by Rudy Wiebe
Ailsa, I love and miss you. (I kiss every one of your fingers that touched me so briefly in the Mainz restaurant) (No, confirm love not kiss—restraint) I quote Stendhal’s novel De l’Amour (the core of this book is Stendhal’s obsession with Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski—no—cut that—just quote):
“I am trying extremely hard to be dry. My heart has so much to say, but I try to keep it quiet. I am continually beset by the fear that I may have expressed only a sigh when I thought I was stating a truth.”
The other day, Sunday 9th, I went to the National Gardens, Areos Park, frequented by less tourists—I didn’t come to Greece to watch Germans drink beer—my favourite place to sit is the X on the enclosed pc map—and I saw in the distance—the O on the map—a slender girl in a white dress coming towards me. As she drew nearer I made out facial features and easy body movements that were strikingly similar to yours. She even had lively green eyes that looked straight at me. But she was not you. She walked past me so easily …
A couple near me is having a tender moment. They sit on the bench backwards, facing the hedge, however I can see their heads tilted together. The girl is crying and talking and the man is comforting her. He is comforting her with physical tenderness, no words. I sit under great trees in famous Athens
… In my Duino letter I said the theme was my confession of love. Here, in Athens, I need to declare that my feelings are much stronger: I am obsessed with you. The only thing that gives me the courage to say so now is the very distance and time that separates us. Mind you, sometimes when I was out at Aspen Creek and you in Edmonton I would go through a similar experience, except there, in Canada just facing it, I felt I was too close to even write down words. Only drive past your house, remember every detail of your family moving in …
… your actions in Germany caught me by surprise, the Ailsa who tried to slip her arm around my waist, who twice placed her hand on mine in the restaurant. But what does Ailsa Helen think, now, on late Monday nights when she can’t sleep, what does she dream now when she’s bored already in her Social Studies classes … o sun of my soul! Write to me, so I know you exist, that you feel. I’ll go to London to seek your response, please write to the Canadian High Commission, London address below. Please, don’t laugh at this awkwardly written letter, if you want to, burn it, but please write a letter now saying you have done this.
Turn your ear to me, Ailsa,
let my cry for help come to you — ugggh —
“Gabriel called today.”
“Oh, good. Where is he? Is he okay?”
“He sounded okay … I think … he mostly asked about us, you know how he—”
“And you always tell him, every detail.”
“Well, he misses us.”
“Good—so what’s he doing?”
“He’s still in Athens.”
“Athens? He’s been there since the middle of August!”
“August twenty-fourth actually—”
“Over three weeks, he’s supposedly travelling, what’s he doing holed up in—”
“ ‘Holed up?’ There’s plenty to explore in Athens, he’s probably taking day trips, Olympus, the Islands, old Sparta, there’s lots—”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Don’t yell!”
“Okay, okay …”
“We didn’t talk too long, he’s okay for money, he says he’s healthy and happy. Fred’s left now, to go to Karen in Italy and then back to Canada, but Gabe said he’s fine. Alone he can just go easy, see what he wants.”
“One postcard and two quick calls … he’s not telling us much.”
“He supposed to report? When I talked to Joan, she said Ailsa got a long letter from him, a few weeks ago.”
“Ailsa? Why would he—what’d he tell her?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Didn’t you ask?”
“She just said it was a pretty thick letter. She wouldn’t read her kids’ mail.”
“Good grief! Ailsa’s barely twelve, why wouldn’t she know?”
“Ailsa’s over thirteen. So, ask Joan—she’s your friend too.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. And she didn’t offer.”
“Hunnn … did you notice anything, in Germany? With Ailsa?”
“Ailsa? They walked together, a few times … we all did.”
“I think they sat beside each other to eat, once or twice. In Heidelberg …”
“Yes … and in Mainz, when you guys went to Marburg, Joan was so enraptured by the Chagall windows she told me about his whole tangled life on the river walk, and Gabe and Ailsa walked behind us, quite a while …”
“She’s just a little kid …”
“But thoughtful and pretty, and so serious all the—remember how he watched that tiny gymnast who never smiled, even when she won all the gold medals, remember?”
“Yeah, Montreal Olympics—that was just a little boy crush.”
“He was fifteen.”
“A teen, it happens all the time and lasts fifteen minutes.”
“He wasn’t ‘just a little boy.’ And he didn’t get over that girl in fifteen minutes—you remember the letter he wrote us about her?”
“Oh yeah, you’re right … yeah …”
ATHENS “AKROPOLIS BY NIGHT” POSTCARD
Sept. 11/84
Dear Mother, Father, Brother and (world-travelling) Sister,
It is nine in the evening. I sit on my balcony and experience the city. A writer across the street two floors up is working as usual. He is a very big-bellied, bearded man who is at his typewriter every evening except Sundays. Such discipline. In the hotel beside his apart. two floors down are three men getting ready for a night on the town. Most likely going to Syntagma Square, the local pickup place. I’ve just finished having a snack of one 7up and a roasted corn on the cob. Venders roast and sell them on street corners all over. 50C–$1.00 depending on size. Somebody is playing a sax, somewhere. Last night, or rather, early this morning that sax was also being played. And everyone yelled when it got too loud. However, it’s all Greek to me. It’s a cloudless night, but then it always is here. It is so dry, jeans dry in one night. I am feeling very good this evening, it’s been awhile but … I trust that all you people, whom I so dearly love, are doing extremely fine. I miss you.
Love, Gabe
DAILY PLANNER 1984: September Wednesday 12
I have decided not to send any of my A letters. She is 13 + not yet 4 months—in no position to understand my writing. Thank you Lord for letting me not make a bigger fool of myself than I already am and for not letting me hurt her with such an obsessive letter of despair what to do today open the door walk out of this room
September Friday 14
Countdown. My sentence in the Athens wilderness is done—no letter, not a word, but that should not matter just say you love her. What to do finally today kill time. Go to Areos Gardens, my habitual retreat, sit, watch. So many people, so much doing, hurry hurry it has to be done! Why God why do I have to feel things so intensely I need always a movie somewhere The Getaway Sam Peckinpah
Evening: extreme loneliness when I call, oh, answer me
—off tomorrow, ROMA
LETTER WRITTEN ON A STAMPED AEROGRAM; NEVER MAILED
Paris, France
Sept.21/84
Dearest Ailsa,
I’ll write a quick note before I leave Paris for London. I waited in Athens 27 days for a letter from you, any small note or card, I want very much to hear from you; that is, if you care to write.
I mailed you one letter (Saturday, August 11 from Duino, Italy), but have actually started dozens more to you, in many different countries; I cannot mail them. They are too extreme in their loneliness to send. Unfortunately, in many ways I find myself too extreme, too intense in my feelings and moods. I have learned to keep them to myself so others will never know what I go through. Besides, no one where I am knows me.
Ailsa, I have gone to many different p
laces but my heart is not in it right now. I see Athens—beautiful ancient rocks, but lots of shoddy mod city buildings too, then back through Rome, Florence—the only thing that made me feel good in Flor. this time was a young man from Poland a little older than me, Przemyslaw P. He was in the hostel bunk next to mine and speaks perfect English, he studied in England over 10 years and earned the money to now travel around by selling ice cream on the street in London. There are many interesting people travelling but he and I actually hit it off, he’s the only one I would want to talk to, we may meet in London in October / I didn’t go through southern France, Arles to see the van Gogh places but travelled by train through Bologna, Italia and Montreux, Switzerland—saw the Palace Hotel where Vladimir Nabokov lived his last years (1961–77) writing his books on cards while lying in bed, very classy place, and am now here in Paris which is beautiful—but I can’t really care much for anything I see because you are never there.
Oh, this all may sound quite strange, and I don’t mean to hurt you or make you feel guilty. It’s just that I’m completely alone in Europe. I am not in any way embarrassed of my love for you, but I do have major problems admitting that I need other people. All my life I have been alone, even with my family that I love, and now I am alone in Paris.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the poem “Einsamkeit”—“Loneliness”—here, but for me it’s a lot stronger than that, I’d call it Being All Alone “Aloneness.” He wrote the poem in Paris while walking these rainy streets September 21, 1902. Well here it is 82 years later, after midnight exact to the day, and I walk Paris streets with rain falling on my bare head, so I changed a few words of one translation (underlined) to show my feelings. I have no reason to inflict you with my sadness, but here, now in this rain under blue streetlamps is just the right distance that gives me the courage to think that perhaps you care:
Aloneness
Aloneness is like a rain.
It climbs up from the sea to meet the evening,
it climbs up from the world’s far distant prairie
towards heaven, which has it forever.
And only then, from heaven, does it fall upon the city.
Rains o so gently in those barren hours
when all streets bend themselves to search for dawn;
and when those bodies, which have still found nothing,
bereft and disappointed, let despair fill their souls;
and when these people who can only hate themselves,
must each sleep alone in one solitary bed:
aloneness then moves onward with the rivers …
I’ve just read this letter over and it doesn’t make any sense
Some black men on the crowded night subway were singing, “Everythin’s gonna be all right now.” Singing together like crazy, no thinking visible, whole big body sing
DAILY PLANNER 1984: September Friday 21
No forward from Athens at Can. Embassy, nothing. Walked. Saw Paris, Texas. Watched it again at a different theatre half hour later—my God N Kinski is so beautiful, the child become woman—in morning I started and quit another letter to A Train Paris Nord 10:40 p.m. boat overnight Dover, arr. London 8 a.m. 22, F19.50
(France–England)
September Saturday 22
London. Guest house, Movie House Guide. Find Przemyslaw P … Polish hostel? I can hear again! Afternoon and evening with Prz. walk and talk and eat and talk
September Monday 24
No Can. House mail. See Herzog films: 1) Signs of Life 2) Fata Morgana 3) Even Dwarfs Started Small, evening 4) Spring Symphony (1983) N Kinski does a lot of the same stuff but the scene with her when she is first being kissed is marvelous
September Tuesday 25
Phoned home—all okay of course loving Mom—saw Paris, Texas (great, after × 2 in Paris, France!) “That’s not her, just her in a movie.” Got bus ticket—65 pds. London return to Ayr/Girvan, Scotland—o the sea the sea north to the sea of Ailsa Craig. Bus leaves Victoria Sta. 7:30 p.m.
Paper like layered snow all over the basement floor. It never melted, never ran away leaving barely a stain.
“… all my life I have always been alone, even with my family …” Gabriel, you wrote that. Did I know? Or Yo—did she know that? Of course we knew, how could we not? You were a solitary kid, okay, often very quiet and by yourself—but always alone? Not as a child tumbling around and so happy playing “Pretend” with Miriam, and then Denn—where was your aloneness? When did it come? How can your young memory hold only that? “… even with my family that I love …”
Hal lay on his back. The thick rug on the basement floor, once a bachelor apartment living room before he and Yolanda bought the house and rebuilt it; but the apartment kitchen cupboards were still there, the square outlet for an electric stove visible between boxes on the new storage shelves. Solid rug/wood floor on concrete, good for lying on your back, flat. Who was the Karen O travelling with Fred? Had she ever been in Edmonton? She cut Gabe’s hair, told him “Pure obsession”—ha, pure as untouchable stars—they must have talked some, why not more?—she left for Naples … ran perhaps … if only … obviously she had been travelling with Fred—was she still? A wife now, Karen and Fred kiddies, children that could be over twenty—avoid that, avoid.
Alone. With Rilke’s Paris “Einsamkeit.” What an implacable determination to everywhere, in every way, find not only “loneliness,” then deliberately change it to starker “aloneness.” And no fumbling Robert Bly translation either: where did Gabe find that beautifully direct “Aloneness [not quite the rhythmic ‘loneliness’] is like a rain … it climbs up from the world’s far distant prairie”—“Ebene” in Bly are plodding “flat places.” Must be Canadian, driving the long land and a narrow black rain comes on over the western horizon. And Ailsa, always—well, her child’s thundering silence. But even before any of that obsession the July 21 “Terror in Frankfurt,” and after that a smaller “Terror in Nice” August 2—those terrifying Rilke angels at train station arrivals, always alone? Was it the echoing din of terminals, the slimy washrooms? People rushing nowhere? But not a hint of that (deliberate?) in later arrivals at Rome, Florence, Bologna, skipping Marseilles and obsessed Van Gogh’s Arles for obsessive Nabokov’s Montreux (was it Lolita? Never a mention), then Paris, the train and boat and train to London, no terrifying angels when he arrived in London? Walked the streets, Hyde Park … avoided?
Hyde Park, 1976. Gabe was fifteen … just days before the Montreal Olympics. Could that have been the first time?
Hal’s eyes had been open for a long time, the basement ceiling was pale stippled stucco; Gabriel probably often walked by this old house as it was then between Whyte Avenue and the North Saskatchewan River valley, though he was certainly never in it. After him they could not endure Riverbend where they had all lived together fifteen years with the outdoor hockey rink across the street, they had to move, away—in this basement ceiling there seemed to be the random pattern of a pool in the stucco trowel marks, a pool with edges swirled like the wading pool in Hyde Park, July 1976: Dennis dances along the concrete edge shouting at the top of his lungs, at last! space to bellow his everlasting Grade 2 song that has together driven them all both laughing and crazy south and north across Europe:
Down in the bushes, beside the pool!
The frogs are having a singing school!
Old frogs, tadpoles …
And slim Miriam, seventeen, sways behind him, her arms and body in supple rhythm with his celebration at one more release from their “cozy,” really “cramped,” English Commer camper, five of them squeezed together for 12,000 kilometres from London south to Paris and east down the Rhine and on south to baking Florence and Rome and Naples and back north to Ravenna and Zermatt and Marburg and Harlingen and Ayr and again to London, that astounding family journey with not one yelling confrontation from anyone:
… and sang, “Ko-kak! Ko-kak! Ko-kak!”
Denn brays while Miriam dances. Yolanda is tracking them with her slide camera
—“Watch the cobblestones!”—and Hal thinks, You’ve already taken a hundred with his mouth wide open and that crazy song! the air so English-London-park blue, sweet and cool as poet daffodils; but through the park trees he is watching something else: the squat bunker among the flowers and bushes where Gabriel has disappeared into the MEN. Behind the wall that shields the entrance. Gabe just said he needed to go, so why does he feel such growing apprehension, watching it?
But he was, Hal remembered that clear as the ceiling over him. And Gabriel suddenly emerges there, but does not come towards them, does not look towards the wading pool where he certainly knows they are all waiting for him, no, he walks very fast and angled away from Denn’s “Ko-kak! Ko-kak!” walks away as if none of them exist. He sees Gabriel so clearly at that instant, walking, that he jerked erect to sit on the basement rug. In Hyde Park he is on his feet and walking too, but not too fast, not looking at the MEN or Gabriel, just staring between them and keeping them both at the farthest periphery of his sight, walks faster and faster so he has gotten between them when he abruptly meets Gabriel face-to-face, panting behind a high bush.
