October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  KALYAYEV — Shut up, Dora.

  During the day, he drove out of town, through aspen woods where soft, luminescent green buds were just beginning to open. The forest edge was sprinkled with houses set well back from the road, one in every three of them sporting a For Sale sign. He would park the car at a trailhead and go exploring, stopping to listen to wood thrushes and warblers, walking on, and finding himself surrounded by hunt camps, beaver dams, bear scat, raised blinds set up to look out over marshlands. Once, in an old burn, he found morels.

  Another time he stumbled onto an old abandoned mine site, in an area of peat bogs filled with black water, like open-pit oil wells. He stopped for a moment by the gutted carcass of a metal tank, half-eaten by rust, half-buried in gravel that spread to the edge of the surrounding muskeg.

  Concrete foundations rose from the ground like monstrous molars busily chewing on the trunks of poplar trees. A signpost riddled with bullet holes. Silence.

  He returned to his car and followed a road that ran for some twenty kilometres through stands of mature conifers and zones of reforestation beside lakes that formed a chain stretching down to the south. The broken pavement finally disappeared altogether, as though swallowed by sand and gravel from a hundred-metre-thick esker, along the top of which the car made its way like a flea along the spine of a dog. He saw a lot of rabbits. Black spruce, Jack pine. A hand-painted For Sale sign near the end of the road, stuck in the shadowy forest.

  He turned up the access road and found himself above an inclined, brush-covered plain, at the centre of which was a large brown house, all angles and squares. It looked almost sinister, with the huge lake behind it and the distant, wild shore. As he sat there contemplating the scene, he saw a crow flying low above the trees, carrying a long, dry stick crosswise in its beak.

  On his way out, Nihilo saw a lynx crouched at the centre of a small sandy patch by the side of the road. He stopped and backed up. It was the first time he’d ever seen one. The animal lounged on the sand, its head up, like the Egyptian Sphinx in the desert. As Samuel slowed down, it was observing the movements of a rabbit romping about some twenty metres back. The rabbit went on gambolling at the edge of the woods, but the lynx lost interest in it and turned its attention to Nihilo and his car, watching him intently but without the slightest sign of fear. Sam detected no nervousness. Its disquieting face seemed to express only cautious curiosity tinged with indolence. After a moment, the lynx returned its gaze to the rabbit, and Sam continued back along the road.

  Maybe. It’s absolute love, pure, solitary, a joy that actually burns me. At certain times, however, I wonder if love isn’t something else entirely, if it could stop being a monologue and become a call-and-response once in a while. I imagine that, you see: the bright sunlight, heads tilted gently together, hearts empty of pride, arms reaching out …

  As she says the lines, Dora is standing at the front of the stage, and finally sees him. In the eternity it takes for her to stop, feel her voice weaken, then remember her lines, Sam feels her eyes travel the entire length of the room and light upon him.

  It was the play’s second-last night. Once again he leaves after the curtain. Afterward, Skuratov bought a round of Goldschlager shooters at the White Wolf, but Sam was nowhere to be seen. He was sitting in his car under a rising, postindustrial moon about a kilometre away.

  The next day, he spent the equivalent of two nights’ stay in the grotty motel at a florist’s shop on rue Drummond, almost beside the foundry. When she got to the theatre, Marie-Québec found a dozen roses waiting for her, with a small card that read:

  WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO COME WITH YOU?

  TWO

  THE LYNX

  CONSTELLATION

  CAMP EL SOUF, JAVESH

  (JORDAN), SUMMER 1970

  “HE’S IRAQI,” DECLARED ABOU DINNAH.

  Or rather Comrade Abou Dinnah, as he insisted on being called.

  Thirty metres from them, a man in fatigues stood up, took several long, loping strides, and threw a hand grenade. They followed its arc with their eyes and, twelve metres away, saw a spruce-like shrub pop into the air, its branches splintered by the blast, the pieces falling to the earth in a brief shower of vegetation from a yellow cloud.

  There was shouting, and someone clapped. The Iraqi walked back to the sixty or so men gathered in the hills in the middle of the desert. He was tall, well built, and the way he walked indicated that under the circumstances (with sixty pairs of eyes staring at him, watching his every move as he pulled the pin from the grenade, tossed the bomb in his hands two or three times before running like a cricket bowler and straight-arming the thing into the shrubbery) he was happy with the way he’d landed it just where he’d wanted it to go.

  “Iraqi,” Comrade Dinnah said again.

  “Apart from Lebanese and Iraqis, do you have other foreigners among you?” asked the journalist.

  Abou was Lebanese. He spoke fluent French, which was why he’d been selected to guide the three journalists around the camp. They were sitting in the cool shade of the pines, separate from the group formed by the fedayeen and their Iraqi instructor. The three Westerners were a team: one worked the microphone and handled the script, another the camera. The third was taking still photographs for a magazine. The dazzling light, the incandescent nakedness of the stones, the biblical hills.

  “Yes,” Abou Dinnah replied. “There are Saudis here, and Egyptians, and Turks … And even some Canadians, North Americans, who are fighting for the French there …”

  “What? Québécois, here in el Souf?”

  “That’s it, from Quebec. Yes …”

  A second grenade exploded a hundred feet from them, and the journalist looked up instinctively. Then they fell silent as a fedayee, his head wrapped in a checkered keffiyeh and his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, passed close to them after detaching himself from the main group. He’d slowed down as he approached the four sitting in the shadow of the bush that sheltered the tents of the FDPLP, as though curious about their presence in this place.

  The journalist jumped to his feet and went up to the fedayee.

  “Are you Québécois?”

  “Huh? How did you know that?”

  “You’re the only one wearing Ray-Bans.”

  Then the journalist saw a second revolutionary coming toward him, his features hidden under a keffiyeh even though most of the others were bareheaded. Waving madly, the journalist signalled his cameraman to join him. The second fedayin’s eyes were deep blue and his hand, when he held it out, was white and slender, a student’s hand.

  “Hello! It’s good to see you somewhere other than on television …”

  “The Kalishnikov is a good assault rifle,” Zadig was saying. “I’d even go so far as to say that the AK-47 is far superior to the American M-16. But for carrying out guerrilla warfare in an urban setting, it’s not so practical …”

  “Why?” asked the reporter, moving the microphone a bit closer to Zadig’s mouth, which could be seen moving through the fabric of his keffiyeh.

  “Because after a while it becomes difficult to find ammunition for it.”

  “I see. But if the training you’re receiving here isn’t appropriate to conditions in Quebec, what are you doing in el Souf?”

  Zadig hesitated. The journalist and the two terrorists were standing at the foot of a hill at the end of the valley. The camera was rolling, the photographer clicking away. Target practice and hand-to-hand combat training had just ended.

  It was Madwar who answered.

  “The FDPLP is the most radical, the most leftist Palestinian resistance group there is, and that’s what interested us from the beginning. But while we quickly saw that the commando training they provide is good, they’re not all that strong on the politicization of the masses. The priority here is clearly military instruction. The other problem is that they spend a lot of time each day discussing Marxist and Leninist dialectics, and we can’t understand a word of it because it’s all in Arabic
.”

  “Comrade Abou Dinnah helps us a bit,” Zadig said.

  “So what you learn here, basically, is how to kill people?”

  “More that than mobilizing the worker masses, anyway.”

  “And when you return to Quebec, what will you do?”

  “Begin a campaign of selective assassinations,” Zadig said calmly.

  “Those who are responsible will pay,” added Madwar.

  “And who are they, the ones who are responsible?”

  “The premier, top businessmen, people like that.”

  “And you won’t be going to fight in Palestine?”

  “I think I will be,” said Madwar.

  “Not me,” said Zadig.

  “And where did you get your code names? Because these are code names you’re using, are they not?”

  This journalist could be a real pain in the ass when he wanted to be.

  “I took mine when I was studying literature at … I almost gave the name of the university. We have to be careful not to say anything that could be used to identify us,” Zadig explained, with an indulgent smile.

  “And what about you, Madwar?”

  “I have nothing to add to that.”

  The photographer asked them to pose for a portrait: combat position, Kalishnikov held in both hands.

  “Try to look fierce,” he told them. “That’s-good-hold-it-like-that.”

  Like lambs to the slaughter.

  At the end of the interview, he shook their hands.

  Zadig: Long live the socialist québécois and international revolution!

  Madwar: Long live proletarian internationalism!

  Zadig: Long live Comrade Nayef Hawatmeh! Long live the FDPLP!”

  Madwar: Long live the FLQ!”

  SAINT-COLOMBAN,

  JUNE 1970, AROUND

  THE SOLSTICE

  WHEN ARE WE GOING TO arrest those pieces of shit?

  That question keeps coming up, believe me. Because that’s what they literally spat in our faces when they came out of the cabin, the sons of bitches. And the night before that, we’d even bugged their place and could hear everything they did, even when they were fucking, because there was nothing at all between us and them. The sound board was in the shit hole we rented next door to theirs, and the two cabins were connected, like a camera with a zoom lens. We heard everything.

  I seen one of them come out. Sideburns, glasses, hair combed on the side, turtle-neck, looked like a faggot. There were these big pine trees in the yard, their shadows were over everything, and you could hear these little birds in them. Sparrows. And when there’s nothing else to listen to and nothing to do but swat mosquitoes, you end up listening to sparrows, take it from me.

  The guys that came out were carrying two shoeboxes under their arms. I took their pictures, if I took one I took ten. They put the boxes on the back seat of the Acadian, careful like, like they had their mother-in-law’s Bohemian crystal wine glasses in them. I don’t know if there are such things as Bohemian crystal wine glasses, but I think there are.

  While they were in the yard, Patenaude called our guys on the walkie-talkie. Sound of the motor drowned out his voice and a good thing it did, too, because the shack we were in didn’t even have any windows. There were lots of us out on the highway, and a few more not far from there, in a house on the river. That’s where the sergeant was. He ate there, slept there sometimes. So he could take charge, direct traffic. We had guys everywhere.

  The next day I was cruising around the bottom of Sainte-Scholastique and I saw a gopher right in the middle of the road, its two front feet practically on the white line. I stepped on the gas and the gopher sort of froze, then it tried to turn around and run back but it was too late, I felt my tire go over it. There, you little prairie dog, that’ll teach you to make holes in farmers’ fields for cows to step in and break their legs and farmers to break their machinery in, gopher holes, they’re nothing but dirty vermin, but there was one less on the earth that day.

  Right after that I heard Sergeant Massicotte’s voice on my radio, we made fun of him behind his back, him with his pipe and the fucking smart-assed way of talking he always tried to pull off, like he wanted to sound cool all the time, like he thought he should understand them before he arrested them or something, which must be why they put him in charge of the investigation into the holdup at the university. He belonged there with those goddamned sons of bitches. I guess he wouldn’t have been too happy if he’d known we called him the Doormouse.

  He told me to get back on the 158 at Saint-Canut, and to drive slowly east, until I see a green Valiant come up behind me and to stay in front of it maintaining visual contact until we reach the autoroute, and from there take the 15 South and make sure the Valiant was still behind me. Yes, sergeant.

  Everything was green around me, the woods, the fields, the bushes, dark green, so green that I thought to myself that a green Valiant could get lost in a place like this. It looked okay from the car, except don’t forget it was full of mosquitoes.

  I did what the sergeant told me, and drove slowly, in radio contact with the guys in the other car that was behind the Valiant, who told me they were coming but not fast, and I told them I couldn’t go thirty miles an hour on the autoroute, so I’d pull over to the side of the road and let them pass, and after that all they had to do was pick up the Valiant and I’d follow them. All in all, there were about thirty of us on the job, no need to be nervous about it. I pulled off onto the shoulder. The river was to my left, hidden by trees in the fields. Farther off were the foothills where my brother-in-law goes to hunt deer. I saw white smoke coming from the mill in Saint-Jérome. I took the napkin that I had from lunch and was still on the back seat, and I got out of the car, raised the hood, and checked the oil, all innocent like. I craned my neck and checked out the cars passing on the autoroute, all the time wiping the dipstick with the napkin.

  At a certain point the Valiant passed by, and the young guy at the wheel looked at me the same as he’d look at anyone stopped by the side of the road with the hood up. Sympathetic, but like he had other fish to fry. As for me, I met his gaze and made a sign that everything was okay. Which was funny, because in fact the car was down half a quart.

  “Those goddamned pieces of shit, when are we going to bust their asses?”

  “Tomorrow,” the sergeant said. And we closed on them at six a.m. sharp after completely surrounding the cottage. We even had guys who go around and cross the river farther upstream, and let me tell you they got eaten up pretty bad. Inside the cottage we seized four FLQ, one of them a real pussy. And three rifles, a few handguns, a cache of weapons, hoods, handcuffs, detonators with dials on them made in China and illegal mechanisms inside them. Plus a big stack of bills from the university holdup. The rifle barrels had been sawed off. At the same time, other commando teams had seized a Gestetner copier in an apartment in Ahuntsic and three hundred pounds of dynamite from the basement of a house on rue Meunier, in Laval. The boxes of dynamite had been wrapped in polyethylene garbage bags. We let the bastards jump into their clothes before we handcuffed them. Got a good look at the babe’s tits when she was trying to get dressed in one of the rooms. She tried to close the door but we kicked it open because we had to keep an eye on her, bra or no bra. Massicotte wasn’t interested in her tits, though, or in the sawed-off shotguns. Go figure: he took out his reading glasses and puffed away at his pipe while examining the papers he found on the desk!

  When the tit-show was over, I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, saw a good-looking guy, then I opened the bathroom cabinet. Aspirin, Band-Aids, and something else that caught my eye: a syringe, with a dozen extra needles in plastic bags and three small vials of some kind of liquid, no labels. I took them to the sergeant, but do you think for one minute that he gave a shit? He hardly looked at it. Don’t bother him. He was reading!

  “Next time,” he said (puff puff), “wear gloves when handling evidence.”

 
“What’s that you’re reading, sarge?”

  He looked up as he puffed away on his briar and squinted at me through a cloud of Old Dutch. He had a stack of The Old Patriot and some drawings of old guns with the FLQ Manifesto written underneath. One thing that struck me was that the Old Patriot was smoking the exact same pipe as the sergeant.

  “Literature, Bobby,” Sergeant Mass said. “Literature …”

  His breath smelled like old pipe juice.

  Two days later, in Saint-Romuald, a shoebox exploded in the lobby of an office building that belonged to the premier’s brother-in-law. Expert analysis later confirmed that bomb fragments recovered from the site came from the same source as the material that was seized from the cabin in Saint-Colomban.

  In the seized papers, there was also a communiqué calling for the kidnapping of the American consul in Montreal, a Mr. Green. I didn’t even know the Americans had a consulate in Montreal.

  A second shoebox went off three days later, in front of a Department of National Defence building in Ottawa, the only fireworks celebrating St. John the Baptist Day in that city, believe me. It killed one employee on the spot. Some sort of secretary.

  ARCHAMBAULT BEACH, 1976:

  GODE’S POINT OF VIEW

  THEY CAME FOR BUCK YESTERDAY. He called them. His death cries kept everyone on the range awake. You’d think he was a wolf chewing off his leg that was caught in a trap. We heard doors rolling open automatically. Steps in the corridor. They asked him what was wrong. He told them: Get me out of here … No one inside could do anything for him. They had him taken out, they left. Buck walked between the rows of cells, looking at his feet. Two hours later he hanged himself with the strap from his artificial leg. In the nursing station. He was what, forty-five years old? Thirty of them spent inside.

  I have a pencil and paper. Buck, he had nothing but his voice. Didn’t know how to write. He had me. We called him Buck, the Buck. When I was on cleanup in the corridor, I’d sit down with my back against the door of his cell and we’d talk. Him sitting in the same position on the other side of the door. We must have looked like two bookends, with a door between us instead of books.