Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  Mischa grunted, continuing to shade a sketch of his milk carton in his notebook.

  “Different how?” said Ana. She was surprised to hear herself almost shouting. The gym resounded with voices and lunchtime clatter, crowds of students flocking in like cattle at feed time. No orderly lines, no silent mealtime prayer. She poked at her food.

  “Like Katie Greer. She grew like three inches over the summer and now she has boobs, but was that enough? Uh-uh. She has to start talking in this, like, deep growly voice that’s supposed to sound sexy—”

  “Says who?” said Mischa.

  “Bex Kinnear, for one. Who, by the way, is all, ‘I don’t shave my legs, I only ever wax because if you shave the hair grows back thicker’—but she can’t say it like a normal person, she has to ask everything? Like, say it as though it’s a question? Even if it’s not? What is even WITH that?” Suvi paused to consider the piece of sausage Ana had broken onto a corn muffin. “Dude, don’t you want to buy lunch like everyone else?”

  “It’s expensive. This is fine.”

  Mischa smirked. “I hear Bex hooked up with Cory Shyman at camp,” he said.

  “What’s so funny, Aleeshah-Meesha-Juanita-Keesha?” Three boys Ana recognized from her homeroom swept up behind them, one grabbing Mischa by the shoulders and affecting a friendly wrestle.

  “Watch out—he might think you’re feeling him up.”

  “Good summer, Meesh, my man?”

  “Spend it with your fag hags, bro?” said the tallest one, helping himself to Mischa’s plate of French fries.

  “Piss off, Fraser,” muttered Mischa. Ana noticed that the tops of his ears had turned bright red.

  “How about you, Suvester-Stallone?” said the one who was manhandling Mischa’s shoulders. He had a buzz cut that made his head look like a cue ball and a faint mustache.

  “Get a life, Sean,” said Suvi.

  “Who’s your new buddy? Did anyone tell her she came dressed like the guy who sits in front of the LCBO?”

  “Her name’s Ana.” Suvi rolled her eyes. “Ignore him, Ana.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” said Sean. He’d started bouncing on the balls of his feet. He wore rolled white sports socks and black-and-red trainers that looked as though they’d smell of fish. “You’ve landed yourself with a pretty cool crowd here. Now that Fraser and Jack and me have turned up.”

  “And I,” said Ana.

  “What?”

  “Now that I have turned up. Not me.”

  Sean recoiled as if Mischa had suddenly sprouted a contagious disease. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re even lamer than the fag and his hag.”

  “C’mon, bro.”

  “See you round, freaks.”

  “What was that?” said Suvi.

  “What?”

  “Correcting his grammar.”

  “He left, didn’t he?”

  “I guess so.” Suvi turned to Mischa, who was folding away his notebook with a face like stone. “So, that’s another thing, I guess: the jerks are jerkier this year.”

  “Suvester-Stallone isn’t even that offensive,” Mischa said. “It wasn’t even that offensive when they were calling you SUV last year.”

  “If you let them get to you, they’ve won,” said Suvi.

  “Right,” said Mischa. “I’ll bear that in mind. See you guys later.”

  Ana watched him go until Suvi jabbed her in the ribs. “Five minutes,” she said. “Bathroom break, then I’ll show you to the science lab. If you get there too early, Doc Rutter will try and schmooze you over the periodic table. Phoebe told me that the guys in this school are all pervs, especially the old ones.”

  Ana waited for the electric buzz before heaving her shoulder against the gray metal door.

  Inside, the center smelled of cinnamon, and as she entered the waiting room she noticed an incense stick smoking gently on the reception counter. From behind a mountain of papers, Becca glanced up and flashed a sympathetic smile.

  She didn’t have to say anything for Ana to understand: still no news.

  The first Mennonites came to Canada from Europe where they were being persecuted for their beliefs. The ones from Chortitza, in Russia, arrived in the 1870s and came to be known as Old Colony (Altkolonier) Mennonites. At first they liked life in Canada, but after a while many of the Old Colony communities started to feel they were being pushed around all over again, mainly because the government wanted them to send their children to English-language schools. So in the 1920s some of them moved to Mexico and Paraguay. In the 1960s, a number from Peace River, in Alberta, went to Bolivia.

  Ana read what the scribe had written for her. The scribe was an ESL teacher who floated between classrooms, helping the kids with learning disabilities and writing tests for the odd person with a broken arm. Her name was Miss G, and she sat with Ana in third period to help with Ana’s written homework. Ana planned to begin seeking her out during gym class too—especially on those days when her class was supposed to be playing dodgeball or basketball or anything that meant wearing gym shorts rather than sweatpants.

  Miss G’s writing was large and loopy, and Ana found it strange seeing the words that she’d dictated, haltingly, rendered in fluid, flawless prose. The only writing Ana had done at school in Bolivia had been copying from the Bible. Never before had she seen her own ideas written down on paper like this.

  Tell us a bit about YOU! said the worksheet handed out in history class that morning. Research your family’s culture (Chinese, Métis, Scottish, Bangla, etc.) and describe it in the space below. “Extra points for illustrations!” their teacher had enthused. “We’ll display our cultural mosaic on the board at the back of the classroom for all of grade nine to see.”

  There are approximately 15,000 Old Colony Mennonites in Bolivia, most of them farmers. They mainly speak Low German, or Plautdietsch, except for the men who speak a little Spanish to do business with the locals. They believe in peace and consider violence a sin. Unlike other Christian groups, Mennonites don’t baptize babies but wait until a person is old enough to decide for themselves if they want to be baptized. Old Colony Mennonites tend to be more conservative than other Russian Mennonite groups. They are very religious and they live by specific rules to limit the use of technology and contact with the outside world. For instance, tractors can be used for farming but must have steel wheels so they can’t go on the roads.

  Alone in the library, Ana flipped through the open encyclopedia at her elbow. There they were: a Mennonite family, formally arranged in height order.

  Old Colony Mennonites believe that girls should be married by the time they reach about twenty, and most families have six or seven kids. Boys leave school by the time they’re fourteen, and girls when they’re between eleven and thirteen. Then the girls help their mothers and the boys help their fathers. Not all Mennonite communities are so strict. Konferenz Mennonites usually complete high school, and the girls don’t have to cover their heads.

  Ana closed the encyclopedia and read back the last section of her paper.

  Where I’m from, this is how you would recognize an Old Colony Mennonite kid: A boy would be wearing dark blue overalls and a shirt buttoned up to the very top—maybe a white shirt, or maybe a plaid one. A girl would be wearing a kerchief over her hair, and if you could see her hair through the scarf it would be pulled tight in two braids. She’d be wearing a long dress with long sleeves and an apron over that, and a straw hat with a wide brim for walking to church or school.

  She picked up her pen.

  It’s better there.

  “Hey, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Suvi landed in the chair next to Ana and began zipping up her pencil case. “No one works in the library on a Friday afternoon—especially not in the first week of school.”

  “This is for our next class.”

  “Exactly. You’ve got all weekend to do it. Come on—we’ll get stuff from the corner store on the way home.”

  My might-have-been life. My should-hav
e-been life. How different everything would be if my family had chosen differently before I was born: my accent, my clothes, my friends, whether or not I liked math, what sort of food I’d eat when I was sad, how I’d cut my hair, if I’d read for fun, how interested I’d be in visiting other places.

  I would have grown up near Winnipeg, because that’s where my father’s family were from. Perhaps by now I’d paint my nails and try a cigarette if someone offered it to me and listen to music on headphones and look bored.

  I’d have a mother and a father.

  Colony Felicidad

  On the way to their new life in Bolivia, my mother’s father was given a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. According to my Aunt Justina, who was about my age at the time, he got it from a traveling salesman whose car had broken down on the side of the highway. My grandfather had done something or other to make the car work well enough for the salesman to get to the next town, and in gratitude the salesman gave him the book.

  “No one’s buying Shakespeare these days, anyway,” the salesman had said. “Next week I’m going into beauty products instead. Housewives will pay a handful for beautiful skin.”

  My grandparents are all dead now. My mother’s father went first, then her mother, then my father’s mother, then his father. By the time my mother disappeared, it was just my parents and me and Justina. That’s a pretty small family by Mennonite standards.

  The Complete Works of Shakespeare sat on a bedside table in my parents’ bedroom. My father isn’t much of a reader, so I guess it was my mother who kept it out. There weren’t many books in Colony Felicidad, and most of them were written in German. So an English copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare was a bit of an enigma. You could almost have mistaken it for a Bible, because it was that fat with a dark blue cover and gold lettering on the spine. Perhaps because it looked a bit like a Bible imposter, my father always seemed to regard it with suspicion. Nevertheless, the one time he caught me starting to open it—my hands still traced with flour from rolling tortillas in the bake house—he swiped it out from under my fingers as if it were a baby he was pulling from a fire.

  “Run along,” he’d told me. “And wash your hands.”

  As I’d left I watched him return it tenderly to its place, and I wondered if he knew that the salesman had said no one wanted Shakespeare any more.

  Toronto

  POLICE STATIONS IN BOLIVIA were often small storefronts with POLICIA NACIONALE hand-painted over the doorway. The last time Ana had been in La Paz, many of the local stations were boarded up because the police were going on strike. The police station across from Walpole Secondary School was different: all glass and aluminum and concrete, with a shiny municipal sign in English and French outside and a wheelchair ramp next to the steps.

  Suvi had been the one to mention the police. She’d watched a TV show about unsolved disappearances that provided a phone number to call if you had any information that led to their resolution. She couldn’t remember the phone number but, she’d told Ana, in most cases you’d just call 911, anyway, or report to your local station.

  None of the women Suvi described from the TV show sounded like Ana’s mother. Ana had seen missing-person posters in the airport at Santa Cruz, and the few times she’d joined Suvi on the subway here, there had been faces and descriptions of missing people on the screens overhanging the platform. Ana had studied them for traces of Helena Doerksen, to no avail.

  There were no officers standing guard outside the police station on Walpole Street on Saturday morning. Mustering her courage, Ana heaved open the front door and walked into the atrium. It was cool and quiet. A man sat behind a tall information counter, the top of his head bobbing in sight as he moved back and forth between piles of stapled documents.

  “Hello,” Ana would say. “Can you help me? I’m looking for a missing person.”

  Or, “Please, is there someone here who can help me find my mother?”

  There was the sound of a chair being scraped back as the man behind the desk stood up. He was young, probably still in his twenties. Italian or maybe Greek. His hair was gelled and combed back in waves. He picked up a paper bag from the edge of the desk, peeped inside and rolled it up again before shoving it into a drawer with a grimace.

  His lunch, thought Ana. Did his mother pack it for him? Or his wife? He looks too young to have children—

  “Can I help you?”

  Ana stared at the badge on his chest. Was he a real police officer, or just a secretary? He didn’t seem to have a gun holster—

  “Miss?”

  “Yes?”

  Her father: what would he say if he knew she was here?

  If this had been such an obvious thing to do, why hadn’t he done it already? Then again, perhaps he had. Perhaps the police had her mother’s case already in hand. If Ana started poking about now, perhaps they would get suspicious…

  A girl arriving in the city with her father, out of the blue—

  “Can I help? Are you looking for someone?”

  The police can find out anything, Suvi had said. The government is spying on us all the time as it is. All of our information is already out there. The only difference is that the police have the tools to locate it and piece it all together.

  They could do this. They could find her mother. Starting with this man standing in front of her right now, watching her with a funny look on his face as though he was trying to work out if now was one of those times they told him about in training, when he’d have to remember a good head lock and his other defensive maneuvers—

  “I said, can I help you?”

  And then they’d find her, and Ana would have to find the right words to say to her—and would that make them a family again?

  What if her mother didn’t want to be found?

  “Miss?”

  Ana swallowed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I got the wrong place. Sorry.”

  French classes were divided into two streams: regular and advanced. “Stupid and smart,” as Suvi put it on Monday morning when they got to school. She could say this because she was in the regular stream, like Ana, who had never learned French before.

  “You’re not stupid,” Ana told her, rankling. She was still digesting the news that there were yet more new teachers she would have to meet: a different one for every subject, apparently. How would she remember them all? Every time a bell rang she jumped and her mind went blank. Would it always feel this way, like school was just a process of being jolted from lesson to lesson?

  “I’m stupid at French. I can’t make out any of the words when the teacher is talking—it just sounds like one long stream of mumbo-jumbo.” Suvi pulled Ana close. “Thing is, it doesn’t matter…because the grade nine French teacher is Hot. As.”

  “Hot as what?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Mr. Peterson (“Tom Peterson,” whispered Suvi—“he supplied for us a couple of times last year…”) wasn’t exactly young. His hair was peppering gray at his temples, although it was still thick and a little wavy on top. There were creases at the corners of his eyes even when he wasn’t smiling. Blue eyes. A hawkish nose and a thin, smirking mouth. He seemed to bounce a little as he walked, like a kid with too much energy. He wore pants that could have been jeans but were too dark to tell; they probably just squeaked through the staff dress code. His tie was knotted loosely; the top button of his shirt was undone. (“He’s got a tattoo,” said Suvi in Ana’s ear, touching her chest just above her heart. “Here.”)

  He wore two rings: a gold band on his left hand and a silver band of interlinked bones on his right index finger. Dropping a stack of worksheets on a desk at the front of the room, his hand sliced through a shaft of sunlight, and the bones glinted.

  “Take one and pass it back.” He scanned the register. “Ana Rempel?”

  Ana raised her hand.

  “Hi, Ana. I’ve been told you’re a recent transfer. Some kids have all the luck.” He smiled quickly.
“Done any French before?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not a problem. Follow along as best as you can for now and see me after class.”

  The bookshelves in most of the other classrooms were generally only half-filled—and then with plastic-bound teaching manuals, rolled-up wall charts, pads of graph paper and dictionaries. In Mr. Peterson’s room, books were squashed into every available inch of shelf space, sometimes two or three deep, lined up vertically but also stacked sideways on top. Some were new, but most looked a little tatty and curled in the corners. Ana tipped her head sideways and squinted to make out the names on the spines. Proust. Camus. Foucault. Sartre. de Beauvoir. Cocteau. Genet.

  “So, Ana.”

  The classroom emptied quickly as soon as the bell rang, and Ana stood awkwardly by the teacher’s desk. She could hear Suvi laugh in the corridor outside with a girl from their homeroom.

  Mr. Peterson snapped his briefcase closed and sat on the desk, hands folded in his lap. “Bolivia. Tell me about it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “No. I mean, yes. A bit. It’s very different.”

  “Heard of a book called Papillon?”

  “No.”

  “I know French Guiana’s a long way from Bolivia, but it’s the only country in South America where they speak French. It’s about this guy who’s been wrongly convicted of murder and escapes from a penal colony there called Devil’s Island. You should try it in English first—I could lend you my copy. Only if you’re interested. It’s not on the syllabus.”

  “Thanks.”

  “OK, so that’s the fun stuff. Here’s the necessary stuff.” He pushed a workbook toward her. “Conjugations. To be, to have, and to do. Être, avoir, faire. Learn them for the end of the week—we’ll run through them after class. And a vocab sheet. At that rate, you’ll be caught up before the end of term. I’ll bet you could be in Miss Simon’s class within the year.”