by Mario Bolduc
On weekends, Max, Kevin, Caroline, and Gabrielle ate together at the house. After the meal, once Gabrielle had been put to bed, Caroline locked herself in her office to write about the fate of illegal Cuban refugees, victims of the power struggle between Fidel Castro and the United States. Or to reveal to readers of The New Yorker the true motivations and intentions of Slobodan Milošević, the monster tearing through ex-Yugoslavia. Max and Kevin opened a bottle of cognac, put on a few jazz albums, and waited for the sun to rise. Family day, in a sense. A strange little family, but a family nonetheless.
As the first rays of morning light came through the window, Max would fall asleep, and Kevin would put on his track suit and go off running in the neighbourhood. He ran circles around Sunset Park, breathless, forgetting his failures, his disappointments, his wasted youth. Did Kevin have regrets about abandoning his running career? Probably. But Max came to believe that he’d gotten mixed up with the riff-raff in Tribeca precisely because he was looking for an excuse to justify an end to his dreams. As if he wanted some external force to make the decision for him.
Because of Kevin’s new job, his relationship with Caroline changed, naturally, despite his swearing that nothing was different. His secret forced him to create a barrier between himself and his wife. She realized it but said nothing. Max, of course, understood exactly what was happening. It seemed clear that their relationship would slowly be poisoned. The lie, the secret, would only be followed by more lies, always essential ones, of course, all inevitable. Max saw in Kevin the repetition of his own life, of his own strained relationship with women, Pascale first among them.
Why had he done it? Why had he offered Kevin this poisoned apple?
The answer was simple: by making himself indispensable, he was forcing someone else, anyone else, to tie their fate to his. On the surface of things, Max was interested in people, yes, but they’d always been disposable. With Kevin he was trying to act differently, to be different. Max was proving to himself that he was capable of real relationships, ones worth more than a few drinks, quickly discarded and forgotten. Worth more than those he built for a scam, only useful to him for a short time. He’d adopted Kevin, in a sense, and along with him, Caroline and Gabrielle. And, together, Kevin and Max had vowed to protect mother and daughter through their silence and complicity.
Curiously, Max felt responsible for his friend’s professional failures. Giving Kevin work on his team wasn’t showing confidence in him. It was quite the opposite really: with his offer Max was signalling an end to Kevin’s career as an athlete and an honest man. He was saying that Kevin didn’t possess the necessary qualities to compete on the same level as world-class marathon runners. From then on it became necessary to lie, cheat, cover up the truth. What seemed like a hand offered to a man in need was really a way to cover his friend’s failures.
Kevin had lost the will to fight. He’d given up his dreams, which had become unattainable. Max regretted having given Kevin the excuse he’d been waiting for to simply declare that he had forever forfeited his passions.
Something his father had never done.
Kevin rarely spoke of Raymond, and never in kind terms. And yet, in the business world, Raymond’s star shone brightly. His company, Nordopak, founded in the basement of his house on a credit margin and a second mortgage, had become within a few years a packaging company with thousands of corporate clients. At the company’s height in the early 1990s, Raymond had had some two hundred employees, a factory, a warehouse, and a fleet of fifty trucks. Nordopak distributed some ten thousand different packaging products in Canada and the United States. And in Europe, as well. Aspekt-Ziegler, the Dutch giant of prefab furniture, was responsible for forty percent of the Montreal-based company’s revenue.
To his happy employees, Raymond Dandurand was God’s gift to man. Their insurance against joblessness and poverty. Every February 19, Raymond’s birthday, employees got the day off. There were great end-of-year bonuses, a well-funded retirement plan, generous summer employment programs for children of employees. In other words, it was a model company. Everyone at Nordopak called Raymond “the emperor” as a kind joke, but according to Kevin, this affection wasn’t mutual. Raymond considered his employees to be foils for his own genius, his incredible success, his knack for business. He was a man of changing moods, taking all the credit for success and distributing blame to everyone but himself.
“A megalomaniac, seriously,” Kevin said about his father. “And self-centred. A schmuck, plain and simple.”
No love lost between the two of them. Kevin had always felt he was bothering his father just with his presence, by being in the way. Raymond had ignored the existence of his son. His eyes might come to rest on Kevin, but he didn’t see him. While other fathers — normal fathers — played baseball or hockey with their sons, Kevin had had to find his own path. When he’d become more serious about running, when his ambitions had grown, not once had Raymond come to see his son run, never having been interested in his performances.
Kevin had found the affection his father denied him in his mother, Roxanne. A tender woman, but always willing to take a back seat. She was much younger than Raymond and took Kevin’s side when things went from bad to worse between father and son. They spent a lot of time together, and Roxanne’s kindness was the only thing that prevented Kevin from blowing up.
“He loves you, Kevin,” Roxanne would say. “He doesn’t know how to say it, how to show it, but he loves you.”
“He’s an idiot.”
“Don’t say that. Come on, tell me about your day.”
And so Kevin would give her a full account, rocked in his mother’s arms, forgetting for a moment his father, who treated him with complete indifference. Sometimes he caught himself wishing his father beat him or slapped him around from time to time. But no, Raymond never rebuked his son; he remained silent, unbearably silent, disinterested.
One afternoon, as Kevin had returned from school — he was eleven or so — he found an ambulance leaving the house. Inside, his father was standing by the china cabinet. His suit was rumpled, his tie undone; he’d rushed back home from work. Roxanne had collapsed in the kitchen. A neighbour had found her.
Kevin and Raymond sped to the hospital and made their way to her room in neurology.
It had been a stroke.
Kevin’s world fell apart. Just the idea of life without Roxanne sent him into the depths of despair. Kevin simply couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe in this stroke. It had to be some sort of trick to pull them apart. He wanted to get the police involved, sic them on Raymond, force him to admit a crime.
Roxanne never returned to consciousness. After school Kevin would go straight to the hospital and hold his mother’s hand, without knowing whether she was aware of his presence or not.
One Saturday Kevin had hidden out in a stall in the hospital bathroom to cry. He stayed there for hours. At some point Raymond walked in. Kevin didn’t reveal his presence, but Raymond leaned against the metal door.
“Kevin, I know you’re there. I can hear you snivelling.”
Kevin closed his eyes. He’d never played hide-and-seek with his father before. Why now?
“Your mother died,” Raymond said, concise as ever, announcing the death of his son’s mother as if he were telling his employees about a recently fired colleague.
Kevin ripped the door open. “I want to see her.”
“It’s over, Kevin.”
Pushing his father out of the away, Kevin bolted for the corridor. Nurses were busying themselves around Roxanne’s room. A stretcher was waiting a bit farther off. Morgue employees were already on the scene. An orderly brought Kevin back to his father, who said, “It just happened a little while ago. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Kevin ran. He ran away from the hand offered to him in comfort. He rushed down the stairs at the end of the floor, ran into the street,
and kept running for hours, hoping exhaustion would kill him so he could join his mother in heaven. Hours later he collapsed from fatigue in a part of the city he didn’t know, hoping he was lost forever.
No dice.
After the funeral, Raymond had found solace in the arms of his mistress, Sharon Jankell, who’d been a lawyer for Nordopak for a time. It had been an open secret for years. Once a week, Raymond and Sharon would have breakfast at Chanterelle, a restaurant on rue Sherbrooke, accompanied by Josée, the child Raymond and Sharon had conceived early in their relationship. Even the day after his wife’s death, Raymond hadn’t strayed from his habit. More than once Kevin had gone to spy on his father’s second family, observing his father the way you would a stranger, from afar, without daring to intervene.
And so the day after his mother’s death, Kevin respected his own tradition, and in his Sunday best, spied on his father’s second family through a window. A family together preparing for what was coming next — without Roxanne, of course. Kevin had tried to get his mother to act for months, tried to convince her to hold her own against her husband. When he’d told her about this second family, Roxanne had been happy enough to close her eyes and ignore the truth.
“Don’t be mad at him,” she’d told him softly. “Don’t resent him for anything. Ever.”
Such submission had disgusted Kevin. As he watched his father’s second family, Kevin was filled with an aching desire. No, he didn’t want to join his mother in death anymore — that was just childish. All he wanted to do now was kill his father, kill the perfect businessman. To get rid of him once and for all. To obtain revenge for his cruelty and indifference.
8
Bucharest, November 27, 2006
Glancing quickly about, Max O’Brien got the lay of the place. Beer mugs on every table, which the harried personnel hadn’t had time to pick up. At the counter, prostitutes, attracted here by the presence of hundreds of foreign conference-goers, just like the young Russian woman at the Intercontinental’s bar the previous evening. Two prostitutes were chatting over a glass of cognac: a blond one, tall and skinny with a nose that had had been worked on. The other smaller, rounder, with black hair and waxy skin.
At the far end of the room Max discovered Toma Boerescu hiding behind a slice of chocolate cake the size of his head. Max ordered an espresso and sat in front of the former cop after almost tripping on the man’s walker carelessly left lying around.
“It’s stuck,” Boerescu spat out between two bites of cake. “I can’t get it to fold.”
Max pushed the walker away.
“And this glorious piece of cake is a gift from some of my old party friends to celebrate fifty years of membership.”
With his fork, Boerescu looked like a mountain climber about to reach the top of Everest. Instead of eternal snow, however, he was facing down a mountain made of whipped cream and diabetes. Next to him, the rest of his meal: a Moldavian tochitura, pieces of pork, liver, and smoked sausages cooked in pork fat.
“Either your doctor’s your uncle,” Max said, “or you’re not being entirely honest with him.”
Boerescu pushed the dessert away. Took out a pill bottle. Max helped him open it. The old man swallowed blue, red, and yellow pills with a sip of mineral water. Finally, he asked, “Do you have the money?”
Max nodded. He’d taken out $200 from a cash machine near the hotel, using a credit card with one of his pseudonyms.
Boerescu raised his head and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. “The one on the right, with the brown hair. You can have her half off.” He smiled as if he’d just told a funny joke.
“What are you talking about?”
“The two whores there at the bar. The one with the brown hair is cheaper.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you notice? She’s a Gypsy.”
The “Little Paris” of the Balkans had had its own Baron Haussmann, though one completely mad and afflicted by early senility: Nicolae Ceauşescu. A cobbler, son of a drunkard from Scorniceşti, he’d fought his way to the top of the Romanian Communist Party by using Joseph Stalin’s method: backroom deals and treachery. Vestiges of his presence as head of state were visible throughout the country. As if, even years after his death, it was still impossible to get rid of his stink. Romania was changing, though; soon enough the country would be the newest member of the European Union, joining the other former people’s dictatorships of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.
“Good old Vlad Ţepeş,” Boerescu said as the taxi turned onto Brătianu Boulevard. “You see tourists looking for him all over the city, as if he should be remembered, as if he was the George Washington of Romania.”
Max looked at him without understanding.
“In America every fountain, every tavern, every river or stream or puddle quenched the thirst of your national hero. But Vlad Ţepeş … a statue here and there. A few words in a brochure. So the tourists are disappointed, of course! On the other hand, this whole fascination for him … for the character. It’s a bit exaggerated, don’t you think?”
“Vlad Ţepeş?”
“Fifteenth century. He resisted the Turks, the fight of his life. He used to impale prisoners, traitors, all sorts of people. Impale them while they were still alive, of course. It was a common practice back then.”
“A charming fellow, clearly,” Max added.
“You might know him by his stage name — Count Dracula. Dracula meaning ‘dragon.’ Back in the good old days of Ceauşescu, the Bram Stoker novel was forbidden, banned! After all, it was an attack on the good standing of all Romanian people. Another fantastic policy destroyed by the revolution of ’89.”
A few minutes later Boerescu asked the driver to drop them off near a church. The two men walked up to the forecourt. Actually, it was more like Toma Boerescu struggled over the paving stones, leaning heavily on his walker. He’d managed to digest his meal, which was reassuring. A few passersby smiled at them. How wonderful to see a son being so attentive to his old man! Max sighed. His fixer was costing him $300 a day. He wasn’t sure he was getting his money’s worth.
A handful of young touts were milling in front of the church selling concert tickets. The eternal George Enescu’s suites, sonatas, and rhapsodies for bored tourists.
“So not the best performance, these ones, but better than some of the others,” Boerescu said, grabbing a flyer. He gestured at a second group of touts trying to lead music lovers toward another church.
The old man paid the woman at the booth for two tickets and led Max inside. The crowd in the nave was sparse, a few courageous souls, like them, braving the humidity of the place to listen to the concert. In the choir, musicians were blowing on their hands, warming them up. Max was beginning to wonder what this whole escapade was about.
Boerescu pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose loudly under the scandalized stares of a few tourists. To them, Boerescu certainly looked like a homeless man come to warm up his feet for a few pennies while listening to Enescu’s music.
The orchestra started, according to the program, with Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano. Despite a few blunders, they attacked the piece with an energy that surprised Max. For a long moment, he was rooted in place, completely transfixed by the music. In the middle of the piece, a half-frozen pigeon flew across the nave — which was covered in droppings — without breaking the attention of the spectators. At least, Max told himself, the day wouldn’t be a complete loss. The violin, darting, throbbing, wailing sometimes, with almost a Romani air, made him deeply melancholic.
Max’s thoughts returned to Kevin and his family. In 1998, for Gabrielle’s birthday, Max had gone over to the Dandurand household, ready to celebrate the day with them. He’d had the impression his friend was avoiding his eyes, was hiding something. Caroline, meanwhile, was simply beaming. She was holding back, trying to keep whatever it was she wanted to say a secret for now, a
surprise. Over a few drinks, while Gabrielle was tearing through the gifts, Caroline, incapable of holding back any longer, announced she was pregnant. Max was over the moon. More than Kevin, it seemed. Why did he have that air about him?
“We’re going back to Montreal,” Caroline had explained.
She’d been offered a job with the Gazette that included generous maternity leave. When Raymond had heard the news, he’d invited his son to work for Nordopak.
“I forced Kevin to agree,” Caroline said.
Kevin smiled. A sad smile that hid plenty behind it. “Marketing. Folding flyers and stapling brochures … you get the idea.”
“Kevin, please …”
It was only after the meal that Max found a moment to speak alone with his friend. “What does this mean?”
Kevin remained evasive. He’d been wanting to tell Max for a while but hadn’t dared.
“And what about your father? You always told me you couldn’t stand him.”
“We’ve made peace.”
He wasn’t very convincing. But, once again, Max wasn’t about to call his friend out on his lie.
That night, as he left, Max had wished good luck to the three of them. No, actually, the four of them. Caroline made him promise he’d come visit in Montreal. In only a few days, or so it seemed to Max, they packed everything they owned and got on the road. Max felt abandoned. All these years he’d been there, supporting the family from behind the scenes. And now, suddenly, they were gone from his life. He decided to not chase them to Montreal, to not show any neediness. What would it look like if he came to visit them? As if he were living the family life vicariously. Whatever the case might be, with their leaving, Max was bereft of the only genuine friendship he’d ever developed in New York.
