Leaving Berlin

by Britt Holmström

  Henry didn’t notice, the same way he never noticed that I had stopped wearing a bra, never noticed the way I flicked my brown tresses. He was engrossed in the new copy of The Godfather I had bought for him at Gatwick, tapping a foot as he read, drumming his fingers, mezzo forte, never stopping.

  I wanted to break his fingers.

  It was dark when we arrived home.

  “We’re home.”

  “You’re home,” he corrected me, shoving the book into his pocket. “I’m not from this fucking backwater.”

  I had hoped to see friends and family waiting, smiling people eager to fold us to their welcoming bosoms, this despite the fact that we had not informed anybody of our arrival. Henry had requested there be no embarrassing display of touchy-feely shit. My family was too extroverted for his taste.

  His own estranged family, “limited and middle class, what’s there to describe,” lived in Ottawa. He refused to tell me what they did for a living. (I have since learnt that they are very rich.)

  Arriving back in Regina after half a year was confusing. I had expected everything to look different, if only to mark the passage of time. But nothing had changed. My grade ten chemistry teacher, Mrs. Arbuthnot, a woman famous for never shutting up, was greeting relatives by the luggage carousel, mouth flapping faster than ever. Mr. Hodgkins, the childless widower who lived across the street from my parents, was pacing up and down, craning his short neck in search of somebody.

  My hometown. An insular world where it’s impossible to pass through the airport without spotting a familiar face.

  And still in the grip of winter. A savage wind tried to tear the skin off our faces as soon as we stepped outside.

  “Welcome home,” muttered Henry. This time he did not hesitate to jump into a taxi, where he crouched in a corner of the back seat, glaring at the naked trees leaning south in the wind. Just as we pulled up in front of the apartment building, it started to snow. Small hard flakes ripping by in gusts.

  “Looks like you brought back bad weather,” grumbled the cabdriver and turned on the windshield wipers. They screeched against the glass. “Won’t be no spring this year.”

  “Like that’s my fucking fault.” Henry got out and slammed the door.

  Blushing, I tipped the driver too much as apology for my partner’s lack of grace.

  The next morning I woke up to the sound of the piano. Notes fell as atonally cold and brittle as ice crystals. It was still snowing. The city had turned white. I forgot it was late March and began preparing for the winter ahead, dragging parkas and boots, mitts and hats from the back of the hall closet.

  It snowed for two days.

  Henry spent the entire time at the piano, building a dirge out of crystalline notes that fell dead long after the snow stopped.

  Spring arrived eventually, it always does, even around here. The earth warmed up, the wheat sprouted green, and Henry and I went our separate ways.

  On the last day of April he headed back to Ontario. He loaded his grand piano onto the back of a truck with the help of two musician friends, tied it down and covered it with a tarp, saying as a way of farewell that we were incompatible. He had tried, he assured me. We just did not belong to the same species. He looked pained, but wasted little time getting into the passenger seat of the truck. There he sat, staring ahead, shoulders hunched, arms crossed, not knowing what to do with them if his hands were not near piano keys.

  Turning my back on him, I went upstairs.

  I had expected the living room to look desolate without the piano. Instead it was roomy and bright. I had feared that heavy silence would fill it and weigh me down, but the air was as buoyant as an impromptu waltz. Inspired, I danced by myself on the dusty floor where the piano had stood. Danced and danced in the room that was mine.

  It happens sometimes, if I see a copy of The Godfather — or an orangutan, an elephant, or a dwarf — that I think of Henry. Henry P. Fontaine, the composer. When I do, I wonder if he still enjoys being free, if still he smiles only when his fingers gallop over an open stretch of piano keys. His long fingers lacked the ability to be still, forever beating out the distress signals I never knew how to decode.

  He has had some success with his music career, producing six CDs over the last two decades. Some critics use clichés like “tortured, but brilliant” when they attempt to explain his compositions. Others indulgently describe the way his music “reflects the disturbed cacophony and the ever present dangers of modern life.”

  I have yet to listen to the first five. There are some things in life one is better off avoiding. But a few days ago I relented and bought his latest CD. It was the title of it that intrigued me. It’s called Leaving Berlin, the name of the first number featured on it.

  It starts out largo — reluctant, suspicious notes that without warning collapse into a dragged out tedium. As they capitulate, a pronounced frustration bubbles to the surface. Flashes of atonal anger glide effortlessly into disgruntled chords that sigh. The chords keep on sighing with deliberate exaggeration, while throughout, somewhere within this misery, furious fingers beat a dogged rhythm, forte, risoluto, intent on escape. They never cease, those despondent, hurrying fingers. The notes they produce are sardonic to the point of snarling.

  The music paints an emotional landscape so forlorn, that when I hear it I want to give in to an immediate need to distance myself from it, to flee, risoluto, before I, too, get stuck in that bleak place.

  Towards the end, the subdued basses grow tired and fall silent, but then, just as the fatigued, brave cellos are about to give up, a small brass section erupts in a startling, joyless crescendo that makes my heart skip a beat every time I hear it. In that fortissimo howl I hear once again how the elephants trumpeted as we waited, not speaking, for the light to turn green.

  THE BLUE ALBUM

  * * *

  SHE HAD SURPRISED HERSELF IN MARCH that year by walking out on the man who was her husband. That was how she had come to think of him since the day they got married: the man who is my husband. As though he had been allotted to her.

  Her sudden departure made the marriage a brief one; still there had been ample time for her to learn to recite — backwards, forwards and sideways — the list of her flaws. It was a list, the man who was her husband was fond of reiterating, that was twice as long as his arm, which, to illustrate, he would raise in a semblance of a Nazi salute.

  She would look at him and think how a Hitler-inspired moustache would not have gone amiss over that prissy little mouth of his.

  The subject of her flaws had begun eating at her husband as soon as he found himself with a wedding ring squeezing his finger. Within weeks he had begun to deplore his failure to notice her blatant deficiencies prior to tying the knot. He had been, in his parlance, wrongfully conjugated. He should have paid more attention, but he had a very hectic schedule, didn’t he? He could deal with only so many frustrations at any one time, he was only human. He was a travelling salesman for a company that sold orthopedic equipment, artificial joints and such. His busy mind had a lot of essential facts and figures, dates and names, to keep straight from day to day.

  Brenda, unambitious miscreant that she was, spent her days poking seeds into dirt in an overpriced greenhouse. Probably the only kind of work she could be trusted with, considering how inept she was.

  Inept how? Timid Brenda used to wonder, numbed by his behaviour.

  Well, the wrongfully conjugated man would reply, if she didn’t know that, then her condition was even more terminal than he’d suspected.

  Whether he had planned it or simply seized the moment that morning, he used the comment as an exit line, accompanied by an expression of disdain that served only to emphasize that he did not sport much in the way of a chin. With the key to his new silver Pontiac shining like a dagger in his fist, he slammed the door.

  The house shuddered and fell quiet.

  There was newly fallen snow powdering the ground, covering a treacherous layer of ice. Normally
Brenda would have called out — it’s what a good wife does — for him to drive carefully. That day she watched in silence as he flung open the car door and hurled his pigskin briefcase and a pile of glossy brochures into the back seat where he kept samples of the latest model of an artificial hip joint. As he bent over, she noticed his spreading butt straining the seat of his pants.

  In the next stupefying moment she found herself trespassing in someone else’s head, peering out of a pair of wide open eyes far more discriminating than her own, at a complete stranger. With a clarity that was clinical in its brightness, antiseptic in its smell, and as sharp as a scalpel, she stood nose to nose with the fact that she did not know the round-faced jerk cramming himself behind the wheel of his beloved car.

  Nor did she want to know him.

  It was in this state of lightheaded awareness that she made the impromptu decision to get the hell out of the house, of the marriage, of the role she was playing. Not at some point in the future, but there and then, before she was forced back into her own wishy-washy head again. Yes, she would flee, and she would take with her only what was hers. Apart from her clothes, few of the items in the house were hers: a non-stick frying pan, an oriental vase, an ornately framed small still life featuring grapes and a dead pheasant, a handsome unscratched mahogany desk and a rocking chair that had once belonged to her maternal grandmother.

  The rest belonged to the man who was about to no longer be her husband. He had inherited the bungalow from his grandfather. (“Lock, stock and barrel, you name it, I own it.”) Nothing but his, from the liquor cabinet — containing half a bottle of Jim Beam — disguised as a globe on a stand, to the mustard yellow shag carpet in the living room, where a stag’s head hung over the TV. His father had felled it with a single bullet. Every night its melancholy eyes glowered at Brenda while she tried to escape into her favourite shows.

  I didn’t shoot you, she often reminded the severed head, but it kept glowering.

  The name of the man she was leaving was Desmond. She had never been crazy about the name.

  Before slamming the door to Desmond’s bungalow for the last time, Brenda had to face the humiliating reality of her situation: she could not afford a place of her own. She would have to share. Go live with a stranger.

  Another stranger.

  She checked the ads in the previous day’s paper with trepidation, knowing it might take greater courage than she possessed to call an unknown, faceless human being to inquire about possible cohabitation. The world was full of sex maniacs and serial killers and perverts in general; it was another of the verities of life that Desmond had alerted her to.

  She read the twenty-four ads twice, confirming that there was only one safe-sounding possibility: one that appealed for a “responsible roommate to share spacious second floor apartment in a duplex.” The ad said to call Donna. Brenda liked the reassuringly feminine name. After five minutes of breathing exercises to induce calm — and getting pleasantly dizzy — she dialed the number, remembering to keep breathing, to make her voice sound business-like, brushing her ineptness under the shag carpet. Hoping this Donna would be at home early in the . . .

  “ . . . Hello? . . . Is this Donna? Oh, hi there! M . . . my name’s Brenda . . . I’m calling about the ad for a roommate?”

  Donna hogged the conversation from there on, driving it expertly, chatting as if they had known each other since kindergarten. She confided that Brenda was the only caller she’d had who didn’t sound like a masturbating pervert.

  They both interpreted this as a favourable sign.

  Taking into account the dearth of potential tenants, Donna said Brenda was welcome to move right in, place unseen, should the spirit move her. “I mean, like, what the eff, eh?” It was a bit risky, she supposed, but Brenda sounded like a decent human being. And it was a real nice apartment, promised Donna, who sounded nonjudgmental and easygoing and had the morning off.

  Brenda decided to take the chance and move in. Non judgmental, easygoing company would make a change. Might give her an opportunity to grow a spine.

  After she hung up, she ran a finger through the Services section in the classifieds. A man with a pick-up truck was advertising small moving jobs at a reasonable price. She called him at once. His name was Ernie Bryner and he confessed to having a slow day, it being kinda the crappy season for moving, what with the weather and all. He would be able to pick up her stuff around ten or thereabouts.

  Next she called the greenhouse where she worked and told them she was not feeling herself at all. Considering the circumstances, this was not a lie.

  Her thirtieth birthday was the following Saturday. Come the weekend, she would enter an age by which one is supposed to have accomplished something.

  Turning her back on that myth, she hurried off to pack.

  Ernie Bryner was half an hour late. He saw no reason to apologize for the delay, but generously offered her the seat beside him when she told him she had no car. Brenda accepted the offer but declined when he held out a crumpled pack of Export A.

  “Youse don’t smoke?”

  “Trying to quit,” she lied, wanting to appear worldly enough to have bad habits.

  “Good for you. Fucking killing me.” To illustrate the approaching asphyxia, Ernie did his best to cough up a lung.

  Less than two and a half hours after Desmond’s Pontiac had torn out of the driveway, Brenda had left for good. Already the year and a half of marriage — and what a bland stretch of days it was — looked unfamiliar. Moving from one life into another, aided by a gasping chain-smoker in a green Chevy pickup, proved such an easy manoeuver it never occurred to her to that this rash decision was the greatest milestone in her life to date.

  The address where the pick-up truck pulled to a stop was a red brick duplex on a leafy street full of identical duplexes east of the downtown core. Not that it mattered where it was, the man who still was, technically speaking, her husband would never come looking for her, not here, not anywhere. Just as she knew that, should she return to plead forgiveness, he would have changed the lock on the door of his domain. He would be sitting on his couch in his living room staring at his TV under his stag’s head, pretending his wife Brenda did not exist. Watching some sitcom, laughing at jokes that weren’t funny.

  Donna O’Hara was six years divorced and favoured sleeveless tops that exposed frayed bra straps. Not prone to navel-gazing, she had never ever entertained those punishing thoughts that were more inescapable than the black holes in space, the holes Brenda kept tripping into while manoeuvering herself into the future.

  Donna was blessed with a constitution so cheerful it bordered on annoying, unhindered in her joie de vivre by obstacles such as moral principles and firm opinions. God knows she was more than easy to get along with, but her middle name was not Dependable. (It was Angeline.) This became evident during the first get-to-know-each-other-days. Brenda realized that should she ever need somebody to be there, if only to lend a sympathetic ear, Donna would not be the one lending it. Donna would be off dyeing her hair, shoplifting underwear at Zellers or — if it was after dark — picking up lost men slouched in bars where ambiance was not a priority.

  On the other hand, the rent was cheap, this not yet being the neighbourhood of choice for the upwardly mobile.

  Most of the time Brenda had the place to herself, which was fine, she really did not mind, she liked to pretend she lived alone. Fridays after work she stopped at Safeway two blocks east to shop and to treat herself to a bouquet of flowers. Carnations with a sprig of baby’s breath, that kind of modest arrangement. The flowers, when placed in the centre of the kitchen table, provided the undersized kitchen with a glimmer of hope. Sometimes she lit a candle while she ate supper. Watched the flame cast an ambiguous glimmer on the surface of her soup.

  Making the best of it, Brenda learned to relax again, day by day, muscle by muscle. It wasn’t easy, but she managed and she was proud of that. Had she felt like frying a pork chop for dinner, she could have
done so without a frowning person dangling it on a fork at arm’s length, snarling “What the fuck is this lump of fat supposed to represent?”

  “It’s an uncanny replica of your face, my beloved,” Brenda had never dared reply.

  The man prone to dangling pork chops was the same man who had once bought her flowers hard to come by out of season, flowers not available in a plastic bucket placed at Safeway’s express checkout counter. The man who, when asking her to marry him, had professed to be drowning in the sapphire ponds of her eyes. She had assumed him a poet for saying that, unaware that clichés and poetry did not walk hand in hand like dreamy-eyed lovers. The way he had thrown his money atop the bill after dinner had humbled her. The tip had been so scant as to be absent, but she had failed to notice that, gratefully beholding the strong take-charge personality of the man called Desmond.

  His last name was Gorchek.

  Inexperienced, and in constant need of assurance, it had never occurred to her to say no when he proposed a few weeks later, as though it would have been bad manners to disappoint him. As if he was expressing a well-intentioned kindness that deserved a reward. Once he shared his last name with her, she had hoped his indelible assurance would rub off.

  It had not. His romantic deportment had been an act — a bad one, looking back — and for reasons she would never fathom. What she had not been able to figure out was why he had kept up the determined act just long enough to get her to marry him, why he had wanted to marry her when it soon became blatantly obvious that he did not like her. It was nothing personal, he just did not have a high opinion of women. Maybe he wanted to prove to himself that he could marry if he wanted to marry.

  Equally puzzling was why it had taken her so long to see through him.