by Dennis Bock
“You can kiss the bride,” he said in a proud conspicuous English. I turned again, hoping that the church had disappeared, hoping that what I’d seen had been nothing more than a rare angle of light performing some illusion on the surface of the water. But it was there again, bigger now and higher in the water. The belfry silent and empty. I put my hands on Nuria’s shoulders and slowly turned her in the direction of the spire. The red clay shingles of the lower roof were exposed now, the building growing like a leviathan, rolling water off its back. Bricks large and glistening and slick with algae and weed as a dragon’s scales. The raft tilted slightly. Everyone stopped kissing and talking and shaking hands and turned at once when Nuria jumped with surprise. The priest crossed himself. We were near the bottom of a hollow valley now, the vermilion sky narrowing above our heads. The top half of the church continued to rise until San Judas Tadeo appeared, the Patron Saint of the Impossible, the evening sun catching him on the right temple.
The rest of Cervera de Buitrago declared itself within half an hour, like a slow striptease. It was close to dark when Nuria and I left our shoes on the raft and felt for the bottom. When I touched something hard and flat I knew I’d found cobblestone. I slid off the raft and helped Nuria down. She rolled her dress up her thighs and held it against her hips as we waded. My parents took off their shoes and socks too and dipped their toes into the water. Father Duque and the fisherman stood at the stern. “Un Milagro,” the Father kept saying. “Esto es un milagro.” It seemed he thought this wedding must be blessed. And maybe he was right, I thought, wading through the town. Maybe something like this was due a family as exceptional as ours. I felt fish tails brush against my legs. The smell of a newly excavated town mixed with the mint and rosemary that rolled down from the hills, humid in the setting sun. I wondered if I’d see the big trout, splashing like a trapped bird in the darkening shallows.
There was a celebration in the town that night, for the rebirth of the sunken village as much as for the miraculous wedding. After Father Duque phoned someone at the obispado in Madrid, he regained himself and agreed with everyone that this was nothing but a coincidence. There were no holy rollers among us that night at Casa Pepe where we celebrated the reception. But everyone agreed that we should be made honorary citizens of the town of Cervera, and that we would be esteemed guests whenever we wanted to return. The mayor, with a result better than he could have hoped for (and it did occur to me later that he might have had something to do with lowering the water levels ahead of schedule), hurried out of the bar and returned a few minutes later with a large wooden key to the city, which he presented between sips of wine to my father and mother, his cigarette dangling from his lips, the beautiful girl whose costume my mother had admired at his side.
I got drunk that night. I did coscorrones up at the bar with José. He filled a small glass with tequila and soda water, then showed me how to slam it down against the bar with my hand covering the top so the mixture fizzed and popped in my mouth and my throat as I swallowed. Some of us danced a Sevillana; then my father went upstairs to his room and came back down with his accordion and played some of his old favourite songs. Later he danced the Schuhplattler, the traditional dance of Bavaria, my mother’s province, slapping his hands and palms against his thighs and rump and the sides and soles of his shoes. He could still do it, though it was a young man’s dance.
The tequila hit me suddenly. I walked out to the plaza and closed my eyes. A ringed moon cast a half-light over the town. I felt it through my eyelids. I leaned against a pillar and waited for the world to stop spinning. I thought I’d only need a few minutes to recover. I listened to the sounds echoing off the four walls of the empty plaza. But when I finally felt better I didn’t go back. Instead I walked along the main street to the edge of town and found the gravel trail that led down to the hollow valley. In the half-light I strayed off the path twice, but I found it again and continued down until I came to the edge of the old shoreline and stopped and looked at the church spire shining in the moonlight at the bottom of the empty bowl before me. I caught my breath and started again, half-walking, half-sliding on my haunches down the incline of dolomite and rock clay and feldspar where the day before I would have swum until the bottom levelled out. I passed the stranded raft and entered the waters of the town, cool now in the night, and made for the church.
In the relief carved above the entrance Saint Judas returned life to a dying shepherd with a touch of his hand. The scene was framed with angels. The doors below him had been removed, like many things of the town that were worth anything and could be carried away, before the original flooding. I walked through the doorway and stood a moment in the dark, water up to my thighs, the only sound now a faint irregular dripping from the rafters somewhere above. There was no statuary, no pews. Even the stained-glass windows had been taken down. I remembered my first dive here, the texture of the water that our flashlight beams sliced around us, picking a large and alien fish out of the darkness, startled by our intrusions. There had been something of adventure in those dives here, always the sense that we would discover some clue to this lost place. But now I only felt cold. The same feeling that had come over me the day before as I walked back to town along the darkening trail.
I went back out into the street and cupped my hands and brought water up to my lips. It was sweet and cool on my throat. The alcohol had made me thirsty. When I took up another handful I raised my eyes to look down the street and saw lights moving over the water. I squinted in the dark. In the distance a procession moved slowly and quietly across the shallow waters, over the drained and muddy plains and up over the hill. At first I believed it was a band of looters who’d come down this night to salvage what they could, odds and ends left behind by hundreds of families. But they were too many and their shapes were too thin, too white. They seemed to shift through one another and disappear into the darkness like candle flames, then reappear a moment later where human steps could not have led them. Some carried their possessions on their backs: candlesticks and enormous clunking radios and baskets overflowing with loaves of bread and bundles of clothing and chairs and carpets and rugs rolled up into awkward sagging tubes. But still I saw no faces. I listened for voices but there were none. I came closer, my hands tucked under my arms now in the chilling night.
How can a trick of light at the bottom of a drained reservoir convince you of the reality of what you can’t possibly be witnessing? I remember thinking this when I saw my sister and grandparents and my old uncle Willy walking among the crowd. A hard pain rolled in my chest and rose to the top of my throat. There they were. Ruby’s face, her quick athletic body, impatient with my slow-moving grandparents and uncle. They were in the middle of the column. Ruby moving between them, running forward a ways and returning, excited and impatient in the way she always was before a trip. They helped each other out of the water up onto the mudflats. My grandparents, both younger somehow. Come from a time I knew from long before. But they did not notice me. They walked, looking ahead and up to the hills as if there was something waiting for them on the other side.
I was shivering now. The night and the water had gone deep into my bones but I stayed and watched this procession move through the darkness, still without words, hundreds of forms, faceless but for those of my sister and uncle and grandparents. I waited until the last of the stragglers had moved far into the darkness and disappeared. A mist was rolling into the valley now. I stood there waiting for my people to return with that column of refugees, my hands in my pockets, shoulders hunched against the chill that had enveloped me. But they didn’t return. I don’t know how long I waited, an hour or more, until the town was under a blanket of mist and I finally turned and walked slowly back the way I’d come, found the abandoned raft, then the path that led up to town.
I heard the party before I saw the lights of the town again. I was wet and covered in mud and shivering. My shoes squelched as I walked along the main street.
I stopped on the sidewalk in front of Casa Pepe and tried to brush the filth from my pant legs. There was shouting and laughing spilling out onto the street, then in the crowd of voices I heard an accordion scale, my father limbering his fingers, and he started in on the song I recalled about leaving things behind, “Muss I den.” I straightened up and walked in and saw my mother and father in the middle of the room. He had the old Hohner propped up on his chest, standing beside a tall thin man playing a nylon string guitar. My mother began to dance with the small girl whose dress had intrigued and delighted her so, its intricate weave beautiful and full of mystery. I pushed through the crowd and found Nuria sitting with the old fisherman at a table by the door with the green-and-white beads. He smiled when he saw me and leaned back and folded his large hands over his belly. She looked at the state I was in and smiled. The mud and water up to my thighs, shaking.
“This creature from the Black Lagoon,” she said, touching my leg. “Looks like you’ve had yourself an adventure.” She knew where I’d been. As she rose I took her hand and put my face into her neck and inhaled. I was glad to feel her warmth, the pulse moving strongly beneath her skin. We began to dance, my mother beside us, the small fragile hands of the little girl placed softly in her palms as she guided her over the floor. I cupped Nuria’s hand in mine and held her tightly around the waist. The whole room started then, arm in arm, clapping along with this farewell song, its melody at last becoming familiar. My father stamped his foot grandly when he turned into the chorus and the words came back to me after all those years.
Now I must leave this place
And you, my sweet, must stay.
The music of our voices floated out into the night over the procession of the dead like shadows and fleeting spirits. The party went long into the night, the singing and drinking and dancing. There was no rush to worry the evening to a close. We’d seen miracles this day. I knew this is where I belonged, here with my people among the living.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo and the Fundación Valparaíso for lodging and companionship during the writing of this book; and the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for making it possible to go where the writing wanted to take me.
I am grateful to the editors at the following publications in which portions of this book first appeared: Canadian Fiction Magazine, Descant, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, Quarry, Coming Attractions 1997 (Oberon Press) and The 1997 Journey Prize Anthology (McClelland & Stewart).
This book could not have been written without the excellent advice of many people. My lasting gratitude to Clare Henderson, Victoria Bell, Bob Ward and Cheryl Pearl Sucher.
Gracias a mi hermano, José Ramón, quien me ayudó descubrir lo que queda al fondo.
About the Author
Dennis Bock’s first book of stories, Olympia, won the 1998 Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award, the Danuta Gleed Award for best first collection of stories by a Canadian author and the British Betty Trask Award. His first novel, The Ash Garden, was a #1 national bestseller and was shortlisted for the prestigious 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Kiriyama Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Caribbean and Canada Region). It won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the Drummer General’s Award for Fiction. His most recent book, The Communist’s Daughter, was a national bestseller and garnered much critical acclaim. Dennis Bock lives with his family in Toronto.
Copyright
Olympia
Copyright © 1998 by Dennis Bock. All rights reserved.
A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
First published in Canada by Doubleday: 1998
First Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2002
This EPUB edition: January 2013.
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