“I’m turning into a vegetable! A fucking vegetable!” shouted Ogle. “And nobody cares! Nobody does anything!”
“Did you ever consider that there is nothing to be done?” said David, grasping the chess case to his smock with both hands.
“Something can be done!” shouted Ogle. “Something can always be done!”
“Perhaps,” said David.
“Yes,” said Ogle, “yes, yes, yes.”
David came to the bed. “Tom,” he said, “be quiet. Get some rest.”
“You shit,” said Ogle. “You can do something for yourself. I can’t. Why don’t you bugger off to Israel? You’re always yapping about it. Take the bull by the horns.”
“It’s not possible,” said David.
“Oh God,” said Ogle. “I can’t feel my toes. I can’t feel my toes.”
“Be calm,” said David. “Calm down.”
“Like him,” said Ogle, pointing to Morissey sleeping a heavy, drug-induced sleep. “Calm like him. I’m not croaking like that bastard. Not in my sleep. Not yet.”
“You shouldn’t carry on this way,” said David.
“Why shouldn’t I?” yelled Ogle. “This whole business has left one bad taste in my mouth. Your doctors, your hospital, everything.”
David smoothed his trousers on his knee. “Please,” he said earnestly, “don’t be bitter. It doesn’t help.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” said Ogle. “I didn’t live twenty-eight years to end up like this – a slab of meat.”
“All right,” said David, “I won’t argue with you. But let me tell you a little story. Some time after the war – 1947 – I ended up in London. I lived with a Jewish tailor in the East End for a little while. I was very unhappy, very bitter. He left me to myself for a long time and then one day he told me a kind of parable. He said there were two kinds of bitterness: one that takes away the appetite and one that stimulates it. Pepper, he said, was of the first kind – it burns the tongue and nothing more. But horse-radish, though bitter, sharpens the hunger and makes a man impatient for the good things of the meal. So, he said, if a man becomes only bitter and downcast he goes no further. But a little bitterness, a little horse-radish, may give one an appetite for perfection.”
“How quaint,” said Ogle, “how undeniably folksy.”
David shrugged and stood up.
“You haven’t told me,” Ogle said, “why, with all your good advice, you’re still here and not in Israel? Physician, heal thyself.”
“Why? Because I fell in love with and married a gentile,” said David. He laughed. “She won’t go. She was born here. This is home to her. So I suppose you could say that I have been forced to make the best of things. I had no choice about acquiring a taste for perfection. Besides, there are no Expos in Israel.”
When it came time to clean his room according to the rotation schedule, Ogle found himself parked in the hallway in a wheelchair along with the other non-ambulatory patients. The walking wounded headed immediately for the television lounge.
Ogle sat in the hallway. He hadn’t been shaved that morning and he scrubbed his beard with his hands. He enjoyed the tingling sensation in his palms. Ogle found that his hands were growing more insensitive with every passing day, and so he was constantly rubbing, battering and thumping them against any surface that would render up some feeling.
It seemed that everything was slipping away. David had showed Ogle his face in a hand mirror the day before while he was being shaved. The left side had sagged and wrinkled and collapsed like a rotten spot on a fruit.
A cleaning lady with swollen ankles and stockings rolled down on her shoes shifted him to another spot where the sun shone directly in his face and made his eyes blink and water.
“Hey,” he said, “the sun is in my face.”
“Hold your horses,” she said, “it will only be a minute.” She waddled away. He held up his stronger hand, his right, and sheltered his eyes. But after only a minute or two his shoulder began to ache and he let the hand drop back into his lap.
He sat quietly for a moment with the sun full on his face. I’m dying, he said to himself for the first time. The idea surprised him, coming as it did apparently from nowhere. He looked about him and understood with a flash of revelatory perception that everyone on this ward was dying. Everyone was a terminal case. Morissey. The stroke victim who sang “God Save the Queen.” The blasphemous clergyman. The demented old man who ate Kleenex and wet his bed. Everybody. No one was ever discharged. He couldn’t remember a single case. As Morissey had said, three men had died in Ogle’s bed and now Ogle saw that he would be the fourth. For a short time he had believed himself different. But there was no escaping this ward. Not even for a moment. Not even on a pass. There was no outside.
And Ogle ached, for the first time in his life, with pity for them all.
“Edward.”
He swivelled in his wheelchair and, blinking the sun out of his eyes, saw the old woman.
“Edward, my dear, dear husband,” she said, “where are the children? Where are Alma and John?”
Ogle began to sob. Each sob was torn, wrenched from his gut. “I don’t know,” he said. “Lost. I suppose they’re lost.” Even as he said these things he did not know what prompted him, except perhaps the desire to enter into a different world, to escape, at any cost, the present.
“Come here, dear,” she said, and the sunlight was melted and diffused in her glazed eyes, “Come here.”
Somehow he struggled across the hallway, the heels of his palms skidding on the rubber tires of his chair.
“We’ll find them,” she said.
“Sure,” he said.
“And after we find them,” she said, “we’ll have a picnic. The perfect end to a perfect day.”
“Fine,” agreed Ogle, who had quite unexpectedly acquired a taste for perfection.
The Expatriates’ Party
JOE WAS dreaming, and in his dream his wife and he were having an argument. She had chosen a bad time to start this one. There Joe was, rubbers buckled, overcoat buttoned to his chin, gloves pulled on – all ready to set out for school. He stood with his hand impatiently gripping the doorknob, prickly with heat and wool and anger, feeling the sweat begin to crawl down his sides, waiting for her to finish with her damn nonsense. He suspected she was going to make him late for class, and at this thought he felt very anxious indeed. In thirty-five years of teaching he had never been late more than once or twice that he could remember.
“Of course I’m pregnant,” she said. “And you’re the dirty old man who slipped the bun in my oven. At your age. Imagine.”
“Don’t be silly,” he replied, doing his best to disguise his exasperation with her. “You’re fifty-seven years old and women fifty-seven years old don’t have babies.”
“Well, if I don’t have a bun in the oven, what do I have?” she inquired with a schoolgirlish petulance that made him feel slightly queasy, a trifle faint with disgust. This wasn’t at all like Marie. And why did she keep using that idiotic euphemism?
“You know what you have,” he said, angry with her for having it, and angry too that she refused to admit it. “You have a tumour on your uterus, and it’s no good pretending it’s a baby. Old women don’t have babies. It’s a goddamn law of nature. It’s a fact.”
It was the steep descent of the plane that woke him. The sense of imbalance, of disorientation, of falling, snapped him abruptly out of the dream. Almost immediately he was conscious of where he was, of his surroundings. He seldom stumbled and groped his way out of sleep any more, but was often jarred out of his dreams in this way, catapulted into reality.
He sat absolutely still and upright, acknowledging the insistent pressure of the seat-belt on his bladder, uncomfortably aware of his damp, sticky shirt tucked up his back.
I never think of her when I’m awake, he thought. Is that why I dream? Is there a law of psychological compensation which I must pay?
The woman sitting beside him, rea
lizing he was no longer asleep, said: “We’re beginning our landing approach now.”
Joe smiled and nodded to her while he took final stock of how she had fared on the flight. She had certainly boarded pert and powdered enough, but in the course of eight hours her make-up had been ravaged and she had undergone some changes for the worse. Everyone over forty had. At that age the body forgets how to forgive, thought Joe. Here we sit, swollen with gas, eyes raw from lack of sleep, legs cramped and toes afire with pins and needles, smiling amiably and socking back the charter-flight booze, prepared to cheerfully suffer the consequences and pay the penalties.
Joe turned and looked out his window. Rags of vapour tore past, luminous with a feeble, watery sunshine. He couldn’t see land below, only a thick, undulating surface of cloud. Nor could he make out what the pilot was saying. His ears had blocked with the change in altitude.
“What’s that? What’s he saying?” he inquired of the woman beside him. He cocked his head to indicate deafness.
“The temperature is fifty-four degrees,” she said, mouthing the words carefully. “Sweater weather.”
“Good,” he replied, acting as if it genuinely mattered to him.
“We’ll be there in minutes,” she commented, smoothing a plaid skirt down on her heavy thighs. “I can hardly wait to take a bath and crawl between clean sheets.” The woman laughed uncomfortably and inexplicably. Was it the word sheets? “I’m staying at the Penta.” She paused. “What about you? Where are you staying?”
Good God, woman, Joe thought.
“I’m staying with my son and daughter-in-law,” he lied.
“In London?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s lovely, isn’t it? You’ll have a full schedule with them taking you around to see the sights, won’t you?”
“Sure will.” Hungry, hunting widow. At least she had said her husband was dead, explaining her ring. But how did you know? Nowadays women were liable to lie about that sort of thing.
The plane suddenly dropped out of the bank of clouds. They were much lower than Joe had suspected. Below him he saw a rush of hummocked, rank turf of such a startling green, a green so unprecedented in his experience, that it struck him as false, a tourist’s hopeful, unrealistic vision. A tiny man toiled in his garden allotment, unconcerned as the plane bellied over him, sweeping him in its dark shadow, surrounding him in a shimmering bath of sound waves.
Joe’s ears popped, clearing, and simultaneously he heard the pilot announce, seconds before the tires touched the tarmac – a fine display of a sense of the dramatic: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to England in Jubilee Year.”
There was a ragged cheer of approval and a smattering of hand-clapping. Relief at journey’s end, at escaping this aluminum tube, at being safe.
Joe smacked his hands together too. And old English teacher that he was, though out of harness, he muttered a line of Blake’s that ran through his mind as swiftly and verdantly as the ground, only seconds before, had sped beneath him.
“In England’s green and pleasant land.”
He was, wasn’t he? In England’s green and pleasant land?
His son, Mark, was waiting to meet him at Gatwick as he had promised, but Joe had difficulty in recognizing him at first. It had been two years since he had seen his son. Now he appeared sporting a fine fan of feathery beard, wearing a flat tweed cap and carrying a furled umbrella under his arm.
Like a bloody convert to Catholicism, Joe thought, more Catholic than the Pope. It appeared the boy had gone ersatz English on him. Joe felt a little embarrassed for his son, particularly when they hesitantly and clumsily shook hands. There was a first time for everything, Joe mused, even shaking hands with your father. You had to acquire the method.
Mark was obviously on edge. He kept fidgeting with his umbrella, stabbing the point at the toe of his shoe and saying, “You look great, Dad. Really fit. Just fine.” His stay in England had clipped his speech and truncated his vowels.
“Fit for an old duffer, you mean,” his father said, pinching up a roll of fat above his waistband.
They collected Joe’s baggage and then, luggage banging their legs, sidled up to a wicket and bought tickets for Victoria Station from a black man. He felt cheated. He had expected his first Englishman to be more like Stanley Holloway. After boarding a third-class coach they stowed Joe’s bags and seated themselves just as the train pulled out. It slid away so quietly and serenely from the platform that Joe wondered for a minute if he were hallucinating. Where were the jerks, bangs and metallic clangs he remembered from the CNR milk runs of his boyhood?
The train gathered speed, and through a window pane smudged with grease Joe watched, without apparent interest, the row houses and villas shudder past, while waiting for Mark to have his say. To get all that off his chest. It wasn’t long in coming. After pointing out a few sights and architectural oddities, Mark said: “I’m sorry we didn’t make it, Dad. It wasn’t right that you had to go through that yourself. But we were broke and it was a hell of a long way to go. I hope you see our point.”
The train swayed past a school. A group of boys were huddling bleakly on a playing-field. What was it that Wellington had claimed? The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. Joe pitied those kids their grey flannel shorts and muddy knees. It must be damn cold standing there. On the platform he had felt a raw, wet wind that had cut to the bone.
He turned away from the window to his son. “I didn’t expect you and Joan to come, Mark,” he said softly. “I told you that on the phone. I don’t want you to worry about that any longer. You know I never set much store on the formalities.” Having said that, he reached inside his jacket and took out an envelope which he passed to his son. “I brought these pictures for you,” he said. “I don’t know if that was wise or not. I took them with the Polaroid and they didn’t turn out all the best.”
Joe wasn’t sure why he had taken the snapshots. Funeral photographs had never been a family tradition, although some of the old-country Germans, Marie’s people, had always taken coffin portraits. Perhaps that was where he had got the idea. Still, it wasn’t like him. But then lately he had been acting in surprising ways that he could hardly credit. The world had changed since his wife had died.
Mark was tearing open the flap when Joe warned him. “I wouldn’t look at those now,” he said quietly. “Not here. Wait until you get home. She’s in the coffin and I’ll warn you – she doesn’t look herself.”
That was an understatement. The mortician’s creation, that’s what she was. A frenzy of grey Little Orphan Annie curls, hectic blotches of rouge on the cheeks, a pathetic, vain attempt at lending colour to a corpse. So thin, so thin. Eaten hollow by cancer, a fragile husk consumed by the worm within.
“What?”
“They are pictures of your mother in the coffin, of your mother’s funeral,” said Joe deliberately.
“Jesus Christ,” Mark said, stuffing the envelope in his pocket and giving his father a strange, searching look. Or was it only his imagination? Joe had trouble reading his boy’s bearded face. The strong, regular planes had been lost in the thick, curling hair, and only the mild eyes were familiar.
“And you’re really making out all right on your own?” his son asked a little doubtfully. “Tell me the truth, Dad.”
“Fine,” said Joe.
“And the pension? It’s okay, no problems there?”
“Full pension,” said Joe.
“And the charges were dropped?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” said Mark, “you’re a real tiger. What the hell got into you?”
Joe looked at his hand. What had gotten into him? He had broken that kid’s jaw as easily as if he were snapping kindling.
“Too long in the trenches,” he said, trying to smile. “Shell-shock.”
“On to other topics,” said Mark with feigned heartiness. “That’s the past. It’s dead, isn’t it? Forgotten. And you’re in England. You m
ade it, Pop. After thirty years of talking about it, you made it.”
“I made it,” said Joe. He reflected that Mark would see this trip in a different light. He would remember the brochures read at the breakfast table, the magazines and travel books piled on the end table that slithered down in a cascade of shiny, slick paper at the slightest touch. All of them illustrated with quaint prospects, thatched cottages, the dark, mellow interior of old pubs with great adze-hewn beams.
But that wasn’t what he had necessarily come looking for. Joe had never explained to anyone what this place meant to him. If he had had to, he would have said: water mostly, tame rivers, soft rain, mist, coolness, greenery and arbours, shady oaks. Things of refreshment and ease. Poetry, too. Yes. Things that cut the deepest thirst. Peace.
Of course, these notions had grown slowly over the years. They began in his first school in a small country place in southwestern Saskatchewan in 1937. He started in May as a replacement for a Scot who had shot himself in the teacher-age. Nobody knew exactly why.
It wasn’t a happy place he had come to. The kids sat hunched in their desks and bit their dried lips and cast anxious glances out the window at dust devils that spun tortuously across the fields. They all looked tired and old and worried. The ceaseless wind rattled grit against the windows. Dust seeped in under the doors, crept under the sills, powdered them all with greyness and desperation. Their pinched faces and smudged eyes, irritated and bleary, watched him closely.
It was an accident his giving them what country folk wanted: a vision of water, of fecundity, of transparent plenty. He would never have planned it; he would have considered the idea cruel.
How still they had gone when he read:
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-towered Camelot.
Man Descending Page 17
