This Great Escape
Page 4
I learned that he had died from Eva, but there was some mystery and I never found out what it was. Eva seemed really angry. She would not speak about him. After his death, even ten years later, when I saw her now and again, she seemed really, really angry still.
LOIS
I didn’t see much of him when he started going with Janine. I didn’t know her. She was a year ahead of us. Therefore I really didn’t know her, but she was a good-looking girl, a very nice kid. I didn’t see much of him then after grade eleven. I’d still see Mike a little bit, I’m thinking of when we got our results at the end of grade thirteen and each one of us were asking the other one how they did. I saw Mike that day. It might have been the last time.
*
Almost a half-century after their courtship, I drove to Almonte to visit Michael’s former girlfriend Janine Blum. It was uncanny—if that is the right word: but not entirely a surprise to me—to learn that Janine lived so nearby. Canada is a vast country. Why Almonte, only forty kilometres to the west of Ottawa, where I lived? Because it was too good to be true, that’s why. Because now I could not pass up making a visit, though we had never before met and I was reluctant to impose and break the silence.
Outside the house, I met her husband, a former diplomat. He left Janine and I alone to chat. Two hours later, when I was leaving that same afternoon, I promised to return, very soon. There was so much to discuss. And yet my parting words were tinged with a variety of regret. There was always that moment, when talking—whether on email, by phone, or in person—that you felt strongly that a return visit was in order and would be necessary; since never more than now, after learning a little more about him, did it become more apparent how coarse was my familiarity and how modest my level of understanding and knowledge was. But how much did I want to know?
Encountering Janine for the first time, I was reminded of Eva, Michael’s mother. Self-possessed, articulate, stylish. In retrospect, to find similarities between a boy’s mother and first girlfriend is, I don’t know, merely obvious. I was very close to Eva in my teenage years and by proxy of the inverted past, I felt immediately at ease with Janine—discussing Michael, times they had shared, and the manner of his death—when maybe I shouldn’t have.
I remember when I visited Eva several months before her death, she had been fascinated that I was writing a novel based on her life story.
“When do you work?” She had asked, pointedly. “Morning or night?”
I responded, “at night, always at night,” and she seemed to comprehend what that all meant. “Be careful,” she cautioned me, making an exaggerated gesture by covering her mouth with both hands, but I made nothing of it. Talking to me she was thinking of Michael. That’s obvious to me now. But at the time, when I was in my mid-thirties, nothing was obvious to me.
I never did return to Almonte after my meeting with Janine, and not because of the distance. Almonte is basically a suburb of Ottawa. Instead, I planned a trip to the McGill Archives, where I spent an afternoon in a small bright room searching through yearbooks and the student newspaper, The McGill Daily, for the first documented signs of Michael’s theatrical career.
Professor Porter has done his best to bring out all the humour there is in The Seagull. To a large extent he has succeeded, but he has thereby sacrificed a very great deal of the drama of the play. Nina is played by Pearl Sheffy, and I have nothing but praise for her excellent performance … Michael Paryla as Konstantin also deserves praise. When these two were on stage together the play almost invariably had all the tension that Chekov (sic) gave it.”
(Peter H. Engel, Friday, December 2, 1955)
Returning from the archives, I found a second-hand copy of the Penguin Edition of the play, which until then I had not read. Soon I could not contain myself, underlining the text in pencil, decorating the margins with asterisks. Trepliov’s character struck me, and when I began to notice biographical symmetries between Michael and Chekhov’s Trepliov, I had to ask myself how playing the part and speaking the lines for that character might have influenced a young Michael Paryla.
It’s a question I ask myself from time to time, from play to play, sometimes imagining I were him.
Trepliov
(Pulling off the petals of a flower, one by one). She loves me … she loves me not … she loves me—loves me not … loves me … loves me not. (Laughing.) You see, my mother doesn’t love me. And why should she indeed? She wants to live. To have love affairs, to wear light-coloured blouses, and here I am, twenty-five years old already. I’m always reminding her that she isn’t young any longer.
*
JANINE (Girlfriend)
I met him when I was in a play myself in high-school, in 1953, and he was not allowed to be in the play of the season because he wasn’t paying attention to his marks, so that was the school’s punishment—you couldn’t participate in these extracurricular things unless you kept your marks at a certain level. So I was in that play and that’s how we met. Then in 1954, maybe, I went to McGill. He was a year behind me. But he came to McGill as well the next year and immediately joined the drama club. He had a chosen role in The Seagull and that was when he started to show his keenness. Then he tried to get into the National Theatre School and he auditioned—I remember very well, because I was with him that day—and the interview went okay but the trouble was he didn’t have French and at that time they were looking for bilingual artists. Not too long after that he started focusing on the idea of training in Munich.
SYBILLE (Cousin)
I first met my cousin Michael when he came to Bogotá for the summer with my brother Nicolas, after Nicolas’ first year in Canada as a high-school freshman. I thought he was very handsome and a happy, jovial fellow. A bit hyper like Eva. I liked him very much. He brought his clarinet, which he played frequently to my delight. At the end of the summer vacation—this would have been 1953—they left again for Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, where Eva and Antoine lived. I was devastated. I saw Michael a time or two after that.
NICOLAS
He was Canadian with a difference. I do not think he felt “German”, but as the years went on and he was just hanging in there—McGill was difficult for him, he wanted to study theatre, get involved in acting—well then he began to say that Canada was a desert for the arts and that if one wanted to have a career in the arts, be an artist, an actor, one had to go to Europe, and for him specifically that meant Germany.
He had failed out of McGill, wanted to act, so, Germany it was—I assume contact was made with Karl.
JANINE
He identified very well with Canada. He came young enough. And he had very good ear, also. And he never had an accent. He learned slang and the Canadian way of speaking in no time. He never had a foreign sound to him. He was very good at languages.
LOIS
The Stehr’s were on one side of the house and the Palumbo’s were on the other, and news travelled quick between them. And my sister, Mary, who was ten years younger than me, went around with Anita Palumbo. So she was down there a lot. Mary would have been four if Mike was fourteen when he arrived in the Soo. Well, Mary was just scared to death of dogs, and she was really scared of their dog, Romeo. And all those years he was in high-school she would have been down there at the house with Anita Palumbo, and Romeo would be around. She didn’t see this—but whether Eva and Mike were having a kerfuffle or what, whether they were having an argument as teenagers do with their moms, and whether Mike lifted his arm or not, to strike his mother, which I don’t think he would do—probably he was just arguing with her, but Romeo apparently bit him. Mary didn’t see it happen but she heard about it, probably from Anita or Mrs. Palumbo. Romeo bit him on the face. Mike got bit on the face. That’s all I’m saying.
KEN
During the war, and for some years after, anything German or Japanese was the ultimate in evil. We all knew families who had lost sons or fathers,
soldiers who had been killed. At Remembrance Day events, the students chosen to lay a wreath were ones whose fathers had died. On the other hand, there were many new immigrants from Europe who came to the Soo at this time to get jobs in the steel mill and in forestry operations. The derogatory term was DP. If any of this was difficult for Mike, he handled it perfectly.
He would have known that success required him to fit in and that would mean not exposing the past. I expect that explains the close association with his mother. He addressed her as Mutti, and often had short asides with her in German even when I was present. But there was almost no talk of life in Europe. I sometimes wondered about Mike’s past but must have received the message to leave it alone. I was told that Mike’s uncle got himself on ‘Hitler’s blacklist’ and that the family had to escape, and the boat his uncle got on happened to go to South America. It was implied that Eva had similar conditions, but the fact that one of Mike’s grandparents was Jewish just never was hinted at. Mike must have known the stories but said nothing. My own family’s church association was odd to Mike, as I have said. When I would talk about religion, he was typically puzzled. “Okay,” he would say, and change the subject.
JANINE
We had a German delicatessen in town, and a small European community, we weren’t all from the country you know. Confections and things from the German delicatessen were always on hand in their house. Eva always had specialty things, and a more robust kind of bread. She took delight in things like that.
KEN
I would say that his body was magnificent. In warm weather, it was not uncommon for Mike to be wearing only underwear in the house. Mike must have been very much in demand with girls. We all had girlfriends and went to dances and parties. The only serious girlfriend that I can remember Mike having was Janine and that must have been difficult since Janine’s family was upper class and Mike did not have much money to fit in there. There may have been some conflict in that regard but Mike was not too concerned that Janine’s father did not approve of him. Since I had access to a car, I did more things with the two of them than might be expected, but I was never at Janine’s house.
JANINE
McGill Theatre: in some ways it is very vivid, and in some ways it was very long ago. At McGill there was a coterie of theatre people and they took a shine to him. I was taking fine arts and my professor looked at all of this scene—there always is these kind of connections on the campus—you have all sorts of little intrigues: he and the theatre critic for the Montréal Star who had an office on campus for a reason I don’t remember—they found it amusing to refer to Michael as ‘The Adonis’. The theatre critic—he was an open homosexual—certainly had his eye on Michael. At the time people weren’t too open—but he was open. Anyways they both had a lot of fun calling Michael ‘The Adonis’.
We were going out but it was a hard year. We didn’t have any place to be, privately. He lived in a fraternity and I was in a girls’ residence. And it was a difficult period for me personally, because my mother was dying at the time. So it was a grim year. Then Michael went to the audition and it didn’t work and he started to focus on going over to Munich.
LOIS
I heard that he had committed suicide. That’s the way it was told to me. That would have come from Mrs. Palumbo, who lived next door to Eva.
KEN
We all liked Antoine. He was an impressive man—did things well, and with good humour. Mike had much respect for him.
Antoine owned a very old Morris Mini and I taught him to drive.
Trepliov
Well, my father was a member of the petty bourgeoisie, as you know—although he was a well-known actor too.
JANINE
Karl was his father, but I don’t think he had any influence on Michael. It had been a bitter separation—Eva herself had very little contact with him. Occasionally there must have been contact, but it was slim. I met him once. It was 1957. August in Munich. I have a very clear memory of that. Michael hardly knew his father. He established contact when he went to live and study in Germany, but he didn’t see him often because Karl was often travelling and often Michael was very involved with his own work. But the morning I met him, Karl had gone to the market and picked up a basket of fresh strawberries, so we met in a park and sat and got to know one another a little bit. I remember it vividly because it was such a lovely moment—sitting in a park and eating strawberries—he’d even thought of bringing some sugar so we could dip the strawberries, using the stems and dipping into the sugar, so it was a very sweet moment. But about Michael’s relationship with his father afterwards—because there would be a number of years in Munich that they would overlap in various contexts because of the theatre: I don’t know anything about that time.
KEN
We listened to the music of the day but preferred classical. That was what was played in his house and it became what I preferred. I took music lessons so I thought I knew what I was talking about in that category but when I once criticized some less-than-trained musician, Mike’s response was, “Listen to it, it is what is being written now.”
NICOLAS
He believed that without a tradition, Canada had no conception of what art ‘is’.
JANINE
His stepfather Antoine Stehr was a very serene, Zen-like person who was good at giving advice. He helped to guide Michael. Young people liked Antoine very much. They were attracted to him. A lot of people looked up to him.
Maybe I was a little closed, earlier, on talking about whether Karl Paryla had an influence on Michael. There was a love-hate attitude in the Stehr house when his name came up. Once in a while there would be a letter and Eva would have hysterics about it. It was seldom, but every once in a while there would be something. Eva would rant. But she also took a considerable pride in the fact that Karl was a director and making a name for himself in Germany, so it was complicated. That was impressed on Michael. The kind of pride in someone who does well in the arts. It had to have been. But certainly in the time I knew Michael in Canada, Karl Paryla was not a name that was discussed, he didn’t know his father, really. He didn’t relate to him until he actually lived over there, and I only saw that one glimpse, our visit in the park.
KEN
One day, when Mike and I were on the way home from writing the grade thirteen English Departmental Exam, Mike told me that he had answered the questions about the Shakespeare play based on a play other than the one that we had studied. Our marks for the year were based on that exam.
We worked at the CPR rail express and freight shed one summer. The next summer we both got shift work at the steel mill. I had a motorcycle. If our shifts coincided, Mike would ride with me to work, but just getting on a machine to ride was of no interest to him. I pretty much took the bike apart and put it back together. Mike had no interest in that.
I am thinking now that he must have spent much of his time reading. Considering what he did with the English exam, a lot of his time must have been spent reading Shakespeare and others. Later on, he must have been thinking theatre while saying chemistry. I wonder if it was to keep out of Eva’s way.
SYBILLE
I was in Germany the summer of 1962. I was eighteen years old. Michael lived in Munich. We spent time together. He was extremely nice and it was there that he took me to the set where The Great Escape was being filmed. He spent a great deal of time showing me how the tunnel scenes were filmed, and answered my many questions. There was nothing much going on the day we visited the set, and he felt bad for me. I didn’t really mind. I was there to see him. One of the stars was on the set, not Steve McQueen, another one. Charles Bronson. Bronson was loud and a show-off and when Michael offered to introduce me to him, I said no way. That guy was so full of himself!
I remember really enjoying my visit with Michael. He seemed to get a kick out of showing me around. He was warm and kind and I didn’t feel he felt h
imself to be more important than the next guy.
That was the last time I saw him. As to the circumstances surrounding his death, here is what I know. He worked very hard and was interested in serious theatre acting. He was not interested in being a Hollywood superstar. His career advanced. Working late into the night and then sleeping late into the day put his schedule at odds with the normal daily schedule. He was usually keyed up at the end of his workday and had difficulty falling asleep. His doctor prescribed a sleep aid for him. He was tapped for a leading role in a theatre production. The premier performance was very successful. He received rave reviews. The celebration of his success lasted into the wee hours of the morning. During the post-premier celebration alcohol was served. How much he drank, I don’t know. Unfortunately, when he arrived home, he took his normal sleep aid. That mixed with the alcohol killed him. He was only 31 or 32 years old. He had achieved great success with this performance, so he was in no way depressed. He had arrived, so to speak. His death devastated Eva.
JANINE
He was a gifted actor. But he didn’t have major roles. He had minor parts. He didn’t live long enough to have more.