by Alan Cumyn
Be well, Ramsay, and come home safe. Please know that you are in our constant thoughts and prayers.
Deepest regards,
Margaret
I look up just as the light goes out. I hear the barking of dogs in the distance, the hard wind of winter. Someone shits in the pail by the door. I cannot even tear the paper. The words are from Margaret. Evidence of life beyond this purgatory.
Sometime later the door swings open, and a wind riffles the pages in my hands. Agony stands in his frozen greatcoat, like some dark snowman who has blundered in. Among the jangle of his harangue I understand just two words: Crome and Münster.
Then he is dragging me out. I leave clutching my coat and my letters wrapped in a small bundle, including these words from Margaret I’d trade the world for her not to have written.
No one else is being shipped out. I look around at Napier, Wilkens, Fines, at the shocked face of Collins. He straightens up by the pail, it seems to me to look Agony in the eye. There is only time for the briefest grasp of hands. He is an old man trying to look away from the grave.
“Keep your nut low!” he calls out just as the door is closing.
Thirteen
“Delores,” I said, “if you could ease this way a little. Yes, and raise your knee — left knee, there, is that comfortable? I’ll make a quick sketch like that. I’m just roughing out ideas. Are you from Montreal, Delores?”
I liked to repeat the girls’ names a couple of times at the beginning so I could remember them later on. Delores had full, bouncy auburn hair and a more pointy chin than I was going to give her on canvas, and her teeth were a little grey, which I could certainly fix. Her legs were the prizewinners, and standing the way she was, stretching to reach something on a top shelf — I wasn’t sure what it was going to be yet — her bottom was perfectly formed.
“Yes, I grew up in Westmount,” she said.
“That’s a nice neighbourhood. Now could you turn towards me? Just a bit. Very good. You have a lovely neck, Delores.”
A fine blush coloured her face. She was perhaps twenty and unconsciously beautiful, if that can be said of anyone posing in such a way in a studio like ours.
“We were hit pretty hard,” she said, “in the crash and everything,” and I began to realize that Delores was not one of those Westmount girls who keeps everything to herself. “My dad has had to find work at Morgan’s. He was lucky to get anything, actually. He’s in the shoe department. And we’re taking in boarders, who’ve been very nice so far. None of the servants could stay, of course. So I help out any way I can. I just heard about this because of Nancy —”
“Oh, you’re Nancy’s friend.”
“We used to summer together at Georgeville. You’ve heard of what her family has gone through. They lost everything. The house wasn’t sold so much as taken, and Nancy’s father used to work at the bank. You’d think they would’ve shown some leniency, but the men who are left would jail their grandmothers if a payment was missed. What’s the world coming to?”
“Just a little more stretch with the right hand. It’s awkward, I know.”
The serious topic was bringing out the beauty in her face.
“The banks are showing their true colours,” she said. “A few years ago they’d loan money for any hare-brained scheme, and now if you don’t already have money of your own then you certainly can’t expect a bank to loan you any. Another friend of mine actually works in a bank. One day her till was short — twenty-five cents perhaps — and they nearly fired her on the spot. Twenty-five cents!”
“You can rest now, thank you. Just have a seat on the stool. I’ll probably ask you to take the position again in a while. Have you a young man, Delores?”
A much deeper blush spread down her neck as she told me about him — Jimmy or Teddy or something like that. “A lot of my friends who still have money,” she said suddenly, “seem completely oblivious of what’s happening. I was with some of them last week, wandering back home after the theatre — one of them had extra tickets — and we came upon some homeless men begging for nickels. And Janet, whose father practically runs Sun Life, almost spat on them. She said to us — and she was wearing a fur coat as she said it, and the one man could still hear us, he had an open sore running down the side of his face — she said, ‘They just don’t want to work.’ I was furious with her. The others had no idea why I got upset.”
“It’s not been a bad depression for those who still have money.”
“That’s it! If you have any money at all these days the world’s your oyster.”
I paused to just look at her — her kind eyes, the roundness of her shoulders, the clean femininity of her face, the unspoiled completeness of her youth and beauty. I thought: I am getting paid to do this work. For ninety-five dollars a month I sit and chat with Delores and her attractive friend Nancy, and Elizabeth and the other models that Miss Dorsett finds. I gaze at them and sketch, and some of these old wounds of mine, which they cannot even see — a girl like Delores was barely born when the war broke out — heal slightly, without fuss, a little at a time.
Something about her reminded me of Lillian. Or perhaps what I wanted Lillian to be. As far as my wife knew, I was doing the same sort of advertising work as with Frame. I hadn’t lied directly but had simply failed to correct her mistaken impression in the small moment of triumph when I told her the news. But how would she ever understand or approve? I would have to find the right time, the right way to tell her.
“If I could just get you to stretch again the way you were before — yes, good! A little higher,” I said, and watched as Delores turned back to her duties.
At the new camp in Münster many of the men have boils and burns on their skin from working in the salt mines. In the bleak barracks at night they rest their bodies and stare blankly at nothing. Their hands, especially, are lacerated with running sores from handling the hard, sharp salt that burns into the skin.
But my luck holds. I am too weak to work in the mines and instead am assigned to a shoe factory, where I sweep the floor, clean up piles of cuttings and other garbage, and shuffle about looking busy. The instant someone takes notice of me I might be returned to Raumen or sent to the salt mines.
How to stay invisible? For hours each day I think of Margaret in her dark moods and how Boulton is comforting her. And how this change of camps means several more months before any mail makes its way to me. And anyway she is married. Hope was slim and now is gone, and yet thoughts churn away regardless.
And I am not invisible to everyone. A young, wan, wraithlike girl runs messages up and down the winding wrought-iron staircase between the shop floor and the manager’s office perched above us like a watchtower. It’s my own fault, I suppose. But anything female is a rarity, and so I gape at her. She has lank brown hair, matchstick arms and grey eyes that pop out as if being pressed from behind.
As I am brushing scrap and dust from one little corner of the factory to another she passes close by on her way somewhere else and whispers, “You are English, yes?”
I am too startled to respond right away, and then she is already several steps past me. As far as I know she didn’t look directly at me.
Some minutes later, on the return route, she passes by quite close again, so I whisper, “Canadian.”
She doesn’t acknowledge me. The next morning, however, I am wiping dirt off a window ledge when she drops some papers close to my feet. As she kneels to deal with them she says, “My family took me to Cornwall one summer before all this.”
“Yes?”
“Padstow,” she says, and goes on her way.
A few days later she manages to say, “Do you fight . . . black bears?”
“Black bears?” She is pretending to be looking at an account book as if she has suddenly discovered something there while walking.
“In Canada!”
“There are black bears,” I whisper, “but we don’t fight them very often.”
It goes on like this, halti
ng and strange, for several weeks. I learn that she loves English gardens, that she thinks the sea is very beautiful, that Canada is full of red Indians and wild beasts. Every fitful bit of conversation is verboten — if caught we both might face severe punishment — and so we keep up the charade.
Finally she asks, “Do you have any . . . extra food?”
Just for a moment she looks directly at me, then she is past. She immediately says something harsh to one of the older factory workers. His neck and face go stiff and he bows slightly. I have no idea what it is about. But I think: she could have me sent off. She could make up almost anything and I would be beaten and made to work in the mines.
So the next day I bring a small packet of dark chocolate from a Red Cross parcel. As she descends the iron stairs I push my broom away from her, and when I know she is looking I leave the packet on a ledge where she can pick it up.
I bring tea bags another day, and dried fruit. I start doing sketches in the barracks, though I have no access to officers this time to pay me and the men are as poor as I am. But packages are getting through, and I make enough to keep this girl from turning on me.
Then one day I am in the storeroom loading boxes by myself when she comes in, apparently looking for something. The door closes and I catch her eyes on me in the first naked gaze she has allowed herself.
“My name is Henrike,” she says.
We stand for a time just breathing, staring at one another. Then she says, “The food is keeping my mother and father alive. Danke.” She stares some more, then remembers herself and leaves in a great hurry, and I continue to look dumbly at the back of the door.
Lunch at DeVrie’s was thirty-five cents and included pork baked to within an inch of eternity but sliced thin enough to fall apart on your tongue, and brown gravy hardly more than greasy water that pooled in a lump of mashed potatoes big enough to see you through the rest of the day, with a few lonely, jaundiced strings of cabbage — it must have been cabbage — to round out the plate. We hardly ever ate out, but now it was Dorothy’s birthday, the twenty-third of June, and two others were with us: David, with his big, leathery face and wild, thinning white hair, and Elizabeth, with her large eyes and glamorous skin. Slight Dorothy somehow remained dominant, the centre of the conversation. We had a table near the big street-side window, and the rain lashed sideways like the spray from a firehose turned against us. David had had Elizabeth posing with a little dog that Dorothy had found for the day — a bad-tempered terrier who was supposed to pull cutely at her hem but chewed it instead and bit David on the ankle.
“I will not return to work with that hound unless management guarantees removal of his incisors!” David declared. He pounded a fat fist onto the table; the jolt spilled some water from my glass. All the seats in the place were filled and the room smelled of smoke and wet clothing. Loudly as the rain roared against the window, we were louder, like drunken sailors ignoring the storm.
“He’ll bite me next!” Elizabeth said. “And he’s ruining my skirt.”
“At this very moment he’s probably eating most of my brushes,” David said. The dog had been left in David’s studio, leashed to a table leg.
“Well, he seemed gentle enough this morning,” Dorothy explained. “I was just walking over to the office when a very elderly man — you know the type, he walks as if he’s had a yardstick stuck in the back of his trousers since his school days —” She straightened up and pursed her lips. “He looked at me as if he wanted either to propose or turn me over his knee and give me a good whack for the dissolute life he thinks I’m leading. He had one of those moustaches that certain men will trim, you know” — she made a funny motion with her fingers in front of her upper lip — “like they’re trimming a hedge. I knew whatever he was about to say was going to be awful. So I stepped closer to him, the way a fighter will step inside to avoid a punch.” She looked at me now. “My father was an amateur boxer.”
“Really?”
“Three knockouts, one serious concussion” — she paused, then flashed a disarming smile — “and he won a fight too, I believe, which gave him bragging rights for the rest of his life. At any rate, I cut in on this old man. ‘Would you mind terribly if I borrowed your dog for the day?’ If I had counter-punched him, his face wouldn’t have looked more screwball. ‘I’m with an art agency, and we’re looking for talent, real talent, and I think your dog has . . . a certain quality. Look at him!’ I bent down, of course, and the dog started to shake and whine as if he’d never been this excited in his life, poor thing.”
David finished scraping his plate clean and turned his considerable body fully towards Dorothy. “He thinks his dog is going to become famous?”
“I never said Rin Tin Tin, but from the look in his eye I think the gentleman is now counting on Hollywood millions. Perhaps you should get back and finish with the mutt.”
David glanced outside in alarm. “In this typhoon?”
“It’s hardly raining now,” Dorothy said. “And I promised to have him back by four.”
“Eye of the storm!” David said, but he was standing now and fumbling through his trouser pockets, which were not jingling. Dorothy watched him for a good long time — while Elizabeth was sorting through her raincoat and arranging a scarf and fussing with her umbrella — until finally Dorothy said,
“It’s all right, David. I’ll get the cheque. Elizabeth too. Now hurry!”
“Thank you, good lady,” David blustered. “I know I had money this morning. It must be some capitalist conspiracy. Workers of the world!” He looked around at the tables of men and women chattering though their lunch hour.
Dorothy finished the thought for him. “Get back to your labours. Ramsay and I will follow shortly.”
We watched as David held the door for Elizabeth, then Elizabeth raised her umbrella for David, who huddled himself under its slight span, and the two hurried along, Elizabeth catching most of the rain.
“Such a gentleman, our David,” Dorothy said. “If I can just keep his wages low enough, he might refrain from drinking himself to death.” She smiled and looked at me, then sipped at the tea left in her cup. “Now what about you, Ramsay? What are you so unhappy about?”
“Unhappy?”
“Perhaps you aren’t unhappy,” she continued, and what had been a light conversation suddenly turned serious. “But you have a certain . . . look. You’ve always had it, ever since you first stepped into the agency.”
She sipped her tea. Both our mugs were nearly empty, but it would have cost beyond the special to order more. She looked out at the miserable weather. “I suppose it rained dreadfully in the war?”
I had never told her I’d been a soldier.
“Famously,” I said. I waited for her to comment further, but she seemed content to nurse her tea. I finished mine and made ready to stand.
“My brother was in it,” she said. “Charlie. He was the kind of boy who would walk into a room and make everybody feel better. He must have had seven different young women desperately in love with him, and even when he told them he couldn’t possibly marry, they still thought he was the grandest fellow.”
“And he was killed,” I said, to cut the story short. But I had subsided back into my seat and instantly regretted the tone of my voice, the hard mask I could feel forming on my face, because hers looked suddenly vulnerable.
“No,” she said softly. “He came home. But there was barely anything in him that I recognized any more. He’d had several teeth smashed out. That was the worst of it — from some brawl in a canteen. An army dentist fitted him with a bad set of dentures that Charlie refused to replace. He didn’t care anymore. He killed himself in 1925.” Now her tea was finished as well, and she was carefully studying the tablecloth.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I saw parts of Charlie in you that very first day. Not just the sad parts, either. He would never talk about anything to do with the war. I’d sit him down and even ply him with booze, but he couldn�
��t seem to say a word about it. Not to me, not to my parents. He kept it all inside. He said it was too . . . no, he didn’t even say that much. He said we would never understand.”
The rain began to pick up again and pelted the window in a cold fury.
“Do you talk about it?” Dorothy asked.
“Not much to talk about,” I said curtly. “Unless you want to wallow in the depravity of it. I’m happy to have it behind me.”
“Is it really behind you?”
I smiled uncomfortably. The waitress came by with the pot of tea and Dorothy ordered more for both of us.
“Shouldn’t we be getting back?” I asked.
But Dorothy sat where she was, looking at me until I felt my face burning.
“How did you end up running your own agency?” I asked. “Who was Barnesworth?”
“My uncle on my mother’s side. He gave the business to me. He thought I might have a good head for it. My uncle somehow believed Charlie’s death was all his fault, because he’d encouraged him to join up with everyone else. For the Empire!”
She was looking at me too closely, as if she felt she had the right to peel back my skin.
“You probably lost some good friends,” she said.
“We all did,” I said vaguely. She kept looking, looking, in the most unsettling way.
“Perhaps we should head back,” I said.
Once or twice a week we meet in the storeroom for a few stolen moments. I continue to leave small packets in convenient places for Henrike to pick up and take home to her parents. She slips inside the room and closes the door, always with either her clipboard in hand or other papers to press across her chest, as if they are needed for protection. Sometimes she is at my side before I manage to turn around.
Her eyes stay open. After the first few times words are irrelevant. We breathe, sweat, yearn, gasp like animals. I feel her hard ribs beneath her clothes, the boniness of her back and hips, smell the smoke of her hair. She kisses frantically at my scrawny chest and inserts her cold, searching hands in the folds and crevices of my prison uniform.
