Tell

by Frances Itani

  “I inherited from my mother,” Peewee said to Kenan—he was lying on his back and turned his head toward Kenan’s bed so as to aim his conversation directly—”I inherited the tendency to believe that I could smother at the slightest of causes. My mother disliked closed doors, drawn curtains, rooms deprived of fresh air.”

  What is he going on about? Kenan thought, not wanting to listen, not wanting to hear about smothering at the slightest of causes. But Peewee would not be stopped, and he knew very well that Kenan was not capable of interrupting. Not then.

  Kenan turned on his side to stare the man down with his unbandaged eye. But Peewee remained on his back with his head turned toward Kenan, and was not intimidated by the glare. While he was speaking, however, his hands and arms were in constant motion, and this caused Kenan to stare even harder. Peewee’s short arms whirled almost comically through the air above his torso, as if some separate momentum might cause him to rise up from the sheets and perform a sudden cartwheel between their beds.

  Peewee’s story came out in bursts over several days. He had been crushed under the weight of sandbags and other debris. A shell had exploded in the trench and he’d been buried under three feet of earth, along with four other fellows. The other four had suffocated. Peewee was dug out, dragged out—with cracked ribs and fractured leg—the only one of his mates to survive. Fortunately, a stretcher bearer was nearby with spirits of ammonia to buck him up and get him breathing again.

  Once he began to talk about his survival, Peewee wouldn’t or couldn’t shut up. His constant talking irritated and angered Kenan, though he recognized Peewee’s right—the assertion of that right—to spill out his story. Wasn’t that what the large gestures of war broke down to? Into smaller bits that were each man’s story? Peewee had lived, his friends had died. Peewee had hung on to life, even while every excruciating breath was under threat of being sucked away. He had not wanted to die and he had not died.

  On the ward, Peewee wasn’t anywhere near death. He survived his wounds and was eventually sent home to his parents, smiling broadly, sitting upright, his chest tightly strapped. His leg was immobilized and propped on a leg-board, a narrow extension that slid under the cushion of his invalid seat. He waved goodbye to Kenan with one of his short arms while he was being wheeled away.

  Kenan called up every part of this memory in clear pictures, almost as if he had been the one who’d survived being buried alive. Kenan had not wanted to hear the drawn-out episodes of Peewee’s story, including intimate details about his mates, but he was forced to listen. He was a silent, unwilling partner in a one-way conversation. He’d have stopped the man if he could have, but at the time he could neither speak nor make a move to set his own limbs in motion to get himself out of bed and shut Peewee up.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE VISITS TO LUC CONTINUED. WHEN SHE wasn’t working at the library, Maggie walked up the hard-packed snowy road to Zel’s home several times a week, to practise and to sing privately for Luc. The teacher who boarded with Zel had left to spend Christmas with her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Leary wouldn’t be back for many weeks. The concert date was fast approaching. Luc had assured the singers in the group that they were improving, and this had been a boost to everyone. Confidence was in the air, a sense that they could, indeed, call themselves performers, that they might actually be ready by the end of the year.

  When Maggie was with Luc, there was no one around to censor or judge. There isn’t anything to judge, Maggie told herself. She was out of sight of the eyes of the town. Most of the time, Zel was in her house. Maggie stopped in to see her friend but then went on to the workroom, where only Luc was present. Zel did not try to join them, or suggest that she should or would. She cautioned Maggie only once. “You are stretching away, Maggie, moving toward an edge. Think of what you have, measure what you might lose.” Maggie listened, and heard. But she knew that her friend did not think less of her.

  Sometimes, after Maggie sang, Luc stayed at the piano and played for her. Beethoven, occasionally Debussy or Liszt. Once, a sonata by Haydn that Maggie asked him to play again because she loved its deliberate pacing and demanding fingerwork, its delicate mood and dynamic pulsing. Whatever Luc played, whenever he paused, the silences between the two ebbed and flowed naturally. Sometimes they spoke little throughout an entire visit. Their hands did not touch, but an undercurrent flowed between them. Each was aware, always aware.

  A very different Luc from the one who stood before the choral society in the evenings. At the theatre, he praised, cajoled, corrected and coaxed the singers to believe that they could create harmony with their voices. That they could create beauty. The singers stood, sang, responded. Gathered up their music and left with satisfaction, with a feeling of accomplishment. Maggie marvelled at the way Luc could lead with such authority. But when he was alone with her, he allowed himself a quietness that calmed them both.

  One afternoon, he began a conversation he had not entered before. Scores and pages were spread out over the table. Luc left the piano and sat across from Maggie.

  “My father, Magreet,” he said. He paused, seeing Maggie go still, and he started again.

  “There were three of us—I had two brothers,” he said. “I was the youngest. We were never close to our father. He was difficult, hard on us, strict. He had been that way with our mother, too. Demanding, always demanding. When I was nine years old, I saw him strike my mother and she fell to the floor. I was certain it was because of him that she died so early. Her name was Hanna. She was only in her late thirties.”

  Luc looked down at his hands spread before him. He shifted in his chair.

  “My mother’s death was not easy to forgive. When I was older, I realized that my father had probably behaved toward her in the same way he had observed his own father behave. What else did he know? And yet, my brothers and I were not like him at all. There was a distance between him and us. We wanted that distance. We knew our place after our mother died. We knew that she had partly been our shield. We learned to survive, but we were not like our father.”

  He looked at her, but Maggie did not comment, did not interrupt.

  “Our house was at the edge of town and our field spread out beyond the lane behind the house. That’s the way small villages and towns were organized: in a circle, more or less. Houses together at the centre, the land to be tilled in the larger circumference of the surrounding fields. My brothers and I worked in the field our father owned, worked hard at school, helped in whatever ways we could. We learned to stay out of trouble.

  “I did well at school, and from my earliest years, I loved to listen to music. In our town—even a town as small as mine—lived a man who made flutes. The flute maker had met Liszt and had heard him play his own compositions on the piano. Imagine what that meant to me when I was a small boy, Magreet. Knowing a man who also loved music and who had met Liszt!”

  Maggie was watching his face. She knew instinctively that he had not talked of this for a very long time. And yet, he spoke carefully, formally, as if he had told himself the story countless times.

  “As it turned out, there were several people in our town who cared about music. One special teacher encouraged me and arranged for me to take piano lessons. At the end of my schooling I was awarded a scholarship. My teacher had recommended me and applied on my behalf. I came home and announced this proudly. Too proudly, perhaps. My father was not interested in having one of his sons accept a scholarship in music. Of what use was music to him?

  “I knew what I wanted to do, so I accepted the scholarship without his permission, and I left home. At the time, I was glad to leave, though I felt very much alone. The day I departed, my father told me, ‘Nothing will ever come of you. You will be back with your hand out.’

  “Of course, I did not go back with my hand out. Because what I was becoming was a musician. I travelled to the city and found a rooming house where I could stay. My room was on the top floor and had a narrow window. In several directions,
I could see tiles, jutting chimneys, coral rooftops. Houses were seamed together, laddered upward because there did not seem to be enough space on the ground to hold everyone. So many people, crammed into one place. The entire scene made me think of England, though I had never been to that country. When I did finally travel to London, I realized I had invented the idea from some scrap of story or myth that could not be prised from my imagination. All this time, years were passing, and still I did not return home, not even to visit.”

  Which country? Maggie wanted to know. Which town? But she did not ask. What did it matter? Something would always be withheld. Parts of Luc’s story would never be let go.

  “Leipzig,” he said, because he was aware of her silent question. “Leipzig was the city where I first began my studies. But after several years, I received a letter from my oldest brother, asking me to come home. The letter was more of a telling than an asking. He wrote that our father was ill and had been taken to the hospital. He wrote that our father was dying. At first, I wasn’t certain whether to believe him. Maybe my father was trying to force me to come home and had asked my brother to write. I knew our father hated the thought of me becoming a musician. I was no longer under his control. But when I considered, I realized that my brother would be loyal to me after what we had been through as children.

  “At the time, it was unusual for someone to be admitted to hospital, especially someone like my father. This was long before the war. If a man was dying, he died at home in the presence of his family. But my father was too ill to be cared for at home by my brothers.”

  “It’s the same here,” said Maggie. “In the country and in town. People are cared for in their homes, at the end. The wake is held in the parlour, the vigil in the coolest room, whichever that might be.”

  “My brother had written that I should make plans to depart immediately. This was not easy; I was forced to borrow money,and I was a two-day journey away. But I made the trip, partly by train and partly on foot. When I arrived in the town of my birth, I went directly to the hospital, as my brother had asked me to do.

  “I entered a long ward that had rows of narrow cots on both sides of the room. Both my brothers were present, and they turned when they saw a nurse pointing me in their direction. I saw them at the same instant; it was like seeing myself in duplicate and triplicate.

  “My father had been a robust man when I left. In the hospital cot, he was thin and weak and his skin had an unhealthy pallor. When I approached, I saw how truly ill he was. My brothers embraced me, and said they would wait outside so that I could be alone with him. When Father realized it was I who was sitting by his bed, he stared at me as if to convince himself that he was not imagining. There was no greeting, no hello, no joy or admonishment. Instead, he said: ‘Lukas, go and bring me a glass of water.’

  “I was confused. I suppose I expected to be greeted or welcomed, even railed at. I looked around for someone who could tell me where to get a glass and some water, and I was sent to an area between two wards. When I returned to my father’s bed, I put a hand beneath his head and helped to prop him up as he sipped from the glass. He looked at me with an expression of sadness and said, ‘Now I am ready to die. Each of my sons has brought me water.’

  “He died within the hour. He never once asked what I was doing, or about the music I loved or the years I had been away. He had never written a letter to me. I’d always believed that he was disappointed in me, angry. He said nothing to prove me wrong.”

  “Even so,” said Maggie, “that was a reckoning of sorts. In the hospital. For him, and perhaps for you? It might have been the only way he was capable of making peace.”

  They sat for a while without speaking.

  “Did you marry?” Maggie looked down as she asked.

  “Much later,” he said. “I met my wife in London, though she was Belgian. Her life ended shortly after the war began. She was killed, massacred along with her parents. Her father was an artist, a painter. She had returned to Dinant, where she was born, to help her family. She was hoping to bring her parents to England soon after the war broke out. There was a rush to travel, to make decisions, to catch a train that could get her to the coast quickly. There was no time for goodbyes because I was in Manchester, directing a choral performance. She left without words. Only a written note. But I remember the words that were spoken before that last trip. All of the words from our years together are gathered in memory. I have all of those.”

  He stared at the wall behind Maggie.

  “We had no children,” he said. And added, “I should have travelled with her. To Belgium.”

  “What would have happened to you?”

  “I’m not certain. The same, perhaps. Executed. Shot. Or I might have been able to save her.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Marie.” His face was contorted. He got up to shake down the coals in the stove. The ashes fell heavily, abruptly, and jarred the silence. Luc returned to the table and pulled his chair around so that he could sit beside instead of across from her. As if reconsidering, he stood and reached for her hand and tugged her up so that she faced him.

  The movement toward each other came from both in the same instant. At least, that is the way Maggie saw herself and Luc when she went over and over the scene, later, in her mind. She took a step forward while being pulled into his arms, and he pressed her against his body and they breathed deeply and quietly. The weariness in his face, the weariness attracted her, the sadness. She had allowed herself to be pulled up by him, to be held; she had allowed herself to hold.

  After a time that might have been long or short—she would never be certain—she stepped away and slipped into her coat. She turned to look at Luc before she left, and she walked slowly back to town and the tower apartment. She did not stop in at Zel’s kitchen to say goodbye. She saw nothing around her during the walk home. If skaters were gliding around the rink, she did not hear their laughter or their shouts. Neither she nor Luc had spoken after that moment. Her awareness, her consciousness, was alive with song.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Emyvale, PEI: December 10, 1919

  Hello Old Stuff

  I can’t tell you how happy I was to have your letter put into my hands this morning. There have been changes in your life and mine since we served together over there, and we both seem to be recovering, though my progress has been slow. At least that’s the way it has seemed through the months I’ve been here. I was forced to “settle in” and I did exactly that. You, too, might regard your progress as slow, but it sounds as if you’re getting around on your own now—that’s what I read between the lines. If you’re as good as you say you are at getting around in the dark with your good eye closed, perhaps you’ll be persuaded to look at what’s beyond when it’s open. One way or another, I think we could cheer each other up if we had half a chance. With a bit of luck, that might happen in the spring months, and sooner rather than later.

  Since I first wrote to you I have been moved downstairs to a ward we loosely refer to as a “halfway” world, which means that anyone moved here is almost—but not quite—ready to leave for good, and will not be carried out in a box. In other words, I am no longer considered a danger to others or to myself. This gives me more relief than I imagined it would. I’ve become used to the routine, and the place gives support in many ways. I know my parents are eager to see me out of here, and no doubt my father has plans for me. He has been a schoolteacher in Charlottetown for many years and would like to see me in the same profession. However, I haven’t decided about that and I am not ready to return to studies until I’ve been out of here for a while. I don’t intend to be one of the invalided soldiers who becomes an “unemployable,” but before I do anything, I want to travel to Ontario to visit you.

  You tell me that you read every day, and I, too, have become a perpetual reader. There is a library of sorts at the end of my ward. My father sends books, but those will have to remain here when I leave. I pull just about anyth
ing off the shelves, from The Old Curiosity Shop to The Weavers to Owen Johnson’s novel Making Money. We have our own famous author from this island, our Lucy Maud Montgomery. You might have heard of her. She has written stories and books about a girl named Anne. My father knew Maud years ago, before she married and moved to Ontario. She was born north of here and there are still plenty of cousins around. Her mother died of the white plague, same as the one I’m almost cured of.

  I am still required to remain relatively quiet, but I am permitted a bit of walking and mild exercise. Mild in the extreme after what this body was once able to do during our long marches. In the halfway world where I am now, we fellows have the choice of sitting in a comfortable lean-back armchair or lying in bed for our cures. Either way, we still have to bundle up and move outside to the fresh-air pavilion every day. I stay out as much as possible. Weather doesn’t always cooperate, but when it does I enjoy the sting of cold on my face. The best days are when sun is mixed in. Now that winter has fully arrived, the biggest change is in the sky. Our island sky is like no other, and if I had even one speck of drawing talent, I’d try to capture what I’m forced to look at so many hours of the day. There are some here who are good at art and who have done a passable job of painting outdoor scenes. But my enjoyment comes from watching. The clearest blues can shift in moments to visions of fire, layers of red and pink as the day wears on. Every morning, a different scene is revealed. Sometimes I think a giant spoon has stirred up the colours. Sometimes the lineup of clouds makes it seem as if someone has laid out an obsessively neat pattern. It’s as if nature knows that we are shut-ins, and puts on her display for our eyes alone. And that’s enough about me being a nature watcher. If I could, I’d try my hand at painting. Alas, that’s not something I am able to do.