by John Degen
“You should think some more about this,” Popescu said, playing his advantage. “The audition is so close, and a space will be made. She has so much talent, it will be a simple case and will seem perfectly correct.”
“I will not pay it,” Vera insisted. “I’ve said that, and you cannot make me change my mind.”
Popescu wiped his mouth and pushed himself back in his chair. His face remained dry and without shame.
“The cheese was not very good these last nights,” he said, and stood to leave.
“I won’t pay it, but I will risk it.”
Vera pulled the board from the wall and placed it in the traditional spot on the table. She cleared away the dinner dishes and brought a bottle of vodka from the kitchen. Popescu had reseated himself and was grinning at the board, his eyes gleaming. Never before had he played for such delicious stakes.
“It is an excellent decision,” he said, rubbing the dice together between sweaty hands.
“Seven matches, five games each match. If you win the tournament, you may do what you wish with my granddaughter. And it is up to you whether she is admitted to the conservatory. As well, I will provide a meal for you three times a week for the rest of my life.”
“Excellent decision,” the tutor bowed to Vera. “You are a woman of honour.”
“But if you do not win the tournament, you must pay my price. You must admit Andrea to the conservatory and see to it she graduates from the program. You must not touch her again, and this family is released from all claims.”
“Madame, if you win this tournament, I will do all those things, and more. I will make sure she is given a place on the travelling orchestra. If you win, Madame, your precious Andrea will play in Paris and in Rome. Your granddaughter will play in Moscow, Madame. If you win, Madame.”
Vera opened the door to the bedroom and helped Andrea carry her great-grandmother onto the daybed in the living room. Andrea sat beside the old woman and held her steady against a mound of cushions. She looked directly into the tutor’s eyes and smiled sweetly.
“You must make your promise in front of us all, Professor Popescu. This is a match of honour, and it must be witnessed. My mother-in-law will hear your terms.”
Popescu repeated his pledge to the old woman, and also, gleefully, explained in detail the prize he would win for defeating Vera.
“It is fair,” the old woman said. “I will die very soon, most likely within this year. You have made a pledge to the dying, sir. Are you sure you want to take this risk, because you must honour it?”
“It is the greatest gamble I’ve ever been offered. I must play.”
As he walked home along Titulescu Avenue alone, his limbs shaking and his skin slick with perspiration, Valentin Popescu could not help himself from crying. He cried for his lost Andrea, for the sweetness of her virginity. He wept because she was the first young girl he had decided to have, whom he would in fact never have. Mostly he cried at the recollection of his play during the tournament, at the understanding he now had of his clumsiness, his ineptitude, his drought of expertise. His eyes filled with tears of shame for himself, and admiration for this old woman, this Vera, who played the board as though it were not a question of dice.
Each year following, until her death, on the anniversary of Andrea’s triumphant audition recital, Vera made a pilgrimage to the conservatory in the centre of the city. If Andrea was in the country, she would accompany her grandmother, but when the young violinist was travelling with her orchestra Vera would go alone. And each year she would tie onto the iron gates of the school a newly sewn handkerchief, in the design of a backgammon board.
“Andrea still plays for the National Orchestra,” Diana says, staring through the window at the impenetrable night. “I saw her once in New York. She is quite famous.”
The small plane lands late in the evening in the city of Suceava, near the northeastern border with Moldova. At the airport there, Tony and Diana are separated from Dragos who is dragged from the gate by old friends anxious to give the groom one last night of debauchery. They ride with the Cup the final forty kilometres to the village of Ilisesti in the rear seat of a black Mercedes sedan, a uniformed driver silent in the front. Again Tony and Diana are kept apart in the back seat by the large black travelling case, which is just as well, since Tony can think of nothing to say in response to her kiss and the story of Vera. Leaving Suceava, Tony lowers his window. Where Bucharest’s air had been hot and choking with smog, here the night smells of pine forest and long fragrant grasses. Tony slips down in the soft leather upholstery, pressing his knees against the front passenger seat. As they drive, he can hear Diana breathing slowly and heavily, and with nothing to see out the windows, he glides off into sleep.
Twelve
Tony’s grandfather killed animals in the family garage, one block south of Danforth Avenue in Toronto throughout the year, following a strict calendar of blood. It was illegal to slaughter one’s own meat in the city, but if the old man understood the law, he didn’t care about it. He killed animals for himself, for his family and for many of the neighbours. In the spring it was a lamb for Easter, during the summer, goats and chickens. Never a pig, though he threatened to kill one, a young one, every year. In the winter months, and whenever there was time, he caught pigeons and songbirds, ringing their necks on his way through the alleyway and plucking them at his chair beside the woodstove in the garage. If he didn’t cook the birds in a stew that day, he put them in individual plastic baggies and froze them. The freezer in the basement of Tony’s childhood home was filled with the carcasses of pigeons and songbirds.
Tony avoided the garage and the smell of blood, though he often could not because the garage was the only place to find his grandfather when he wasn’t in the house. Sent to fetch the old man for dinner, Tony would stand outside the killing zone, by the raspberry bushes, calling into the warm gloom. He would pick handfuls of raspberries and crush them into his mouth to smother the smell of guts and blood. His grandfather always seemed hard of hearing when Tony came to get him, yet the old man was able to hear a starling near the feeder in the front yard from his seat by the woodstove. Tony tried not to look at the things in the garage, and the old man tried to make him look. The lamb was always the worst. Hanging from the chain on a wooden crossbeam in the roof, the Easter lamb looked too young for death. Its body deflated, unusable, and Tony wondered where it was they scraped the delicious meat from. The lamb dripped into a galvanized steel bucket, eyes open, surprised by the knife. The tongue always curled out between the teeth. The head went for soup.
At that age, two years before the onset of adolescence, had they cared to notice him in this way, Tony might have been a philosophical liability to his family. He was a tender thinker, and to live comfortably in his family, that was a bad way to be. If not bad, then unhelpful and certainly unproductive. The tender thoughts might have been helpful for the lamb or the birds if Tony was in any position to act on them, but he wasn’t. The slaughter of animals continued despite Tony’s opinions and feelings. The family went on eating the meat of songbirds. The neighbours visited the garage to receive their share.
Killing thrived in the neighbourhood. If they didn’t actually need to live in this way, they at least thought they did, and so it was a lifestyle that justified itself. The existence of an overstocked produce department in the supermarket just blocks away did not stop any of the families in Tony’s neighbourhood from growing their own vegetables. Yards resembled farms, and the rhythm of growing set the clocks. To break the tiny neck bones of birds was to admit that the sun had moved through the sky again.
Finding a wounded pigeon in the alleyway one evening, Tony hid it from his grandfather. He confined it under a cardboard box beneath the porch for a day until he could manage to move it higher. He built a three-sided perch for the bird from discarded wooden shingles, and lay terrified and red-faced on the slant of the roof to hammer the structure safely under the eaves. One wing refused to fold properl
y, but otherwise the bird seemed strong. With rest and food, Tony reasoned, it would mend itself and fly away from the danger of his neighbourhood. Every morning, while his grandfather toured the gardens and garages of the street, Tony snuck into the alley to feed his pigeon. He nailed the lid of a sauce jar to the end of a pole, and used wire to secure that pole to another pole. The two poles together reached the perch under the shadow of the eaves, and in this way Tony managed to pour a handful of cracked corn into the bird every morning. He stole the cracked corn from a bag just inside the garage. It was normally used for bait. There were hand-sized piles of cracked corn tempting birds to every corner of the yard and garden.
This was the lesson Tony learned from his wounded pigeon, a lesson in leaving things be. Had he left the bird fluttering and unable to fold its one wing, had he followed one of his immediate impulses and walked away from it, the bird would have managed one of two things. It would have somehow made its own way out of danger, walking or somehow hopping itself into a safe place, healing its wing over time and then escaping. Or it might have died much more quickly. A fluttering, injured bird in that alleyway would most likely finish in the jaws of a cat or the hands of an old man, both quick if not painless ways out of the world. Tony’s bird lived several days longer. It watched a few sunrises over the eastern roofs of the neighbourhood, ate some cracked corn, and then died anyway, the victim of a young boy’s tender thinking and its own growing strength.
On its fourth afternoon in the shingle perch, the pigeon began to stretch and test its injured wing. It unfolded and flapped and managed to make things right, and in doing all that, it made a lot of noise under the eaves and sent a lot of cracked corn falling to the cement below. While Tony learned something at school, and while the bird tested and retested its healing wing, Tony’s grandfather took a pole wired to another pole, removed a jar lid that had been attached to the end, and drove several long nails through so they protruded like the spikes on a cruel medieval weapon. It was a wonderful tool and Tony’s grandfather was proud that he’d invented it. The bird died easily on the first or second strike and stuck to the spikes for easy retrieval. Tony’s pigeon was the first of many unfortunates to use that shingle perch. The old man built five more like it, and turned the alley eaves into a pigeon farm, fattening the birds that landed there with cracked corn, and harvesting them later with the spike pole.
Many years later, lying in bed with an older woman, Tony was led to a comfortable conclusion about a grandfather who kills songbirds for food despite not needing to. He had given up trying to alter the fates of things in his life because plainly he was no good at it. He had not saved the pigeon. The most he had done was make it feel a bit more secure before it ultimately died an uglier death than the one he’d saved it from. And to alter the behaviour or thinking of a man like his grandfather would be as complicated and impossible as time travel.
His grandfather had been dead four years, and Tony lay on a lumpy futon in the bedroom of Ewa Loest, catching his breath after an early evening’s lovemaking.
“Tony, I think about my own father, and what he has done since the war. How is it possible to enter the skin of someone like that and make him better? And who’s to say what’s better? If you are not like your family, it is because you have been differently tested. We live in an absurd time, this end of the century. We simply are different from them. You must let them remain back there where they belong. Don’t try to bring them with you.”
There would be more strenuous lovemaking later in the night, and yet more the next morning. Ewa, a visiting scholar from the Czech Republic, was a demanding and athletic lover. Their relationship would last little more than one spring and summer, and it would wear Tony out. By the end of their time together, Tony would have decided to stop trying to alter the lives of the young athletes he coached, and taken the well-paying desk job offered him by the League. Ewa was scheduled to leave Toronto to teach at a university in the States. When they began sleeping together, she told Tony he could expect nothing beyond the end of August, as she was to meet up with her fiancé at the new school. In her words, they were merely “helping each other through the summer.”
Ewa was always interested in the ways people were tested in life, and how they responded to testing. She studied and taught criminology, and applied scientific strictness to all human activities. Their first sex had been sudden and unplanned, though Tony had hoped for it for weeks before.
Ewa and Tony’s affair began in early April. They met while both audited a philosophy night class on the ethics of decision-making. Walking through the back campus together one evening after a late lecture, they were caught in a sudden spring snowstorm. It advanced on the university from Lake Ontario, howling through the canyons of downtown Toronto and falling on top of them across the gothic roofs of Hart House and University College. The air filled with dry, icy flakes and, within minutes, curbs began to drift soft under the swirls of snow blowing across the roads. Ewa laughed and opened her arms to the storm.
“This, finally, is the Canada I imagined,” she gasped in the force of the cold gusts, and turned to Tony, a spectacular shine in her eyes. “Please, take me somewhere wild.”
Tony had known her just long enough to realize he had stepped into a test. In her head was a picture of some experience she expected of this country, or this city or this man, and now it was time for it to happen. He felt a jolt of despair pass through him. He wasn’t ready for the test, hadn’t expected it would arrive so soon, but he thought quickly nonetheless. The yellow glow of a vacant cab approached them across Hoskins Avenue.
“The beach,” Tony found himself saying to the driver. “Queen and Woodbine, as fast as you can without killing us all.”
He settled back into the seat and found his hand resting between Ewa’s. She was rubbing her palms together, warming herself up. The city passed in whiteness and grey washed with the yellow of street lamps, a short twenty minutes of silent drifting motion. Snowstorm acoustics blanketed the streets, and when they left the cab the mixture of sound under the muffle was the clacking of bare tree branches in the wind and a distant, low roar. They crossed Woodbine Park to the boardwalk. As he’d expected, Tony and Ewa were the only people willing to face the lake wind on such a night. To the west, the city blinked faded lights through a wall of white on black. The aerial strobes of the CN Tower sent out eerie, haloed glows. Lake Ontario bucked and roared in front of them, kicking up screens of icy spray to join the snow. It was the black heart of the storm, cold and deadly. It was exactly what Ewa wanted. She hopped on her toes on the boardwalk letting out screeching explosions of laughter.
“It’s perfect.” She screamed into the wind. “It is so unmistakable.”
The beach was divided by impromptu juts of rock and concrete, craggy wave breaks that stretched like fingers far into the lake. Ewa pulled Tony by the hand out above the water, a six-foot width of broken and icy concrete between them and certain drowning. The sides of the breakwall grew softer the further out they went, rounded and smooth, the leftover shapes of millions of frozen waves, dripping stalactites between cracks in the rock. When they could go no further they turned back toward shore to see only the white torso of the storm, thickening now and twisting with its own gusts. The city also had disappeared. There was Tony and Ewa, and there was snow and water and ice. There was nothing else. Ewa pulled Tony’s head to her mouth and spoke low into his ear.
“This is how we live,” she said. “Threatened. If you brought me here, it means you understand this, yes?”
“Yes,” he said, realizing, suddenly, that he agreed.
Ewa turned to look back out into the lake. Her black hair had a white gleam around it. Tony touched the gleam and it crackled. He ran his hand down her back, and it was like he was caressing a woman sculpted in glass. In the three minutes they were standing on the breakwall, they had been misted over by lake-spray. Every surface, including skin, held a thin, hard coat of ice. If they stayed still, they would eventual
ly freeze in place.
At Ewa’s apartment they dried their heads with towels and warmed the rest of themselves at the radiator.
“You are a perfect gentleman,” she said, removing her wet clothing. “I asked you to do something for me, and you did the best possible thing.”
Tony looked at her, shivering beside the radiator in a black bra and panties, rubbing the red skin of her legs with a towel. He understood that he had tested well. There was a brief struggle on the living room couch. The initial discovery of lips and tongues and skin, the testing of shapes in the hand. There were pauses in which they looked at each other, looked at bodies and fingers, and looked at the situation; pauses to assess and approve. In the bed, Tony was surprised by an actual growl. He looked at Ewa’s face and realized another test had begun. Her arms tensed and her legs locked around him. He was being challenged to fight for control, and it was not a fight he might easily win. When he managed to enter her, she laughed with surprise and approval. They wrestled in this way most of the night. He woke in the morning to her encouraging hands and mouth preparing him for more.
“Tony, you worked so hard, and lasted so long for the first time with someone new. I’m very proud of you,” she smiled. “But, I’m not finished, and it’s very important that I finish. If I don’t finish, I won’t be able to do any work today. Do you think you can? Or shall I do it myself?”
Ewa Loest’s need to finish would define Tony’s life for the next few months. He found himself attending this need at all times of the day and night and in any place available. They made love on the creaking plywood desk in the tiny library office she’d been assigned at the university. They quickly and efficiently had sex in most of the bedrooms of host professors during a summer of dinner parties. One night in early August, Tony managed to help Ewa finish while floating in a moonlit Lake Rosseau at the cottage of a fellow graduate student. Only once during the whole of the spring and summer did Tony collapse in limp exhaustion, unable to bring it all to its conclusion. He lay in Ewa’s bed while she kneeled on the mattress and finished herself with his hand. He watched her clenched eyes and marvelled at her determination. The sight of her finishing herself gave him new life, and the night ended well.
