Deafening

by Frances Itani

  Tress was watching, her mouth open, her jaw dropped.

  “Close your mouth,” Grania said. “It’s rude. Throw.”

  Tress looked at her own hand as if the green cup were attached. She pulled back her arm, pitched hard, and exploded into laughter as the cup smashed. The wind blew furiously as if catching the mood. Green and white fragments lay at the base of the rock. More, Tress signed. Fingertips touched fingertips. More.

  Each of them threw a monogrammed hotel bread plate with Y-shaped cracks. They let them fly together and the plates spun through the air and dropped.

  “Where did you get these?” Tress was laughing so hard she was doubled over. She had to repeat so that Grania could understand.

  Grania read her lips and grinned. “I have a supplier. We saved them until they were needed.”

  “We?”

  “Mamo and I. We threw them before I left for school in the fall and when I came home every June. Other times, too.” When things get bad. “There will be more. Mrs. Brant keeps the cracked ones. She’s my supplier.”

  At this piece of information, Tress looked astonished.

  “Mother?”

  “She never knew. Still doesn’t. Mamo stored the dishes in the clock bag. In the O’Shaughnessy trunk.”

  “All those times you and Mamo said you were collecting rocks…”

  “We were smashing dishes. But we brought rocks back, too.”

  It was Grania’s turn to laugh. She pulled out a glass and tossed it underhand. It shattered on top of the boulder and the pieces sat in the hollow like an archaeological find. “That was for Chim,” she said. She wasn’t laughing now. “For missing Chim. For all the danger.”

  “This is for Kenan!”

  Grania saw the shout on Tress’s face. Tress whammed a gravy boat into the side of the rock and followed it with a sugar dish lid. “For the dead arm. The swinging arm.” She yelled again into the howling air. “For his beautiful face.” She sank to the damp tufts of old grass where the last bit of snow was clumped, and she began to cry. The wind whipped the tears until they were streaked across her temples.

  “Stand up,” Grania said. “Stand up and finish. This won’t work if you give up. Can’t you see that Kenan will walk out of the house when he’s ready?”

  But Tress stayed where she was.

  Grania flung a vinegar stopper, which twirled clumsily and crashed. “That was for Cora. The last time she talked to me she said, ‘You poor little thing. It must be hard to be alone without your husband.’ Do you know what I said? I said, ‘Alone is easy. It’s being with people that is hard.’”

  She dug into the near-empty bag. “This is for Mother. Who tries to hold things together, I know. But she has never given up the guilt and, because of that, we might never get past it.” It was a small platter but it was the heaviest dish, the hardest to throw. It connected with the boulder, and its jagged pieces sagged to earth.

  Grania slumped to the ground and put her arms around Tress.

  Everyone was afraid of something. Grania had been afraid that Jim would not come home from the war. Kenan was terrorized by what he had been through. Tress, of what she and Kenan had to deal with. Bernard was afraid to make a move towards Kay, but now that he had begun a slow courtship, he might have the courage to go on. Mother was afraid when Patrick became Vince and ran away to war. Father, afraid he couldn’t keep the hotel going to support the family. And now, Mother and Father, both, feared the loneliness they’d created between themselves.

  Had Mamo been afraid? She had rocked in the chair at Grania’s side every night because she’d worried that Grania might die. She had kept everyone away from the room until the fever passed, so that no one but herself would be in danger. Other hands had pushed trays of food, fresh linens, fluid in bottles through the doorway.

  Grania had not hung the picture of daffodils back on the wall, and she never would.

  Grania had not said goodbye.

  “You’re crying,” Tress said. “Graw, you’re crying.” Tress pulled herself up off the ground and now she reached for Grania’s hand and pulled her up, too.

  Grania felt the struggle, the column of air pushing up. She began to sob, her chest heaving in and out in rapid breaths. She tasted salt. Her tears were salt. She could not see through the crying. She tried to look into the darkness of the clock bag. Her hand groped and pulled out two china saucers. For Mamo’s P-Ko tea.

  “These are the last,” she said. Her face was wet, her cheeks unwiped. “These are for Mamo.”

  Help me. Help.

  She gripped one saucer and handed the other to Tress. As she did, she glanced up to the bedroom window. The two of them stared up. Kenan had pulled back the curtain and was at the window, watching. They didn’t know how long he’d been there.

  Grania waved, and Kenan raised his good arm and made a throwing motion through the air. She and Tress turned to the rock and pitched the saucers with all the strength they had.

  They faced the bay then, both silent. Grania reached up with a palm and wiped her tears.

  “Now,” she said, “we’ll go inside. We’ll tell Kenan to come down for his tea.” Her thumb and index finger stirred into her left hand, tea. “After that, I’ll catch the train. And we’ll clean up the pieces when the rest of the snow melts.”

  Chapter 27

  The train shook the platform and rattled Grania’s insides. She was close to the crowd but alone, and separate, and behind. A band was playing to the left of the station, back a little. Her body was aware of the rhythmic beat of the drums. Ahead of her, beyond the train, the sky was the clearest blue.

  She saw him the moment before he stepped down. Eyes that were earnest, but old. Old eyes. The train loomed behind him. He was in uniform, and she thought of the creases she’d pressed down the sides of the last pair of civilian trousers he’d worn.

  His face was fuller. He looked taller, as if he’d grown.

  From her first glance, she understood. She knew now that it was like returning from the land called School. Only this time, Jim was returning from the land called War.

  She would never know where he had been. Nor would he know where she had been.

  He looked at her. Eyes intent, alert, searching his own.

  “Wife,” he said aloud.

  She was wearing her long spring coat and a hat he had not seen before. It was blue and had a turned-up rim and was pulled low over her forehead. He could not see the red hair that must be tucked up inside. Her eyes were round and large under the brim of the hat. Eyes and nose and lips and face. Face pale, thinner than he remembered. How was he to believe that he was home?

  Tears flowed down her cheeks for the second time. She watched as he made his way between men and women on the platform. His eyes never left her face.

  “Wife,” he said again. And then, “My wife.” He could not stop the sob.

  “Sorrow,” his lips said then. His body lurched forward. The peach-basket lady was standing on the platform, watching. The troops hung out the train windows, shouting and laughing. Most were travelling on to Toronto and points beyond.

  Grania caught the edge of Jim’s last word, caught it sideways as she circled the crowd. She felt his hands, the weight of them as they pressed down upon her thin shoulders. He pulled her towards him. Hands and arms held her gently, tightly, against the rough wool of his tunic. She leaned forward. He felt her stillness, her strength.

  Sorrow, she said to herself, and she thought of Kenan at the upstairs window of the narrow house, of Mamo’s grave that she had not yet seen, of herself and Tress throwing the last of the saucers from the O’Shaughnessy bag. Sorrow can be borne.

  She shaped the C and the H and she said aloud, “Chim.” She pulled back, to see him, and her hand reached up to his face. She ran her palm over its wholeness, one cheek, and then the other.

  He is different, she said to herself. But some things are the same. For now, we will live in the present. That will have to be enough. Until we are bet
ter.

  She looked at his lips; she touched them.

  “Grania,” he said. “Say my name. Again.”

  He heard the soft laughter. The sound of her.

  The sight of her.

  His arms tugged her to him again. The train was moving off, sliding out on its cross-country journey to a distant ocean. This time, she did not pull away to see if he wanted to speak.

  P.S.

  Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  Author Biography

  FRANCES ITANI, Canadian freelance writer of fiction, poetry, essays and reviews, was born in Belleville, Ontario, and grew up in a rural village in Quebec. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and English from the University of Alberta and an M.A. in English literature from the University of New Brunswick. She studied with the late W.O. Mitchell and with Rudy Wiebe. Prior to writing, she studied in Montreal to become a registered nurse, with graduate work at Duke University and McGill University. She taught and practised nursing for eight years.

  She has written ten books, including her novel set during the First World War, Deafening, which has been chosen for both CBC’s “2006 Canada Reads” and for Radio-Canada’s “2006 Combat des Livres.” Deafening won the 2004 Commonwealth Award for Best Book (Canada and Carribean region) and was shortlisted for the 2005 IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award and the 2005 William Saroyan International Literary Award (Stanford University). It won the 2003 Drummer General’s Award and was named 2004-2005 College Book of the Year by Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton, Alberta.

  Deafening has been translated into seventeen languages and has been optioned for film by the producer of The Shawshank Redemption. In 2004, the Canadian Booksellers Association nominated Deafening for Book of the Year and Itani for Author of the Year.

  Her most recent book, Poached Egg On Toast, won the 2005 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction and the 2005 CAA Jubilee Award for Best Book of Short Stories. Leaning, Leaning Over Water has been published in Canada and England, and is forthcoming in Germany. Itani’s three other story collections are Man Without Face, which won the 1995 Ottawa-Carleton Book Award for Fiction, Truth or Lies and Pack Ice. She has published three books of poetry, which were illustrated by Molly Lamb Bobak and Shizuye Takashima, and a children’s book, Linger by the Sea, also illustrated by Molly Lamb Bobak.

  Itani co-edited (with Susan Zettell) a collection of stories, One of the Chosen, by the late Danuta Gleed. Itani is advisor to the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, administered by the Writers’ Union of Canada. She served for two years on the Membership Committee of the Writers’ Union and was poetry editor of The Canadian Forum (1996-1998). She is well-known as a teacher and is a frequent keynote speaker for meetings, groups, conferences and workshops.

  Itani won the CBC Literary Award for short stories in 1995 and 1996, and third prize in 1984. She also won the Annual Contributor’s Prize for Best Short Story in Canadian Fiction Magazine. She has written for numerous journals and newspapers in North America and, at present, reviews for The Washington Post.

  Itani has been involved in humanitarian work throughout her adult life, including volunteer work with the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), Big Sisters, the Multiple Sclerosis Society and the Ottawa Deaf Centre, where she served on the board of directors. She participates in numerous fundraisers for literacy and is a member of PEN International, the Writers’ Union of Canada and Access Copyright Canada. In 1999 she set up The Itani Family Award for Flute, an annual prize awarded to a young musician studying with the Ottawa Youth Orchestra Academy.

  Currently, she is working on a new novel, Celebration. She lives in Ottawa.

  About the book

  In Her Own Words: An Interview with Frances Itani

  When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?

  Unlike some writers, who start the lifelong apprenticeship during their middle childhood, I did not begin to write until I was nineteen or twenty—and even then, not yet seriously. I always loved to read, however, and my parents read to me and my four siblings throughout our early childhood. There was no library in the small village where I was raised in Quebec, and I always felt that there were simply not enough books! I couldn’t wait to get back to school every September just so I could get to the books. Until I was in grade five I attended three one-room schools, but there were no libraries there, either. The reading material often amounted to texts plus a dozen books on a shelf above a water cooler at the back of the room.

  “I did not actually make the commitment to writing until I met W.O. Mitchell.”

  I was encouraged by several professors during my university years to “do something with this writing,” but I did not actually make the commitment until I met W.O. Mitchell at the University of Alberta in 1972. He encouraged me with the kind of enthusiasm that only W.O. could muster, and the timing must have been right, because I began to believe in the possibility of becoming a writer. I was twenty-nine when I began to venture into poetry and fiction. I had already practised and taught nursing for eight years and had worked in five Canadian provinces and in three countries. I had one child and would have another when I was thirty. During those early writing years, the acts of child-rearing and writing became so entangled that they are now hopelessly enmeshed in my memory. It would be impossible to untangle the writing, the studying at night while I completed two arts degrees and the raising of two babies.

  “I knew that the novel would encompass thematic contrasts of sound and silence, love and war, survival and loss.”

  Deafening represents an extraordinary amount of historical research and background reading, and yet there is a cohesiveness to the novel, and the characters move effortlessly through your narrative. Can you talk about what it is like as a writer to create such a story and how you were able to make the emotional lives of your characters shine through?

  I confess that at the beginning I had no idea where I would take the story I was trying to create. I knew that the novel would encompass thematic contrasts of sound and silence, love and war, survival and loss. I knew that I would be writing about a deaf woman. But when I started to do research on the First World War, I had to trust my instincts that two separate and very disparate paths would somehow intersect. I began to imagine and visualize various scenarios of sound during possible war scenes while, at the same time, I was reading archival material at the former Ontario School for the Deaf and probing possible ideas about Grania’s world of silence.

  Perhaps simultaneously, I was imagining what kind of people Grania and Jim might be and what shape their love might take. As I began to piece their outer world together from my extensive research (including a visit to First World War battlefields on the Western Front), I was also permitting their inner selves to move around my imaginative landscape. I knew from the beginning that Mamo would be a strong and important influence on Grania’s life; also, that Grania would have a sister with whom she would have a close and complex relationship. I became interested in the way strengths and dependencies shift back and forth between sisters, as well as between other family members. I knew that Grania would have to have strengths of her own if she were to be interesting at all. And I wanted Jim to sing, to have an ability that would be outside Grania’s sensory realm.

  “I gathered up…stories; I paid attention to detail, and I read and I read.”

  Creation of character happens at so many levels that it would be impossible to be definite about how all of the musings, thoughts, dreams, ideas while I’m out walking, etc., come together to make up credible fictional people. Also, I sometimes use an overheard detail, or an observation from an interview or from my own memory, to shape the main trait or action of a character. Of course, I was dealing with an entire family and had to work out the multiple relationships within that intimate group. I also had to create and invent the characters of young men who were going off to the Front and who would soon experience the terrible horror that was the First World War. I listened close
ly when I interviewed veterans and experts in the field. I gathered up some of their stories; I paid attention to detail, and I read and I read.

  “I would say that the biggest influence as far as craft goes is Chekhov.”

  Because I create fiction in an entirely organic way, I allowed the material to begin to lead me. As it grew out of itself, I followed. It is the only way I can write. I never start a story or a book with an overall plan.

  What writers do you read and is there any writer who has greatly influenced your work?

  I would say that the biggest influence as far as craft goes is Chekhov—his attention to detail and his ability to use the suggestion of brush stroke to create an entire picture. For storytelling, it would be Heinrich Böll. For sheer beauty of prose and imagination, Virginia Woolf. I loved reading her letters and journals, and those many volumes helped me enormously during the first decade when I began to write. Also, the early stories of Audrey Thomas helped me to believe that I could write about my own world. Paulette Jiles has a wonderful and unique imagination. Her poetry stops me in my tracks every time I read it, because it always takes me by surprise. Lorna Crozier’s poetry is astonishingly concrete and moving. The poetry of Michael Ondaatje and Seamus Heaney carries me through times when I can’t read fiction while I am writing fiction. I love the stories of William Trevor. His novel Fools of Fortune is an engaging work of perfection.

  I like to read fiction that allows the reader to move in emotionally—fiction that does not rob me, as a reader, of my right to enter the story and “feel” what the characters are feeling. I learned an important lesson from W.O. Mitchell, which was to “exercise restraint.” He also stressed the importance of using concrete, sensory detail to tell my stories. I experimented, early in my writing career, with building story from that which is concrete so as to allow the reader to move to the abstract.