Things As They Are?

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  All the time he had been delivering this sardonic discourse, he had kept his eyes fixed on his glass of beer while he slowly rotated it, grinding it into the tabletop. It came as a complete surprise to him when he looked up and encountered a stony stare of unrelieved, naked animosity.

  “Well,” said Jack, “it’s just a story I thought might be interesting to write. You don’t have to agree with me.”

  Madox erupted. He shouted that he knew who Greer was really talking about. Who kissed priests’ hands? Who was the hypocrite before God? Who was a slave? Who worshipped others’ ideas? Fuck him. He was wrong. All Roland’s convictions had been arrived at on his own. And he had convictions, which was more than Greer could say. Another thing. He was getting pretty damned pissed off with Greer and his snide remarks about his religion. His religion was nobody’s business but his own.

  The more Greer tried to assure him that he had not been talking about him at all, that it was a terrible misunderstanding, the more furious Madox became. At first Greer didn’t realize what was wrong: the immobility of Roland’s face helped hide the fact that he was drunk. It was the swearing that tipped him off – Roland was not a swearer – and the rage, the rage born of utter frustration, his voice booming out asshole, dicklicker, cunt, cocksucker throughout the dining room. “So fuck off and mind your own fucking business, why don’t you?” he ended by shouting.

  Greer felt a tap on his shoulder. A man from the table of merry makers, silver-haired, distinguished, stood over him. His face was beet-coloured. “I don’t know what your friend’s problem is,” he said in a tone that is acquired only after years of handing out orders to subordinates. “But if you’re going to take him out in public he ought to control himself. His language and behaviour is offensive to the ladies. Please make him stop it.” Before Greer could collect himself to reply, the executive turned briskly on his heel and marched smartly to his table, several of the women greeting their champion with approving looks.

  Greer rose to his feet.

  Roland had suddenly regained his composure. “Forget it, Jack,” he said in a calm voice. “One way or the other, it’s always the same. Sit down.”

  “No,” said Greer. “I won’t forget it.” At the same time he wondered what had come over him. He hated scenes.

  Some minor awkwardness with his chair alerted Greer that he too might be suffering the influence of alcohol. Concentrating on carrying himself in as dignified a manner as possible he approached the table. There was a stir. The gentleman in authority squared his shoulders in an expensive blue suit and ran a hand down the length of his tie, appeared to be readying himself to stand but, in the end, settled for defensively shoving his chair back from the table a few inches.

  Greer halted directly in front of him. “Why don’t you tell him yourself?” he said.

  “What?” said the man sharply, taken aback.

  “You want him to shut up, why’re you talking to me? I’m not his babysitter. Come on back to the table and say what you have to say to him directly, man to man. He is a man, if you haven’t noticed. Then he can tell you to go fuck yourself to your face.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said the suit. The comment was meant for the table, not Greer.

  “He’s not an idiot,” said Jack. “He can understand you perfectly well.” Greer began to motion the man out of his chair. “Come on over to our table and give him a piece of your mind, such as it is.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with your friend,” he said, “but you’re drunk.”

  “Really,” said Greer, “won’t you speak to him? An old-fashioned Dutch Uncle talk would mean the world to him. To both of us actually.” He leaned forward. “Just a few pointers on life and how the best people behave in Chinese restaurants.”

  Roland, following this performance eagerly, was excitedly trying to rise from his chair. “Come on over,” he suddenly shouted, beckoning with a crutch. “I never had a conversation with a fucking doorknob before!”

  “You see,” said Greer, “he would love to chat. Won’t you spare him a minute, up close and personal?”

  “Hey, the red baboon’s ass in the blue suit!”

  All around the table there was general consternation, people were getting hurriedly to their feet, fishing for purses underneath chairs, exchanging whispers and agitated glances. One of the junior-looking executives from the far end of the table was squeezing his way past the ladies, hurrying to reinforce senior management. In the high polish of a nearby gong Greer caught a glimpse of himself, his cropped head sinister, a model for the escaped convict, galley slave, Magwitch, Jean Valjean. Little wonder respectability was beating a retreat.

  “Anything I can do, Mr. Tyler?” asked the young man, eager to ingratiate.

  He was ignored. “I’d watch my step if I were you,” said Mr. Tyler to Greer. “If you two insist on making public nuisances of yourselves you’ll get mixed up with the police. That’s just a friendly warning.”

  Roland was standing now, swaying as he tried to disentagle one of his crutches from chair legs. “Hey, Jack,” he bellowed. “Need any help with those two?”

  To Mr. Tyler, Jack said quietly, “I think you’ve confused public nuisances and misfits. The two of us are misfits. Get it right, why don’t you?” From behind, he felt the hands of white-jacketed Chinese waiters closing on his arms.

  Public disgrace, getting tossed out of a restaurant, had them howling all the way to the airport, laughing school boys recounting and reliving a stupid prank. Self-appointed rogues and rascals, they swaggered through the terminal. The shared adventure heightened the emotion of the leavetaking, Greer impulsively throwing his arms around Roland’s neck at the gate, Roland letting one of his crutches fall to the floor so he could thump his friend’s back. “Have a good flight,” said Greer, his voice tight. “Wherever it takes you.”

  “You too, Jack,” said Roland.

  Only after Roland passed through security did Greer remember that he had meant to ask his friend whether it was really true that he could ride a bicycle.

  Out in the parking lot Greer stood under the hot glare of the afternoon sun listening to the jets take off. He had felt nothing like this in years, was still keyed-up, wildly elated. A plane soared into the summer sky, its engines whining. Greer checked his watch. Five-thirty. That would be Roland on his way. Jack closed his eyes. He realized he would never see his friend again but he knew how he wished to hold Roland Madox in his mind. Forever like this, in reckless pursuit of his destiny. The bicycle, swift ghost in the gloom of an October evening, rubber tires whirring madly on the pavement, the roar of a jet under a cloudless blue canopy. The same headlong rush against the odds.

  Mad, whirling monk, thought Greer. And then it was he remembered that Chekhov had had his monk too. Greer had never been able to make head nor tail of the story “The Black Monk” because this fantastic, dream-like fable was like nothing else Chekhov had ever written. As unlike his other stories as the monastery in which Greer had spent the past month was unlike the outside world.

  In Chekhov’s story, a brilliant young man by the name of Kovrin becomes obsessed with the legend of a black-robed monk who, a thousand years ago, wandered the wildernesses of Syria and Arabia. The mirage of this black monk was projected onto a lake many miles distant and this mirage produced a second mirage which produced a third, and so on, until the image of the monk had flown all about the world, to Africa, to Spain, to India, to the Far North, perhaps even beyond, to Mars, to the constellation of the Southern Cross. But the legend held that after a thousand years the mirage would return to earth and make itself known to men. Which it did to Kovrin, in the form of a cyclone whirling across the Russian landscape, a cyclone which transformed itself before his eyes into a monk who addressed Kovrin – something that optical illusions are not supposed to do. The message which it whispered to him was that he was a genius.

  Exalted by this news, in the months that follow, Kovrin discovers the sweetness of life. He falls in
love, enjoys his wine and cigars as never before, works on his philosophical investigations with unremitting energy and purpose, is filled with inexpressible joy. But one night his new wife awakes to find him sitting in their bedroom talking to an empty chair. Only Kovrin sees the black monk seated there.

  He is handed over to doctors to be cured of his delusion. After treatment, the black monk ceases to appear to him. Kovrin is a changed man, but scarcely for the better. Where once he was interesting and original, now he is cruel and listless, a mediocrity. He quarrels with his wife and insults his father-in-law. The marriage falls apart, Kovrin and his wife separate.

  Then one night in a resort hotel, Kovrin hears a song which reminds him of the black monk’s first visit to him. Filled with the rapture of anticipation he sees a black waterspout forming across the bay. The waterspout sweeps down upon him and the monk materializes. He chides Kovrin for passing his last two years so sadly and barrenly, all because he refused to believe the monk’s message. Kovrin, in ecstasy, cries out for his wife, cries out for the work he gave his youth to, cries out for the beautiful garden which had been his dead father-in-law’s single passion and, in crying out, his tuberculosis-ridden lungs begin to haemorrhage. In the morning he is found dead.

  Yes, said Greer to himself, slowly walking up and down the parking lot. Yes, yes, yes. Things as they are. But did things outside a man or woman simply mirror things inside? On the drive back to the abbey he, like Kovrin, began to recall the past. A gentle rain in Amsterdam. The harsher rain of last month, a muddy dog, a dead child in a church, the ringing of bells, Roland groaning down a corridor to kneel before something Jack could not imagine.

  Two months later, Greer was present to watch the monks harvest their crops. What had been green was now yellow, the roads were dust, the pines soared even darker against the hot blue sky of August. It was good to walk among the heaped and bristling swaths like Chekhov in his beloved Melikhov, to have begun a nineteenth-century kind of story.

  Acknowledgments

  Some of these stories have appeared previously: “Home Place” in The London Review of Books, Best Short Stories 1988, The Minerva Book of Short Stories, Grain, and The Bridge City Anthology: Stories from Saskatoon, and before first publication was broadcast on CBC Radio; “The Master of Disaster” in Canadian Fiction Magazine; and “New Houses” in Border Crossings.

  In “Man on Horseback” certain sections have been typeset in italics to appear as direct quotation. They are not, with the exception of a fifteenth-century definition of a good horse taken from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Nevertheless, I would like to acknowledge the following as sources of certain information used in this story: The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture by John C. Ewers, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 159, Smithsonian Institution Press, City of Washington, 1955; The Astonishing Adventures of General Boulanger by James Harding, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1971; The Horse in West African History by Robin Law, published for the International African Institute by Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980; Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Centenary Edition, Cassel & Company Ltd., London, an affiliate of Macmillan Publishing Company Inc., New York, 1975.

  I would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Saskatchewan Arts Board during the writing of these stories.

  I would also like to thank my patient and thoughtful editor, Ellen Seligman.

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  June 1992, Saskatoon

  Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He is the author of four novels, My Present Age (1984), Homesick (1989), co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, The Englishman’s Boy (1996), winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and a finalist for The Giller Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and, most recently, The Last Crossing (2002), a long-time national bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. He is also the author of three collections of short stories, Man Descending (1982), winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Faber Prize in the U.K., The Trouble With Heroes (1983), and Things As They Are (1992).

  Acclaimed for his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written plays. I Had a Job I Liked. Once. was first produced in 1991, and won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His second play, Dancock’s Dance, was produced in 1995.

  Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.