All My Puny Sorrows

by Miriam Toews

They’re seeping, he said. Like I have an infection or something.

  Pink eye? I asked.

  I don’t know, he said. They always seem to be running, just clear liquid, not pus. I lie in bed and all this liquid dribbles out the sides. Maybe I should see a doctor, or optometrist or something.

  You’re crying, Nic.

  No …

  Yes. That’s what they call crying.

  But all the time? he asked. I’m not even conscious of it then.

  It’s a new kind of crying, I said. For new times. I leaned over and put my hands on his shoulders and then on the sides of his face in the same way that he’d held his record.

  We sat quietly for a while then Nic told me Elf was supposed to be doing a run-through in three weeks, two days before the opening. I said there was no way she would be ready and he agreed because all she talks about is not being able to do the tour, and the sooner concerned parties got the news the better. Then I told him to just call Claudio, he would deal with it, the way he’s always dealt with it.

  I’ll phone Claudio if you want, I said.

  Well, maybe we should hold off a bit.

  I think he needs to know now.

  Listen, I know what Claudio will say, said Nic. He’ll say, let’s wait and see. He’ll think she can come out of it again, like she did last time. He’ll say performing saved her life and that’s what it will do again.

  Maybe.

  And maybe he’s right and she should be pushed a little bit and she’ll be okay.

  Yeah, I said.

  But … she obviously doesn’t have to do the tour if she doesn’t want to do the tour, said Nic. It doesn’t matter in the big picture. I’m just saying that she might suddenly decide she really wants to do it and then …

  Yeah, so we shouldn’t cancel now, I said.

  Nic’s head fell to the table, slowly, like a snowflake. His arm was stretched out beneath it, his empty palm in the shape of a little cup.

  Nic, I said. Hey Nic, you should go to bed.

  We did then what we always did at the end of our talks. We sighed, rubbed our faces, grimaced, smiled, shrugged, and then we talked about a few other things, like the kayak that Nic is building from scratch in his basement, and his plan to finish it soon and in springtime carry it on his head down to the river which is only a block away and paddle upstream to somewhere, that will be the hard part, and then drift downstream all the way home again.

  I left him sitting at his computer, his face lit up like Boris Karloff in the ghostly funnel of the monitor’s light. I wondered what he was looking at. What sorts of things do you google when your favourite person in the world is determined to leave it? I got into my mother’s car and checked my phone. A text from Nora in Toronto: How’s Elf? I need your permission to get my belly button pierced. Pleeeze???? Love you! Another one from Radek inviting me over. He’s a sad-eyed Czech violinist that I met when I was walking with Julie on her delivery route the last time I visited Winnipeg. (He was actually the reason why I accompanied her on her route. She had mentioned that she delivered mail to a really handsome European guy who also seemed lonely and desperate. Like you, Yoli, she’d said.) He had come to Winnipeg to write a libretto. But who hasn’t? It’s a dark and fecund corner of the world, this confluence of muddy waters, one that begs the question of hey, how do we set words to life’s tragic score? Radek and I don’t speak the same language, not really, but he listens to me patiently, comprehending, well, I don’t really know what—that if he sits tight for an hour or two listening to me ramble on about my failings in a language he doesn’t really understand he’ll eventually, inshallah, get laid?

  Just now I’m worried that “get laid” is a term no longer used but I’m too ashamed to ask Nora for an update. I’m at an age where I’m stuck between two generations, one using the term “getting laid” and the other “hooking up,” so what are you supposed to call it? I sat in the little kitchen of the attic apartment Radek is renting on Academy Road and talked to him about Elf, about her despair, her numbness, her “hour of lead” as Emily Dickinson puts it, and my house-of-cards plan to make her want to live, and about futility and rage and the seas on the moon named Serenity and Cleverness and which one would he prefer to live next to (Serenity) and did he know there was a glacier somewhere in Canada called Disappointment and that it feeds into Disappointment River and that the Disappointment River empties into the Disappointment Basin but that there is no Disappointment stopper in the basin? And Radek nodded and poured me wine and made me food and when he walked past me on his way to the kitchen to stir the pasta or the rice he kissed me on the back of my neck. He is very pale with black wiry hair that covers his entire body. He jokes in broken English that he is not quite fully evolved and I tell him that I admire him for not burning it or ripping it all away like North Americans who are terrified of hair and fur in general. Body hair is the final frontier in the fight for the liberation of women, Radek. I’m so exhausted. He nodded, ah, yes?

  When he gently placed the pasta on the table, he said, I have seen your sister play.

  What? I said. You have? You never told me that.

  In Prague, he said. And I am not surprised.

  Surprised by what? I asked him.

  By her suffering, he said. When I listened to her play I felt I should not be there in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterwards stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.

  I thought about his words for a while, his old European charm, and the way he talked. Maybe we could fall in love and move together with Will and Nora to Prague, and my life would become less like my life and more like Franz Kafka’s. Will and Nora could study tennis and gymnastics and Radek and I could go to operas and ballets non-stop and become intense and poetic and revolutionary.

  I would put her in the same category as Ivo Pogorelich, or perhaps Evgeny Kissin, he said. She understands that the piano is the perfection of the human voice.

  She has a glass piano inside of her that she worries will break, I said.

  Yes, he said. Maybe it already has. And she’s barely holding the pieces in place before it shatters. I think I fell in love with her just suddenly that evening. I wanted to protect her.

  Oh, great, you’re hot for my sister? He laughed and said no, of course not but I figured he was lying. So much for my Prague fantasy. Well, I thought, Prague obviously hadn’t been a barrel of laughs for Franz Kafka anyway, so never mind, never mind!

  Do you want more wine? he asked. What was she like as a child?

  All she did was play the piano, I said. And petition for things.

  Ah well, if there is one thing you’re going to do in life it may as well be playing the piano, said Radek. But you must have other memories, no?

  She learned French when she was really young, I said, and sometimes that’s all she spoke and sometimes she’d stop talking for long periods of time like our father. She had different nicknames for me: Swivelhead, Mayhem. She tried to pretend that our Mennonite town was an Italian village in Tuscany or something by renaming everything and everyone. All the streets, everything. She became obsessed with Italy. When our old Mennonite relatives came over she’d address them as signor and signora and offer them espressos and grappa. People made fun of her. It was a bit embarrassing for me too.

  Ah, but she was only creating excitement, said Radek, yes? Being funny and sophisticated!

  Yeah, I can see that now, I told him, but at the time … you know. A town like ours is not the best place to work on your comedy routine. Our house was once shot at.

  What? said Radek. Because of Elfrieda?

  I don’t know, I said. We never found out. A lot of people made fun of our dad too for riding his bike all the time and wearing a suit every single day and reading books. That made Elf cry. She woul
d get really angry. She would fight with people, mostly with words, trying to defend him. When she went away to Oslo to study music she sent me tapes of herself talking about her life in the city, and then she was studying with some guy in Amsterdam and after that a woman in Helsinki. I listened to the tapes over and over in the dark and pretended she was there with me. I had them memorized, every inflection, every breath, and I talked along with her, over her, even her little chuckles. I had memorized it all.

  Radek poured us each another glass of wine and said he was thinking of something Northrop Frye had said about the energy it takes to get out of a place and how you must then move forward on that momentum to keep creating, to keep reinventing. Would I agree?

  I would agree, yes, I said. Is it even legal to disagree with Northrop Frye?

  Of course, said Radek, perhaps you—

  I know, I know, I was just kidding. But I do agree.

  You missed your sister, said Radek succinctly.

  Yeah, but it was more than that. I didn’t really want her to come back. I don’t know if I was conscious of that at the time but I knew, somehow, that she had to stay away. And yet at the same time I felt I needed her in order to survive that place, so I was really busy and anxious trying to figure out for myself how to be brave when she was gone. She played tennis a lot with me when she came back to visit. We played in the dark. Blind Tennis. It was fun but we lost a lot of balls. She told me I had to listen very carefully when we played Blind Tennis, that was the thing. We laughed our heads off in the dark and screamed when we got hit with the ball. When she played the piano I could tell what her mood was. She got all the top scholarships in school, she was even on some TV quiz show, but a lot of things made her mad. People not trying hard enough made her so mad. Bad form made her crazy. When the pastor and his old guys from our church came to our house to tell our parents they shouldn’t let Elf go away to study because she’d get big ideas, she lit his revival tent on fire that night and the cops came to our house …

  Oh my, said Radek.

  But first, when the church guys were at our house she played Rachmaninoff in the other room. My mom and I were hiding in the kitchen. And it was like the more pressure they applied to my dad, the deeper she screamed. Well, screamed with the piano. She drove them away with her brilliance and her rage, like Jesus with the money changers or you know like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs …

  Like sunlight to vampires, said Radek.

  They were such simple, brutish men, it was like playing for an audience of mastodons … She didn’t—

  Which piece was it? asked Radek.

  G Minor, Opus 23.

  What happened when the police came to your house?

  My parents wouldn’t let them put her into juvenile detention or send her away to the Christian reprogramming camp in the woods, I think it was just a threat anyway, but we all went on a long road trip to Fresno, California, to get away from the police and when we came back they’d forgotten about it. Elf convinced a boy in Fresno to be her boyfriend while we were there and he tried to hide in the trunk of our car on the day we were leaving but our father felt the extra weight when we drove off and stopped to get rid of him. Elf and this boy started making out like crazy after my dad hauled him out of the trunk and my dad couldn’t deal with it so my mom had to get out of the car and tell Elf we had to go. I remember her tugging on Elf’s arm while she was still kissing the boy. And then Elf finally got into the car sobbing her eyes out and the boy ran behind us for as long as he could like the farm dogs around East Village.

  Radek laughed. Do you have a photo of her? he asked. I took one out of my wallet and showed it to him. She was all huge green eyes and shiny black hair. She looks like an alien, doesn’t she?

  He said, She is beautiful.

  The first time I ate at Radek’s table I told him that I had been faithful to my husband and had raised children with him, and Radek smiled sweetly, nodding, as though he liked that woman, preferred her even, but you know, here we were. I’m so tired these days that often I put my head down on his table and fall asleep while he cleans up the dishes and then he picks me up and carries me to his bed and removes my clothing carefully, draping my jeans over his chair so that my lip balm doesn’t fall out of the pocket and roll under his bed into the dust, and he places my shirt over his lamp to cast an interesting aura, and he makes love to me very gently, like a gentle gentleman. Those are the words my grandmother used to describe my grandfather when I asked her what he’d been like as a husband. Gentle. It’s all I can think of too to describe Radek. When he comes he says something softly in Czech, one word. I like to play with the tips of his fingers, feeling the hard ridges and grooves that are formed from pushing down on his violin strings for five or six hours a day.

  He told me that once I barked like a dog in my sleep. I had a very vague recollection of doing it, of a dream I was having where everything I was feeling and everything I wanted to say about everything I was feeling came out, finally, as one lousy inchoate bark. Sometimes I think that I’m coming a little closer, at least in my dreams, to understanding Elf’s silences. When I was living alone in Montreal, heartbroken over a lost love, she sent me a quote from Paul Valéry. One word per letter, though, so it took me months to figure out. Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm … you will triumph.

  FIVE

  IT’S THE MORNING NOW and I’m hungover. My eyes are ringed with purple bags and smudged black mascara and there’s a thin crusty line of red wine on my lips. My hands are shaking. I’m drinking takeout coffee from Tim Hortons. Double double double double. My mother is on a ship. Nic is drowning in equations having to do with tapeworms. I brought Elf the things she asked for, the dark chocolate, the egg salad sandwich, the clean panties and the nail clippers. She was sleeping when I arrived. I knew she was alive because her glasses were resting on her chest and bobbing up and down like a tiny stranded lifeboat. I put the purple dragonfly pillow next to her head and sat in the orange vinyl chair near the window and waited for her to wake up. I could see my mother’s beater Chevy way down below in the parking lot and I pushed the green button on her automatic starter to see how far away I could be from something to make it come to life. Nothing happened, no lights came on.

  I checked my BlackBerry. There were two messages from Dan. The first one contained an outline of my shortcomings as a wife and mother and the second an apology for the first. Alcohol, sadness, impulsive, regrettable behaviour. Those were his reasons. The staples of discord. I understood. Sometimes he sends me e-mails that are so formal they seem to have been drafted by a phalanx of lawyers and sometimes he sends me e-mails that are sort of a continuation of our conversations over the years, a kind of intimate banter about nothing as though this whole divorce thing is just a game. All the recriminations and apologies and attempts at understanding and attacks … I was guilty of these things too. Dan wanted me to stay. I wanted Elf to stay. Everyone in the whole world was fighting with somebody to stay. When Richard Bach wrote “If you love someone, set them free” he can’t have been directing his advice at human beings.

  I went into the washroom Elf shares with her roommate when she has one (Melanie has gone home for a visit with her family) and looked around for signs of self-destruction. Nothing. Good. Even the cap on the toothpaste had been replaced and who, let alone a person wanting to die, would bother with that? I rubbed the wine line off my lips and brushed my teeth with my finger. I tried to wash away my smudged mascara and made it worse, ghoulish.

  I willed my hands to stop trembling and ruffled my hair a bit and prayed to a God I only half believed in. Why are we always told that God will answer our prayers if we believe in Him? Why can’t He ever make the first move? I prayed for wisdom. Grant me wisdom, God, I said, the way my father used to say grant when he was praying instead of give because it’s less demanding. Meek. I wondered if my father has inherited the earth because according to Scripture he should be running the entire show down here right now.

&nbs
p; Elf opened her eyes and smiled wearily, resigned to have woken once again but obviously disappointed. I heard her thinking: What fresh hell is this? Our favourite Dorothy Parker quote and one that makes us laugh every time we say it except this time. Really, it was only once that it made us laugh, the first time we heard it.

  She closed her eyes again and I said no! No, no, no, please keep them open. I asked her if she remembered Stockholm. The embassy, Elf? Remember? She’d invited me to hang out with her in Sweden for a week when I was pregnant with Will and we’d had a tragicomic experience at the Canadian embassy, where she’d been invited for lunch the day of her opening at the Stockholm Concert Hall. I went with her, dressed in some kind of enormous shimmering maternity dress I’d bought at Kmart or something, and spent most of the meal trying not to embarrass the Von Riesen family. We sat at a long white table in a white room with the ambassador and VIPs (who were also white) with names like Dahlberg and Gyllenborg and Lagerqvist. Elf was gorgeous, stunning in some simple European black thing, and a total pro at these fancy gigs. Everything about her was so sharp. So crisp and defined. I looked like one of those recently discovered giant squids next to her, oozing around in slow motion and dropping food on myself. Elf chatted in German with an exquisitely handsome, well-dressed couple, about piano playing probably, while the ambassador’s aide asked me what I did in Canada. I’m trying to write rodeo books, I said, and you know (pointing at my stomach) having a baby. I was too emotional most of the time and had been vomiting up herring in Stockholm’s perfect streets and sweating in my polyester dress and I was nervous and doing stupid things like knocking over the ambassador’s wine with my huge stomach when I reached for a roll, and wrapping myself in the Manitoba flag so that Elfie could take my picture, and then pulling the flagpole over. I didn’t know how to answer the questions I was being asked, questions like: Have you also been blessed with the musical gene? What is it like being sister to a prodigy?