And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

by Jocelyne Saucier

  I have a hard time imagining Janelle in the role of helper. Having moved around a lot, she keeps her distance from sorrows and hassles that don’t concern her. She already has a life that she complicates to suit her. And yet, during our conversations – particularly during the blue hours, which are conducive to thought – she would talk about Lisana as if she knew her inside out, as if she had had access to a Lisana that no one else had bothered to get to know, when, according to what Janelle said, they had barely exchanged a few words in Swastika. She had sympathy and even admiration for the woman. ‘Her stubbornness, her refusal to let herself sink into the absurdity of days, the strength it took her to resist life’s illusions.’ And she was outraged. ‘What is this tyranny of happiness? Lisana is much better off unhappy than trying to be happy.’

  ‘What did you do with her?’

  I could see that Janelle had found in Lisana echoes of her own life. They shared the same hard core, a tight knot, deeply buried, that they protected with all their strength – through inertia in Lisana’s case, and through movement and itinerancy in Janelle’s.

  ‘Where she is, she has the right to be unhappy. She doesn’t bother anyone.’

  I wasn’t going to learn more. The place where Janelle had put Lisana and her depression would remain off-limits to me. But I knew it existed. Because come the thaw, in March, when all the snowmobiles have is wet snow, it’s dead quiet at the Restaurant Clova, and Janelle went away for a week. She came back without telling me where she had been. I didn’t insist. I had learned that there was no point forcing open locked doors. Our conversations had to stick to the story of the rail journey that had sparked a romance that – I knew, oh, how I knew – would not survive.

  This story was in our bed, in our blue hours, it was the only path that was available to keep me close to her.

  I spent the winter going back and forth between Senneterre and Clova.

  Did I launch this investigation to fan the nascent flames of the couple we never would become? Not exclusively, because there were also the school trains. It was a marvellous story and the perfect counterpoint to the story of Gladys’s journey. I couldn’t think of one without thinking of the other. It was the same story when all is said and done. The Gladys who headed out on the rails one fall morning was no different from the one who dreamed of her future to the sound of the clickety-clacks. And I am collecting the pebbles they left behind them.

  In the spring of 2013, I made my first trip to Swastika without really knowing what I was searching for or how to go about it. I am an English teacher, not a police investigator, and Frank Smarz’s was the only place I could show up, under the pretext of a recent alliance among smokers, but to say what? Ask him what? I was aware of the ridiculousness of my situation.

  It is a four-hour drive between Senneterre and Swastika. I had plenty of time to get the measure of my anxiety. I also felt a little drunk. I had never gone to Northern Ontario, and I could feel the tingle of novelty in my body and mind. I was at the beginning of my travels, yet I already considered myself a great traveller.

  I had gone through Kirkland Lake, and in leaving town, I spotted on my right a strange structure that criss-crossed the sky with black, disparate shapes. At first I thought it was a scrap-iron dump, but the structure contained lines that were unfamiliar to me, and I made a U-turn. I parked on the road that led to it, and that was when I realized it was a commemorative monument to Kirkland Lake miners. The monument, some ten metres high, was of a mine shaft and five life-size miners frozen in drilling, conveyance, and scaling operations. All in the purest spirit of Soviet realism to the glory of the workers. Three tall black granite headstones listed the names of the miners (three hundred, I counted) who died on the job and the dates of the accidents.

  I thought I was at the entrance to a cemetery, but a sign farther along announced it was a museum. And I did what Léonard Mostin did, like lots of travellers with time to kill in Kirkland Lake. I followed the sign and the others marking the winding road, and I met Bernie Jaworsky.

  Bernie, I believe I mentioned, is a volunteer at the museum. He had published Lamps Forever Lit a few years before, a book that required a great deal of research, I think I also mentioned. And he quickly spotted in me the light-headedness of someone who is standing before the void and hesitating to plunge. ‘For me, it was the three hundred names on the monument that led me to the edge of the chasm,’ he confided later at the restaurant.

  We visited the museum, which I liked less and less as I discovered its reason for being. A museum devoted to Harry Oakes (the museum had been his home), a magnate of the mines where the men on the monument died and who was mysteriously assassinated in his luxurious home in the Bahamas. I didn’t understand how you could celebrate both the miners and the person who let them die on the job. Obviously, I said none of this. Bernie was eager, affable, attentive, and cared about showing me the museum. But what was crying out inside me did not escape him once we were in front of the museum centrepiece, Nancy’s Room, the bedroom of the Oakes’s eldest girl, with its plaster ornaments. I didn’t ooh and aah in wonder as expected, offered not even a nod of appreciation. The birds, the animals, all the nice stories, Don Quixote, Humpty Dumpty, engraved in the plaster on the walls for the pleasure of the darling little girl of a killer in the mines only amplified my grumbling.

  At the restaurant, I vented my feelings. Bernie listened to me dispassionately without interrupting, and when I had said all I had to say, when I had worked through my shock and there was nothing left for me to do but eat my pierogies, Bernie looked at me with all the attention of his small, searching eyes and said: ‘There is no contradiction. If there’s something we respect here, it’s work and money.’

  My revolt, my noble feelings, were a familiar discourse to him. ‘There are families who lost someone to Harry Oakes’s mine and refuse to set foot in the museum.’ He had let me give free rein to my emotions, and he waited until they served the coffee to ask me what brought me to this part of the world.

  He didn’t know anything about the school trains, but he was familiar with Gladys’s story. ‘Everyone here knows it, but what you are looking for is going to take you much further than you think. You won’t come through it unscathed.’

  He was right, he is always right, my friend Bernie. I got lost in lands that drove me ever further without getting the final word on the story. I went off in search of the school trains, of everything about Gladys, and myself, it seems, because the man who was coming and going to meet strangers discovered another way of being in the world. I would come home, to my habits, to everything that had always seemed too small and that now seemed to have new dimensions. I was at home, I was listening to the radio, I was buying groceries, I was jogging, but I was also in Chapleau, Swastika, Metagama, Sudbury. I was at the centre of a constellation of people I had met all over, some of whom had become friends, whom I found in my notes, on my iPhone, and who accompanied me wherever I went. I was obsessed. My thoughts were restless, there were conversations, back and forth, and when the chatter got too loud, when it started contradicting itself, I would head off to check what everyone had said.

  Weekends, Christmas holidays, Easter, and the summer break (blessed be the occupation of teacher), I spent them all on the road, on trains, always moving and now chained to my computer. I wonder whether there will be an end to all this.

  I lost Janelle along the way. It was written in the stars. There was no way she was going to change the course of her life for me. She needs movement, excitement; a humble English teacher from a sleepy little town is not going to keep her on her toes. All I hoped was that it would last a little longer. We made it a little more than a year in a sort of suspension of time, with me going almost every weekend to Clova and her astonished to see me arrive, as if our story were starting over each time.

  She was the one who had the idea for a trip to Paris. I never would have dared suggest it. It was an outlandish, fabulous, irresistible idea.

 
‘What if we went to see him in Paris, your Léonard Mostin?’

  I don’t know whether it was the desire for travel, whether Clova was starting to get her down, or whether she really believed it when she said that the key to the mystery of Gladys would be found in Paris. ‘Your Léonard Mostin, he was at the station that morning; he was waiting for the train with Gladys. He may know something no one else does. You have no idea the sorts of things that are said between travellers when they are waiting. Two strangers who are going to part and forget one another talk to the other as if talking to themselves. Who knows what Gladys told him that morning?’

  We were those two strangers, Janelle and me, in the bed where we explored each other without her ever giving me the key to her mystery. I didn’t know what held her in this state of want, continuously in movement, always about to leave, and she never asked me about my life in Senneterre, past loves, or anything else. She was solidly in the present, waiting for a more promising place to give her a sign. I was afraid of the moment I would lose her, and I said yes to Paris. I secretly hoped that, during the short time we would be a couple on a trip, she would reveal herself to me.

  I had collected all the information to recreate Gladys’s itinerary, and I had come to her motivation, what had driven her to the rails, and, what obsessed me even more, what intrigued me even more, was what she had said to her daughter that morning of September 24 that could have made Lisana believe there was a suicide pact. A supposed pact because no one, not Suzan, not Janelle, not Frank Smarz, no one believed such a horrible thing. But something had to have been said that morning to convince the daughter to let her mother go and that could enlighten us as to Gladys’s motivations. All that remained was that glimpse of possibility, a conversation with a stranger the morning of her departure, Léonard Mostin.

  It was Desmond, Suzan’s son, who put us on the scent of the man people thought to be a Jewish historian. The handyman poet had become a novelist and had unexpected success with his first book, a historical novel about the Ojibwe massacre at Frederick House, which earned him many awards and invitations around the world. He ended up at a literary festival in France, and it was there, in Vincennes, at the Festival America, that he met Léonard Mostin.

  I should have known when Janelle arrived with everything she owned. ‘Ready for the big adventure,’ she said to me, pushing two huge garbage bags in front of her. And this was in addition to the enormous knapsack that was digging into her back. It all weighed at least one hundred kilos. Neither of us had travelled by plane, but I knew they wouldn’t take it. ‘They won’t take it? Oh well, I’ll leave some here.’ Elation! She had quit her job to go on a trip with me, and she was leaving me three quarters of her possessions. ‘I’ll pick it up when we come back.’ I believed her. I’ll admit that I thought there was a chance for her and me, when we came back, in my bungalow, my little town. It was ridiculous. She was ready for somewhere much more interesting than here.

  She is an impressive woman. It was the first trip to Europe for both of us, and I was astonished by her facility for finding her way on the RER, the metro, everywhere really, and the strange language she started to speak, a sort of Parisian Québécois, with Franco-Ontarian tones (‘absolutely delicious,’ Léonard Mostin said, under her spell). All her senses were on alert. We would leave in the morning from Rue Serpente (a small old-fashioned hotel, room the size of a thimble), and we wouldn’t have taken more than two strides before I would feel her rise up above the sidewalk in a state of receptivity to everything that was on offer. She had already left me.

  What can I say about Léonard Mostin? He is an intellectual, a lover of books – his tiny apartment was full of them, they spilled over everywhere – and he was delighted to play host to us, we who had come from the wide-open spaces that filled his novel. He was likeable, attentive to our questions, and, above all, curious about us, our life over there in what he called ‘the land of the dark comedians.’

  The conversation we had hoped for hadn’t taken place; he and Gladys hadn’t even exchanged words, but he was generous. He described her as he had seen her that morning. Hair white like snow, cut square, the three-quarter-length coat or rather a thick puffy jacket that fell to mid-thigh, and the tote bag that was her only luggage. An old woman, he said, leaning against the station wall, not moving, not seeing, who was waiting for the train without really waiting for it. ‘What was she really waiting for? For the train to go by and leave her there waiting? Or had she already left? Somewhere else, far away from herself, maybe she was overwhelmed, devastated, overcome by what lay ahead of her. I started to approach her, and I realized that the woman was carrying death inside her.’

  The words! The words and such conviction; I felt like I was wandering in the middle of a novel. I let him say it. But Janelle pounced immediately.

  ‘Why … What makes you think that? … ’

  ‘Her smell.’

  ‘ … Her smell?’

  ‘She smelled like my mother when she was dying. It’s not something you forget.’

  I felt another novelesque flight in the making, which he held back because Janelle wasn’t going to let the first one go.

  ‘A smell … of wax?’

  ‘Exactly. A waxy smell. How did you know?’

  ‘That was the smell coming out of Gladys’s bed. But when I met her, during all those days on the trains, she didn’t smell like that. Do you have extrasensory perception or something?’ (He shook his head.) ‘When I think about her, that’s the smell that comes back to me, and I like it. I can bring it back whenever I want by doing this.’ (She touched her fingertips together and placed them under her nose like one does for an object when you want to be sure of the smell.) ‘That was your mother’s smell?’

  Was that when I lost her? When they were sitting across from each other at the tiny table in Léonard Mostin’s tiny apartment, sniffing the flesh of their fingers and looking at each other as if they shared a secret?

  We spent ten days in Paris, and Léonard Mostin was with us for all ten of them. He took us to the Champs-Élysées, Notre-Dame, Père-Lachaise cemetery, Sacré-Coeur, all of which he called ‘the Paris of tourists,’ and he took us to his Paris, with its narrow winding streets that change names at every turn, the squares (the Franco-Ontarian was astonished to learn the English word was used), the little terraced bistros (‘You sit facing the street?’), and I could see him amused at our astonishment. I wondered whether we were going to become characters in his novel. Along with the swearing Ukrainian from the cemetery and the young Indigenous lover, he talked about them as if he had met them the day before and had had long conversations with them. If Gladys had become an old woman who carried death within her, what would become of us? I could see us wandering in the streets of his novel, unrefined but endearing characters, me a bit humdrum and Janelle who went charging ahead of herself and transformed before your very eyes. I understood pretty quickly who the novelist’s focus was on.

  At the Musée d’Orsay, in front of a painting by van Gogh, I had a revelation of what would be our undoing. Janelle was in front of the self-portrait of van Gogh. Janelle was no longer Janelle.

  Do I need to spell out that I’m not an art lover?

  I had let them leave me behind in the rooms of the museum. I was tired of standing in front of paintings and waiting for their comments. To my great surprise, Janelle had as much to say as Léonard Mostin. When I caught up with them, they were in front of the painting by van Gogh, both of them speechless, Janelle completely transformed, her features brought together in a point that illuminated her face, her eyes with the same steady stare as those of van Gogh. She was no longer her own, she was the gaze that was gazing at her. And beside her, Léonard Mostin was wonderstruck.

  Did I really see the tear on her cheek, or was it pure imagination on my part? She was in such a state of excitement, at once pain and rapture, that I could believe anything.

  ‘I never thought I would see this painting in real life,’ she said, t
urning to Léonard Mostin.

  He asked her whether it was her favourite van Gogh. She told him that the nights churning with colour were what was most beautiful about van Gogh, and she asked him whether she could see Café Terrace at Night. ‘Not here,’ Léonard Mostin said. Probably in Amsterdam. That’s where the largest van Gogh museum is.’ And from one thing to another, always about how dazzling van Gogh’s colours were and the artist’s great humanity, she said this sentence that lifted the veil of the mystery of Janelle.

  She said: ‘Van Gogh is what did me in.’

  It was more than was needed to pique the novelist’s curiosity. And there, at the Musée d’Orsay, before van Gogh’s self-portrait, we heard her whole history. Studies at the School of Fine Arts, years throwing colours on canvas that refused to take life, the conviction that she was worthless, that she would always be worthless, that van Gogh was the one who found the way of colour, that there would never be any other, particularly not her. ‘I learned to live without illusions,’ she said. ‘I thought it was over, that I was bulletproof, that I would never have another artistic emotion.’

  I wasn’t surprised when she announced that she would not be going home with me. Too many signs had piled up during our final days in Paris. Léonard Mostin, who would never leave us alone, the discussions I felt excluded from; I was nothing more than a little pet dog sniffing around the bone I was thrown during the conversation.

  There were no heartrending goodbyes. One last night, a mid-air kiss when I boarded the RER for the airport, and it was done. Nice and clean.

  It was a month before I got an email. She had visited the museums of Amsterdam and Otterlo, with Léonard obviously (‘he’s super’), he had taken her to visit Vincent’s and Theo’s graves at Auvers-sur-Oise, she had seen the room at the inn where the artist died and ‘You’ll never guess. I saw the wheat field with crows, the real one, not the painting, the field where Vincent van Gogh set up his easel to make his painting.’