Indians on Vacation

by Thomas King

  “So why doesn’t it work?”

  “No idea,” says Mimi. “What about that messenger bag?”

  One of the problems with travel is that once you start, you can’t get away from it. If I were home, I could take a break and go out to my workshop, or I could sit in the backyard and read a book, or I could curl up on the bed with Muffy and take a nap. These aren’t options when you travel, since one of the demands of travel is that you keep moving.

  “What do you want to do next?”

  We are standing in the middle of Old Town Square, next to a massive monument composed of creepy guys dressed in long robes. One of them is reaching out with a claw-like hand, as though he is going to snatch up a passing child and eat it.

  “Surprise me.”

  “The old Jewish cemetery in Prague,” says Mimi, reading from the guidebook, “has more than eleven thousand gravestones.”

  “You want to spend the afternoon looking at gravestones?”

  “You know who’s buried there?”

  “Elvis.”

  “Are you tired, Bird? Is that the problem?”

  “I wouldn’t mind an espresso.”

  “You just had pizza.”

  “We’re on vacation,” I say. “People on vacation sit in cafés and drink espresso.”

  I’M NOT SURE why we travel.

  The default response is that we travel in order to see new places, to meet new peoples, to broaden our understanding of the world.

  Whereas I tend to see travel as punishment for those of us who can afford such mistakes.

  Travel does allow us to collect new adventures, gather up new stories we can share with family and friends. The problem is that travel stories are only interesting if something untoward happens, if trouble makes an appearance, if a disaster is survived.

  No one cares that your trip to Turkey went off without a hitch, that your plane was on time, that your room was lovely and had a view of the Aya Sofya, that the food was marvellous and cheap, that everyone spoke English, and that you weren’t robbed, mugged, or annoyed in any way by the locals, the police, or other tourists.

  The first expectation of a good travel story is that something went wrong. No one wants to hear about the perfectly uneventful time you spent in Istanbul. Not even you.

  Next time, try harder.

  When we were younger, before we had children, Mimi went on the Internet and found a seven-day, all-inclusive vacation to Costa Rica for next to nothing. There were colour pictures of large white birds and scary-looking crocodiles and trees filled with howler monkeys, along with a young couple walking hand in hand on a sundrenched beach while a dark-skinned man in a white jacket followed them around, in case they needed a towel or another drink.

  I came home from the trip with a sunburn, a great story about Mimi having the top of her swimsuit ripped off on a jungle water-slide, and a dozen photographs of some very large iguanas.

  But I don’t remember feeling that my social conscience had been improved.

  The resort had been a sanitary bubble designed to shield you from the realities of culture and to limit your interaction with the local people. They were there to serve you, and you were there in your role as an ATM with a camera.

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, walking down a street that looks a great deal like many other streets in the world.

  “Besides the Jewish cemetery,” says Mimi, “there’s also a couple of famous churches.”

  After years of travelling the world with Mimi, looking for the Crow bundle and trying to find out what happened to Uncle Leroy, the last thing I want to do is go into another church.

  Of any sort.

  To be sure, the things are historic, and the architecture is remarkable. But all I see are monuments to indulgence and power.

  “How about we skip the churches.”

  Mimi sighs. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s check out the cemetery, and then we can stop at a café.”

  So we walk over to the Jewish cemetery, but when we get there, we discover that there is a long line of tourists outside the ticket booth.

  “We have to pay to get into a cemetery?”

  “You check the prices,” says Mimi. “I’m going to take a peek.”

  Taking a peek is one of the things that Mimi does best. When we moved to Guelph and were looking for a house, Mimi would march onto porches and look in windows. Once, she leaned a ladder against a house and climbed up so she could check out the kitchen.

  Today, she ambles over to an iron gate and peers through the grating. I pretend to price the tickets. Mimi waves me over.

  “You can see some of the gravestones from here.”

  What I can see of the cemetery is disturbing. I don’t know what I had expected, but this wasn’t it.

  “Why are all the gravestones so close together?”

  Mimi checks the guidebook.

  “Looks like a salvage yard.” I hold out my hands by way of apology. “And the wait time to get in is at least an hour.”

  “Really?”

  “No less than forty-five minutes.”

  Mimi decides we should at least walk the perimeter. The graveyard is surrounded by a thick stone wall, but every so often, there’s a small portal that you can look through.

  “You can’t see much,” Mimi tells me. “The gravestones are stuck in the ground at all sorts of angles. It looks as though someone dropped them out of the sky and just left them where they landed.”

  I don’t bother looking. Graveyards are graveyards.

  “I’d like to be able to read the inscriptions on the stones.”

  “They’re probably in Yiddish.”

  “Probably.”

  “Or Czech.”

  “Rabbi Loew is supposed to be buried here,” says Mimi. “According to legend, Loew is the guy who created the Prague Golem.”

  I know the story of the Golem. A brute made out of mud. Brought to life to defend the community. The desperate fantasy of a desperate people. Gods and angels, Wonder Woman and Superman. Every culture has heroes and talismans that it looks to for protection.

  Mimi comes away from the wall and brushes herself off. “The problem with creating monsters is that, in the end, it’s impossible to control them.”

  At the Battle of Hattin, the Christian army under the command of Guy of Lusignan carried the True Cross into battle and was slaughtered by the Muslim army under the command of Saladin. At Wounded Knee, the people put on Ghost Dance shirts in the hope that they would stop bullets.

  “Let’s get that coffee,” says Mimi. “And while we’re at it, maybe we can figure out what we want to bring home from Prague to put in the new bundle.”

  ONE OF THE FIRST PLACES we went when we started following Uncle Leroy’s trail was Paris. When we got home, we went out to Alberta to visit Mimi’s mother and to give her the initial report.

  “Where are the children?” was the first thing Bernie wanted to know.

  “They’re grown, Mum. Tally is working in Ottawa, and Nathan is finishing up at UBC.”

  “No reason you can’t bring them along.”

  “I’ll tell them to call you.”

  “I don’t want a phone call. I get all sorts of phone calls. People call to tell me about my tax problems and my dirty ducks.”

  “Ducts, Mum. And you don’t have a tax problem. Those are scams.”

  “I know they’re scams,” said Bernie. “I tell them I don’t have any dirty ducks but that I got a bunch of geese that could use a good scrubbing. You know what they say?”

  “They hang up.”

  “So, did you find out what happened to Leroy?”

  Mimi shook her head. “You have to remember, Uncle Leroy was in Paris more than a hundred years ago.”

  Bernie took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “So what? You see a Blackfoot warrior hanging around the Eiffel Tower, and you’re going to forget it? Probably made all the newspapers.”

  “Leroy was a Blackfoot warrior?”

  “Close enough,�
�� said Bernie. “So, where are you two planning to go next?”

  “Follow the postcards,” Mimi told her mother. “We’ll just follow the postcards.”

  Sometimes, Bernie would pick up Chinese takeout in Lethbridge. Pork fried rice, chicken with black beans, teriyaki beef, and steamed dumplings. I would set the table, while Mimi’s mother caught her daughter up on the local gossip.

  “So, I have this idea,” Mimi said. “And I don’t want either of you to say anything until I’m done explaining. Can you two do that?”

  “Probably not,” said Mimi’s mother. “You want a fork or chopsticks?”

  “What do you guys know about medicine bundles?”

  I helped myself to some of the chicken before it disappeared.

  Mimi didn’t wait for an answer. “They’re mnemonic devices.”

  Bernie waggled a chopstick at her daughter. “Someone’s been on Google again.”

  The teriyaki beef looked good, but I knew it had too much sugar for me.

  “Bundles contain things like feathers or stones or bones,” Mimi explained between bites. “Each of the items could have some spiritual significance, or it might have been attached to a specific story or to a song.”

  “And someone’s been reading Wikipedia.”

  “But not all bundles are sacred.” Mimi scooped most of the pork fried rice onto her plate. “Some are secular. Family bundles. Bundles that are a living history.”

  “Crow bundle was a family bundle,” said Bernie.

  I watched Mimi take the last dumpling. “So, what’s your idea?”

  Mimi picked a piece of gai lan out of her teeth. “What do you think our chances are of finding out what happened to Uncle Leroy or to the bundle?”

  “What’s less than zero?”

  Mimi sat back in the chair. “So,” she said, “assuming that we will never find either of them, what do you think we should do?”

  “We should stay home.”

  “Or?”

  “We should stay home.”

  Bernie kept a ready supply of ice cream and chocolate syrup in the house. Mimi and I cleared the table, while Bernie got out spoons and bowls.

  “What we should do,” said Mimi, after the ice cream had been allotted, “is continue to follow the postcards around Europe and look for Uncle Leroy and the bundle. At the same time, we should create a new bundle.”

  “Make our own bundle?”

  “They don’t just fall out of the sky,” she told me. “People put them together. Someone put the Crow bundle together, and we could do the same thing.”

  “You want to get a piece of leather and put stuff in it?”

  “Not just any stuff,” said Mimi. “It would be things we find on our travels.”

  Bernie thought about it and nodded. “Honour Leroy’s memory.”

  “We could call it the Travel bundle.”

  I got the smallest bowl of ice cream with no syrup. “This in honour of the guy who ran off with the old bundle?”

  “I got just the thing.” Bernie pushed away from the table. “Just make sure he doesn’t touch my ice cream.”

  She came back a few minutes later with a black case. “Here we go,” she said. “Ballistic nylon. And it has a zipper.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a piece of elk hide,” said Mimi.

  “Sure,” said Bernie, “if this were the nineteenth century.”

  “You want to make a medicine bundle out of a zippered nylon case?”

  “Used to belong to your auntie Helen.”

  “The chef?”

  “She carried her knives in it,” said Bernie. “When she quit and went back to singing, she gave me the case.”

  “Doesn’t seem all that authentic,” I said.

  “Authentic is overdone,” said Bernie. “Authentic is one of the ideas Whites use to hold us in place. It’s one of the ways we hold ourselves in place.”

  “I got no problem with a nylon medicine bundle,” said Mimi. “And the zipper will make it easier to put things in and take them out.”

  “If you’re concerned about authentic,” said Bernie, “I can always get Ester Fox to do a little beading on the case. Maybe a floral design.”

  “Okay,” said Mimi, “so let’s get started.”

  “Sometimes,” Bernie told her daughter, “starting is how we continue.”

  SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE. Mimi finds a coffee shop. I have an espresso, which comes with a cookie. Mimi has something called an Italian hot chocolate. Once I sit down, I don’t want to get up. Mimi is wrong about travel. It doesn’t slow time, it just wears you out.

  “Are you tired, Bird?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “But not too tired.”

  “I’m very tired.”

  “Then we’ll go to the castle tomorrow.” Mimi sips her hot chocolate. It’s quite thick and looks as though it would be better managed with a backhoe.

  I sink into the chair. If I sink down far enough, I may disappear altogether.

  “What do you want to do for the rest of the day?” Mimi slides the guidebook across the table, in case I need help with the right answer. “Your choice.”

  She doesn’t mean this, of course, but it’s sweet of her to offer. I take a moment to contemplate all the things we could do and see in Prague, City of a Hundred Spires, Rome of the North, Mistress of Bohemia.

  And then I sink into the chair even further, flag down the server, and order another espresso.

  IV

  I wake up in the middle of the night to find my left eye swollen shut. This is the very newest of the medical bruisings.

  Kitty catches me on the way to the bathroom. Cancer, she whispers. Intraocular lymphoma.

  I close the door and stare in the mirror. Eugene is standing behind me shaking his head.

  Death warmed over, he says.

  Didi and Desi stand quietly next to the toilet, holding hands.

  My eyelid and the surrounding soft tissue look like the leading edge of a mudslide.

  “Shit.” I can feel moisture leaking out the sides of the eye and trickling down my face. I get a piece of toilet paper and dab at it. “Shit!”

  I listen for any movement in the bedroom.

  Louder, says Eugene. She can’t hear you.

  Screw sympathy, says Chip. Fight through it.

  There is the momentary impulse to get dressed, go onto the bridge, and throw myself off. I have no idea how far it is to the water, or if the fall would kill me or just get me wet and cranky. I’m sure there’s a formula. Height, velocity, the degree to which water will compress.

  Don’t worry, says Eugene. We can look it up on the Internet.

  “Bird?” Mimi sounds sluggish and far away. “You all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Who you talking to?”

  When I get down to the breakfast room, Oz is waiting for me. Today, he is dressed in a dark suit jacket with a bright yellow T-shirt. The T-shirt has da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on the front with a caption that reads, “Give Chimps a Chance.”

  Considering the successes of human evolution, this seems a reasonable request.

  “Ah,” says Oz, and he comes to his feet. “Blackbird Mavrias. Here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  “Your eye is unhappy.”

  “Allergies.”

  Oz spreads the napkin on his lap. “Today, the special is the same, but first, you must tell me of yesterday.”

  I pull up a chair and sit. “We saw the statues. In the courtyard.”

  “Kafka.” Oz cocks his head to one side. “And the pond? Did you notice the pond?”

  “What about the pond?”

  “In the shape of the country,” says Oz. “The statues are pissing on the Czech Republic.”

  “Ah.”

  “In Prague, we have a great sense of history and of humour,” says Oz. “Not long ago, either would have got you shot.”

  I check the menu. Oz is right. The choices are the same. “And we
saw the big clock.”

  “Of course,” says Oz. “Everyone who comes to Prague goes to the clock.”

  “It wasn’t working.”

  I tell Oz about the pizza place and the Jewish graveyard and the wasted afternoon we spent at the Dripstone Wall and wandering a farmers’ market.

  “Good, good,” he says as I tick off the attractions. “So today, you must go to the castle and see Zlata ulicka.”

  “Okay.”

  “It is also called Golden Lane.”

  And, that in the evening, Mimi found us a restaurant near the KGB Museum that served koleno, which turned out to be pig knuckle marinated in beer, served with a heavy, dark bread and vegetables soaked for much too long in vinegar.

  “I think it’s on Mimi’s list of places to see.”

  “Near the entrance to Golden Lane,” says Oz, and he closes his eyes for a moment as though he is trying to look at something inside his head, “there is a statue of a naked boy. Tourists rub his penis, and now it is golden.”

  “And that’s why it’s called Golden Lane?”

  “No,” says Oz. “Of course not. Golden Lane was the street where goldsmiths used to live. The boy has a golden penis because the tourists will not leave him alone.”

  I try to imagine people taking time out of their vacation to rub a statue’s penis.

  “The saints on the bridge and the men peeing in the pond are symbolic,” says Oz. “But with the boy, the rubbing is for fun.”

  I wonder if more women than men rub the boy’s penis.

  “Blackbird Mavrias.” The little man wags a finger at me. “You are famous. I find you on the Internet. Yesterday, I read many of your stories. My favourite is ‘Words on Rock.’”

  “Writing-on-Stone,” I say. “It’s a provincial park in Alberta.”

  “We have such camps in the Czech Republic. Weekends and the summer.”

  I turn the handle of my coffee cup to the right.

  “But in our Indian camps,” says Oz, “there are no Indians.”

  And then I turn it to the left.

  “Littlechild.” Oz bows his head. “A sad story. Story after story you write. Then, there is nothing. Why is this? Will there be a book?”

  “So, you design games?”

  Oz cuts a piece of pineapple into triangles. “Justice. Always you write about the need for justice.”