-side cabins. A rusting half-ton pickup has been abandoned beside the toppled fence. A small van is parked in front of one of the cabins.
I stop the Beethoven tape reluctantly, because it is in its third movement, which seems to be asking a series of spirited questions. Each, in turn, met with forceful response. The delicacy of the back-and-forth sequence that follows is a part I love because it moves towards strength. The theme never lets go. I have a sudden yearning for Okuma-san and wish he were beside me now to listen to this recording. If he were alive, he’d be ninety-eight years old. Older than Miss Carrie, who admits only to being born after the turn of the century, while Okuma-san was born one year before. Sometimes, I imagine the two of them meeting and I create conversations they might have had. Would Miss Carrie have made Okuma-san laugh? Sometimes, perhaps. My memory calls up his face but what I see is intensity, not laughter. Intensity and, yes, wisdom and caring.
I stretch my way out of the car and open the back for Basil, who immediately relieves himself against the fence and heads for the front steps like some hirsute cousin who is returning for a reunion after a long absence. It might be my imagination, but he looks shaggier than usual. Dirtier and smellier, too. I rap at the door, lean down and give warning: “Make an impression, will you? A good one. This is our one hope for a bed tonight.”
Basil is accepted, odour and all, not only in the cabin but in the tea room, too. For that’s what it is, as proclaimed by a homemade sign taped to the desk, with the inked and unexpected words: OFFICE AND TEA ROOM.
I pay cash in advance to a heavily bearded man, and an image arises: Rip Van Winkle. And then I think, No, Rip wouldn’t be wearing a Viyella shirt, nor would he have strands of shredded wheat lodged in his grey beard. Strands that are so caught up, they’re growing in the same direction. Not a good sign.
I utter a silent prayer that this specimen of manhood is not involved in food production. His mouth is closed, the sound of his nasal breathing like water rattling through pipes. He nods, grunts, has no words to spare, and I wonder if he’s verbally challenged or if shredded wheat is lodged in his vocal cords, as well. He disappears into a back room and I go out to the car, grab a flashlight and a few things I’ll need for the night, and take them to the cabin. I feed Basil a bowl of dog meal on the braided rug by the door and mix in a tin of meat to make up for the surrounds. He gobbles this in seconds, gulps half a bowl of water, lifts his hairy face and crosses the room, dripping a trail of water that I don’t bother to wipe up. I pick up the book of letters I’ve brought to read, lock the door—which doesn’t fit the jamb—and bring Basil with me to the tea room. If I leave him alone in an isolated cabin under the trees, he’ll moan and bark and fling his body at the door. Or worse, tear the rug to shreds and have us evicted.
Surprisingly, we are not the only ones in the tea room. A young woman with a single golden braid down her back is chatting with another the same age, maybe early twenties. Both, I’m relieved to see, are clean. No shredded wheat in sight. They are sitting at the table nearest the entrance and nod as we come in, more to Basil than to me. The second young woman is bony and angular, with long brown hair. One of her eyes is half-closed, which gives the odd impression of imbalance. On the wall behind the cash register, a hand-printed sign has been pinned to a corkboard with an open safety pin: ANITA WILL READ YOUR TEA LEAVES.
Rapunzel and Anita, Lena would say. Look out for the sisters Grimm. They could be in disguise.
There are only four tables in this spacious room, which must have been a dining room in grander times. The lodge windows look down over the hill I’ve just driven up. There are woods on both sides of the gravel road. Woods the thickness of the ones Henry and I used to prowl with homemade bows and arrows around the camp when we were children, pretending to stalk bear and cougar. Two of the tables here offer a view of a creek below and a walking path that approaches from another angle. The creek looks wide enough to be a small river. I’ll check the map later, maybe hike down in the morning and give Basil some exercise. I take a seat by the window and face the setting sun, only to be met by another unlikely sight. Two women are climbing the path. Given the shrinking light, they’re in silhouette but definitely heading upwards. Basil coils himself at my feet and closes his eyes as if he wants no part of the experience. Rapunzel and her friend don’t seem to be bothered by the overheated room. I sling my jacket over the back of my chair, and I’m still too warm.
The menu is handwritten and the hours of the place, which doesn’t have a name, are printed across the bottom: Your welcome—4 to 7 in the evening p.m.
Rapunzel is suddenly standing beside my table, her attitude suggesting that I’ve interrupted her conversation. From two choices on the menu, I order a large bowl of chili and a cup of coffee. She disappears behind a painted door and I hear older female laughter in the kitchen.
Uneven light is sparkling up from the creek. I wonder about the place; it must have a history, a story, many stories. If Lena were with me, she’d amuse me by inventing her own. The women who were climbing the trail now enter the room somewhat flushed, greet me—Basil raises his head momentarily and gives a low moan—and sit at the window table in front of mine. They might be in their forties or fifties—I can’t guess ages anymore, not with accuracy, though I don’t know when I lost the ability. They order small bowls of chili and a large pot of tea. The tea is wanted before the meal. It’s impossible not to hear every word, though they’re trying to keep their voices low. It’s obvious that they’re staying in the other cabin for the night and were out for exercise and fresh air. The van must belong to them. From their mutterings, it sounds as if they are not pleased with the state of their cabin.
I’d like to enjoy my own silence, but it’s difficult to focus on the page in front of me. Okuma-san used to talk about the more famous of Beethoven’s letters that he had come across when he was a young student in Europe. Many of the letters, Okuma-san read in German; some were read in translation. When a complete set was published in English in the sixties, I ordered the set for his birthday. The three volumes came back to me after his death in 1967, along with his other sparse belongings.
But I find myself r
eading the same lines over and over. The letter is addressed to a child and makes a case for the true artist having no pride, only a blurry sort of awareness of how far he is from reaching his goal. I can identify with the part about the goal, but I’m unable to block out the conversation at the next table, and look up.
The women are wearing bulky cardigans, obviously knit by the same person, in tones of beige and faded cocoa. Eagles have been knitted into the design, but these once regal birds are adorned with long, limp beaks that droop like useless appendages. If I were to give the sweaters a title it would be Eagles made impotent. The women now shed the cardigans because of the heat of the place. The woman facing me has iron-grey hair and a too-cheery look, as if she’s recently learned that every aspect of life is truly laughable. Her eyelids flutter so rapidly, I wonder if she has a neural problem. The fluttering intensifies when she speaks.
I can only guess at her companion’s response to the disconcerting eye movements, because the second woman has her back to me. I look down at the page again and wonder if Beethoven was being honest when he expressed the belief that he had no pride. He did not, I know, have the love of a woman. Though he spoke hopefully and frequently of love, especially in letters he wrote during his thirties.
Basil, full-bellied Basil, stirs beneath the table when the woman facing me says to her companion, “We could have our tea leaves read. Did you see the sign at the entrance when we came in?”
“I don’t think so,” says the other quietly. “I don’t tamper with that sort of thing.”
“What do you mean—that sort of thing? What harm can be done? Come on, it might turn out to be fun.”
The young woman seated with Rapunzel turns out to be Anita, the tea-leaf reader. No surprise there. She moves to the table of the two women as if tugged by a magnet, her brown hair swinging, one eye remaining half-closed, as if that is requisite for a seer. She pulls up a chair between the two.