Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  “I want you,” said Parker, by way of finalizing our conversation, “to get him to stop calling me.”

  “Okay,” I said, though what I really wanted was to tell Parker to fuck off.

  It has always been my belief—though this is something I don’t advertise too widely in the department where I work—that the whole purpose of art, the very reason for embarking on it in the first place, is to entertain us, and, by entertaining, to make us forget. For there is always a story prior to the stories given to us to tell, and this is the desire to tell, to put experience into the best possible form, the one that will make other people gather around, rapt with attention. This was why we were at the Laughing Cat in the first place, as if a wooden table at some average delicatessen could serve as a fire for us to gather around, warping hardship into something that made us laugh, or nod, or consider, and whether the stories were based in fact or imagination didn’t make the telling of them any less an art. It was art, not truth, we came for.

  Which meant that if you really wanted to forget, really get outside of yourself, then what you needed was not to talk about stories, as Nate wanted to do, but to listen to them, or, better still, tell them, and not in a repetitive way, but in an attempt to breach what little we knew, and the forms in which we knew it. And that’s why I had remained silent about what I did for a living, and why we had developed the rules that safeguarded our forgetting.

  It was with this in mind that I drove to Nate’s that night. Though I now realize there was also an element of guilt there—that for all the years we’d been regularly dosing ourselves with the medicine of stories, we’d also been letting friends like Mara and Nate spin out of reach, entertaining ourselves with the wonderful tales that to someone else might have been evidence of their decline and of the imperative to help them. We’d warmed ourselves in the heat and light of two men burning out.

  By the time I tracked down Nate’s address among the contacts he’d supplied when we were trying to resurrect our group, and found it on a map, and driven over to his place, it was well past sunset, and I had to drive slowly through the trailer park, threading between abandoned wagons and tricycles, slowing down for speed bumps that, being unpainted, were invisible in the dark. I recognized the trailer next to Nate’s, a rectangular box painted over to look like a case of Molson Canadian. He’d told an anecdote about this once—one of the few that were funny—how the guy had run out of money halfway through and had gotten Molson to sponsor him for the rest of the paint, only to spend the money on beer.

  I knocked on the door, but found it open, and the force of my knuckles pushed it further ajar. Peeking in, I saw the flicker of a television, and then Nate, who was sitting on the couch with a bottle cradled between his legs, licking his lips absently and staring at the ceiling as though deciding on whether to let in whoever was at the door.

  “Nate?” I said, quietly. His head snapped into place, the look in his eyes one of surprise. “Can I come in?” I asked. He shook his head. I looked around uncertainly, as though the lack of invitation was not due to me but the door I’d chosen, as though trying a different one, or a window, might elicit a different response. “I spoke with Alvin Parker,” I said.

  Nate raised the bottle to his lips. “I’ve been reading some,” he said, and I was surprised to hear his voice so clear and lucid, not drunk at all. “I read one—it was pretty complex though—which said that the forms of our stories are also the ones through which we process our experiences, and, as a result, how we think of the world and our place in it.” Nate was speaking slowly, reciting sentences he’d memorized, and I had to lean my head through the door to hear. “Neat argument, eh? It’s like the structures … the stories our parents give us are already making us think of the world in certain ways before we even get into it.” I wanted to tell him that if you traced things back you’d find the world came first, then the stories, or that the things that happened in the world and the stories were so intertwined you couldn’t separate what came first from what came after.

  But Nate continued before I’d had a chance to speak. “When Katie left it was weird.” He took another drink. “I’d be walking around places and what I was seeing, instead of actual things, was how she wasn’t there.” He glanced in my direction. “Now how can that be? Tell me. How in the name of God can you see something that isn’t there? Is that even possible, or did I go crazy?” He waved his hand over a shoulder to suggest the past, and I could hear his nails scratching the wall behind the couch he sat on. “Nothing connected, you know? It was like her absence was also the absence of whatever it is that makes things connect. And that’s why this book is so interesting. It tells me that the way we connect stuff—like the past to the present, or ourselves to other people, to things see?—is through ‘meaning.’ We’re able to make meaning when we can draw a line that binds stuff together. And that’s what a story is, I guess.” He tilted the bottle between his legs, reading the label, and then, holding it by the neck, placed it on the coffee table in front of him. “The weird thing is,” he whispered, “… is that all these years, down at the Laughing Cat, my stories have been doing the opposite thing: they’ve been about how things don’t connect. I thought I was coming to grips with that—making peace with a world that doesn’t mean, but just is.”

  He coughed. “I’ve been trying to figure out why I keep doing it, you know? Why keep sending Katie the money? I know that guy she’s with isn’t working. I know the kids don’t see all of what I send them, that she shovels some of it his way. Why do I do it?” He looked around at the trailer. “I mean, who needs this? I could just disappear. Lots of men do it, you know. They just walk out. Slip from one life into another. That’s what Mara reminded me of every week,” he folded his hands into the place where the bottle had been. “I mean, Mara doesn’t live in the world at all! It’s like he’s a ghost or something, slipping in and out of himself. And I’d listen to his stories, that incredible life he’s living, and I’d think: why can’t I do that? Why am I stuck here, making these payments, forcing myself to live in this … shithole.”

  He opened the hands in his lap and looked at the palms. “All these years I’ve been trying to explain—mainly to myself—why I do what I do, what makes me choose this, and the more time goes by the less I can come up with a story that makes sense.” He laughed bitterly. “All I come up with are stories about how you’ve got to accept the fact that you do things, make choices, that don’t always make sense.”

  My neck was becoming stiff with the weight of holding my head through the door. “I’ve been trying really hard not to blame her for this. Really,” said Nate. “And then that guy Parker comes to the Laughing Cat, and starts talking about Mara’s stories, and I feel like maybe I have a chance again.” He looked hard at me. “But we all know how that worked out. Either I’m beyond help, or nothing ever happens on Mara’s walks and he’s totally crazy.” Nate trained his gaze on me now, as though nothing existed but the next question: “Why didn’t you, though?”

  “Why didn’t I what?” I asked, withdrawing my head through the crack, scared that it presented too much of a target.

  “Help me,” he shouted. “When I could still be helped!” He’d risen suddenly off the couch and come to the door. “You knew all about this stuff. You were on the outside the whole time! And you were just sitting there, listening to me struggling along. And you stayed quiet. Why didn’t you help me when you had the chance?” I looked at him. “Even just being able to sit in silence, like you do, even that would have been better than this!”

  His face was straining out of the crack in the door now, his mouth so wide it looked as if his teeth were projecting from his face. I stepped back. “Nate,” I said, shocked, “that book you’ve been reading … it’s just another story.”

  He pushed me with full force, toppling me backwards and down the three steps that led to his deck. “Don’t patronize me!” he shouted.

  I stood up, my pants covered in mud. “Nate,” I tr
ied to sound earnest, “the reason I didn’t say anything is not because I’m keeping it secret. I haven’t got anything to tell you! What?” I threw up my hands. “You think I could take you out? Take you where? Silence isn’t a place; it’s nothing, Nate. The reason I haven’t talked about it is because you can’t talk about it. That’s what silence—real silence— is.” I paused and lowered my arm, and then said quietly, “Nobody’s ever really outside, Nate. We’re always stuck in the beginning.” And I wanted to add something more, a qualifier, words that would give Nate a sense of how lucky he was, how he had managed, in telling his stories, at least to sit at the Laughing Cat and have us listen, to take us away from what we were thinking about, even if what he said was sad, even if all he accomplished was testifying to himself— a man who would not acquiesce to defeat, to abandonment, who’d rise every morning and start all over again, formulating his next story as if just being able to speak was redemption in itself.

  My problem, I reflected, opening my mouth to speak, then closing it as Nate stepped to the top of the stairs, was that I wanted so much to tell, and couldn’t begin, that the instant I thought of one particular story another hundred would crowd it out, pointing to its limits and politics. But every time I wanted to speak of a man who couldn’t make up his mind, who’d prevented himself from making the basic gesture of commitment to others, whose sum total of company took place once a week at the Laughing Cat, all I could do was think of how it could be said. And that, dear Nate, I wanted to say, is all of my story.

  Nate just stood above me, glaring down with his fists hanging to either hip, a scowl of betrayal on his face.

  And in the days since I threaded my car back through the tricycles and wagons and trash, and the days since I once again started catching sight of Mara downtown, I have gone over and over what I should have said, how I should have begun, all the variations that might have made Nate open his ears to me, that would have made at least part of what we had at the Laughing Cat once again possible. I have weighed the options while the books crowded upon me, a massing of that terrible knowledge that always makes me step backward when I think I’m stepping forward. The knowledge that spares me no room to speak.

  The Inert Landscapes of György Ferenc

  For Bill New

  MY FATHER WAS a landscape painter in a nation that would not be reproduced. When he looked out over the forests and oceans, the lakes and rivers, even the clouds and mists, all he saw was a blank slate, a landscape so deprived of the associations and history he was used to that his brush was always poised above the canvas, stalled in the act. His tragedy, I suppose, was that for him Canada had become a place of exile, a removal from the one country— Hungary—that had always spoken to him, so insistent with its colours and forms it was as if the geography, not he, were dictating the speed of the brushstrokes.

  The archetypal moment, the one that encapsulates my father’s relations with Canada, is that rainy September day in 1954 when he walked over for an afternoon tea and paused in the entryway to my apartment, staring at a print I had received from one of my students. I was teaching art history by then, at the Toronto College of Design (where I still work)—having been hired for my “anti-totalitarian perspective”—and spending a lot of time at the local bar with the men and women enrolled in my Survey of Western Art course, many of whom were also in the visual arts program, or working artists.

  I was sharing the apartment with the woman who was to become my wife, Marguerite, a former student who went on to become a schoolteacher, and that September day we were both standing behind my father as he appraised the print. It showed a water tower erected in a town up the coast that was not unfamiliar, because it was where our family had first settled after my father got us out of Hungary by flashing from the car a set of ration booklets the guards mistook for passports, waving us through in advance of less-resourceful refugees. (This was just months before the Iron Curtain clanged down, preventing Hungarians from going west, and transforming the job of border guard from document inspector to sniper.) The town in the print, Stillwater, was our first home after the Austrian camps, and though we lived there only a few years before moving to Vancouver, it was a time of peace for my family, filled with the exhilaration of having come through fire unsinged; of finding ourselves in a country where we could express our dislike of the government, read what books we liked, pursue studies along non-official lines; where my father could again produce his “bourgeois” landscapes, many of them so abstract they’d been banned as “decadent” or “ahistorical” by the Nazi and Soviet art censors.

  The water tower was printed in deep blue and black, the pipes and metal siding of the container contrasting with the darkness the artist had ascribed to the surrounding brush and forest. My father looked at it from a few different angles, and then said, “It’s not bad, but it would be better if he dropped the title.” I hadn’t noticed the name of the print before, and bent down to look at it, only to find, in pencil just underneath the artist’s signature, “Stillwater Tower, 1953,5/25.”When I asked my father why the title was problematic he couldn’t really come up with a response, shrugging his shoulders and muttering something to the effect that it was a water tower meant to provide water, and that he remembered seeing a lot of rust on it, which reminded him of a nearby parking lot, and that there was a “profound lack of poetry in Stillwater;” in short, like the rest of Canada he’d encountered, there wasn’t any spirit there, just a kind of banality he referred to as “square.” “This country,” he frequently said, “is art-resistant.”

  This was his dominant theme. No matter how good the wine was, no matter how smooth its taste, if it came from someplace such as South Africa or California it could only ever be second rate; and if it had a name like “Bill Bart’s Estate,” or “Otter Pine Ridge Cabernet,” or “Frank McMillan Chardonnay,” then it would never, ever, ever be good wine—sorry. “How can you take seriously a wine that goes by the name of Bill Bart?” my father would ask. “No, no,” and he’d shake his head. It was the same with everything. Glenn Gould’s fame, for instance, my father was certain, derived entirely from the fact that he was Canadian, because Canada just didn’t have many good artists and so had to elevate to cultural prominence the few mediocrities it produced (in Hungary, he insisted, players of Gould’s calibre were “to be found on every street corner”); and, besides, his first name was Glenn, for God’s sake! Who’d ever heard of anyone being able to play classical music well, never mind being worthy of playing it in the first place, whose name was Glenn? “No,” my father said, “I’m sorry, but it’s quite impossible.” That’s not to say there weren’t moments, he admitted, when, listening to Gould, he’d almost be lulled into liking the music, almost forget where it was coming from, but then it would occur to him that the guy playing was called Glenn, and that would be it.

  And it was the same with my print: the minute the image suggested anything Canadian, the magic or mystery or art would vanish and it became a living reminder of how lacking this country was, how it was not “founded,” how it was without ethos, without lexicon—just a terrible mishmash of British “squarehead” thinking and Hollywood “pop culture”—and how far removed my father was from the place where real culture, real art even had the possibility of being produced: namely, Europe. “They just don’t have it,” he would sigh. “And it’s not something you can cultivate.” This was a country where you could work, where you could find the necessary isolation, but it was not a place that lent itself to art because to have art you needed a vocabulary that bespoke “spirit.” Here, the mountains were only mountains, the rivers only rivers, the lakes only lakes. They spoke of nothing but themselves and so remained objects of blank utility, not “coexistent”—by which he meant that for landscape painting to be possible you had to have the sense that the geography and the people of a country weren’t relative to one another but were one another—that landscape and citizen, like ghosts, were mixing their atoms in order to occupy the same spot at
the same time—and that this was especially evident in the names given to Canadian geography, which seemed to him inappropriate, tossed off, distilled from woefully ordinary activities such as logging, fishing, and hunting.

  “Every nation logs and fishes and hunts,” he’d say, “so what?” You could switch the names around and you’d still have the same mountain, same lake, same water tower. But take the “Szabadság” out of Szabadsághegy in Budapest and suddenly there would be a crater where Freedom Mount (he hated these sorts of translations, by the way) had once stood. Paradoxically, the same terms he deplored in English “sounded right somehow” in German, Italian or Hungarian, as if the sonorities of those languages were productive of the spirit, the sense of oneness, that names such as Mount Logan could never conjure up.

  And my father had been very successful back there. The famous Hungarian critic, Bruno Keles, wrote, in his canonical treatise, The Budapest Circle, that “György Ferenc is the most perceptive of our landscape painters; in his work one sees the absence of a dividing line between a geography and its people, or, rather, one senses the inextricability of geography and the soul. His paintings are at once celebratory and melancholy because they recognize the fragility of a nation in its incapacity to survive the removal of its frontiers, the transformation of its names, the evaporation of its colours.”

  He and our entire family suffered horrible abuse under the fascists, particularly once the Arrow Cross Party came to power in 1944; and things were no better under the Communist regime, when our family was kicked out of our Budapest apartment (where we’d lived, during the last year of the war, under house arrest, as a result of my father’s stature as a nationalist and the various inflammatory statements he’d made against the Nazis), and relocated to a small town south of Debrecen, to a tiny, poorly insulated home that we were sure had once served, more efficiently, as a henhouse. There, we lasted only four months before my father packed us into a Fiat aimed at Austria.