by Eric Dupont
“What’s her name?” Magda, now on her third green beer, asked me brusquely.
“Uh, Claudia, she’s called Claudia,” I stammered.
“Claudia. A Berliner. Well, I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies,” she hissed.
“She’s actually from Cologne,” I said without thinking.
“From Cologne! Eine Wessi-Tante! Ach! Scheußlich!” she raged.
The other people in the Biergarten chuckled quietly. Eine Wessi-Tante was perhaps the worst thing she could have called her, Michel. Such contempt. It means some bird, some chick from the West, but it’s more insulting than that. The same way Quebecers would say “A maudite Anglaise from Westmount!”
I didn’t speak for a second, taken aback. How dare this crazy old woman insult the woman I considered to be my future, my dreams, my Holy Grail, the solution to all my problems? But I kept my cool. I tried to get Magda to understand that Claudia had in fact defended her PhD thesis on Das Nibelungenlied in Toronto. She must have something between her ears.
“In Toronto? On something so German? She can’t have been good enough for our universities. There you have it. And you’re in love with her, Kapriel? You can do much better than that, a handsome young man like you! I would almost rather you had told me it was boys you were into. Eine Wessi-Tante! Na, was soll’s! That’s really asking for trouble . . .”
“Magda, now you’re being nasty . . .”
“I only want what’s good for you! Don’t say I never warned you. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. She’ll have you under her thumb before you know it. Vixens, the lot of them! And from Cologne to boot!”
“She’s absolutely right. And I speak from experience!” a man in his sixties piped up, having followed the conversation from the beginning. His wife promptly emptied her beer over his head, much to everyone’s amusement.
“I married her two years after the wall came down. From Hamburg, she was. And look at me now! Here she is pouring beer over my head. Watch yourself, Kanadier!” he warned me, patting his face dry with a napkin while his wife stormed out of the Biergarten.
The laughter took a full minute to die down, by which time the man had gone after his Wessi-Tante, no doubt to try to patch things up before she emerged from the kitchen wielding a knife. Magda realized she’d gone too far. She tried to change the subject.
“Did you know, Kapriel, that I used to sing? It was a long time ago,” she said.
“Opera?”
“Everything. Schubert, Mozart. I was a soprano.”
The thought of this woman singing made me smile.
“You don’t believe me?” she asked. It was as though she’d read my mind. “I loved Italian opera best, Puccini.”
“Tosca?”
“Yes, Tosca.”
More beer arrived. Magda began telling me about Puccini.
“In Berlin in the 1930s, I went to the opera twice a week. I must have seen Tosca at least twenty times. No, more! At the Deutsches Opernhaus in Charlottenburg and at Unter den Linden too. It was my favorite Puccini opera. People tend to prefer Madame Butterfly, but I always preferred Tosca,” she confessed, now seriously inebriated. “Whenever I think of that idiot Cio-Cio San waiting in vain for her Pinkerton to come back! And the other one, Suzuki! Completely under that crazy woman’s spell. When you stop to think about it, Madame Butterfly is nothing but a defense of slavery!”
She stood up. And there, in the middle of the Biergarten, leaning on her cane, she began to sing. People pretended not to notice, but she sang so loudly that soon all eyes were on her. The funny thing is, she sang really well. She projected her voice just like Anamaria di Napoli does, and she knew every word of Tosca, only in German! Michel, she sings every bit as well as Montserrat Caballé! Such a pure voice! I recognized the part from Act I when Tosca surprises Cavaradossi painting Attavanti’s face in the church. You must know it by heart.
Von unserem Häuschen mit mir sollst du träumen,
Es hängt versteckt hinter blühenden Bäumen,
Fern von der Neugier, vom Geräusch der Welt
Nur dem Liebesglück geweiht.
It sounded even more beautiful in German, the kind of thing I’d like to come up with for Claudia. The others stared at her in admiration as she sang. She went on for at least a minute, a song about stars, about the wind rustling the leaves, about a place where Tosca might be safe and loved. I would have given anything for you to be there to sing back. She looked at me like Kabaivanska looks at Placido Domingo in the film, her gaze just as heavy with meaning. Then, people began to applaud. Someone shouted, “Bravo, Magda!” which only went to prove that everyone in the Biergarten knew her. She was too drunk to go on, but still she clenched her fist and shouted: “Ah diese Kokotte!” I had no way of telling if it was Tosca calling Attavanti a tart, or Magda cursing Claudia, my Wessi-Tante. Magda could barely stand.
“Time to go home, Magda. I’m tired too.”
“Help me. I can’t walk anymore.”
I walked her home as best I could, stopping a hundred times along the way. She had to concentrate hard on every step so as not to topple over. A combination of her cane and my arm helped her keep her balance. When we got to her door, she rummaged for her keys in her bag, grumbling all the while, and eventually unlocked it.
“Carry me to my bed, Kapriel,” she implored me.
I sat on her bed with her for two minutes, just to make sure she didn’t choke on her own vomit. She seemed okay. Her eyes were open and she was getting her breath back. She began to talk, but clearly not to me. She kept saying the same thing, over and over. “I left her by the side of the road, there was nothing else for it. She was just too cold. My little Helga . . . My little Helga.” She was delirious. I went back to my apartment, a little worse for wear after my afternoon in the Schrebergärten. It never crossed my mind that Magda might have taken a shine to me, but I swear for a second I wondered whether she was jealous, as jealous as Tosca. Why attack Claudia like that? She doesn’t even know her. And that voice! I’m no expert, Michel, but she’s quite the opera singer, a real diva! What a surprise to hear a voice like that coming out of such an old, clapped-out body. I didn’t even know there were German lyrics for Tosca. Isn’t it always sung in Italian? You’d know better than I.
Since I was still a little tipsy, I hopped on a tram and went out to a bar in Prenzlauer Berg. I couldn’t stop thinking about Claudia. It was a singles bar. I kept on drinking and struck up a conversation with a blonde who vaguely resembled Claudia. She took me home to her place. The whole thing was done and dusted in under an hour. I swiped her copy of Harold and Maude and by the time I got back to Lichtenberg in the early hours of the morning, the stars were shining in the sky, Michel. The stars were shining . . .
Gabriel
* * *
Ring im Uhrzeigersinn
May 18, 1999
Dear little brother,
Time flies. Only four days before Claudia gets back to Berlin. May 22. Mark the date on your calendar. Declare a national holiday in every country around the world. Another four days and I’ll be free. Another four days and my life will begin at last.
Today I sat in the S-Bahn that goes around the Ring, the circle line around Berlin that leaves from Westkreuz and goes to Ostkreuz before returning to Westkreuz via Südkreuz und zurück. I was sitting opposite a very elegant lady, very German, probably what Claudia will look like twenty-five years from now, perhaps how Suzuki would have looked if she’d been born in Lichtenberg or Charlottenburg. I try to steal a glance or two: German women, Prussians especially, don’t like being looked up and down like cuts of meat. In that respect, they’re a lot like women in Quebec. She was wearing a salmon-pink summer dress, an off-white cotton knit shawl over her shoulders. Her red lipstick went perfectly with her purse, itself half a shade darker than her dress. Like Claudia, she too had a Marlene Dietrich hairdo, and she wore a small amber necklace. Did you know that amber comes from East Prussia, Michel?
The Germans say sich zusammenreißen, to pull oneself together. And watching them get a hold of themselves is the most moving sight in the world.
When I got back, I rang Hilde’s doorbell. I wanted to print out a document to hand in to my German teacher at the Goethe-Institut on Tuesday. She was home, thank God. I spoke to her a little about Magda, asked if she knew anything about a little girl called Helga by the side of the road. “You know, Kapriel,” she said. “Magda’s washed with every water, she’s been around, you know. She might have been talking about East Prussia. I know she was in Königsberg during the war. That might have something to do with it. Times were tough in Königsberg with the Red Army, especially for . . . Do you know much about East Prussia?”
East Prussia, she told me, was a German province. Its capital was Königsberg, Immanuel Kant’s hometown. (It’s funny: Königsberg means the king’s mountain, just like Montreal is the royal mountain. They both basically mean the same thing.) It was a German province for centuries, until the Red Army rolled in with their tanks in 1945. The three million or so Germans who lived there had to flee. It was total chaos, in the middle of winter. Hilde told me that Magda had been there in January 1945 when Germany fell. She showed me a pair of earrings. “Das ist Bernstein.” Amber. East Prussia is on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where amber comes from. It’s petrified pine resin, apparently.
I think it must look like the Gaspé Peninsula or Rivière-du-Loup. Like where Suzuki grew up, I mean. Hilde told me about the gorgeous sunsets over the sea. At any rate, the woman who had been sitting opposite me on the S-Bahn was wearing a yellow amber necklace that’s the same shade as Hilde’s earrings. Amber’s lovely. It appeals to the gentler side of our nature.
Yesterday’s operatic incident in the Schrebergärten for some reason or other reminded me of my final few months at Holy Canadian Martyrs. As I mentioned already, young Stella stopped singing for two years, at least in front of her classmates and teachers, on the orders of her singing teachers, who wanted her to rest her voice. It seems she had two singing teachers as well as a music theory teacher, the one I met that Saturday when I went over to the Thanatopoulos house for the first time. In early January 1998, the girls I’d first taught in Grade 10 were finishing high school. Most had already chosen a university. My three favorites—Melikah, Candice, and Kayla—had grown into glorious young women who had moved on from experimenting with makeup and short skirts. They had taken every phys ed class up to Grade 13, even poor Kayla (Zira the secretary let her sign up for my classes for her last two years of high school to show that all was forgiven). They were my informers, almost my girlfriends. They would always come sit with me in the gym after school, chattering away while the boys played basketball. This closeness brought with it an unhealthy curiosity about the state of my love life.
“Is it true that you slept with the librarian?”
Melikah wasn’t the type to beat about the bush. I managed to dodge their questions most of the time, telling them that wasn’t the type of thing you asked your teacher.
“Mrs. Robinson says we should watch ourselves around Mr. Lamontagne, is she right?”
I don’t know what Candice meant by that. Had Mrs. Robinson really told the students to be wary of me? The poor woman . . .
“And what about Mrs. Robinson, did you have your way with her too?” Of the three, Kayla had the sharpest sense of humor. We laughed for ages. The very thought of Mrs. Robinson at the height of passion would have left a dead man in hysterics. Melikah did an impression of her climaxing in her Northern Irish accent . . .
“Oh Lord! Oh Lord! Oh! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Yes, yes, yes. Glory!” We were crying with laughter. I think it’s my time with the girls at Holy Canadian Martyrs that I miss the most. Their youthfulness, the laughter of eighteen-year-old girls. They weren’t going to let it go.
“You know, Mr. Lamontagne, we’re eighteen now!”
“Put a sock in it, Candice.”
“Do you want to have a beer with us?”
A beer. In Ontario they could lawfully have sex with a twenty-nine-year-old man, I reminded her, but she’d have to wait another year for a beer. I don’t know what young Ontarians find so fascinating about having a beer with their teachers anyway. It seems to be a rite of passage, as important to them as being baptized or circumcised is to others. And yet every year, some dumb, greenhorn teacher gets caught raising a glass with his underage students. Complaints are filed; names are printed in the newspaper. All hell breaks loose. This is Ontario.
“So, yes?”
“So, no.”
They seemed disappointed. But they still managed to convince me to take them to the University of Toronto pool on Harbord Street, just opposite where I lived. I’d been training at the weight room there ever since moving to Toronto. I think they were keen to lift the veil on my mysterious private life, to see where I went outside the world of prayers at Holy Canadian Martyrs. Part of them probably also wanted to explore the bowels of the university all three had chosen to continue their studies. As good little girls from Toronto’s well-to-do suburbs, they were seldom allowed to venture downtown alone. Never at night. They were to be home for supper and never so much as mention the streets they walked like voyeurs: Queen Street, where junkies staggered about in broad daylight; Church Street, where the gays strutted; Spadina Avenue, positively crawling with Chinese. They said they were going to see a show. Which, strictly speaking, wasn’t entirely untrue. And so it was agreed we would go swim lengths at the university pool the following Sunday.
It was unbelievably cold that day. The girls found me half frozen by the door to the university sports center. They’d swapped their Holy Canadian Martyrs uniforms for outfits that were much too sexy for a wintry Sunday afternoon in Toronto. Candice was shivering. They took forever to come out of the locker room. When they finally appeared poolside, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. They were all wearing microscopic fluorescent bikinis, the kind Brazilian girls strut around in at Copacabana. And since they squealed with every step, their entrance did not go unnoticed. They were quite strong swimmers, Candice especially. By way of retribution, I challenged them to swim eighty lengths, which I do every Sunday. They managed forty without batting an eyelid, swimming fron
t crawl and breaststroke. Melikah stopped at sixty, half dead. Kayla, out to impress, made it to seventy-three. Only Candice kept up with me right to the end. It took two of us to help her out of the water. They were much more subdued after that, slinking back to get changed in silence.
I had to wait a good twenty minutes for them by the entrance. None of them had dried their shoulder-length hair. They wore it like agent Dana Scully from The X-Files, apart from Melikah, that is. Her curly hair was a little longer. Three drowned cats on a freezing Sunday afternoon.
“Are you nuts! You’ll catch your death! It’s minus ten out!”
“The dryers weren’t working. This place is a dump,” Kayla complained.
“What do you mean the dryers weren’t working? None of them?”
“None of them,” Kayla replied. “Do you have a hair dryer at your place, Mr. Lamontagne?”
It was always the same every time my three princesses had done something wrong or were trying to wheedle something out of me. I knew the locker room dryers were no doubt in perfect working order, that they were only looking for an excuse to come back to my apartment. They must have looked me up in the phone book and seen that I lived in the block right beside the pool, on Spadina. Poor Kayla gave herself away as she asked me, nodding over to where I lived. They were all so flawed, so adorable. And there I was, torn between leaving them to wander the streets of Toronto with wet hair and the risk they would tell their parents they had spent Sunday afternoon at their gym teacher’s place.
“We won’t tell a soul,” simpered Melikah.
I should have let them catch pneumonia instead of giving in to their mewling. And yet they meant no harm. They just wanted to see a bachelor’s apartment with their own eyes. In the hopes of spotting a stray bra, a pack of condoms by the bed, perhaps a lover still fast asleep . . . But they would see none of that because I never bring anyone back to my place, except Claudia once in 1995 and that was only for a cup of tea. I’m more the “don’t stay the night, leave with a book” type. My bookshelf wasn’t going to get any heavier if I began bringing girls home.
