The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  He began to giggle. “You look so serious.”

  “This is serious.”

  He made the sound in his throat that showed he was willing to swallow his laughter. “Then Mother dear . . . ,” he reached across the table to take one of her hands in his, but she snatched it away . . . “Since you refuse to wrestle with my soul and nothing more is expected of me than reassurance — yes, yes, that’s all it is. She’s pretty. I like pretty women. She likes my company. That’s all. We’ve never even been out on a proper date. It’s thanks to her that I haven’t yet jumped off a bridge, but that doesn’t mean I intend to elope.”

  She stood up and hurried into the ladies’ washroom where she leaned against the wall and bit her lip. Was it as simple as that? She wanted to believe so. Had all her terror been nothing more than the result of Iris’s imagination? She hadn’t realized just how scared she’d been until she saw her face in the mirror. If she let go and started crying she’d be here for hours.

  When she’d blown her nose and splashed cold water on her face and returned to the table, James pulled a white envelope out of the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. “You and I have got ourselves an invitation.” He slipped a card out of the envelope and glanced over the fancy black script. “Tomorrow,” he said, and handed the card to her. “This may not be the best moment to give it to you, but you’ve got to admit it’ll be something to tell the old girls back home.”

  Was she making no progress at all? This thing had a gold-embossed hammer and sickle at the top. The problem was to keep herself breathing while she read it. “On the occasion of the 62nd Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution . . . The Ambassador of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics requests the pleasure . . .” She closed her eyes. Of course this must be a joke. “You can’t be serious.” If he only knew how her heart was beating now. “Forty thousand horses couldn’t drag me into that place.”

  Even her distress — surely it was obvious — was something he could chuckle about. “You want to find out what it’s like to live in a capital city, then come with me and find out. Rub shoulders with the diplomatic set. I’ll be there to rescue you if someone tries to send you to Vladivostok for a holiday. It’s only a boring stand-up thing, at lunch. And later there’ll be smiling-Vladimir’s poetry reading at the university.”

  She looked at her own small hands, feeling — oh, so fragile. “You want me to go home and tell people that I attended a party celebrating the slaughter of the Czar and his family and who knows how many thousands of people since?”

  “Don’t be childish,” he said. “We send our musicians over there to play for them, they send their poets here. Things have changed, it’s not the way it used to be.” He studied his hands. His father’s hands. “Mother, I’ll be going whether you go with me or not.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” she said, making an attempt to sound stern. Something had to stop him and it seemed to be left to her. “This game you’re playing has gone on long enough, it’s getting foolish.” Her voice, however, betrayed her. Anyone could have told she was ready to cry.

  “But I’m going anyway,” he said, turning his hands over to examine their palms. “I’m going anyway without you so there’s no point talking about it any more.”

  “Then you were lying to me?”

  He laced the fingers of his two hands together and rested them under his chin. “Lying?”

  “About this girl. You were lying. I can’t believe you would go ahead and attend this thing when you can see how much it upsets me unless the girl means more to you than you’ve admitted.”

  “Mother,” he said, and for a moment it looked as if he were having trouble breathing. He looked down, looked over his shoulder, closed his eyes. “Mother, what am I going to do?”

  She felt as if a leg had dropped off her chair, or the floor had tilted. Was she about to faint? When he looked up at her now, she saw in his eyes everything she’d hoped she would never see in her life. Things were even worse than she had originally feared.

  “He’s in love,” she told Iris, the minute she got in the door. She stood in the hallway, stunned, while Iris stripped off her coat. Then she allowed herself to be guided to a chair.

  Iris looked as if she were prepared to drive her fist through the wall. “That idiot,” she said. “Ask him why doesn’t he read the newspapers some time. Ask him if he’s never heard of Czechoslovakia. Or Hungary.”

  “He cried,” Bella Robson said. “When we got back in his car he broke down and cried. This is horrible. The boy is in love.”

  “Tell him to stop reading so many of his sappy books and smarten up. Ask him where is his backbone. Ask him if he’s forgotten he’s got a family that doesn’t want to be dragged into this.” She crossed her arms and pulled up her bottom lip and threw herself so fiercely into a chair that her feet left the floor. “He’s in love! Ha! A few years on a collective farm ought to cure him of that!”

  Of course, Iris washed her hands of the whole affair when Bella Robson told her she was going to an Embassy party tomorrow — she had to go, though she was perfectly terrified at the prospect. If it weren’t that James’s life was at stake, she said, she would have chosen to fly home on the first plane pointing west. If she wasn’t such a pushover, Iris said, she’d have torn up the invitation, laid into the girl for all she was worth, and threatened to disown James if he didn’t change his ways.

  Walking down Laurier Avenue the following day she would have turned and fled when she saw the newspaper photographers around the gate to the Embassy if it hadn’t been for James’s hand on her arm. One of those photographers was bound to be working for the police, collecting a file of people who attended a party like this. Just wait until the next time she applied for a passport. James’s strong hand, however, moved her forward and guided her in through the narrow gate in the black iron fence. Before and after, she thought. This was one of those moments when you knew your life would never be the same again. Her whole body shuddered. Grey walls, grey steps, small identical windows. Was this how prisoners felt being led into prison — as if they were actually stepping out of their own familiar skin and into a stranger’s?

  This stranger she’d become was prepared for the gruff man who welcomed them at the door, and for the sullen-faced youth who showed her where to hand over her coat, but was not prepared for the sight of the little room off the foyer where a man sat watching a panel of . . . three, six, was it nine? . . . television monitors. One she could see was trained on the gate. Another on the chauffeur-driven cars that pulled up outside. There was not enough time for her to get a good look at the others. Was one of them watching the prime minister’s office? Was one of them, for that matter, watching James’s apartment? The man who sat staring at the tiny blue screens glanced at her for a moment, from under heavy brows, then looked away. Why wasn’t he ashamed to be caught doing what he was doing? Why didn’t he shut the door?

  The stranger she’d become was quick to forget the sinister television monitors when she found herself herded into a line that filed past the ambassador and some other official-looking men in uniforms. It was at a time like this that she missed her husband most, though he’d been dead now for fifteen years. Why wasn’t he here to endure this terrible thing instead of her? He would have known what to say to these foreigners. He’d have known, for that matter, what to say to James, to smarten him up. All she seemed able to do was tremble with fear and rub her cold clammy hands together and hope that she wouldn’t say precisely the wrong thing. When her name was announced, she walked forward with her heart beating painfully in her throat and shook hands with the ambassador (just exactly what she’d expected him to be, short and bald, with a chest plastered over with medals) and couldn’t think of a single thing to say. The ambassador barely glanced at her, then turned to greet James, whose name had already been announced.

  “Idiot!” She heard Iris’s voice in her head. She’d missed her chance to tell that cocky little big-shot how she felt. B
ut then — why deny it? — if she’d opened her mouth and told him her fears for her son he’d only think she was crazy.

  A crazy woman was exactly what she was beginning to feel like, anyway. Who else but a crazy woman would have felt enormous relief to see the Armenian poet detach herself from the crowd in the adjoining room and hurry this way, smiling at Bella Robson like any good hostess who was surprised and pleased that a very special guest had arrived? Who else but a crazy woman would feel this rush of gratitude towards the very person she was here to protect her son from? Had she allowed herself to become so terrified, then, that even the face of the enemy was a welcome sight in this horrible place, this crowd? She delivered herself over to the girl with a small whimper and went through the motions of accepting a drink, eating something unidentifiable on a cracker offered her by a young woman in an apron, shaking hands with people whose names she forgot just as soon as she heard them. Here I am, brushing shoulders with people from every country in the world, she thought. But no flame of excitement leapt to life in her, as it might have in other circumstances. Here I am, she thought, inside the belly of this big grey machine that would like to digest us all, given a chance. These ordinary-looking people she was meeting, she knew, were the real-life equivalents of those sneaky-looking murderers and torturers she’d learned so easily to hate in the stories she watched on her television set. They were hiding behind a mask of normality here, but she knew she was surrounded by cold-blooded killers, who would seduce her son and steal him away and destroy him. This wasn’t a story she was watching, this was real.

  Yet she couldn’t deny she was glad to be led around the room and introduced to people who looked important. This one from Switzerland. That one from Peru. She didn’t catch where the fat one was from, but she did like the way he kissed her fingers and admired her dress. For James’s sake she resisted telling him she’d found it in a second-hand shop in West Vancouver, though it looked as if it were created just for her. An ivory background with rusty-yellow daisies. The tall long-nosed Englishman with the limp handshake seemed more interested in someone coming up behind Bella Robson, but fortunately the little man in the Red China uniform was willing to exchange a few words on the weather. It wasn’t easy, in this crowd, to keep from spilling your drink down your dress, or backing into someone else, or putting your heel down on somebody’s toe. “All stuffy diplomats,” the girl whispered, “but maybe we can find an actor, or a musician. We have some here, you know, though not very many.”

  Neither the actors nor the musicians materialized, though it was enough just to know they were in the same room, or in one of these rooms. Eventually the girl left Bella Robson to her own devices while she went off to talk with James by the table of food. It was up to the officer in his pale-blue uniform and white hair to introduce himself, as he seemed intent on doing. “Colonel Viktor Kozhevnikov,” he said. “Soviet Air Force.” When he shook her hand, he leaned forward a little as if his instinct was to bow. When he stood upright again, light flashed off the rows of medals on his chest. They dangled like toy coins on ribbons. If she stole a quick look, would they really say “Hero” like those in the old cartoons?

  Colonel? No one was going to believe this. No one was going to believe he took her empty glass from her hand and guided her, by the elbow, to the bar, where he had it refilled. No one was going to believe that, when he put it back in her hand, he said, in his perfect English, “In this crowd of stiff serious men, you stand out as so gracious, so feminine. Are you an ambassador’s wife, or a new ambassador yourself that I haven’t yet met? Why is it that we haven’t met at these things before? Usually they are so boring, but I would remember someone like you.”

  Boring? When she was thumping with excitement? Was it possible for a Russian airman to be so handsome, and her own age as well? When he smiled, the skin crinkled out from the ends of his eyes. Blue eyes, exactly the colour of his uniform.

  He wanted to know all about her. About her home, her family, her reason for being in Ottawa. All of it, everything she said, seemed to fascinate him. And what about him, did he have a family back home? Or were they here? He had one son who was an engineer, he told her, another a doctor. His wife was in Leningrad still. He seemed determined to tell her everything, his wife’s brother’s career in the foreign service, everything, but all she wanted to know about was those medals. Did she dare ask if these were Russian letters she saw on them, or pictures? Was a person allowed to ask such a thing, or touch them?

  Well, why shouldn’t she ask? And touch as well. “These decorations, you have so many, could you tell me what they’re for?” With two fingers of her right hand she touched each one, flipped it a little to show that while she was impressed she wasn’t all that impressed, and then felt their weight in her hand. “Did you have to risk your life for each of these?”

  What had she done? Cold sweat broke out across her forehead. She couldn’t hear a word that he was saying. Fingering a colonel’s medals? People had probably been shot for even attempting such a thing. To his credit, and probably contrary to his training, he hadn’t batted an eye at her vulgarity. Such a gentleman that he wasn’t even allowing his eyes to show the contempt he must feel for her ignorance. A country woman, a westerner, a product of this soft society where familiarity had replaced respect. Her face burned. Every one of those medals seemed to deserve a long story but surely he could tell she wasn’t listening.

  “I must,” she said, “find my son.”

  “You are not well?” His hand touched her arm.

  “No. No. But I promised . . . I must see where he got to . . . I’ll be back . . . I’ll be just . . .” Oh, but she had to escape.

  Luckily James was in another room, on a chesterfield pushed up against the sheer curtains of a window that looked down on a park. And a river. She was glad just to sit and pretend she was part of this conversation. He was listening to the girl, who appeared to be a little upset. What had gone wrong? “He is,” she was saying, and had to search for an appropriate word. Her eyes, when they swept past Bella Robson, did not acknowledge her. “He is quite obviously a horrible man. You could see that, surely, during our yesterday’s drive.”

  Bella Robson looked at James. Presumably they were talking about that Vladimir. But was this allowed? Wasn’t she afraid the microphones hidden behind those paintings would pick up what she was saying? James, thank goodness, seemed to have the sense to keep his own mouth shut. For a change.

  “He says the most outrageous things and then I’m expected to translate in a manner that won’t offend. He drinks too much. All across your country. Every place we went. He said terrible things. To me, to our hosts, to the poets who had come to meet him. I wore myself out, ah, trying to think of ways of saying these things politely, in English. Politeness — politeness is so important and yet so exhausting! Fortunately no one, anywhere, seemed to understand very much Russian.”

  “Like what?” James said. “What kind of thing did he say?”

  I don’t want to hear this, Bella Robson thought. There are things I am better off not hearing. But where could she go? Back to the airman and his medals? She could stare at the embossed wallpaper only so long.

  “Like this.” The girl cast a glance around the room, perfectly aware that she shouldn’t have been saying any of this. “In Vancouver, I find myself trying to find a polite way of saying that he thought this country was full of ignorant peasants, incapable of appreciating a poet of his own importance.”

  “And what did you say?”

  She smiled. “That this is such a young country, so close yet to the soil, that it must be very difficult sometimes to appreciate a foreign poet who writes of very esoteric matters.”

  James laughed. “Well done! You’ll make a diplomat yet.”

  “In Calgary,” she said, “he told a gathering of young academics and poets that he had never seen such an ugly city in his life, nor confronted such a collection of homely faces gaping at him like stupid pigs. He does it, I think, to
annoy me. He knows I couldn’t possibly tell them the truth.”

  Then why are you telling us? Bella Robson squirmed. Was it already taken for granted that James, and she too, were insiders, sympathizers? That they would not repeat any of this?

  “It would serve him right,” James said, “if you translated him literally some time. Let people see what kind of a man he is.”

  She pulled a face to show mock alarm. “The purpose of these cultural exchanges is to promote understanding and sympathy. Do you want to be responsible for destroying that?”

  “I suppose,” James said, “that we have to make some allowances for genius.”

  Bella Robson stood up. It was time they left. Some others, she saw, had gone to collect their coats.

  The girl smiled ironically. “The drunken nonsense of a giant talent may have some tragic dignity to it but the same behaviour in a man of only a tiny talent is pitiful.”

  “But this man . . . he is one of your best?”

  “Did I say that? In fact he is barely known at home. Our best people do not get sent to the, ah, smaller countries. It is not something to be offended about, it is only natural.”

  A minor poet! Just as Bella Robson had suspected! Before going downstairs for her coat she made a point of searching through the crowd until she found him. There he was, in a corner, lording it over a bunch of admirers. Who was translating now? The mushroom-coloured carpet was littered around their feet with bits of food and abandoned toothpicks. Did she recognize a Member of Parliament in his audience? What a stupe, to fawn over this silly impostor. When the poet’s eyes flickered her way, she cocked her nose at him and swung on her heel. Let him see that not everyone in this country was so easily impressed.

  Before she escaped, however, the colonel left a conversation of his own to intercept her. Was he going to give her a lecture on protocol? “I can see in your face that you are determined to leave,” he said, standing directly between her and the door. He stuck out his hand and, before she could think, she was shaking it. “Please,” he said — and crinkled those eyes up again, so attractively — “We will see you later, surely, at the poetry reading?”