by Leon Rooke
“Monsieur Vadon instilled in me a love for French authors and the French classics which I recited by heart here in the Greek billiard halls. Yours among them, my friend. Monsieur had me write my first stories in French.”
Quietly they talk shop for a time. Life. Books. Art. The pressure to hold off oblivion.
“Tolstoy kicked his desk into splinters,” Babel said, “looking for the right word.”
“Flaubert would wrestle a word to the floor. He would pound it with a shoe until it had precisely the sound and meaning desired.”
The hour drooped. It had been a long, frustrating day.
“That story of mine, ‘Guy de Maupassant,’” Babel asks, “what did you think of it?”
“Mine were as good,” Maupassant says.
They roar with laughter.
Babel sinks into gloom.
“No, really now, what did you think?”
“I liked it.”
Babel nods. He wipes his specs. He wants more.
“It was a fine tribute.”
“And?”
“You were always funnier than me.”
Both fall silent. Maupassant gazes out over what is now derelict space. Gone are the choppy waters of Odessa Bay, the tilting ships, the onyx sky. One whole summer he had sailed a yacht on the blue Mediterranean. Now the terrain is empty. If he held up a hand he would not see that either.
“Shall we be on our way?”
God sleeps.
The hands tremble.
“He thinks He’s home,” says Babel.
“In the palace of ice.”
A cherubic expression rests like a mask over His face.
Exit, two ghosts.
13
FRANNIE
The moment Frannie Balduchi caps the InkSpeak pen, folds away the yellow writing pad, closes the Maupassant and Babel books, the reams of dog-eared research, daughter Nathalie’s books, the lover-engineer’s book, and is stuffing these in the backpack, saying to herself It is time to go home and fix papa his dinner, the bird in the rafter squawks. It squawks as though its tail is on fire. But Frannie is mistaken. It is not the bird but Gregor the insect who is calling her name. In a panic. Gregor the insect is racing out the Purloined Letter door, shouting over his shoulder, “Come quick, Egi don’t look good.”
She is running too. She is running with wading boots. Stones are attached to each ankle. Wall upon invisible wall must be passed through. Air is heavier than lead and a queer taste has run right past her, leaving bile in her mouth. Her sight is riveted on her father, the overturned wheelbarrow, the scattered goods: on her father collapsed on the pavement, clutching to his breast as many of those precious ledgers as his hands can reach.
Jesus God, she thinks, running, it’s that Thamn-al-batn come all the way from Algeria, come from goddamn somewhere, this shitheel Thamn-al-batn is fucking us up.
“Papa, Papa!” is the scream.
Run, Frannie, run.
14
STOMACH PRICE
Egi Balduchi, down on the pavement, fighting with demons who want his ledgers, is feeling not bad. He’s given the project his best shot, and for an exbureaucrat paper chaser from the Department of Prisons and Corrections putting in orders for forty-six brooms he’s done, no, not bad. He sees that pleasant boy from the Purloined Letter who has been smitten with his daughter since age one racing his way, and Frannie behind him coming on strong. Somewhere in the vicinity must be that fine witchy woman Angelique La Rue, because he clearly remembers a moment ago she had hold of his arm. She was steering him home when Thamn-al-batn stuck a thousand pitchforks in his gut.
He’s okay, though. He knows he’s okay, because he sees everything so clearly. He sees, for one thing, those many who have entered their stories in his books. He could sense among the passersby those who needed, who required and warranted, entry in his Who’s Who. They were curious about his table, they studied his sandwich board, they examined him as they would the growth of something unidentifiable emerging from questionable soil, and always something in their eyes, the faltering steps, the what-is-this? gave them away.
Someone should be paying attention to these people. That’s why he did it. It was what he had told Ula those long years ago, what Frannie seemed by instinct to have recognized. In that Thamn-al-batn country one had to feed the friendly visitor four days. Share with them your scraps, if scraps were all you had. Sit them at your table, let them use your bathroom. Perform the public service, don’t fit them out with brooms. Too bad you had to pay the host’s price. A hell of a price, an injustice, but what could you do? He would see these people coming and almost instantly recognize the need. There’s one for the book, he’d think. That one. Already rising, extending a sharpened pencil, extending his chair.
Take your time. Get it off your chest. Spill the news. Tell your story.
So he had got a good many shits, con artists and the like, so what, let a good editor cull the crap from the true.
He regretted he had yet to come up with a proper title. Something classy was required... zingier, more a heart stopper… than Balduchi’s Who’s Who.
He has another regret. The “B” ledger. He never got his own entry in there. Whenever he tried, nights at home or sunlit days when little was doing on the street, people at home futzing in their gardens or the whole city scooted off to cottage country, proper words to stand as his own mark flew off into the dark.
How strange, he thinks, that they left no trail.
Birds, Ula had often said – starlings and the like – could pick words right out of a person’s mouth, fly away, and make nests out of them.
In no otherwise could birds come equipped with speech.
Robbers, she told Frannie, rounded up the Balduchi family ZZZs while Egi, Ula, and Franuchka slept. They stacked the ZZZs up like cordwood at their own house so the robbers’ little robber children could be snug and cozy when winter hit.
Ula had ruled the roost with stories like these and when the roost was shipshape she went off and ruled Monsieur’s Empire of Cheese.
It was a damn lie that a streetcar knocked her flat.
Balduchi’s X ledger is the thinnest by far. It is in the X ledger that the statement of the two Arabic-type fellows who informed him about Thamn-al-batn is to be found. Xebec, the pair submits as the family name. Shabbac in the Arabic. In Algeria, this was. Balduchi has looked Xebec up at the Runnymede Library on Bloor West. Three-masted ships once used by corsairs. Plain pirates to you and me. Though in Algeria if you said Xebec you could be meaning both pirate and ship.
It was Frannie, reading the entry, who had pointed this out.
He feels Frannie’s warm mouth arrive outside his ear.
“What’s that, Papa?”
He hears her perfectly well despite the distress in her little girl’s voice.
Her mouth is in the wrong place. The ear doesn’t breathe. She ought to move her mouth to where it can.
15
IMMIGRANT CULTURE
An ambulance turns the corner, cuts a zigzag path through the shuffling traffic.
It roars right through Babel and Maupassant.
“That was quick,” Babel says.
“Laudatory,” Maupassant agrees.
“It’s the Who’s Who man.”
“One of ours.”
Frannie, down on her knees, clutches her papa.
“Will he live?”
“He’s alive now. That’s all I dare venture.”
“What is that book?”
“Your old friend Ivan.”
They drift rearward, out of the field of action. Maupassant studies the scene closely, looking to discover trees that are not trees, water that isn’t water, a sky that can be rolled up like a rug and carried away on something called U-Haul-It.
“Your little Fifi seems done with us for the moment,” Babel says. “What do we do now?”
“I don’t know. It’s a bit vexing.”
“Where are we?”
“N
o idea. A city I never knew existed.”
“Different, though. Lots of mix and match. A rainbow world. Let’s explore.”
16
LOVE LESSONS
Gregor the bartender will load the twenty-six ledgers, the sandwich board, the web chair, the fold-up table, and a paperback book into the wheelbarrow. He will study at length a single shoe abandoned on the pavement. Worn heel, missing tongue, paper thin in the sole. Egi wore rip-off running shoes, Nikes, that he knows. All the same, Gregor will pitch the shoe into the wheelbarrow. He will push the wheelbarrow to the Purloined Letter and stow it behind lock and key in the beverage room. The wheel wobbles a bit. He will tighten the nut if a wrench can be found.
The Department of Prisons and Corrections has seen fit to locate a halfway house for women three doors east of the Purloined Letter. The avowed purpose of this residence is to enable newly released prisoners, mental patients and the like, a dollop of grace as they re-engage the terrors of society.
Some, of course, claim the halfway house is a festering sore, a drug den, a brothel, that its presence not only undermines neighbouring property values but also offers full evidence of liberal left winger shit winder heart-bleeding socialist politicos’ mindless coddling of the criminal element and by rights, say, in a decent democracy, ought to be burnt down.
Gregor the bartender is not one of those.
Gregor the bartender once lived in this house with his sick mother in those days when the city was known as Toronto the Good and every day was a walk down Sabbath Lane. The structure had been a two-bit rooming house back then.
Gregor’s custom, these days, is to pass the house with light footsteps and a sad heart, an eye slanted to see if a light yet burns in his and his mother’s former room. To glimpse, as he sometimes does, her weathered face behind the panes. His mother had hung a prism from the shade. Over the years, not one ex-prisoner, mental case, or dreg of society has found cause to remove the lovely bauble.
Still there today.
Hello, old Mother.
A woman is sweeping the halfway house porch with a quick broom. She is barefoot, wearing a grey smock. Green hair cactus-spiked tops the black face. A week ago there was snow and bitter cold. The apple tree in the yard is unaware of this. Already blossoms are sprouting. Shrubs by the walkway, however, remain covered in burlap. “Who you looking at?” the woman demands of Gregor. “I see your snake eyes slicing my way. You think I’m something you want to look at, is that it? Maybe you think you better than me.”
Gregor stops in his tracks. The wheelbarrow, such is its nature, flips over.
“Where you going with that wheelbarrow?” the woman says. “I bet it’s stole. It is, I bet so. You got the look. I see your kind every day. What you got in that thing? Come here, let me see. Come on, I don’t bite. I know you. You work at that gyp dive down the street. Got that bird. That fucker-bird keeping us halfways up at night. What’s them ledgers for? I seen you pick them up. They’s the Who’s Who man’s. I see you hugging the Who’s Who man’s daughter. I see you talking to Sister Angelique also. Me and Sister cousins of the First Light. That’s wiccam talk. I know everything about you. You can’t tell me one thing about yourself I don’t already know. I seen them ghosts too. Looking like two ends of the same dishrag. Bible salesmen from caves in the desert, they looked like. Cars run right through them, no need a driver even to swerve. Chatterboxes chattering away.”
“Pardon me,” says Gregor.
“No need to.”
“Pardon?”
“I see all things from this porch. With my halfway eyes. My little view of paradise. Love, for instance, I see that. Come here.”
Gregor uprights the wheelbarrow and pushes it along the path to the halfway house when the woman holds up her hand.
“Stop right there,” she says. “Halfway is far enough.”
Gregor stops. He’s at a loss. The wheelbarrow has been badly loaded. It leans one way, he corrects that, then it leans the other. The wheelbarrow seems to have in mind dumping all its goods at this halfway woman’s feet.
The woman watches his struggle with cold eyes. She has a cold face. He feels he’s entered a field of ice.
“Love, I said,” she goes on. She has a stern, reproving voice, one that will brook no dissent. She has a warden’s voice, but Gregor knows the halfway house is self-regulated. Residents answer to no one because they answer to all. You can get your throat slit if you don’t toe the line. So Gregor has heard.
“You don’t say much, do you?” the woman says. “You the Mute Force or the Spent Force, which is it? Speak up. This broom’s gittin’ antsy, it’s not got all day.”
She swats the air with the broom. Gregor dances back. Dust motes swirl. The woman pokes out an arm at Gregor’s old room.
“None of the girls will habitat that room,” she says. “A ghost in there. She yours?”
Gregor feels a cold wind circling his neck. Chill bumps run over his flesh.
“No need to reply. A fool can see the resemblance. You making a business call?”
The woman points to a small sign nailed above the mailbox: LOVE LESSONS DAILY, 2 ’TIL 5.
Another sign says, WE BURN JUNK MAIL.
“Let me have a look at you,” the woman says. She studies his face, then takes a slow walk around him.
“Stop turning,” she says.
She comes up close. She rubs his belly, nodding. “Not too much flab.”
She crouches low, running both hands along his legs.
“But no muscle man either.”
A hand flits across his fanny. It comes up between his legs and folds over his penis.
“Least you not maimed.”
She rises, smiling.
“You’ll do,” she says. She pats his back.
She’s no longer cold. She’s warm as Sunday Baptists roasted on a spit.
Gregor’s face is crimson. No woman has ever touched his privates on a busy street in bold sunlight.
“Bashful too,” she says. “That’s a plus. I hate doing business with tight-butt arrogant buttheads think their pecker is the Taj Mahal.”
“I better go,” he says. These are the only words he can think to speak. Yet his legs remain locked in place. His breath is locked in his chest, no escape.
“You can go nowhere worth going, in your present state. You are lost in the Land of Unreturned Love. Any step taken is shooting yourself in the foot. How many feet can a man in the Land of Unreturned Love afford to lose?”
“But…”
“But?”
“Sorry. You got me confused.”
“Affection Denied does that. A man in Unreciprocated Love walks alone in a dark halfway house.”
“What?”
“You’re a dog yelping at eternal fog. Let’s get on with it. Plain as the nose of my face, I see you love Frannie Balduchi. Love sits on you like a new suit on a dead man, plain to eye and ear as a wolf howling from a woodpile. It runs out of you like sap from a Maple tree. Lust, love, hunger. It’s all need and need is big in a man of your scale. Your biggest need is Love Lessons. Today it happens I’m selling them cheap. Got my special on. My two-for-one Gigantic Spring Sale. Open your wallet. Let me see the green.”
“Love Lessons?” repeats Gregor.
“Lesson number one. You get a fat Fail. Don’t repeat everything a woman says.
Number two. Pull that tongue back inside your mouth. Makes you look dopey. What woman’s going to fall for that?”
“Ma’am?”
“Don’t ‘Ma’am’ me. ‘Ma’am’ is what us halfways had to call the screws. Not to fret, though, I’ll shape you up, turn you into a topnotch Spring Lover. Spring forward, Fall back, that’s our halfway house motto. See this Love Lesson contract? Glance it over… sign on the dotted line.”
The woman thrusts papers into his hands.
“Nine copies,” she says. “Never mind the small print.”
She thrusts an InkSpeak pen into his hand.
“
Page two you see my price chart. Fifty dollars to secure the love of a stupid woman, twice that if she’s ugly, a further fee if the love object has webbed feet, ingrown toenails, B.O., and such as that. The less you get the more you pay, in other words. Plus VAT and GST. But you’re smitten with the beautiful and smart Frannie Balduchi so I’m prepared to negotiate. I’m open to offers. Smart women cheap is my deal of the week. Smart women are a glut on the market, oversupply and limited demand. Your lucky day. You want her, she’s yours. All coming with my Spring Offer Money-Back Guarantee. I don’t fix it, you nix it.”
“You’re saying you can make Frannie love me?”
“Make? ‘Unmakes’ more the tune. First we got to unfix the damage already done. Love is a mystery, as you’ve heard, but I can lift the veil. Come on inside. We talk it over. You got the Who’s Who man’s wheelbarrow. Mr. Balduchi the host with the most, never mind he pays the Thamn-al-batn. Frannie? Her heart’s a piece of cake. Insect, she calls you now. Few of my lessons, she be around you like bees in a field.”
A hand fluttering in the window above.
Mom?
Anything is possible.
Inside they go.
17
LOOTED TREASURE
Babel and Maupassant are down at the Toronto waterfront, looking out over Lake Ontario’s blue expanse. Twenty-seven miles of broken glass, as a local poet has said. A portion of Europe could fit upon this lake, never mind that this Europe would instantly sink and be no more. A movie would be made of the sinking and win all the Academy Awards. History would find and redefine itself, buoyed by thunderous applause. Glass on the water are shards of light slipping from the mouths of the innocent dead. Their very last breath. We walk under green lanterns and find ourselves at the end of green evening arriving at the sea’s green edge. Dry seasons lust for winter’s cold and the snows of yesteryear succumb to the same fever. Babel and Maupassant are speechless, under the onslaught of what awaits.
Beginnings are without end and something always does.
On the esplanade a goateed man in a ponycart hawks wares made, he says, in the azure heaven that is Istanbul.
Bones from the Azores.
Attila’s hatchet.
Spices from Beelzebub’s very table.
