The Stalinist's Wife

by France Theoret

  I am regressing. I have the nasty feeling of growing smaller. I am an adult. My childhood is long past. Whenever we are on vacation, I have a secret wish that you would talk to me about what kind of little boy you were. This quiet idea, almost an obsession, lies heaving below my eyelids. I get up in the morning; I go to bed at night unable to speak; I don’t dare ask you what it was like when you were a child. I know nothing about your past. We have to start somewhere. You are my priority. I listen to what you tell me, and so my turn will come. You will listen to what I have to say. I will sketch out what has happened over the past few days. You have seen my father drunk and staggering, on the attack from the moment we arrived. My mother calls him “your father” when she talks to her children: Your father swore that not one of his children would go to university. He only started drinking when you went. She makes me anxious.

  This is one of the delicate subjects we never touch, not under any pretext. It is the most difficult one. Every year at the same time, in the holiday period between Christmas and New Year, I wish we could talk about these things so that you know what I have to say. I start in a low voice; I approach you gently. The words accumulate in my mouth, collect at the edge of my lips. I give up and retreat, disappointed that you cannot guess what is turning my free time into turmoil. I am in a stupor, wasting my time. You can see that I’m going in circles and you let me know I should get back to my writing desk.

  Work starts up again with its compressed winter schedule that requires tight organization. I no longer think about your childhood, or mine. I am delivered of the past and of memory. This is the last day of our life together. You don’t know who I am. Or what it was like before our nine years of marriage and the three years of dating that preceded. How does it feel not to know anything about this? I see it as shameful, one more reason to admit my guilt. I did not succeed in getting you to know me. I left you and feel humiliated at the thought that I am still a stranger, a bloodless figure, without substance. In your eyes, people are shapeless blurs. You see what you can extract from each one, which is what many people do.

  I am careful not to annoy you or enter into an emotional exchange. Otherwise you will emit harsh, raucous cries, the sound of scraping metal. I am afraid you might burst into a thousand old pieces, worn out too quickly. After an argument, you mock me, your scorn wrenches my spirit. I will certainly not start again. I feel more and more confused. The life I led before you is of no interest. That’s the life I want to talk about. I recall what happened. I am silent. My silence hurts. I feel ravaged by ancient and current humiliations. I have an idea of you as a man of superior intelligence who could listen to the first words that come from my memory. The years have gone by. I am like a phantom, a false being, a shadow, something empty. I burn with shame. Have I been nothing but a servant?

  You harass me with your working class origins; you reproach me for being the daughter of a businessman. You are the son of a factory worker. Your father repairs and restores the tires of heavy machinery. It is between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius in the plant where the men work with toxic products. He tells the story of some newcomer, a young man, fainting in the heat and from the effort required to lift the gigantic tires. Only once has your father talked about what it’s like in the factory. There are many things you don’t know; for example, the location of what he calls the shop. Your parents have had their bungalow for a long time. My parents have never owned a house. You proclaim that property is theft, that profit is theft. You keep on trotting out your father’s working class life. It’s your way of distinguishing yourself from your university colleagues. In the name of your father we all owe you something. You made efforts to reach your high position. A father like yours could hardly be an intellectual support. You succeeded because of your perseverance. Society must compensate you for any difficulties you may have. Society is everyone else, those nearest you, your wife and the professors in your department. I am not the daughter of a factory worker. That’s what you tell me. It’s your way of talking to me about the past, about the child and the teenager you once were. I feel anxious; I feel unworthy. I learn to feel disqualified in your eyes. This is new. You already have precedence in the house. You are asking for even more self-effacement, which means more services.

  The specious insults you fling at those who hold doctorates make me uncomfortable. You produce a constant stream of verbal abuse against those of your colleagues who hold this highest degree. I feel dispossessed when your frenetic outbursts slam gross and unjust insults against my eardrums. The university provided you with years of free time at full salary to write your thesis. You took the time off and you didn’t write. I spoke to you several times about the planned thesis. I got the same predictable response, replacement words, excuses from a brutal, unfair man: I’m not ready to write. You announce that a doctorate is unnecessary. The union is there to ensure that you keep your job. You are already teaching at the highest level without this useless document. You compare yourself to Roland Barthes, who doesn’t hold a doctorate either. You blow up. You make me complicit in the judgments you hurl at colleagues and in your plans for vengeance. I suffer from not being able to tell you that you’re abusing public funds by refusing to write. My response is normal. Deep down inside I object to someone receiving money and not giving anything in return. You are a parasite and a cheat. I feel like a coward because I don’t confront you. Acquiring a doctorate is an achievement. At the same time I can hear my family snort at higher education and higher diplomas, tearing them down, making fun. I am unable to open my mouth and defend what I value.

  May, and your classes have already ended. The weather is lovely. We go to Outremont to visit colleagues of yours, a husband and wife who teach in your department. She is a great beauty, and was once the driving force behind Gaston Miron, the woman for whom he wrote “La marche à l’amour.” We enter the vast and austere Victorian house whose space is filled with antique furniture. The place looks right for studies and intellectual life. Your colleague has decided that we should celebrate the first warm day. She tells us that her husband selected each piece of furniture, individually, in antique shops, and invites us onto the balcony at the front of the house. We wait for her there. He brings out a platter with a bottle of champagne and some plastic glasses. I am twentyseven years old and have never had champagne. It is afternoon; we’re outside; the sun is strong, warming us up. They want to celebrate the beginning of your holidays. The bubbles are nice to watch, and to drink. A few sips and I am already dizzy. Their young son arrives with a neighbour the same age. Your colleague introduces us. The little boy says hello. I don’t say much. I don’t know what I like best: the champagne, the first strong sun of May, the woman’s exceptional beauty. You keep your vicious remarks under wraps. No sign of your usual insults against these people. You smile. You produce harmless chatter. You are being charming, even affectionate. I feel singularly uncomfortable. You present yourself as young and naïve, in search of a new set of parents. I can see that your colleagues accord you privileges. You are their resident genius.

  You accept another colleague’s invitation to his country house. The man is tall and has an impressive voice. He associates with young artists and writes on contemporary art. He offers you the opportunity to write a piece for a collection he is editing. You find excuses. The professor begs you to accept the offer. You say you aren’t ready to write. He extends the deadline. You do not say what you have often told me, that the institutions appropriate these automatist artists of the counter-culture. You hold our host’s attention with your indecision. He has invited another couple: the man, who is stocky and somewhat older, is talking to his partner, a woman with a tired body who keeps on repeating how her life has been nothing but disappointments and sufferings, a series of injustices. That man asks the professor how his divorce is going and asserts that the judges are all prejudiced in favour of women. The professor, the stocky man, and you all repeat that same sentence. One by one you repeat these words with terrifi
ed looks on your faces. The tired woman sits there, crushed by the men around the table. I try to catch her gaze, in search of solidarity. She lowers her head. I hear this sentence about judges being prejudiced in favour of women for the first time in my life. I remove myself from the conversation. I hear the woman make a comment about me: she’s twenty-seven, hardly looks it. I discover that she is my age. The stocky man leans over to his partner and says: she’s not like you, she hasn’t lived through anything. Unease takes over. There are too many of us cooped up in a summer house while the sun is shining out there on the water.

  ***

  We lived in five different apartments. Each time you decided on how the rooms would be used and I never questioned this. This was a constant. You kept the best room for your writing desk.

  I don’t remember how we came to only ever take account of your needs. You always took the biggest room, with the best light, and the least noise, and never justified this. I looked after our moves; I bought the furniture, which I then placed, cleaned, or had re-upholstered if that was necessary. I scrubbed the floors, disinfected the kitchens and the bathrooms to make them liveable. While I was busy scouring the whole place, you set up your bookshelves and arranged your books in alphabetical order. We would finish up our work the same day. You would stay in your new office. I would run from room to room, my hands chapped from the dirt and my lips cracked. All there was left for me to do was set up my writing desk in the living room, or in the part of our bedroom that was reserved for me. You said a strange thing after we separated: you accused me of never opposing you, of never once protesting. Was I so lazy, so numb and so concerned with your well-being that I accorded you every right? My love for you comprised friendship and so much more. Your profession ranked much higher than mine. I accorded it such an obvious priority that I accepted all of your desires.

  My brother told me he saw you after we broke up. He did not accept our divorce. I’d deprived him of a friend. One day he wanted to hurt my feelings. He announced that he was seeing you and your beautiful colleague, Gaston Miron’s muse. I don’t have as strong a sense of family, and so I have to consider myself guilty for our break-up. I refused to live under the same roof with a Stalinist. You have to know the fanatics and their dogmas to understand how impossible it is to live with them. What was I for you? I did not measure up. I didn’t have the credibility or the social status to combat your new ideas.

  You did not become a disciple of Stalin for the sake of your family or mine. You kept that part of yourself quiet; you hid it from them. Whatever it was that motivated your thinking and your activities, the political obedience that became an inseparable part of your life, which you then imposed on me in our home – none of that was ever revealed to anyone in our families. One of my brothers claims to be your friend, he admires you. He remembers you and alludes to you long after our separation. He liked the man who hid what was important to him, the man who always dissembled his intellectual pursuits.

  My brother does not like intellectuals. That is a truism. He avoids them. He denigrates them. He puts them down in order to raise himself up. He considers them fake, vain, and domineering. When he ran for city councillor in Montreal, a voter referred to him as that little fat guy. I didn’t see him that way. He seemed tall enough to me. But he was poorly shaved, had rotten teeth, and the clothes he wore, which he bought in garage sales and church basements, stank. When he became a city councillor I told him he needed to buy new clothes. I had no influence. I would talk to him about these trivial material things in neutral and discreet tones. I didn’t say how ashamed I felt. I didn’t mention this conformist and inappropriate emotion. Occasionally, I would accompany him to a reception at city hall and be introduced to the mayor and other dignitaries. The councillor would be wearing a stained summer jacket though it was winter. It closed tight across his gut, revealing its girth, and the twisty legs of his trousers crumpled over the top of oversized old shoes. More than once I asked other family members to talk to him about his clothes. No one listened. They would pull faces, think I was crazy. This brother is a half-god for them.

  The day he was nominated, I spoke to an audience of voters. I said he had the soul of a politician and had longed for a future in politics since adolescence. I was well-known in the neighbourhood, well-prepared, and willing to stay by his side that evening. I’d written out my speech. Quite aware of what I was doing, I chose my family over my feminism. The other candidate was a woman. The eloquent words I had written for the occasion and that I uttered that evening were on behalf of a man.

  Over the course of that meeting, the candidate bit his nails and muttered: I haven’t got a chance; it’s all been decided; the other candidate’s a woman. He achieved his first victory because of my speech and that of my new partner.

  All he has to do is ask for my help and I devote entire evenings to his party. Before elections and on election days, I am at his entire disposition. I join the team of anonymous supporters, volunteers who are attached to their candidate, willing to forge on to victory or defeat with whichever one they’ve chosen.

  My brother saw I was submissive, and so he needed to place me a rung below him. This is a constant. I am his inferior. He hardly speaks to me during election periods. I’m the one who distributes his party leaflets in the neighbourhood. I phone people to find out how they plan to vote. The phone lists are long and detailed. The rooms are small. The telephonists create a hellish racket, a cacophony of dissonant voices. The candidate strolls about as though he were a traditional boss among his employees. He proclaims: nobody’s working around here. Let’s go, move it. We need results. The women sympathize with him: the poor man’s nervous. I take refuge in a bubble. The lists are endless. The volunteers don’t say hello to anyone, and they don’t return my greetings. We’ve been working side by side for weeks. They all have the same haggard, impenetrable faces. The candidate doesn’t make a single presentation. The atmosphere is heavy, almost hostile. Everyone wants to be the candidate’s favourite. I am at my work station, on a straight wooden chair. We are not a team. We are helping the future councillor who is not providing anything to drink. My face in the mirror is pallid. Most of the telephonists look yellow under the neon lights. I am the sister. His other supporters believe in his ideals, in the promises of the party leader. They are moved by their pride in belonging to a larger group. I am helping, supporting, collaborating in the name of my family. I have no soul. Or if I have one, I am selling it: my brother changes political allegiances. He demands that I vote against his former party, which I do. He utters vulgarities that hurt me, ambles by in front of me: let’s go, move it! I have the feeling of déjà-vu.

  My brother doesn’t like me telling others that he has the soul of a politician. He only liked that for his nomination. Lately, he’s been asking me not to say this anymore. People have a negative view of politicians, is what he says. What was acceptable at the nomination meeting, because it was directed against a woman, is now unacceptable.

  Sometimes he is absolutely cold; sometimes he is charming. He knows how to appear affectionate. He comes close; he touches me, puts his arms around me. I trust him when he has that soft, gentle voice. I don’t really want to hear any of his secrets, the words full of revelations. We don’t talk about family or about our childhoods. Between us, the past does not exist. The last time we had a quiet moment, I told him I would die without completing all the projects I have planned. In a low voice he replied: Me too. I thought my statement was melodramatic, pathetic, fake.

  I imagine that he lives in the present, filled with hope for the future like many a Quebecker. He talks about himself. I listen. I am a gifted listener. He complains a lot. That’s the order of things. I recently read the results of a major survey of our people. They complain. He’s constantly worried about his health, about the financial risks he faces in his business ventures. He is a bargain hunter. He regularly attends auction sales, looks for cheap investment opportunities, lowincome buildings that he plans t
o re-sell immediately. If you don’t take risks, you can’t win. He often wins, and has every concrete, material reason to be happy. He talks about his successes with attentive charm. He’s a winner.

  When we were children, the idea of winning was inculcated in us, an unwritten law, the purpose of our present and future actions. Material objectives are the most noticeable and the most satisfying. After he lost the election a first time, and then a second time, he returned to this single and central idea of our family’s education: the primordial focus on profit.

  One day when he was upset and his voice irritated, he told me out of the blue and without my understanding his bad temper that he would take revenge on me and stand for election to the National Assembly in Quebec City. I was impressed. He is aiming high, has big goals. Recently I asked him whether he still aspires to represent our riding. He refused to answer. He’s flattered by my words. It’s not my intention to flatter him. I want to provoke him. I appeal to his politician’s soul. I feel family solidarity and devotion for him.

  My brother is ambitious. He is self-taught; he never went to college. He believes in experience, practice, action. He has all round confidence in his abilities and his charismatic personality. He is wary of diplomas, and people with diplomas, anyone who has a university education. Whenever he talks to me I hear a hint of suspicion in his voice, and I never allow myself to talk to him about his work. He shows no interest in me. I am either indifferent to him, or I bother him. I don’t dare think about where he would place me in the family hierarchy. Possibly on the bottom, on the very last rung of the ladder. I’m the one who accepts all his irritation and frustration and fulfils all his needs, offering him my energy, collaboration, and loyalty.