by Ursula Pflug
How could Sandrine even know such obscure literary trivia? Maybe, sitting on the train, she’d read a tourist brochure whose useless facts were now emerging from her subconscious like flotsam escaped from lengthy entrapment beneath the waves. Maybe some kind of mischievous metaphysical imp had taken up residence in her brain, excising important data, such as her husband’s name, and replacing them with dreamy poetic childhood memories whose relevance, if any, she couldn’t fathom. At least not now, not yet.
Was it even a real memory? And if false memories weren’t inserted by evil therapists and hypnotists, as often alleged, where in fact did they come from? Anyway, evil therapists usually inserted memories of childhood abuse, and the train memory, while dripping with anxious feelings of abandonment, wasn’t about abuse.
Sandrine felt tempted to haul a stepladder into the bedroom and unfold it under the trapdoor. She’d climb to the top step, tea in hand. It was the kind of minor eccentricity she liked to indulge in. She told people she was practising for menopause. She’d even walked the streets of her village carrying a coffee mug, and not the stainless travel kind but a proper ceramic mug with daisies and ewes on it.
She looked at her husband meditatively chewing on his pencil end. All she had to do was ask. Was his name Ethan? Or maybe Karl Johan? If it wasn’t either of those, then what was it? Maybe she’d written his name in one of her notebooks. In fact, that was highly likely.
Very quietly, so as not to disturb his chewing, she got up and tiptoed down the hall. The bedroom closet was capacious enough to hold large objects such as the stepladder in addition to their meagre supply of clothing. Leveraging the ladder out through a selection of her man’s plaid shirts, she opened it beneath the pink trapdoor in the ceiling. The trapdoor was pink because Sandrine had once painted the walls and ceiling, rebelling against her husband’s blues and browns and camo. It was his house; he’d inherited it along with two or three other nearby properties both large (a swampy hunt camp) and small (a cottage on one of the lakes), and every damn wall or floor or roof or exterior wall on or in each of his houses, sheds, and barns was either green or blue or brown. Sandrine remembered how when they’d begun dating she’d taken whatshisname for financially struggling because of his frayed shirts and ailing trucks. She was used to city signifiers of prosperity: clever phones and name-brand clothing. His little white clapboard house near the Brookside canal, the one she’d moved into after they’d married, had been so unassuming she’d felt a little sorry for him. Later she’d found out it was a country thing; folks had houses and plots of swamp and cedar bush tucked away all over the county, bits and pieces that had been in the family for generations. Many families were cash poor but land rich, their various parcels having been acquired during earlier times when land had been cheap to come by, having then been recently expropriated from the local Michi Saagiig. It was still cheap, comparatively speaking, tucked away in this forgotten Eastern Ontario township.
Sandrine stopped in mid-thought halfway up the ladder, imagining a house painted in camouflage. She smiled. It could be quite wonderful, certainly a talking point. Would she use the green-and-brown kind or the greyscale kind? The different types of camo had different names; Sandrine just didn’t know what they were. What she did know was that she had once painted the bedroom not camo but a flaming flamingo pink. She’d done it when her husband was away hunting, just to prove that she had some say, to prove that pink was a good colour. If he hated pink so much he shouldn’t have married a girl; a moose would’ve done just fine. Moose, after all, were brown.
Still parked halfway up, Sandrine pictured Mike’s winsome moose wife and giggled. Then she climbed back down to retrieve the flashlight that always sat on her nightstand in case of a power failure; there were lots of those in the country, just as there was lots of camo. Truth was the pink had gotten to her, too—the much and suchness of it; maybe a paler pink would’ve done the trick just as well, proved the point, made her husband laugh instead of groan.
Once back at the top she pushed the trap door out of the way. It wasn’t hinged, just a loose slab of wood squared a little irregularly to fit the slightly irregular square someone had long, long ago cut into the ceiling. Sandrine hoisted herself up and turned on the flashlight.
She’d bring the box of books down, she figured, or she’d sit up there all night, opening one book after another, trying to find the passage about the lozenges woven into or printed onto the train upholstery. If she were smart, once she’d found it she wouldn’t slip the book, unlabeled, back into its box. She’d slap a sticky note on the page, or she’d get a fine-point marker and write on the cover, or she might even take the book and carry it down the ladder to keep on her night table until it drove her crazy and she could no longer stand the presence of this chapter from an earlier life, recorded in neat cursive hailing from the days before her handwriting had gone to hell.
Amazingly, the box was right near the hatch, as if someone had pushed it there for her perusal. Or else she’d had this same idea a month ago, and forgotten. Just like her husband’s name.
She selected a book from the top layer, opened it in the middle and read aloud. Over the course of a lifetime I have found that random thoughts, like dreams, can be cryptic messages from the soul, disguised or veiled, yes, but requiring only a bit of personal pondering, inspection or introspection, to parse their meaning and significance.
Not the passage about the lozenges, not at all, but maybe there was a connection nevertheless. For instance, hadn’t she just been thinking that often enough the timing of certain thoughts was significant? Did that mean there was a reason she was thinking about the train in Africa on which her father had left her, promising to meet her in Tunis the next day while he went to visit an old French girlfriend living in the south, in Tataouine?
What happened, Sandrine? Did something happen on the train that you’ve shut out? Is that why you’re thinking so much about the damn train suddenly? Djerba’s other name was the Isle of Forgetting, after all. Or is it the feeling of abandonment by your father that you’re still, decades later, trying to heal? Maybe nothing beyond his departure had to have happened for you to feel so neglected. Maybe the train voyage was perfectly innocent and nice, if a little bit frightening as you spoke neither Arabic nor French well, and Tunisia isn’t the sort of country in which young teen girls travel alone, then or now. Did something happen on the train, Sandrine? Think a little harder. Maybe, like her husband’s name, she’d written it down in one of the notebooks, whatever it was, if there had even been anything. There were so many books in the box. Layers and layers of books, not in any kind of order. She looked at the one she held in her hand with its green cover and creamy lined pages, not all of them full. She hated wasting journals. She could resume writing in this one, just to confuse the hell out of herself when, in another ten years, she got it out of the box so she could look for her husband’s forgotten name again.
What was the point of even having a husband if you couldn’t even remember his name from one moment to the next? She closed the book again, looked at the cover, which all by itself ought to offer clues. Without perusing the interior, she ought to be able to discern both the approximate year and her place of residence at the time of writing. Maybe even where she’d gotten the journal itself, whether it had been a gift or something she’d purchased in a stationery store, unable to help herself, knowing she shouldn’t buy it, not really, because it was expensive and the rent was due.
She opened the book to a random page.
The café I am sitting in is like the café on Sixth Street, she read. That one was a basement café with nice white cups and healthy carrot bread. She would leave her apartment and walk there during the day. The clerks were supercilious. She felt her loneliness and her poverty were both recognized and snickered at, a little. She was cute enough and her thrift-store coat was of good wool and a becoming cut; with a church-sale silk scarf she thought she looked q
uite good. And yet anyone must be able to tell that she was poor and lonely, bored and aimless.
Sandrine couldn’t remember having written this, nor could she remember the café, but there had been a lot of those over a span beginning approximately at the time of the trip to Tunisia and ending when she moved into her husband’s house and started a family. She never went to those sorts of cafés anymore, mainly because there weren’t any in Brookside or Stony Creek, villages that favoured Canadian Chinese and breakfast specials. She examined the handwriting. It was undeniably her own, evoking the long-gone days before her cursive had gone to hell. She felt a little regretful looking at her beautiful penmanship, wondering whether she could relearn it. Trying to recover lost cursive would be sort of like going back to French or pottery, both skills she’d once been not half-bad at but had left by the wayside at some point.
Probably the same point at which she got pregnant, if not before. She’d taken up reading about nutrition and child development, consequently both French verb conjugations and wheel throwing had seemingly vanished—poof!—from her brain as if they’d never been there at all. Did it even matter? She wasn’t with Mike or Randy or Euell or Darrel because of his name but because, with him, she no longer had to be that person, the one who scribbled obsessively in sad cafés, the one who had looked out the windows of a train that had seemed, forever, to pass through the North African night. On Djerba there were three-thousand-year-old olive trees, still living. What did trees that old dream of? An older dream than that of the Romans, by far.
What happened on the train, Sandrine? She had in the end tired of the years of lonely views and focused just on the upholstery, its patterns repeating, over and over. Clack clack clackety clack. Eventually the train had left North Africa and gone back to Canada as only dream trains can.
Sandrine heard her husband enter the bedroom. She listened to him sit down on the bed; it must be late, even by her standards. She began her descent, clutching the little green hardcover book with its descriptions of thought processes and sad cafés, if not train upholstery. Later she’d leaf through it again, and hopefully come across a list of lovers’ names that would end with her husband’s.
On Fire Bridge
I’M SURE NOW THAT YOU started the fires, that your desire called them into being.
I see you in our kitchen, your orange-stockinged legs up on the table, smoking cigarettes, pleased as punch. It’s dawn and we haven’t slept.
“We are like gods,” you say, “playing marbles in space.” I like you saying it; I like your arrogance. I like how you always push me to stay up late, when, if it was up to me, I’d have been in bed hours ago. But you need those sunrises, need what they give you.
We walked together so very far, little friend, much farther than I ever could’ve gone without you. I was so happy! We dreamed together, prying open all the doors in space, doors that were never supposed to be opened, at least not by us. The revolutions that occurred in far corners of the galaxy because of our pliers! That were never supposed to occur, at least not for that reason. In the very centre of things we found a gaping hole and fell into it. Time yawned. In its breath we were taken apart and reassembled, exquisitely, in a different way.
sss
In my memory I come with you till halfway across the bridge. It is so cold on your damn bridge, a shivering place, and underneath us the waters rage, a stormy winter current so strong I’m afraid it will carry me away, even when I’m just looking at it. I never thought for a moment you were planning a much longer journey, a journey you would never return from. I come up behind you, always the dawdler, going only because you have gone, sometimes you fool me, allowing me to believe it is I who leads.
On the bridge I stay back a few feet, watching, a little terrified, how you sit on the edge, your legs dangling, staring into the whirlpools. I like it, but it’s very strong; enough of God’s raw breath to last me a whole month. But you, you always want to stay. You call me a wimp. All the same, you want me with you. When we do leave, you explain, it’s because of me, because you don’t want to stay alone. I sigh. We go home together, home to breakfast specials and laundry and floors that always get dirty again. I am content just to be with you, but for you there is never enough; you are so hungry, always wanting to go back. Over morning coffees we argue, and the outcome is always the same. You will go alone, you say, if I don’t come.
When I met you I thought I was the brave one, the adventurer; sometimes you even let me believe it, for a little while, so long as it meant I’d come a little further, stay a little longer. Until of course the time came I didn’t go. And now I retrace our worn steps, calling, hoping to find you.
sss
The surface of the water rippling. Scudding smoke, embers. The fire is close by tonight. The rain turns cold, turns white. Pebbly stone rough under my hands. The bridge’s railing. One hand, the right one, curled around a cigarette. Cigarettes change taste when it turns cold, when the snow comes. The new sharp smell reminds me of you. I smoke: the tips of my fingers go numb and tingly with clues. You are nearby.
And now this writing has led me to you, to a voice that seems to be yours, to a place like the places you loved, the bridges. “Isn’t it good here?” you say in my mind. “Isn’t it good?”
And I say, “God, how I’ve missed you, how I’ve missed this strange feeling, as though my cells were electrified, as though I’d been drinking for a week, as though I hadn’t slept in years. Oh God, oh God,” I say.
You chide me, saying, “If only you’d come too, that last time, like you promised, everything would have been different.”
Perhaps I did promise.
If only I’d had the courage to leap into the fire, then I would find you still alive, unsinged. I go in my mind, now, just for a moment, to be with you. You are always inside the fire now, dancing. It’s as if I can see you through the flames; as though you come out and join me to say, “Hey, no burn marks.”
We talk. I care about burned bridges, about writing, but you never have. “It doesn’t matter,” you say. “Death doesn’t matter, appearances are a lie. They saw insanity, those others, but that was only the outer shell. I am where I have always been, dancing inside the fire.” Ah, that strange feeling of being with you.
It’s always night and sleeting on your bridge.
You turn to go. You smile, will I cross with you tonight? But I don’t, not even this time, this second chance. If I did, they’d burn the bridge, and besides, I have to be somewhere in the morning, to write you into life. I stroke your leather jacket good-bye, with a tenderness born of fear, as though even in this dream our lives are so dangerous we might really never see one another again. As perhaps they are.
My footsteps ring on the empty bridge but you call me back one more time. “Kim?”
And I say, “Yes?” and you hand me a film can, full of wooden matches.
“You might need them later,” you say, when I ask.
sss
In the morning the city is grey and full of rain; I walk through it bleakly, missing you. The newspaper is full of stories of fires, and I am jealous, knowing you caused them.
I go to the bridge, but in the morning it is just a bridge, snow swirling into the river. There is the smell of smoke, of fire, but I know that even if I crossed here, I’d never be able to find you; the snow has obscured your footsteps. Still, I hear you laughing at me, faint as a train whistle, very far away. Later on I sit in cafés and look out at the snow. I drink coffee and smoke endlessly, writing in notebooks, feeling I have failed.
sss
The forgetting begins, the loss of memory. For days that feel like centuries I sit in my diner by the river, reading my newspapers, watching the snow swirl. I forget what you look like; everyone becomes you. They build a highway, a busy one, between the diner and the river; all summer the bulldozers are hungry, tearing the earth. When winter comes again I have fi
nished the front section, moved on to arts and entertainment. When the snow returns I am sure you will come back, will bloom again like a winter flower. I bring a boom box to the diner, and I listen to talk shows and to my favourite tapes while I wait for my pancakes. When they close up for the night they leave one light on for me, and let me help myself to coffee. I become a legend, a tourist attraction; bohemians and artsy types come and sit down beside me, hoping to catch some of my fire, hoping they, too, will become so free they will be allowed to stay in diners all night long, watching the fish swim around the room at purple morning, let out from their aquarium for an hour at dawn before the place opens for the nine-to-fivers to get their before work coffees.
sss
Purple chrysanthemums appear in my water glass, books on my table, television sets. Soon they move out the next table to replace it with a washer and dryer; after the showers are installed I never have to leave. Still I forget you. Still I see others. A man with long yellow hair tied back with a string shares my table for weeks; he shares my ability to go without sleep, or else he’s the only one I know who can drink as much coffee as me. He makes tiny objects so small one needs a microscope to see them, but his hands are like laser beams and he can see without one, so one learns his trick and one’s own eyes become microscopes too. Tiny sections of the table become very large, magnified a thousand times, until one can see them, the things he makes: intricate boxes full of electronic parts and food for the soul. They are beautiful, they are art.
