The Kissing Fence

by B. A. Thomas-Peter

  There was something reassuring about the pieces settling in a way that justified his effort to let go of what had gone before, if Harry’s and Paul’s deaths would not be lost. Only one question remained. Without the obligation to the cause, what would be his purpose? Without a community or communal home to find a role within, was it enough to be with Nina? It might be, thought Pavel, if there were children.

  Nina called for him to return to their bed. Somewhere from the riverbank, an owl also called to him.

  13

  Vancouver, October 5, 2004

  Pavel lifted his head from the newspaper and stared out the window of his tiny apartment. The trees he could see were hanging on to their green, edges of leaves curled brown and yellow. Many had given in to the autumn wind, falling where they were taken.

  There’s no point, thought Pavel. It was a hopeless struggle and no energy should have been spent fighting against it. Dulcie McCallum, the ombudsperson for BC, had given them such hope in 1999 with Public Report No. 38, a resounding call for the injustice of New Denver to be put right, but the attorney general, Geoff Plant, would not say what had been recommended. Everyone knew what was right, but right did not matter to these people. Pavel returned to the newspaper article. Geoff Plant was quoted:

  “I extend my sincere, complete and deep regret for the pain and suffering you experienced during the prolonged separation from your families.”

  Complete and deep regret, thought Pavel. It’s nothing. The children of New Denver, now men and women, would see it as nothing. For all that he and they had endured since leaving New Denver, this was nothing but another betrayal.

  He checked again the date of the paper and found the names of eleven children from New Denver attending the Parliament Buildings in Victoria to hear the statement read by the attorney general. There was no mistake. It was the occasion they had all waited for. How stupid they were to believe it would be the start of being whole again.

  He yearned to leave the bitterness behind and do what was normal: to connect to family, be the father he could not be, go to work, stop the bloody medication, feel part of something not tainted with being a victim. It would be so good, he thought, to talk with someone without having all of this shit in my head. Not many spoke of it, but it was what they all felt. Would it not just stop! If not for themselves, then for their children. So many of their children had been driven away.

  He was reminded of his son, Dmitri. The boy, now a man, had been let down and had taken his anger to Vancouver to dissipate in that anonymous place, without purpose as any of his people knew it. It was something else to be guilty about, and yet he could not solve the hurt that stopped him from being as he should without the apology—a real one, not this damned statement of regret. Anger flared and he crushed the paper in his hands. He had seen so many stories in newspapers casting his people in a way that absolved the English Canadians from what they had done.

  From his pocket he drew a lighter, flicked it with his thumb and put it to the top corner of the offending paper. It began slowly and then became like a liberty torch. Without thinking he jammed it in the kitchen waste and watched it burn. There was smoke in the room, and fire started roaring as the alarm began. A hanging towel began to burn beneath a plywood cabinet. The gathering cloud swirled above him, leaving enough room to sit and watch the convection sweep the flame higher. There was no fear and no motivation to get away. Whatever happened next did not seem to matter.

  August 6, 2006

  There was nothing like Riverview Hospital in the Lower Mainland. The sloping acres had flowing lawns and broadleaf trees grown large with a hundred years of sanctuary. It had become home to thousands of people struggling with their mental health. At its largest, five thousand people lived there with a dedicated community of staff. For all of them it was a complete life. The buildings were square, imposing, exaggerating the institution’s strength and rendering as insignificant each of the people living there. Admission signalled the end of agency as an individual, and so it was with Pavel Korenov.

  Someone, he thought, must have believed such symbols of strength would be reassuring to those living with mental illness, or perhaps it was the outsiders to be reassured by the sense of enduring power of the institution designed into the buildings. Symbols of their strength were everywhere, and none seemed connected to the truth of things. These people had no use for humility, doubt or shame, except in those who were called patients. Perhaps not all of them, Pavel thought. There is kindness in some.

  His lawyer had said it was a kindness to be sent to hospital rather than prison. Choosing to be described as mentally unfit or deemed mentally incapable of forming intent, or whatever words they had used to demean him, they had said, was a good thing. Apparently it was his only defence against the charge of arson in which he had disregarded the risk to the lives of others. Pavel’s history of imprisonment for possession of explosives would guarantee a life sentence to be served in prison. His lawyer had said, “Why put yourself through a trial when the outcome would be against you?” The doctors would say he had attempted suicide when the balance of his mind was disturbed, and Pavel had agreed to what he thought would be a shorter stay in hospital. However, the medication, the electric shocks and the boredom caused him to think he could no longer look after himself. This, he supposed, was what they had meant by it being a kindness. If only the kindness would end.

  For all their treatments, the dreams could not be stopped, nor did he want them to stop. His nighttime torment was not to be shared or treated as a symptom. His disappointment and fear were not to be recalled as an illness. It was his life and had value of a kind, even if it meant he wrestled with the sheets of his bed as if they were spirits entangling him. No matter that he woke soaking from fear and the struggle to save himself. The intensity of his fight was all the intensity he had, and he would keep it. Pavel sat in the cavernous day room and recalled every detail of last night’s struggle with such clarity that he might have been sleeping. The muscles of his arms and face tightened and twitched with the memory.

  It always began with Pavel the boy surveying the earth from above. It was covered in snow, spread like a tablecloth to the east of New Denver. To the west, the long silver Slocan Lake ran north and south, butting up against a mountain range on the eastern edge. People moved slowly between the buildings of the old sanatorium, and then he was among them. Children played and snowballs flew. They stopped and gawped at Pavel. Their mouths smiled, bleeding on sad white faces.

  A girl said, “We can’t go home. Can you help us?”

  “What can I do? There’s nothing I can do,” said Pavel.

  “Then why are you here?” she asked.

  A boy said, “My mother stripped naked and walked in the streets.” There was defiance and pride in his eyes. “And burned the house down.”

  In his dream Pavel knew what was coming next and clenched his teeth.

  A wave of voices rose from the yard, claiming that parents were walking naked in the street, and then snow began flying.

  “Look! There they are.” The children pointed through the eight-foot chain-link fence surrounding the compound, children on the inside and adults outside. Three rows of tall sinewy men stood to the right and three rows of robust women on the left, naked in the snow, frozen together like chicken legs from the freezer. Still eyes stared endlessly at the children. From open unmoving mouths the drone of sacred Russian song emerged. Under the deep tones there were chirping sounds. Pavel saw the children crying against the fence, dangling by their lips on the frozen steel, like fish hanging in a drift net. Miles in the distance buildings burned orange, yellow and black.

  In the dream Pavel turned to run, but the ice and snow prevented traction and quickly he was down, scrabbling, clawing at the ground to get away.

  A woman’s voice shouted, “Take him inside!” Two Mounties were on the boy and began dragging him out of the yard. He struggle
d against being pulled away, but he was no match for the two men.

  In the hospital day room Pavel gripped the arms of his chair and closed his eyes in fear of what he would now see. The Mounties pulled him backwards up steps and through a doorway. He kept his head down until the door slammed, enclosing him in a room. He raised his head, not wanting to look but having to see. Harry lay on a table, all the flesh of his torso lost. His eyes watched for what Pavel the boy might do. There was nothing to be done except allow the helplessness of terror wash over him, grind his teeth and grip the arms of his chair.

  Footsteps approached: two people, tapping on the linoleum floor and echoing in the cavernous day room of Riverview Hospital.

  A nurse said, “I’m not sure how long you’ll want to stay. He doesn’t seem to be having a good day today.”

  “I won’t stay long,” said a familiar voice.

  A chair scraped up beside Pavel and he waited until his son, Dmitri, spoke.

  “Hello, Father. How have you been?”

  Pavel glanced at his son—a glimpse of the boy he had abandoned was all he could endure—and began crying.

  April 29, 2013

  Nearly all the patients had departed from the hospital, now formally closed. The last patients waited for new residences to be made ready. The imposing structures on the Riverview site and uncompromising organization of the community had none of the enduring qualities of the past. Now the edges crumbled like autumn leaves. Large buildings stood empty save for their occasional use as filming venues for movies Their disinfected aroma lingered but the smell of mice, mildew and dust grew. Pavel contemplated that musty whiff and imagined thousands of beds made and unmade, the flakes of men and women combing hair, removing socks, scratching at dry skin now trodden into floorboards, falling between the cracks. The smell rose again as if reminding the world that they had lived here. Tomorrow he was scheduled to move to a new place, after eight years of meandering the grounds. The prospect revived defiance, not yet wholly extinguished.

  Pavel had settled to being in Riverview, but at the worst of times the horrifying metaphor of the place preoccupied him. The hospital had been built a hundred years before, in the same years his people had marched across Alberta to the Kootenays, driven from Saskatchewan, in their efforts to live according to their customs. They had found themselves dominated and controlled by government and institutions insisting they abide by rules governing how they lived. Obedience had been demanded, assimilation was required and dissent led to certain disadvantage. A century later Pavel regarded the beautiful trees and lawns of Riverview Hospital, listened to staff and patients celebrate the end of these days and thought nothing had changed. It was, for a patient in Riverview, as it was for all the Doukhobors since their arrival. The choice was to go along with what others wanted, or extinction.

  There had been an expectation of an apology for the treatment of the New Denver children arising from them taking their case to the BC Human Rights Tribunal, but yesterday the judgment, and the disappointment, had come with a visit from Nina. A seventy-six-page judgment had concluded that the confinement, beatings and abuse the children had experienced had not been a matter of discrimination. In his darkness, there was humour. It seemed that British Columbia treated so many people cruelly that, indeed, they had not been discriminated against.

  He had been wrong to pin any hopes on this. He always knew the tribunal could not offer an apology, whatever it concluded, but the pressure on government to live up to its own Human Rights Tribunal might have led to something—hope, at least, but that was the problem. He smiled at the realization he had avoided for so long. He had learned to live with disappointment, as his people had done over three centuries, but he could no longer live with hope.

  His mind wandered, remembering Nina, the mop of hair and piercing blue eyes that had arrested him in New Denver all those years ago. She had offered hope to him there, while he was in prison and afterwards. He could not live up to all that she was or break from the hope that their leader, Sorokin, had offered, and which he followed. When that was smashed, it was too late to go back. He had been driven from Nina, not by disappointment in her but by the hope Krestova and his people could be renewed. Thank God she was strong enough to look after Dmitri. He pushed his family from his thoughts as more than he could tolerate.

  It was time. All the staff were in, many more than usual, celebrating the closure. They did their best to keep the anxiety of tomorrow’s move manageable by being present, keeping things light, special food, a few speeches, and having medication at the ready. More staff meant that each one accepted less responsibility for keeping an eye on what was going on. It was an opportunity.

  Pavel left the ward without speaking and made his way to the tree he had chosen. It was an enormous copper beech. The leaves rustled and whispered above him as he gathered the rope he had taken from the filmmakers weeks before, threw one end over the chosen branch and tied the other off. He worked quickly, fearing only that he would be found and stopped. He estimated the height of the noose from the ground, adjusted the knot, pulled it close to the trunk and began climbing the few feet to a place he could cling onto, before placing the noose around his neck.

  Something shuffled above him in the branches and he looked up. Without thinking, he said, “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.” Then he thought, How ridiculous to be talking to an owl, and let go of the trunk.

  14

  Grand Forks, January 8, 2018

  It was not something that William could explain, although he felt it keenly. Neither were there coherent thoughts of why he should be making the journey to Grand Forks to see his mother on this day and at this moment, except that it was the only thing he wanted to do.

  Somehow his mental construction had been fixed for the last two decades, believing that she would be there always. It was, as so much of the world he had made, a convenient assumption absolving him of responsibility and obligation. He had left the police station and gone directly home to leave the Tesla, which did not have the range for his journey, and pick up Julie’s Mercedes.

  The travel time was nearly six hours, a little more with a single stop for gas and something to eat. Now, the last light of the day completely gone, he drove south down the Crowsnest Highway to meet the Kettle River at the first of seven sweeping bends beginning on the western outskirts of Grand Forks near the edge of the forty-ninth parallel. He slowed to find the unmarked turning on the right, off the highway. Unless you knew it was there, you would fly by the unadorned turning without a thought. It was a cemetery for the Doukhobor people.

  Through the hedgerow separating it from the highway, the slice of land between road and river was wide enough for a dozen cars to park side by side on the gravel. The lights of the Mercedes illuminated nothing in front but a blanket of snow that stretched as far as could be seen. William stopped the car, left the lights on and stepped out into the crisp night, pulling on his coat and tucking a scarf around his neck. The sound of the Kettle River rushing along could just be heard. In the same ravine, the sound of an owl haunted the night.

  Nothing marked the way and he strained his memory to orient himself. The last time he had visited, it was autumn and daylight. He had waited until the group of friends, celebrants and his mother had left before showing himself, making his way to his father’s newly dug grave. At the time he had not wanted to be inveigled into justifying his departure to those who might question him, but now it seemed more likely he had been hiding shame. Among normal people it could be masked by his affluence, the cut of his suit, his designer sunglasses and the Omega on his wrist, but it could not be hidden from these people, who cared nothing for all he had or had become. Somehow, William thought, it was fitting that he had arrived in the dark.

  A shed to the right at the edge of the ravine offered a waypoint from which he might recall the place of his father’s grave. He crunched the snow toward the memory. Each marked gra
ve lay flat on the ground, some with the smallest of arrangements to allow flowers to stand. Even in death it was important for these people to accept an equal and humble place among others, but it meant only the indentation of the quilted snow blanket revealed the place of each grave.

  William squatted down at the spot he thought he remembered and brushed the snow away. The lights from the car were too far away to help him. From his coat he pulled his iPhone and turned on the light. His memory was wrong. At the next grave he swept the snow off and was again mistaken. The date was too new. He should have known that more people would have been placed in the neat rows since his father had been laid here, but for a minute he felt the panic of a child lost from his father in a crowd. It was ridiculous, but still he could not help but rush three rows to the next grave and then two rows to the next, sweeping the snow away, as if it covered all that would save him.

  He was much deeper into the cemetery than he remembered when his finger scratched snow from the letters of another small flat stone. Holding his iPhone at an angle to cast shadow in the marks, he read the name: Pavel Korenov. He placed his hands on the stone and allowed the urgency of the search to drain from him. The freezing cold of the stone went unnoticed and he spoke as if his father were listening.

  January 9, 2018

  Outside her apartment William hesitated and checked his watch; ten thirty in the morning was not too early, but he thought he should have given her notice. He had no idea what to say or how to begin, except he knew a connection with her must be made before the chance was lost. For all he knew she would turn him away. It would not be the first time one Doukhobor had turned their back on another. He was beginning to think he could return tomorrow and was stepping away from the door when it opened. A handsome grey-haired woman with piercing blue eyes looked at him.