I’m a good wife, I think. I don’t complain or criticize. I cook the foods my husband likes. I keep an orderly house, mind the children. I stick to a budget; I contributed to the mortgage and RRSPs, when I was working. I see the movies my husband wants to see. I never turn down sex. I know from reading magazines, and from overhearing lunch time conversations, that these are the things husbands complain about.
All of this is easy. I have no patience with women who can’t manage a job, a house, a marriage, children, competently. It’s not rocket science, as they say.
The trick is not to care about any of it too little, or too much.
That is what I mean by refugee.
After lunch, the shopping in smart Yaletown, trying on clothes by local designers, beautiful coats like priest’s robes, in cashmere and mohair, draped so perfectly that they are like origami. They suit Mother well, with her tall, angular frame, her sharp cheekbones. I love them: I am in love with these coats. I want one of them especially, an asymmetrical fall of earth-coloured cashmere, more than anything else I’ve ever seen. But it, like the others, is scaled much too long for me. I look like a hobbit. The salesgirl says it can be hemmed shorter, but she says it doubtfully. We all know that the entire premise is too big for me.
We will find something for you here, she says, leading me to another shop. I see little Asian ladies go here all the time, she says. The coat is grey silk; it is the kind of expensive silk that does not shine, but seems itself a source of light. It is fitted, with a high waist and a stiff, round collar, like a little girl’s dress. I do not like it, but Mother says, Try it on, and when I do it turns me into something – a china princess, I think – in its stiffness, and Mother buys it for me, and I do not resist.
Now you are a grown woman, you need some good clothes, Mother says. I imagine Damira and Ally putting their sticky hands on the silvery silk. I hope that I will not scold them when they do.
My mother is a formidable woman. She was celebrated in her field, and now that she is retired, she volunteers a full three days a week, and still looks after all of us. She will take anything on. Yet I have always felt in her a barely concealed panic toward me, a sense that she finds me too difficult, too confusing to deal with. We almost always end up talking about clothes.
MY BROTHER PAVAL is a rocket scientist: He works for NASA. Our parents complain, mildly, under their pride, that they never see him. He is always busy. I imagine his life: a few select friends, his perfect industrial-minimalist apartment, his new Porsche. His time structured as carefully as one of the computer models he makes.
Our parents talk about his busyness with pride and longing. He has removed himself, a little, from our orbit.
We celebrate his birthday without him: our parents and I, my daughters.
WHEN MY DAUGHTER ALLY WAS BORN, Paval came to visit me. This was a surprise; he was still a student, but had already begun to evade the net of family conventions. Perhaps my mother had said something, in some sort of fright, to him on the telephone: It had been a difficult, fraught birth, at one point dangerous for both Ally and me. Now I lay in a hospital bed, wounded, exhilarated. Paval picked Ally up from her transparent plastic bassinet, held her up like she was some new electronic device. I swear he turned her over, as if to read her specifications.
Interesting, he said, and put her back in the bassinet. Then leaned on the window ledge, looked at me. Your eyes are all bruised and your lips are cracked and swollen, he said. Is that normal?
Thanks, I said. My hair felt dirty and my abdominal muscles hurt so that I couldn’t even roll over, and I thought I probably smelled bad.
I heard some interesting news, my brother said. Alex S. . . . , you know, our cousin, he used to visit us at our summer house – he’s alive, after all. He’s in Canada. He was captured, it seems, and in a prison camp, but then he escaped and lived in the hills for a while, made his way out of the country, ended up in Montreal, somehow, without papers.
For the second time that week, my heart almost stopped.
WE WERE AT OUR VACATION HOUSE on the seacoast. (It was the first thing to be lost, to be taken, the vacation house. Along with everything kept in it.) I was sixteen, my brother Paval thirteen. Pav had a motorbike, a small one. I rode it: I did not know how to ride, but I got on, gunned it, flew down the hill, the sea glinting almost white over my right shoulder, my hair whipping around my neck. At the foot of the hill: you in an ancient car. You stopped, rolled down your window. I knew who you were: You had the family face, the curling upper lip. You took off your sunglasses. I saw that you had the same eyes as Pav and my mother: round, granite with squiggles of gold. You reached an arm out of the window, grabbed the handlebar of my bike.
Who are you? you asked. I saw in your face that you thought I was interesting, in a sexual way, and wild, dangerous, even.
The second day of your visit I seduced you, in the sea cave, the one we called the Glass Grotto, at the turning of the low tide. I had planned, since I was, oh, eleven or so, since I knew, more or less, about sex, to seduce someone in that grotto. It was the perfect place: the rocks razor-edged with barnacles, the pools charged with sharp-toothed eels, stinging jellyfish. The tide only ebbing out of the cave for an hour. At its return, anyone inside would be trapped by the currents, drowned and shredded. There was a small patch of damp sand, body-sized. I lay on it and pulled you over me.
You were reluctant, but I arched up my girl’s breasts, put my tongue in your mouth, made you believe I knew what I was doing. Maybe I did. Oh, yes. You were twenty-two; you had a girlfriend (with you on this trip!); you were my second cousin.
You came to visit, when we were back in the city, surprising my mother. She had been fond of you when you were a small boy, but wary, later, when you grew up, when political schisms separated that branch of her family. We used subterfuge; we were guerrilla lovers. We made love in my parents’ bed while they were at work (and I supposedly at school).
Then I talked my parents into letting me enrol in another university than the one at which my parents taught. A university in the city you lived in. Then you were almost living with me; we saw each other every day.
You said: We must not be too exclusive; we must not fall in love. You said you had other girlfriends. I said I had other boyfriends, too. It did not occur to me that you might be lying.
Then the tanks in the city. My parents sent for me in a hurry and I got on the train with my suitcases, without leaving a note for you.
I was seventeen. I didn’t know yet that a careless omission, a casual mishap, will erase possibilities from life forever.
MY MOTHER HAS COOKED A DISH that is one of Paval’s favourites, even though he isn’t here: lamb with apricots, and an almond cake as well. We eat the meal in a relaxed, pleasant way. My father puts Ally’s food in the little compartments on her plate. Damira eats without a fuss, partly because Glen is not present. My parents telephone Paval, and Ally gets to talk to him as well. She chatters about the birds, the adored birds.
The little finches, it seems, have done well. They have produced two tiny eggs, pea-sized eggs, but perfectly white and oval, in a tiny nest. They sing: zee zee, their little computer sound. Their little painted bodies flit around their cage. Damira wants to see them fly, but my father says they are too nervous, with extra people in the house. They must be peaceful, they must be protected, to hatch those eggs.
But later, somehow, the cage is opened (we suspect Ally, but it could have been Damira, who can’t leave the birds alone) and the mother bird escapes and flaps, panicky, into the light fixtures, the curtain headers. She takes refuge, briefly, on top of the kitchen cabinets, and my father climbs up on a stool to catch her, but as he extends his hand, the bird flies away again, trilling in alarm or defiance. My father moves, slowly, calmly; he almost catches her, a few times, but she keeps slipping away. Then he stops: We’ll leave the door to the balcony open, he says, and she will settle down. And she does, the little bird, after a few more panicked flight
s at the windows. She perches in one of the potted plants, and my father catches her by throwing the dishcloth over her.
But when she is put back into the cage, she doesn’t perch: She sits on the floor of the cage. The other bird, the male, leaves the nest, flies around the cage.
My mother says, needlessly: the eggs will have cooled too much now.
Then the little female is dead. She resembles, even more, a painted toy. There is a little blood at her cloaca. My mother says that she must have had eggs inside still that broke when she struck the walls and window. Damira sobs; she won’t be comforted. My father shouts at my mother, in their own language, that she should mind what she says, and my mother shouts back that he was foolish to bring the birds into the apartment, with little children. That is the first time that I have seen my mother and father argue since we left our old country. We are careful with each other, in my family.
SO I CARRIED THAT NEWS HOME from the hospital after Ally’s birth, along with Ally, held close to my heart. Why didn’t I try to contact you then? I don’t know. Imagine it: me sore, battered; Damira still in diapers, Ally a difficult baby, struggling with asthma, eczema, colic, as if she’d been born into the wrong planet, into an environment hostile to her external and internal surfaces. For her first three years, I did not sleep more than a couple of hours at a time.
I did look for you, especially when the internet got better, when it could be used to find people. There are three men in Montreal with your name, four in Toronto. I couldn’t call from home – Glen pays the phone bills, audits them each month; it’s one of his hobbies – but I made awkward trips to the one mall I could find at which the payphones worked and the corridor was not too noisy, and I worked my way through the phone numbers, Ally in a sling on my side. It occurred to me that there were many other cities I could check, but after a time, I gave up.
But I would not have recognized you then. I would not have admitted you to my life. I was complete. No: complete is the wrong word. I lived in a vortex of busyness. The chaos of my life was enough to contain me.
And I thought that I could find you any time I wanted.
I say to my mother, as we’re having tea in her gilt-edged glasses, do you and Father see much of your friend Josip? Where is he living? I say this as casually as possible, I think.
My mother says: You know that you need to go back to work now. Ally is too attached to you. With Damira in kindergarten and Alexandra three, you should go back to work.
They won’t take her at the daycare, I said. She can’t speak properly and she can’t get the hang of the toilet. And she screams.
She’s too distracted at that place, my mother says. Bring her here. Papa will watch her for you.
It’s not rocket science. I think: I do need to go back to work. I need my days filled again; I need my name on the editorial page again.
Yes, I say. I will go back to work.
A woman needs something more than cleaning her house and watching a child, my mother says. And you don’t want to get too mixed up with those refugees. Some of them have so many problems that they have brought with them. They can consume your whole life.
Does she mean Josip, or someone else?
I am a refugee, I say.
My mother shakes her head, smiling fiercely. You must go back to work, she says. Even when she smiles, her eyes are very round, alarmed-looking. It feels that she is trying to give me a hidden message.
PAVAL COMES BACK for our mother’s birthday, though it seems he was taking holidays then anyway. He brings her a fur coat, a real fur coat, the soft skins of some small animal, as a gift. My mother loves it. She has no compunction, it seems, about small soft animals. She makes sure that Damira and Ally have clean hands before they are allowed to stroke her. The fur is a soft grey with a kind of shadow – ombré, it is called. It floats nearly down to her ankles. Glen estimates its cost, and is sanctimonious. He underestimates by about half, too – Mother tells me, later what she insures the coat for. Glen, I can see, also feels outdone: There is no way we can match that gift. But I don’t care. I have decided that my gift to my mother is to just exist. As she insists on that, she can take it as my offering. Of course, Glen and I have given her some new Le Creuset casserole dishes and a bathrobe and flowers, as well. But she and I both know, I remind myself, of what is the real gift.
Paval has also arranged for all of us to go out to dinner. Otherwise, he said, Mother will end up cooking her own birthday dinner, which is true. He wanted it to be just the seven of us, but Mother and Father have insisted that all of the hangers-on come too – they will pay for the hangers-on – and so Paval booked a whole room, table d’hôte. He did this, prudently, a whole month in advance, and let me know.
When I heard the name of the restaurant, I knew immediately that I had found something I was looking for.
I was back at my desk, back at my job that had been kept open for me: out of my great value, I tell myself, not out of compassion or a string of bad fits in my temporary successors. Back overseeing articles on “Ten Financial Mistakes Women Make” and “Decorating Your House for the Holidays.” (We are wrapping that article this very week: Christmas features are produced in August, to be ready for October release. The photographers put blue film on the windows, when shooting interior shots of decorated mantelpieces and trees, to get a wintery light.)
I was working, and had a good computer at my disposal, and also a new cellphone, and time I did not have to account for, during the day. I received my brother Paval’s email, telling me the name of the restaurant he had booked, on the weekend, and I thought: I will phone. On Monday, first thing, I will phone.
It was the first independent, active thought that I’d had in fifteen years.
But then your email, like a bird, like the great shoe-headed storks in our country that return in spring, back home winging all the way from Africa to flap heavily onto the roofs.
So that is how it feels, I thought: The open air in front of you gathers itself into a wall, and you strike it, and in your brain, an explosion of light, and then blankness.
It was so unexpected that for the first second I was confused: I thought that I might have already have called you, and the email was a reply. That you’d somehow heard I’d traced you, finally, back to this rainy city. I thought for a confused second that someone had passed on the information that I was looking for you, and that’s why you had emailed me.
You had, you said, been sitting in a waiting room on the weekend. One of your cooks had cut herself. You had picked up the magazine, flipped through it. My photograph, my email address. Had said to yourself: I will email right away.
You said, you will think this strange, but I have been thinking about you. I thought I saw you near the law courts one day, on the street, in a red coat.
That kind of coincidence is disturbing. It shakes the fabric of things. It makes you think more things are possible than really are.
Now is the point where I feel it necessary to lay everything out, to make it clear that this happened, this dual firing of missiles, at the same moment. Why is that? Obviously, I feel my intent will be questioned, my motives doubted. My actions, of course. I have long ago erased the email you sent. I erased it in a great hurry without printing it out or committing it to memory, so guilty was I already.
I keep returning to the coincidence of our mutual sending up of flares, as if that coincidence removes responsibility, makes what followed inevitable. And I keep hearing a voice of reason that questions my logic. Is it my mother’s voice? A voice like hers, at least: cool, rational. You have known Alex was in Canada for over three years now, the voice says. And why did Alex not email or contact you before? He must have known – through Josip, or others – that you lived here. It is not my mother, though – it is my own brain. My mother does not know these details.
When we arrive at the restaurant, seeing the name, only my father is surprised. Oh! he says. Such an odd coincidence! That was the name the children gave to
that little grotto at the beach, by our summer home, wasn’t it? I’d forgotten about that. Do you think there is any connection?
I notice then that my father is the only one who is innocent. My mother, my brother Paval, and I say nothing. Glen, of course, comments that the restaurant looks “dubious,” but that is not out of any covert intelligence. He had tried to subvert the plans, to get my mother’s birthday dinner changed to another location, for example a franchised steak house, where he “knew what he was going to get.”
I feel I do not need to say this: that my mother and Paval somehow know, as if I were transparent, as if they have foreseen this for years.
THIS IS NOT A WAR STORY; I have said that. I have not said that my parents are slightly different colours than each other, and that their faces show different genetic origins very clearly. Canadians are not used to that – Canadians of European descent are all blended together, northern and southern, mountain and valley races. Even my daughters’ faces show only vestiges of my father’s eyelids, his lips, and no trace of their paternal great-grandmother’s jutting Scottish jaw.
In my former country, there were three peoples – three main peoples. Some raped and tortured and murdered others. Some lost seaside villas. And some, at the time of this story, are being tried by an International Criminal Tribunal for war crimes. My father’s and mother’s families were ancient enemies, and you, in spite of your relation to my mother, were also suspect in your connections.
Echolocation Page 7
